There are still a couple of days left in fall, but it feels like winter this week (and it's almost Christmas), so here I go. Some downers this fall:
An irritant: If you read this blog, you know I can be kind of picky. I find it really annoying when someone who should know better (or should have an editor who knows better) totally messes up facts. I won't belabor the point, but I have to say the court room scenes in Middletide by Sarah Crouch and The 24th Hour by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro are so inaccurate it's laughable.
A disappointment: I loved Stanley Tucci's memoir Taste, in which he wrote lovingly about food--cooking it, eating it, sharing it with family and friends--as he reflected on his life. So I was looking forward to What I Ate in One Year, which is essentially a diary of 2023. However, it lacked the emotion and descriptive writing of Taste; in fact, it read like a book that was cranked out to capitalize on the success of Taste, with little of the feeling and insight of that book. Perhaps comparing a book about one's life to a book about one year is unfair, but Stanley led us on (the cover even looks the same), and I don't like it!
Another disappointment: It happens fairly often that an author has a great premise but the book just doesn't live up to it. Imagine my excitement when I discovered Jessa Maxwell's The Golden Spoon, a mystery set in the midst of a television show strongly resembling The Great British Baking Show (one of my favorites). Imagine my disappointment when the plot was a mess and the characters were cardboard.
But on to things I liked!
Fiction
I am not a fan of Curtis Sittenfield. In fact, I actively hated her book about Hillary Clinton and didn't think much of either Prep or Sisterland (though I did find her silly take-off on Pride and Prejudice enjoyable). So I was surprised that I really liked her collection of short stories, You Think It, I'll Say It. The stories are about young to middle-aged women at a moment in their lives when they misperceive what is happening to them or make a bad decision or are searching for something that may or may not be there. In the title story, for example, a woman starts a flirtatious game with her husband's colleague, drastically misjudging what the game means to him. In "The Prairie Wife," a happily married lesbian wife and mother is angry when she discovers her first female lover has become a popular Ree Drummond-style Christian content creator married to "the stud in overalls." In "Off the Record," a reporter takes her fractious infant with her on a trip to LA to interview a starlet the reporter believes might actually be a friend; she is not. I'm not sure I gained huge insights into women's experiences, but the stories still resonated.
Many of Peter Heller's books fall into a genre Denver Post reviewer Alison Borden calls "nature and men and danger." This isn't my favorite genre (as seen in my recent dis of the "man on the run" nature of the much-lauded James), but Heller does it so well I enjoy his books, and Burn is no exception. Jess and Storey are best friends who take an annual hunting trip. This year's is in Maine, where they soon encounter blown out bridges and burned towns (with a small number of dead bodies but no living ones). When they run out of gas, they must figure out how to get out of Maine, where they eventually learn secessionists are battling with government forces. Their escape is complicated when they find a young girl by herself. What is it that makes Heller's books good? His descriptions of nature, his insight into how the human mind works under stress (or at least the male mind), his building up of character through actions and memories. What wasn't so good about Burn? The ending!! A little resolution would go a long way!
Valentine, by Elizabeth Wetmore, is a grim story about a 14-year-old Latino girl, Gloria, who is brutally raped and nearly murdered by a roughneck working in the oilfields around Odessa, Texas, in 1976 and some of the local women affected by the crime. The book's chapters are told from different women's perspectives. While four women are central to the narrative, there are a few chapters from other points of view. The four primary characters are Gloria, who survives ; Mary Rose, who opened her door to the badly injured Gloria when she escaped from her attacker--the event changes Mary Rose's marriage and life; Corrine, a retired teacher and widow who drinks too much, puts up walls around herself, yet still becomes involved in helping others; Debra Ann, a 10-year-old whose mother has disappeared, leaving to spend the summer on her own while her father works. Teen pregnancy and violence against women (the owner of a bar where the roughnecks hang out warns the waitresses, "Keep your eyes peeled for the next serial killer") are prevalent. Yet the women somehow manage to maintain a modicum of autonomy. What I couldn't help thinking about while reading Valentine was how similar this fictional account feels to articles I've read about the recent oil boom in North Dakota. Sad.
I didn't love The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, which is a sequel to her novel The Plot but is also a sequel to the plagiarized novel in that book (very meta). The Sequel's protagonist is the widow of the plagiarizing author of The Plot, who turns out to be (like many of Korelitz's characters) a horrible but interesting person. She starts out as relatively sympathetic, but everything we learn about her makes her increasingly villainous. I did enjoy the book but what made me decide to include it here is the very clever device Korelitz used to title the chapters--each is the title of a sequel by another author (It Starts with Us, Ready Player Two, More Tales of the City) but also content-appropriate to the chapter. I was so enchanted and impressed by this device (she includes a list of the related first novels for those of us with less literary knowledge) that it vaulted The Sequel onto the fall favorites list.
The Lion Women of Tehran, by Marjan Kamali, as the title suggests, is a novel about brave Irani women facing challenges posed by family, culture, and repressive regimes from the 1950s to the present. But it's also a story about friendship. Ellie is from an upper-class family, thrust into temporary poverty when her father dies. At the public school she attends, she meets Homa, whose family is poor but loving. When Ellie's demanding mother agrees to marry her late husband's brother, they move back to an up-scale neighborhood and the girls' friendship languishes until Homa manages to enroll at Ellie's elite high school. Ellie is at first rude to her, afraid Homa's friendship will ruin her relationships with wealthier girls, but Homa quickly charms all the girls and their close friendship resumes until a betrayal causes a rift that lasts for years.
Colored Television deals with so many issues I wasn't sure what author Danzy Senna was hoping we would take away from it. The protagonist, Jane, is a mixed-race novelist who has spent ten years writing her second book--she describes it as the Mulatto War and Peace, though it does not have a chronological narrative like the original W&P--only to have it rejected by her agent and publisher. When she decides to sell out to Hollywood, coming perilously close to plagiarizing a friend's idea in the process, her attempt is ironically both unsuccessful and successful. Meanwhile, her marriage to an artist whose work does not sell is on the brink, perhaps not surprisingly since she picked her husband because he matched a psychic's description. They move annually, housesitting, living in wealthy acquaintance's carriage houses, renting cruddy apartments, etc., all the while hoping to someday be able to live in a neighborhood they refer to as "Multicultural Mayberry." Their constant moves are hard on their two young children, one of whom has an unspecified learning challenge (it sounds like he is on the autism spectrum); his parents disagree on how to handle his issues. For me, Jane is such a mess that her fulminating on the issues mixed-race people face is less informative/compelling than the experiences of the teenage protagonist in Senna's first novel Caucasia (a superior novel IMHO). Yet I find myself thinking about the book, which pushes it into the fall favorites category.
Mysteries
For a genre reader, discovering a new author whose book you enjoyed is a good thing. So I was happy to not only enjoy Close to Home by Cara Hunter, but to discover there are several more D.I. Adam Fawley mysteries. I feel a binge coming on. Anyway Close to Home involves an eight-year-old girl who seems to have gone missing while her parents were throwing a backyard barbeque. But questions arise about what really happened and how her family members might have been involved. There are a lot of twists, and I don't want to give them away, so I'll just say I recommend this mystery set in Oxford, England (but not referencing the university at all). BTW: I discovered after drafting this that I had read a Hunter book before--a memory is a terrible thing to lose!
Nonfiction
In words less scholarly than those of the author, I would describe Erwin Chemerinsky's book Worse than Nothing as an epic takedown of the originalists, demonstrating that originalism is not a coherent judicial theory, but a rhetorical ploy for justifying desired ideological results, quickly abandoned when it does not generate the favored outcomes. One of Chemerinsky's most interesting points is that, were the "originalist" justices sincere about their purported beliefs, rather than expanding the Court's power as they have recently done, they would be overturning Marbury v. Madison, as the originalist case for judicial review is weak to nonexistent. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the Supreme Court or not concerned about the direction it is going with the conservative super-majority. (Previously posted in slightly different form on Facebook)
I started watching the Netflix series based on Tembi Locke's memoir From Scratch and quit about half way in because it seemed like a stereotypical depiction of family drama in a bicultural/biracial marriage. So I'm not sure why I picked up the book, but I found it quite different and much better than the series. It's primary focus is how Tembi and her daughter dealt with the loss of their husband and father, Saro, and how spending summers in his homeland, Sicily, with his mother, other family members, and the small community where they lived was healing. It doesn't hurt that she also writes about food (Saro was a chef), one of my favorite things. I guess it's no surprise that the book would be better than the TV show (even though Locke was one of the creators of the show), but it definitely is.
Favorite Passages
While to our eyes, waves appear suddenly on the shore, their abruptness is an illusion. Waves begin their journey thousands of miles out at sea. They accumulate shape and power from winds and undersea currents for ages. And so, when you see the women in Iran screaming for their rights, please remember that hte force and fury of our screams have been gathering power for years.
--Marjan Kamali, The Lion Women of Tehran
What if my own life was like a flower? Something I had to continually tend to and nurture. Sicily was the water and sun that fortified me to stand stronger in my life after loss. And maybe my leaving a rock at the cemetery, as an act of remembrance, had additional meaning. Maybe it was a symbol of the lasting permanence of Saro's love. His love, life, illness, and death had taught me so much but it was the undergirding of his love that was my salvation in loss.
--Tembi Locke, From Scratch
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