Well, I finally read The Women, by Kristen Hannah. Sorry, but it's a freaking soap opera--everything that could happen to someone who served in Viet Nam does happen to the protagonist, plus two of her wartime lovers return from the dead. It's ludicrous. I really don't understand why people love it so much.
Even though I had mixed feelings about Dream Count, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I wish the readers who adore The Women would read it to see what good writing actually is. Adichie is an immensely talented writer (see Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah) and many of the topics she explores in the book (mother-daughter relationships, the diverse experiences of African immigrants in the United States, sexual violence and pornography, female circumcision) are interesting, but there's just too much worrying about finding a man and/or having children for this old lady!
I just finished the latest collab by James Patterson and Bill Clinton, The First Gentleman. From Bill's point of view, I suspect the mystery (which is okay) is just an excuse for the speech given by the fictional president, Madeline Wright, in which he presents his ideas for solving the U.S.'s long-term economic problems. Somehow I doubt that mystery readers are suddenly going to start lobbying for his proposals!
I know I have cited an article about endings not being that important before, but I recently read a book that the ending entirely ruined for me. In Honor, Thrity Umrigar makes us feel the horror of honor killings in India and then tacks on a romance novel ending. Did she think that readers just couldn't handle the sadness? Did not work for me--but maybe others liked it.
Seems like I've had quite a few DNFs recently but I don't write them down so not sure if it was really more than usual. Two of note: my online Univ. of Illinois alumni book group's most recent choice, White Mulberry, by Rosa Kwon Easton (writing style was so turgid I couldn't hack it) and the much vaunted All Fours, by Miranda July (it wasn't the graphic sex--I just found the protagonist's midlife crisis boring). As a friend recently said, I've got less time left in my life to read, don't want to waste it on stuff I don't enjoy. And, side note, if you want to read about people who endured Korean/Japanese conflict, stay away from White Mulberry and try Pachinko by Min Jin Lee or Flashlight by Susan Choi, which I just finished and thought about including in the below list of favorites.
Fiction
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid had been on my TBR for years but I finally picked it up and found it thought-provoking. The narrator is Changez, a Pakistani man who happens upon an American in Lahore and invites him to dine while Changez tells his story of living in the United States but returning to Pakistan after becoming disillusioned with aspects of American life and business. Why he chooses to tell his story to a stranger is not clear (at least to me), and the book's ominous ending makes that question even more puzzling. Changez came to the U.S. to attend Princeton and stayed on to work as a financial analyst and pursue a young woman named Erica. But then 9/11 happened and his perspective on the United States began to change. After he was fired from his job (he brings this on himself ) and Erica disappeared, he returned to Lahore, where he became a teacher and protest leader. But is he a fundamentalist (religion is not part of his story) or simply someone with concerns about the United States? That is the question!
I was surprised to enjoy Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, as I had actively hated his earlier book Cleanness. His favorite unnamed poet-protagonist now lives in Iowa City with his poet partner L. The pandemic is raging. One day he suddenly has an intense, crippling pain in his abdomen; he resists going to the ER, but after several days, L convinces him he must seek help. Soon he's in the ICU with hospital staff flocking to his room because of his unusual condition--a tear in the internal wall of his aorta. The book takes place in the protagonist's head--his worries, his experiences of illness, memories of his family and romantic life, and even thoughts on poems he has taught high school students. Although it has little of what you'd consider a plot, it's a fascinating look into the experience of illness. Also, as a result of reading the book, I've developed a corollary to my hypothesis that one cannot attend the Iowa Writers Workshop without writing a book about the horror; the corollary--no small American town serves as the setting for recent novels than Iowa City. Am I right?
I absolutely loved The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. Perhaps it was inevitable--it's an epistolary novel, a form I enjoy when done well, and the protagonist was a woman in her 70s, Sybil Van Antwerp. Since her retirement as the chief clerk in her long-time colleague's court, Sybil's main method of interacting with the world has been through letters (she emails too)--letters to her best friend (and former sister-in-law); her two surviving children; her brother, who lives in Paris with his partner; authors; the chair of the English department at University of Maryland College Park, who won't let Sybil audit courses; to the son of someone she and the judge sent to prison unjustly; to a young boy who is bullied at school but finds some solace in writing to Sybil. Though she thinks she is settled into her quiet life, in fact she is about to go a rethinking of her past and present. It sounds intense but it's also highly entertaining. Might be my favorite book of the year so far.
Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart is told from the perspective of ten-year-old Vera, an extremely bright (she keeps a list of Things I Still Need to Know in her diary), neurodivergent (she cannot stop herself from spewing facts to her classmates) Russian-Korean-American girl. Her Russian emigre dad regards himself as a literary pundit but is anxious to sell his struggling magazine to an African billionaire. A great dad he is not. Her stepmother, "Anne Mom," is a WASP-y sort at least trying to be a good mother to Vera and her son Dylan while advocating for liberal causes. Her biological Korean American mom allegedly left the family because Vera was a "difficult child." There's family drama, dystopic political issues (in a classroom assignment Vera is tasked with defending a constitutional amendment to give the votes of the Christian right more weight, cars with women are stopped at state lines to check on their menses, etc.), AI devices (a thinking chessboard and a self-driving and conversational car), and middle school friend drama. Although the book generally received lukewarm reviews, I enjoyed Vera's combination of knowingness and naivete.
Mystery
I recently discovered and enjoyed an older Tess Monaghan mystery I had missed--Butchers Hill, by Laura Lippman. Tess has just gone out on her own as a PI. It's early days and her finances are problematic, but she quickly gains two clients, both seeking to find young people who were adopted or in the foster care system. Of course, both cases have unexpected layers that uncover facts about a notorious neighborhood crime and about Tess's own family. It reminded me why Lippman was one of my favorites (before her last couple books!).
I did follow-up and read the second book in Tess Gerritsen's Martini Club series, The Summer Guests, and I enjoyed it although, as with its predecessor, I found the CIA-related parts of it somewhat far fetched. Once again, retired CIA agent Maggie Bird and her cohort of four other ex-CIA folks take on the job of helping Acting Police Chief of Purity, Maine, Jo Thibodeau, this time to find the missing teenage daughter of a wealthy summer family and figure out who the dead body in the pond is (it's not the teenager). Of course, they also get on her nerves when they pay no attention to what she forbids them to do. There's spy stuff, family stuff, annoying state cop stuff, summer people vs. locals stuff--and it's entertaining.
In my opinion, Anne Hillerman isn't the writer her dad was, but I still have enjoyed her books continuing the careers of Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito and the retirement of the venerable Joe Leaphorn, although he barely makes an appearance in Shadow of the Solstice. Chee and Manuelito are dealing with several situations here--a dead man discovered by a teenager, an addiction treatment scam targeting indigenous people, and the impending visit to the region by the Secretary of the Interior, which has brought a fringe environmental group to Shiprock. What I particularly appreciated was the focus on a real Medicaid scam, which was uncovered in 2023. As is the case generally with Medicaid scams, it is providers, not beneficiaries, who are committing fraud. They, not recipients, are the folks who should be punished (okay, hard not to get political these days).
Is there a better villain than a serial killer? In The Girl from Devil's Lake, the latest entry in J.A. Jance's Joanna Brady series, we get the story of a serial killer from his earliest murder to the present, interspersed with the Cochise County sheriff's efforts to solve that present murder, the death of a young Mexican boy found across the border in Arizona. SPOILER ALERT: One of the most interesting things about the book is that a long-term antagonist of Joanna's ends up dead, making me wonder how Jance might replace that irritant/tension in future Brady books.
Short Stories
Many reviewers seem to have disagreed with me, but I really enjoyed Curtis Sittenfeld's second collection of short stories, Show Don't Tell (I enjoyed her first collection as well). The stories feature women, many in mid-life, others younger, dealing with events or issues that somehow bring up moments from the past. In "Lost But Not Forgotten," for example, Lee (the protagonist of Sittenfeld's novel Prep) is attending her 30th class reunion, unsure why she keeps subjecting herself to a group of people among whom she always felt somewhat uncomfortable--and her life as the founder and executive director of a nonprofit that serves incarcerated people is far from her classmates' careers in finance, banking, or "managing their family's wealth." In "White Women LOL," Jill is shunned by the other elementary school moms because she "Karen'ed" a table of African Americans in a restaurant and video of the incident went viral; she tries to redeem herself by finding the lost dog of the most prominent black mom in the neighborhood. "Creative Differences" is the story of a young artist (and preschool teacher) in Kansas who realizes that the famous director who wants her to appear in his "documentary" is really using her as part of a commercial and refuses to participate. And, by the way, there is a story clearly set in Iowa City (although it's not directly identified), adding to my hypothesis about the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Non-Fiction
Abigail Leonard followed Four Mothers as they approached motherhood and made their way through the first year of their children's lives. Because the four mothers were from four different countries--Japan, Kenya, Finland, and the U.S.--she was able to explore not only different cultural views on motherhood but also public policies toward motherhood, child care, and health care and how those policies evolved over time. Despite bringing unique backgrounds, professions, and relationships with their children's fathers to the story, many of the challenges the women face were similar in type but different in scope. One was external support available. Another was the fathers' inability or choice not to share equally in child care. The father of Chelsea's child was married and, although he at first wanted to be involved, gradually disappeared completely, leaving her without support. Anna and her partner were from different cultures and disagreed on child-raising, ending up separating rather acrimoniously when their child was an infant. Tsukasa's husband wanted to be involved, but his career and the attitudes toward work in Japan often made him unavailable. Sarah seemed to have the situation most likely to result in help from her husband--she was married and had the more lucrative job--but her husband was polyamorous and had other relationships outside the marriage, which took up time. It's all interesting and kind of sad, in that, despite a lot of rhetoric about how great parents are, we aren't doing much to help them.
Favorite Passages
Her grandmother's euphemisms had a way of cutting deeper than anyone else's insults. Needle, needle, needle. It was like going to a bad acupuncturist.
--Laura Lippman, Butchers Hill (to clarify--my grandma didn't needle, but the description fits others I have known)
