Karen

This book has one of the most unpleasant, unhappy protagonists I have ever encountered. Isabel is the middle child in a family that moved from Amsterdam to a rural area of Holland for safety during World War II, to a house procured for them by Uncle Karl. Isabel, now in her early 30's, is the only one who still lives there, and she guards the house and its contents fiercely, firing her hired maids when she suspects them of stealing silverware or other small items. Although Isabel is the sibling with the strongest attachment to the house, it's understood that the house belongs to Louis, and if he decides to take possession (to raise a family), Isabel will have to find somewhere else to live. So far this has not been an issue, because Louis is a womanizer who shows no inclination to settle down, but it lives in the background of Isabel's consciousness. Things come to a head when Louis brings a new girlfriend, Eva, to stay at the house while he's away on a business trip. She presses all of Isabel's buttons, and Isabel makes herself as unpleasant as possible. Meanwhile, some hidden truths about the house and Eva start to come to the surface.

Although Isabel is painfully unpleasant, we know enough about her background to understand a little bit about why she is that way. She's aware of some anomalies in her life, although she isn't able to resolve them on her own--maybe isn't quite aware that they need resolving, until her life blows up. I thought this situation was built very beautifully. Her two clueless brothers (clueless in different ways) just want her to relax, maybe get married to Johan, the neighbor who has shown some interest in her, and not take everything so seriously.

The family situation has some parallels with the post-Holocaust environment of 1961 Netherlands. Although the war is over, the reckoning is not. The majority of the country would like to move on and live a "normal" life, but it's not possible until the murder and displacement of the Dutch Jewish population in the Holocaust is addressed.

As a work of imagination about a historical figure, this is a great book. Groff writes from the assumption that Marie de France was Marie the Abbess of Shaftesbury, illegitimate half sister of Henry II of England. From there, she writes a surprising novel about an ungainly, unwanted girl from a family of "viragos" coming into herself in a place that was meant to be a dustbin or a prison--a place where she would be out of the way, among a group of other unwanted girls and women.

When Marie first arrives at the Abbey, it is so poor that the nuns are starving. The Abbey was willing to accept her because she came with a dowry which would buy food for a while. By the end of the novel, Marie as Abbess has made the Abbey rich and powerful in its community and increased the number of nuns and oblates many times over. Over the course of the novel, she and the Abbey grow in stages, maneuvering around threats from outside and pushing through internal resistance. It's a portrait of leadership, among other things.

I was curious about the title of this book, Matrix. The book is full of "-trices," meaning female staff: cellatrix, infirmatrix, etc. So, what is the meaning of "matrix"? The latin meaning is "Womb," a place within which something grows. Similarly, in biological sciences a matrix is the substance in which a sample grows. So, Marie is the womb in which the Abbey of Shaftesbury grew, but I think the name also suggests some other less literal growing. I'm enjoying thinking about that.

Also, the writing in this book is so good.

Horse tells the story of the great racehorse Lexington and his enslaved groom and lifelong companion Jarret, but it recognizes that that story didn't end when Lexington died, or even when Jarret Lewis died. Their relationship continued into the future, and the conditions under which they lived their relationship had profound effects on the people who came after them. All of this is accomplished in a novel that moves back and forth between characters in pre- and Civil War times, and characters in 21st century pre-Covid times. I found it deeply absorbing, touching and disturbing, and well worth reading. Not too many details here, because I don't want to give spoilers, but this is easily my favorite of the Geraldine Brooks novels that I've read.

Adunni is a 14 year old girl living with her father and two brothers in a Nigerian village at the beginning of this book. Before her mother died, she made Adunni's father promise to keep her in school and not marry her off, but soon the family can't afford the cost of school or the rent of their house. Adunni's father tells her that she will marry Morufu, a man 40 years her senior who already has two wives and 4 other children, in exchange for enough money to pay the rent. Adunni is already mourning her mother, and this violation of the promise her father made to her mother is devastating to her. Everyone around her, including her friends, tell her she should be happy, since she'll be married and taken care of, and will soon become a mother, but her only wish (besides having her mother back), is to go back to school.

Adunni's troubles continue and multiply until she is a domestic servant in a wealthy Nigerian woman's house in Lagos, beaten and starved by her employer and sexually harassed and pursued by her employer's husband. At every step of her journey, however, she has found someone willing to help her--sometimes in a small way, but sometimes in a big way. In Big Madam's house, in the midst of her troubles, she also finds hope.

The narrative is written in what I think is meant to be a native Yoruba speaker's pidgin English--Adunni telling her own story. It's not explained, but it becomes clear later in the book that Adunni's English is not very grammatical when someone offers to help her improve. However, the "pidgin" English that Adunni uses is consistent within itself and has grace, so it's a pleasure to read.

This is a tale of a young girl's resilience and the courage to free herself from hardship that many of the people around her expect her to just endure. There's a lot of sadness in the story, but also bright moments of kindness that nurture hope for the future.

I read this several months ago, just now getting around to writing a review. As someone who fell in love with the Twin Cities while visiting as a teenager and moved here permanently in 1998, it's fascinating to get glimpses inside the minds and lives of people who were born here and often live not far from the neighborhood where they grew up. Although I have been here almost 30 years, when I get that chance, I feel like an outsider newbie all over again.

I'd never heard of Mark Connor, a St. Paul Irish American poet who also writes about boxing, until I was given his book to read this spring. His voice in this book is conversational, like someone you'd run into at your neighborhood dive. His poems revolve around his concern for a woman he's having a kind of ambiguous relationship with, trying to honor his Catholic faith, and binding it all together, his Dad, who taught him the Catholicism he now loves. The poems are connected by a narrative that covers Irish Americans in St. Paul, growing up around his parents' friends, going off to work on an Alaskan fishing boat, returning to volunteer at a homeless shelter for Native youth, boxing, and what Catholicism means to him. If someone were to record this as an audio book, I could imagine Craig Finn of the Hold Steady narrating it.

Although this book was not really my cup of tea, I enjoyed the glimpses of my adopted hometown through a native born son's eyes. I appreciated the humor and philosophy woven through It's About Time (the title is a pun), and I will keep an eye out for Connor's name in future Twin Cities publications.

This is a good old fashioned melodramatic thriller set mostly in the fictional town of Ruffano, Italy. Armino Fabbio, a tour guide for a Genoan tour company, has a chance encounter with an old woman who reminds him of the nurse who took care of him as a child in Ruffano. When she is later murdered, he leaves his job and sets off for Ruffano to see if he can verify if it really was Marta, his old nurse. As he comes back to the town he left as an 11 year old boy in the chaos of the end of World War II, he is drawn into the intrigues between factions at the university that threaten to engulf the whole town, and he finds that his family drama is at the center of them.

I was instantly drawn in and read this compulsively in two sittings. The melodrama hit the spot. I especially appreciated the mirroring of the town's (fictional) historic drama between medieval Dukes Claudio and Carlo that is essential to the plot.

This is a behemoth of a book at 645 pages. It's very readable history of ACT UP New York, with interviews from surviving members of ACT UP, pages of photos, and appendices for primary source documents. Unlike some histories, this one contains the personal voice and perspective of the author, who was also an active member of ACT UP. Schulman covers ACT UP's meeting format, the affinity groups and other interest groups that formed, planning and execution of actions, and the tensions that formed between the group of ACT UP members who would meet and work with government and pharmaceutical companies and those who carried out the disruptive protests and actions in the streets (and workplaces, and churches, and news organizations...). It was completely fascinating.

The main idea I have about this book, having just finished it two hours ago, is that Navalny understood his place in the world. Towards the end of the book, he writes about faith being a great help to him as he lived in prison and tried to keep fighting corruption from there under very difficult circumstances. It's not the glitzy TV evangelist type of faith he was talking about, but the knowledge that the work he was doing was right, and he was the person to do it. In that sense, he was called by God to do it, and while it was painful to have so much taken away from him, it was more important to keep doing his work. I find his clarity about this so touching and so powerful.

I read a review when Patriot first came out that said it was cobbled together from bits and pieces, and it showed. I think it's appropriate that it shows, actually, given that Navalny wrote much of it from prison in one hour chunks when he was allowed to have writing materials. The "cobbled together" feel adds to the power of the book. Highly recommend to anyone who cares about Russia, US relations with Russia (especially DJT's relations with Russia) and American politics post 2024.

I love to read advice columns, so I was pretty sure I'd enjoy this book. I didn't know anything about Dear Sugar or The Rumpus, but I was right, I did enjoy it. I enjoyed the way Sugar would answer her letter writer's question with a story from her own life, and the way that story's relevance was often not what I expected it to be (somewhat like a parable). And, of course, I enjoyed reading the letter writer's story too. It's all about the stories, and there were some doozies in this book.

I'm not sure I would have enjoyed writing a letter to Dear Sugar and having it answered the way she usually did, though. I definitely wouldn't have enjoyed being called "sweet pea," "darling," and "honey bun." And I might not have liked having my heartfelt question responded to with a detailed story from the advice columnist's life. It feels self involved. The times when it bugged me the most were the times when she described her own reactions to the story from her life and then told her letter writers that that would be their experience as well. That was misguided. In many cases, I think the advice she gives in this book is wise and humane, but it might have been better to leave out the lengthy stories about herself, or at least make them less lengthy. But had she done that, the book would have been a lot less fun to read. So, I'm ambivalent.