Karen

Birnam Wood has been described as a thriller, but I think it might be more accurate to call it a tragedy in the old fashioned literary sense.

There are some great things in this book, especially the development of the main characters. I loved the ambivalent relationship between Mira and Shelley, which is the center of the novel. There is obviously friendship chemistry between them, but there is also offhanded contempt and resentment to complicate it. From the beginning I had more sympathy for Shelley, but I was rooting for them to work it out by the end of the novel.

The dynamics of the environmental activist group Birnam Wood would be recognizable to anyone who has been involved in similar endeavors. Mira and Shelley's relationship fits so well into the tensions between remaining true to principles and the drudgery of sustaining activism when you're always on the edge of flaming out. When Tony, a former Birnam Wood member who has been away for a few years, arrives back on the scene just as Mira announces that the billionaire Robert Lemoine is offering to fund them, those tensions boil up into an argument about whether the group can stay true to itself if it takes the money.

There are discussions about various aspects of that question throughout the book: what are the things you just wouldn't do, no matter what? How important is it to be authentic, versus doing what is expected of you? Is it better to say "sorry" or to thank someone for their patience, forbearance, etc?

The characters are struggling with self awareness, how to be in relationship with each other (even if they've been married for decades), and how to hold true to their own visions of how things should be.

We learn early on that Robert Lemoine has no scruples about being authentic or having a relationship with another person, and my question as I read the book was whether any of these normal human characters would be able to hold onto themselves as they encountered him.

I really hated the ending. It seemed like such a waste of all that character development to have everyone die. The only way I could make sense of it is to think of this story as a tragedy, where character flaws (of the kind that are discussed throughout) lead people to not be able to do what they should do. I'd be interested in what others think about this.

This novel is a genre bender. Or maybe it would be better to say it has some of almost every genre in it. It has prose narrative from almost every perspective, in different styles, from a doctor's case notes to true crime tabloid, and plenty of third person omniscient that flows along so seamlessly that you might forget that you are reading as you are mesmerized by the stories of a house on a plot of land in the western Massachusetts woodlands and the succession of people (and animals and insects) who lived there over the years since colonization. There is poetry, song, photography, thwarted romance, and an unabashed ghost story. Some of this sits together a little awkwardly. When you start to get comfortable in one section of the book, look out, because you are about to be unseated and it may take you a while to settle in again. I found the end pulled everything together for me, though, so the disparate parts made a convincing, beautiful, slightly melancholy whole.

I really enjoyed this detective story, where Elizabeth II is the detective behind the scenes. The main characters are well fleshed out, so I felt I got to know them as I read the book. One of the characters who was almost universally disliked was humanized by the Queen (for the reader, not for the characters in the book). Each time I thought I knew where the story was going, it went somewhere else instead. As far as mysteries go, it was not formulaic, nor was it too cozy. Apparently this is book #2 in a series, and I am thinking about looking around my library system to see if the first book is available. I would definitely read another book by this author.

I've been keeping my reading light this summer because I have a lot of stressful stuff on my plate. I read this in my back yard over 3 days.

This is a collection of ALL of the Father Brown stories by GK Chesterton. In retrospect, although I mostly enjoyed them and I finished the book, 718 pages was too much for me. The stories contain quite a bit of social criticism--of people's ideas about science and the supernatural, the place and purpose of religion in life, among other things.

The stories are full of melodrama and strangeness. Quite a few of them involve characters from former British colonies, especially India, or British people who had served in the colonies. A common framework for one of these stories has a somewhat lurid atmosphere and characters who are afraid that supernatural forces are at work. Father Brown, a Catholic priest who seems to have a lot of time off from his regular duties, serves in these stories as the dispeller of superstition. He applies reasoning to his astute observations and shows how an ordinary human being accomplished the crime and why. As he does this, he also cautions his observers that the answers he provides are not less disturbing than the supernatural explanations they originally feared.

The copyright on this volume is 1963, with copyrights from the original books starting in 1911. The attitudes towards people and ideas from the former British colonies reflect the attitudes from those times. Racial slurs are used with no consciousness that they are offensive.

I also have a bone to pick with the publisher, Penguin, who calls Father Brown "Fiction's best loved amateur sleuth" on the cover of this volume. I would argue that title belongs to Sherlock Holmes.

I'm not a big romance reader, but sometimes life calls for it. I read this in my back yard over about a day and a half. It isn't demanding, but it is enjoyable. My one major disappointment with it was that there weren't any explicitly non-white characters as there are in the TV show. I didn't mark this as historical fiction because, although it is set in a specific historical period, there is so much about it that is anachronistic. If you read it expecting it to be historically accurate in any way, you'll be disappointed. However, it does deal with some real issues that challenge people's relationships with loved ones, especially shame and unresolved anger. I liked it.

This emotional novel tells the story of an interracial family from the perspective of Birdie Lee, the light skinned, straight haired daughter of Sandra Lodge Lee, a white woman who comes from an old Boston "blueblood" family, and Deck Lee, a Black man who went to college at Harvard. Birdie's older sister, Cole (Colette), has much darker skin and tightly curled hair, and the two sisters experience different treatment from the people in their lives based on how they look. Early in the book, the girls' parents split up. Sandra is involved in political activism that Deck thinks is too risky. Eventually, Sandra decides she needs to flee Boston and go into hiding because of her political activities, so the girls are separated. Cole goes with Deck and his Black girlfriend Carmen to Brazil, and Birdie goes on the run with Sandra. Along the way she learns that she will present herself as a white Jewish girl as part of her mother's disguise, since the authorities will be looking for a white woman with a Black daughter.

This is an emotional, reflective novel, but it is also a story well told. Sandra and Deck Lee are likeable people with their own complicated histories and motives, but the consequences of their choices for their daughters are profound.

** spoiler alert ** This retelling of The Children of Lir is in the voice of Aife, the woman (foster child of Bodhbh, sister of Aebh, wife, after Aebh, of Lir) who turns her stepchildren into swans for 900 years. I picked this book up not knowing the original story, so I was frustrated by the narrator referring to and ruminating on "what I did" for a good 98 pages before the deed was done. After that, I thought the writing and narration was strong. This book has been called a "feminist retelling" of the story, and that makes me want to read other versions to compare.

Niamh Power was born in Ireland, immigrated with her parents to New York as a young girl in the 1920's, and then lost her parents and the rest of her family in a fire when she was 9. The Children's Aid Society took her in and then shipped her and other orphaned children out to the Midwest to be "adopted." In Niamh's case, and others', adoption meant being brought to someone's farm, home, or place of business to work.

Niamh's story is told alongside Molly's, a 17 year old modern day foster child who is having conflict with her foster mother. When Molly steals a copy of Jane Eyre from her high school library, she has to do community service. The mother of her boyfriend arranges for her to help the elderly lady she works for clean out her attic, and Molly and the elderly lady strike up a bit of a friendship.

The two stories illustrate the vulnerability of foster children, and how, although the surrounding culture has changed, many things about being a foster child have not. Although this is not specifically marketed as a YA book, it is empathetic about the issues that young adults face, especially in a foster family. It might be a good choice for a teen.

A widowed white Irish American father and his two black adopted sons are at a Jesse Jackson event in Boston when they are involved in an accident. Another person involved in the accident, seemingly an unrelated bystander, turns out to be much more connected to their family than they initially thought. On top of that, the ne'er do well estranged older son (not adopted) chooses that night to reappear at home. Family drama ensues.

This is family drama, but it is very polite, well behaved drama. Characters disagree with each other vehemently, but there is no yelling, banishing/disowning each other, or even cursing. Still, the characters are interesting people and the story is compelling. The title, "Run," refers both to the sport and running for office, with a pleasant bit of ambiguity, since the widowed father is a former Mayor of Boston and would like one or both of his adopted sons to become President of the United States. My one complaint about this book is that it becomes hard to believe the eleven year old girl is really only eleven as the story advances.

I read this book because I encountered James Rebanks on Twitter and enjoyed his posts about raising sheep in England's Lake District. Rebanks writes about how his experience of the Lake District as his ancestral home, where his family has been raising sheep for hundreds of years at least, is different from the romantic vision that non-farmers have of the place. As he describes the work he does throughout the seasons, the relationships he has with his parents and neighbors, and a bit of the history of sheep farming in his part of England, you gain some appreciation of what he means. The book is engaging, even for a non-farmer. Well worth reading.

Libertie is an African American girl and then young woman growing up in the shadow of her mother's reputation as a respected doctor and her mother's ambition for her to become a doctor too. Libertie has her doubts about whether she's cut out for the medical profession, and questions her mother's choice to treat white women despite their racist attitudes and behavior. However, she doesn't openly oppose her mother's wishes. This book is Libertie's coming of age story, set in Kings County, New York a little before and then after the Civil War. It's an enjoyable novel to read, with complicated yet sympathetic characters, and real personal conflict, in a recognizable historical setting. Highly recommend.

The author sets out to find "the wild places" in England, Ireland, and Scotland, thinking that they are isolated places that have been left alone, but comes to believe that wildness is bursting out everywhere. In the process, you visit some astonishingly beautiful places with him (and various friends of his, especially a character called Roger) and learn about their geologic and social history. This is a wonderful book.

This book is an epic consideration of parenthood in circumstances where the child profoundly challenges the parents' expectations: cases of deafness, Down Syndrome, dwarfism, schizophrenia, transgender, prodigies, children of rape, and children who become criminals are all examined. While it is a doorstop of a book (702 pages of narrative, 960 pages including notes, bibliography, and index), it is compulsively readable. Andrew Solomon's narrative is precise about difficult or nuanced emotions, but never dense.

One of the most fascinating discussions in this book is about the tension between whether to "cure" conditions like deafness, or celebrate the distinct identity that the condition confers. Solomon examines this dilemma and the nuances it takes on with each case that he considers. Is the condition a disability or an identity? Can a disability be separated from a person's identity? Would it be appropriate to grieve if, for instance, no more children were born with dwarfism, deafness, or autism?

Until the final chapter, Solomon's prose is measured and calm in its description and analysis of people's relationships to the challenges presented by their children. The final chapter, where he describes his own journey to fatherhood in light of all the work he had done for this book, is a shift to a much more emotional tone. It felt like a radical change after 600 pages of his previous tone, but was fitting to his subject matter and allowed him to sum up the wide ranging investigation of his book.

Read if you're looking for stories about people adjusting to parenting situations that are radically different from what they expected. It's mostly uplifting, boosts empathy.

This is a Pulitzer Prize nominated novel from 1991 about the killings of Osage people in Oklahoma in the 1920's to take over their land and the oil beneath it. It covers the same events that were covered by David Grann's non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon, but it tells the story from the perspective of the extended family of Belle and Moses Greycloud, an aging couple who own valuable land and who repeatedly lose family members in the killing. As a novel, it's a beautiful but wrenching story, with a cast of unique, likeable characters who are caught in a system that is rigged against them. As a reader, you are drawn in to feel a part of the community surrounding Greycloud family so that you can feel the weight of their grief and their helplessness to protect themselves against more loss. It's not an easy read, but the story is so well told that you will want to keep showing up to read it.

This is a harrowing tale of a British Navy shipwreck off the coast of Patagonia in 1742, and the struggle of the survivors to save themselves. David Grann sets the scene thoroughly, describing how the voyage came to be planned, how the ships in the convoy got their crews, who the notable personalities were, so that by the time they set out on their voyage, you have a good picture of the situation and a sense of dread about what's going to happen to them.

Grann includes extensive notes on his research for each chapter. Logbooks and diaries from the voyage exist, as well as narratives written by survivors after they made it back to England. As Grann points out, all of these were carefully constructed to make the writer appear justified in his actions, though it's clear that almost everyone did terrible things after the shipwreck.

I recommend reading this wrapped up in blankets, with a hot beverage within reach, while a storm rages outside. Feel deeply thankful that you are not a castaway on a remote island off the Patagonian coast, and that you can read about this fascinating disaster and its aftermath in comfort.

This is a dark novel about a woman (coyly calling herself Collette LeSange, but born as Anna) running an elite preschool for the children of wealthy people in a small, upstate New York town. The town is the same town where she was unwillingly turned into a vampire as an adolescent girl by her “eccentric” grandfather. After about 150 years away in Europe, where she had several experiences of devastating loss, she has come back to her childhood home and opened her successful school. Trouble starts when she accepts Leo, a sickly child with parents who appear to be at odds with each other. Leo shows precocious talent as an artist, though, and “Collette” can't resist admitting him to the school against her usual policy.

About that same time Collette begins experiencing increasingly uncontrollable hunger for blood and seeing portents of Czernobog, the “god of endings” of the title. As we see events at the school unfold, we also see the story of what happened to Collette after she was shipped off to Europe by her grandfather, so we understand her deep sense of loss and grief, and her anxiety that another terrible loss may be coming.

This book does a good job of evoking anxiety and dread. Collette, the main character, is sympathetic. She clearly loves children, knows how to work with them, and tries to protect them. She tries to keep herself under control by following strict routines. But as changes begin to occur in herself, her anxiety about what's going to happen and her ability to keep hold of herself climbs, and mine did too.

I found myself annoyed each time Collette questioned her experiences of portents of Czernobog, and more annoyed the more I knew about her past. She's seen these things before! She knows what happened! How can she question whether it's really happening now, or whether it really means what she's afraid it means? I found it especially annoying since questioning our experiences is something women are taught to do from a young age. I didn't want to see her do that.

There's a lot I'm leaving out, because there's a lot going on in this book. If you like melancholy with an icing of dread and an occasional gross out, you should give it a try.

I became a fan of James McBride's writing when I read The Good Lord Bird several years ago. When a friend of mine handed me The Color of Water two weeks ago (when I asked her for something uplifting to read while I was recovering from illness), I was excited to read it, but I had no idea what an emotional wallop I was going to receive.

James McBride describes being mystified and somewhat disturbed as a child that his mother didn't look like the mothers of his friends, but she brushed his questions off, or redirected his attention to topics she considered more important than her history or her racial identity: education or other things he should be doing to make something of himself.

This book tells the story of his mother's life up to the point when she became his mother, and his own process of growing up with her as his mother, learning about her past and coming to terms with what it meant for his own life. Chapters alternate between his mother's voice, describing what it was like to grow up the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants, and his own voice, describing what it was like to be the son of this formidable woman.

Ruth's story is heart-wrenching. Her father, a not very successful rabbi who moved his family around as his contracts with congregations were not renewed, was an abusive brute. Her mother, disabled by childhood illness, was quiet and passive, “a good Jewish wife,” who didn't speak English. Ruth and her siblings ran her father's general store, endured his abuse, and watched their father beat and berate their mother. When Ruth finally made the move to leave her family for her own preservation, she was plagued by guilt. She married a black man named McBride who worked for her aunt in New York, which caused her whole extended family to expel her. “You're out of the family,” her aunt told her when she called at one point to ask for help. “Stay out. We sat shiva for you.”

Letting go of her family was the beginning of a new life for Ruth. She converted to Christianity and helped her husband start a new church in their apartment living room. She had seven children with him, and when he died, she remarried and had five more children with her second husband. Although Ruth was financially poor, she was full of energy and resourcefulness for raising her family and building community. She had lifelong friends in the majority black community where she lived and among the families of her two husbands. She kept moving.

The chapters where James McBride describes his attempts to distance himself from his embarrassing, mysterious mother are painful to read. He doesn't gloss over the fact that he was courting danger. He credits some close calls with violence and some serious talks with black men who had spent significant time in prison with helping him begin to care more about the direction his life was taking. He describes gradually reentering the life of his family, and his description of his mother putting him on the Greyhound bus to send him to college is understatedly touching.

Although it was surely a practical decision for Ruth to close the door to her past for a long period of her life, re-opening it for her son turned out to have surprising, healing consequences for both of them. It sounds trite, but this is such a powerful, affecting story. I'll be thinking about it for a long time.

A melancholy portrait of the family and life of Charles d'Orleans in the late 14th and early 15th century. This book portrays the politics and major events of the time from the personal perspective of this sensitive, somewhat contemplative character. Although it is not a very happy history, it is written with insight into human personalities dealing with adversity. Overall, I thought this was a satisfying novel about people who really existed contending with difficult circumstances that really happened.

Western, horror, monster story, fairy tale, a mixture of all of these becoming its own genre. At the beginning of the book, we see Adelaide Henry riding away from her past as it goes up in flames, and we're a bit horrified. As we get to know Adelaide a little better and learn more about her past, the story becomes more complex. I love female protagonists who are not immediately sympathetic, and she is a great example of this.

We follow Adelaide to her new life in Montana, where a collection of odd characters join her circle of acquaintances. She had planned to live a solitary and isolated life, but she soon realizes she won't survive the winter on her own. While her connections to other people complicate her life, they are literally lifesavers, both physically and emotionally.

There is suspense and creepiness, as well as descriptions of overt and implied violence. I'm not a fan of horror, but I make an exception for Victor LaValle because I trust his style, which is unique.

I enjoyed this mystery/thriller that started out with a murdered Swedish real estate agent/wife/mother and gradually led to the discovery of an international conspiracy involving the leadership of an almost-post-apartheid South Africa. I don't read a lot of mysteries, and I haven't read Henning Mankell before. I liked how the process of investigation was portrayed, in particular how small discoveries led to larger ones, or how coincidences led to failures to find or transmit information.

I can see myself reading another one of these sometime in the future!

There's a lot going on in this 300 page book that I thought would be a light beach-read-like imagining of “what really happened” when Agatha Christie went missing for 10 days in 1925. The story is narrated by Nan O'Dea, who we quickly find out is conducting an affair with Agatha Christie's husband, Archie, and is intending to get him to divorce Agatha and marry her. We might make some assumptions about why Miss O'Dea is doing this, but as we learn more about her history, those assumptions are called into question.

This is a clever mystery wrapped up in a tale of star-crossed lovers, separated by World War I and then patriarchy, and then grief and trauma.

This is an epic of storytelling through the history of India and its relationship with its British colonizers. Read it.

I don't think of myself as a big sci fi reader or fan. Occasionally I'll pick something up that has elements that sound appealing to me, but I don't seek out sci fi on purpose. I picked up A Half Built Garden because the theme of attempting to bring Earth back from the human caused brink of destruction appealed to me, but somehow the description I read failed to mention that there were aliens in this book. I might have steered clear if I had known, but then I would have missed a delightful surprise of a book. Judy Wallach-Stevens is an ecologist with the Chesapeake watershed, in a world which has reorganized itself into networks of watersheds, communities that monitor and tend their local bodies of water and their ecosystems. Decisions are made by technologically assisted consensus, where people share their knowledge to be able to come to decisions that treat humans as part of the ecosystem, but not more important than the ecosystem. The story begins when Judy is making her customary rounds one night and receives an alert that there is a disturbance. When she investigates, she finds an alien ship has landed...and the story takes off from there.

A Half-Built Garden has a fully imagined world, where family structure, gender, uses of technology, politics, diplomacy, and ethos with regard to the natural world are addressed. However, you learn about all of these things work as you watch Judy Wallach-Stevens deal with the repercussions of finding an alien spaceship in her watershed, rather than by being told about them explicitly. Ruthanna Emrys immerses her readers in her world skillfully, so that you enjoy the sensation of finding out about child rearing practices in this new world rather than feeling like you're groping around in an unfamiliar place.

Without giving anything more away about the plot, I will also say that this novel also deals with issues of consent, and of people coming in as rescuers when the supposed rescuees don't think they need to and don't want to be rescued. I really liked the way Emrys handled this topic.

Summary: I wouldn't have picked this book if I had really known what it was, but I was surprised all the way through by how much I liked it.

There's a central mystery to Sea of Tranquility, although this is not what you would normally call a mystery novel. Three people who are separated by centuries experience a jarring anomaly where their moments bleed into the others: a glimpse of leafy tree branches overhead, a snatch of a violin lullaby, the whoosh of an airship taking off. We're not sure what happened, and the characters are disturbed enough by it that it becomes an important moment in the lives of those who experienced it.

The characters have other disruptions in their lives: Edwin St. Andrew has been exiled from England to Canada in 1912 because his father doesn't like his views on empire and colonialism. Mirella's husband has committed suicide because he invested heavily in a financial scheme that turned out to be a fraud perpetrated by the husband of Mirella's best friend. Olive Llewellyn is an author on tour on Earth to promote her best selling book, and missing her husband and daughter back home in their Moon Colony, just as a global (and interplanetary) pandemic begins. Finally there is Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, who is at loose ends after the end of a failed marriage when he takes up a job as a security guard at a hotel in Moon Colony Two.

I feel an atmosphere of slight melancholy in Emily St. John Mandel's novels, which along with the lovely simplicity of her writing, keeps me coming back. There is sadness in the background, and often sadness in the foreground too, but her characters keep moving forward, creating their lives.

I didn't realize until I was already partway through this novel that it is the third book in a trilogy. I might have liked it better if I had read the first two books first. As it was, this book was somewhat opaque to me, and I wondered how accurately the translation reflected the style of the original Norwegian text.

We meet Ingrid on her native island of Barrøy as she packs up her infant daughter Kaja and sets out on a journey to find Alexander, a Russian POW/fugitive (and the father of her child) that she rescued after he survived the shipwreck of the Rigel. Her friends and relatives try to dissuade her from her search, but she won't be discouraged. At each stop she makes, she interviews people who have slivers of information about where Alexander went and what happened to him on the way, and can point her to the next place to search. At each of these stops, though, she encounters people who are unwilling to give her all the information they have. Some of them collaborated with the Nazis during the war and are trying to keep that a secret, but the motivations of others are unclear, at least to me. Ingrid, however, can tell that people are not telling her the whole truth.

I was engaged with the story and the characters, especially Ingrid, but I found the writing style confusing. Characters seemed to be able to infer inner truths about each other from matter of fact conversations about coffee. Reading this book felt like being an outsider overhearing conversations that have a hidden subtext. I knew there was more going on than met my eye, but I couldn't figure out how it was being conveyed all the time. Also, the fact that Ingrid had a regional accent that would have made her sound funny to people in other parts of Norway was conveyed by spelling her words differently throughout the book. I understood why it was done that way, but it also irritated me because it made her seem too much like a dumb hick stereotype, which she wasn't.

So, I had mixed feelings about this book, though I really liked the end. Perhaps other readers will be able to enlighten me about the writing style.