Karen
This book follows Oksana, a child of Ukrainian immigrants to the US, as she grows up from a 7 year old hoping her schoolmates don't notice her grandmother waiting to pick her up after school, to a mother-to-be attending her grandmother's funeral in Kiev. Her energy, acerbic outlook, and full-tilt approach to life get her in trouble, especially as a child, but also make her irresistible–to read about, but apparently also to the people in her life. One storyline of the book leads to Oksana's realization of how much she is like her beloved Baba, whom she has always viewed as a somewhat outrageous character with an operatic life story.
I thought about labeling this as a comic novel, but decided not to. It is very funny in places but not all the way through, and I don't think comedy was its central goal. It's a light-spirited growing up story. Don't let the cover art (which I love) fool you.
Beautifully written, unflinchingly told story of a talented high school girl's rape by her English teacher and the repercussions it has for her adult life. The story is told from the perspective of Vanessa, the young girl in question. For most of the novel, she sees her relationship with Jacob Strane as a love story, so it's difficult reading. The last part of the book brings some tentative relief, though.
I appreciated the discussion of Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita which is embedded in the novel. Strane has Vanessa read the book as part of her grooming, and it remains a touchstone for her through college. Because the book is so significant for her, she brings it up in conversation, so other English teachers in her life have the opportunity to comment on Lolita and how to read it at different points in the story. It amounts to a mini-conversation about Nabokov's novel and how it is interpreted or misinterpreted/misused by its readers.
Overall, it's painful but well worth reading.
Perhaps starting in the middle of a series is not the best way to read a novel. This was my first Louise Penny, and although I liked it, it didn't live up to the expectations I had based on the love my friends have for Louise Penny novels. Armand Gamache is newly retired after some traumatic event that is only alluded to, and his friends and family eye him anxiously to make sure he is okay. When one of the residents of Three Pines, the village Gamache and his wife are living in, confides her worry about her missing husband, though, he is drawn back into the life of a detective.
For all that it constantly refers to the hard and dangerous life of a detective, this book is wrapped in coziness. There are characters whose sole function is “lovable crank” or “supportive friend.” The characters spend evenings eating communal meals which are described with detail a foodie would appreciate. When it comes to detection, Gamache often gleans information from small details that the reader is not privy to until much later, which I find annoying.
This story takes place among a community of artists, and deals with artistic inspiration, authenticity, and risk taking. The subject matter was interesting, and I liked the setting of Quebec, but I was not bowled over by this book. I think I will read the first in the series before I give up on Louise Penny, though.
A very creepy story set in 1950's Mexico, about a young socialite who goes to her newly married cousin's isolated home to check on her after receiving a disturbing letter and is drawn into the strange family life there. It is not an accident that Noemi and her cousin are Mexican with native heritage and the Doyles are British in this tale about being taken over against your will. The blurb on the book compared it to HP Lovecraft and the Brontes, but in atmosphere it reminded me of Daphne DuMaurier, except that the heroine is much more likeable. I really enjoyed this.
Katharina Kepler is illiterate, so it is her neighbor, friend, and legal guardian Simon who writes down her account of being accused of and tried for witchcraft. Simon doesn't like to stand out or attract attention to himself, but he feels a sense of obligation to Katharina, so he commits himself to standing by her in her troubles. He goes with her to the court, speaks up for her in his understated way, and writes down verbatim what she recounts as her experience.
Katharina's narrative includes her sharp evaluations of all the people involved, and sometimes whimsical preoccupations. Her principle accuser, the glazier's wife, she call the Werewolf. The Werewolf's brother she calls the Cabbage. The local governor, whose name is Einhorn, she calls the False Unicorn. She dotes on her cow, Chamomile, and offers medical advice to anyone who seems to be ailing. In many ways she is an easy target for people who resent her, and she refuses to change her behavior in the face of the accusations against her. Her son, the astronomer Johannes Kepler, is also a strike against her, since he published theologically suspect writings and is at odds with the Lutheran and Catholic churches.
The book alternates between Katharina's narrative (as written by Simon), personal notes inserted by Simon about his own state of mind, and testimony from witnesses that appears in questionnaire form. It's funny, maddening, and sad, and also the most enjoyable book I've read this summer.
An unmarried, unnamed woman of a certain age is living her life alongside, but not necessarily with, friends and acquaintances in an unnamed, presumably Italian city. She seems to treasure her solitude and independence, but also long to be more closely entwined with people–she's lonely, but also reluctant to break out of her loneliness.
Not much happens in this quiet novel. There are some lovely scenes (the woman is alone in her compartment on a train when a group of joyful, demonstrative family members break into her solitude. They are eating and offer her food, which she refuses, but she admires them and enjoys their presence until they exit), and a very slow movement toward the ending, but it's far from action packed. Ultimately, it just didn't make a big impression on me.
These stories are a bit madcap, and most of them have sly references to the infernal in them: characters saying “The devil only knows,” or a sulfurous smell, or a building burning down in an inferno. They cover everything from a clerk at a bureaucratic agency losing his mind over a series of clerical errors to a story about the lengths one man would go to avoid having his apartment requisitioned to house more people. These stories, especially Diaboliad and The Fatal Eggs, contain the seeds of the absurd and malevolent world of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.
Reading this as a middle aged adult is quite a different experience from when I read it as a romantic teenager. This time around I see it as a study of willful self deception intertwined with societal structures that put women in the position of having to beguile men for their security. The character of Philip Ashley starts out as sympathetic, an orphaned boy raised by his benevolent cousin, but quickly becomes insufferably possessive once he develops a fascination for Rachel. In spite of his friends' warnings, he isolates himself and digs deeper into his obsession. Rachel herself may or may not be a danger to him. She certainly leads him on, whether that's because she feels she has to or because she has nefarious purposes is unclear. This is a masterpiece of ambiguity.
I loved this novel's forthrightness, especially about some less public aspects of trans women's lives. The story is about a love triangle of sorts: Ames, who was born as James, transitioned to become Amy, and then detransitioned to be become Ames, has an affair with his boss Katrina, a cis woman, and gets her pregnant because he thought he was sterile. As they are deciding what to do about the baby and their relationship, Ames proposes to bring in his ex, Reese, a trans woman who has always wanted a baby, to help raise their child. Not surprisingly, everyone's feelings and responses in this situation are complex. One of the best parts of this novel is the interplay between what each person thinks is truly beyond the pale and what they will accept as reasonable behavior, while trying to make a new kind of family.
The first part of the novel alternates between the present day and the past, presented as weeks or years pre or post conception. This way we learn about Reese and Ames/Amy's past, both individually and as a couple. The second part of the novel is in the present, where each person in the triangle is grappling with their expectations, fears, and desires.
There are a couple of places where the conversations that characters are having feel a little preachy, but the line between preachy and enlightening is thin. I definitely was enlightened by some of those conversations, so I don't want to give that too much weight. Mostly, I just enjoyed the robust voice of this book and the generosity of spirit that the characters are reaching for. This all sounds very serious, but there are moments of dry hilarity too. I will 100% read this author again.
A relatively uncomplicated story and a fast read compared to many of Margaret Atwood's other novels, including The Handmaid's Tale. The book is three first person narratives: Aunt Lydia from The Handmaid's Tale, Agnes, a young woman who was raised in Gilead, and Daisy, a teenaged girl raised in Canada who is learning about Gilead from the outside. Of the three, Aunt Lydia's narrative is central. We learn some things about her backstory that don't make her exactly sympathetic, but they do make her seem more human. She is also present in the other two narratives even when she is not physically present in the story–evoked as a bogeyman and revered as a founding figure in Gilead.
The more I think about it, the more I think this novel is about Aunt Lydia. I would say more, but I am suppressing all kinds of spoilers.
If you're at all interested in what happens to Gilead in the time after The Handmaid's Tale, I recommend this. It's a page turner that doesn't require a huge amount of energy to read, but it is satisfying to think about afterward.
The narrator's world in the first part of this book is dominated by “The Portal,” a social media platform where people get their news and spend time interacting with others. The portal is a kind of parallel society with its own standards of behavior, of what is funny or interesting or appropriate. The narrator is a sort of expert or representative resident of the portal who is in demand around the world for her talks about the world of the portal. I labeled this book Dystopia because of the portal, where the things people say and do are harsh, crass, loud, nonsensical–and where harshness, crassness, loudness, and nonsensicality seem to be encouraged and applauded. There is also reference to a dictator and authoritarian policies recently enacted that may sound familiar to people who have lived through the 2017-2021 Trump administration.
Midway through the book, a change occurs. The narrator steps back from the portal and becomes more connected to people. The harshness of language and behavior recedes in the presence of some harsh reality. I have to admit I felt MUCH more sympathetic to the narrator in this part of the book.
No One is Talking About This is written in brief, disconnected paragraphs–a little long for most social media platforms, but short for a novel. Sometimes the paragraphs flow together and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the paragraphs are opaque and sometimes they are highly accessible. There are beautiful sentences and sensitive observations all the way through. The style makes it easy to read the book quickly, so whether you love it or not, it won't take long to read. I didn't love it, though I appreciated Patricia Lockwood's ability to make the portal into such a hellscape that I thought seriously about closing my social media accounts.
The perfect summer read for Late Pandemic Times: a dystopian novel about a young woman with a “golden arm” being raised by resister parents in an ultra-connected, hyper consumerist dystopia. A group of “Surplus” parents decide to start an underground baseball league and Gwen's pitching catches the attention of the surveillance state. With baseball suddenly declared an Olympic sport, and with a major Olympic showdown with ChinRussia coming up, Gwen is recruited to university so she can train with other elite athletes.
Themes of class and race underpin the story, which is also set in a chaotic ecological climate: many “Surplus” people have to live on boats because sea level has risen due to climate change. One possible punishment for misbehavior is for people to be cast off of land and forced to live entirely at sea for a period of time. Storms at sea have become so dangerous that being Cast Off can be a death sentence.
The whole story is narrated by Gwen's father, Grant, a former teacher who is good at making gadgets to help his family evade the constant state surveillance. His pragmatic, sensible, slightly wry voice gives the impression of steadiness, even when he is deeply worried. I found this combination of calm affect and scary circumstances very familiar after the last 4 years, and especially after the last year.
Highly readable, emotionally complex, very satisfying. Also, Ann Patchett says it's a “Stone cold masterpiece.”
A nice, creepy, and well researched vampire adventure novel. The story starts out being narrated by the teenaged daughter of a world-weary diplomat who has dark secrets in his past. There's a transition to the world-weary diplomat narrating the stories of that past to the teenaged daughter. Then there are letters from the diplomat's graduate advisor, and letters from the diplomat, interspersed with clandestine train trips across Europe and interpretation of legends of Dracula. The frame of the letters occasionally gets confusing, but the story they tell is pretty gripping. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
Klara is an Artificial Friend (sometimes pejoratively called a “machine” or a “robot” by people in the novel) built to be a companion for a child. She is chosen by Josie, a young girl with fragile health who lives with her mother and a housekeeper in the countryside. The story is told from Klara's perspective, as she learns about Josie's health problems and family life. Klara is focused on helping Josie, so she strives to fit into the household routine and meet the family's expectations for her, but she also acts independently to provide a very different, un-machine-like help to Josie.
Since Klara is the narrator, and she is curious and observant of subtle human emotional responses, she is easy to empathize with. There are aspects of her that make it clear she is a machine (her vision sometimes divides areas into quadrants, or she occasionally sees people as cones and cylinders), but she is a sympathetic machine–I thought of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This premise, that a machine could exhibit human like qualities, is a familiar one. But this novel also highlights an emotionally fraught discussion about whether there's anything in a human life that can't be replicated by a machine, if the subject is observed closely enough and the engineer is skilled enough. One of the adults in Josie's life admits to having a hard, cold center that believes that such a thing is possible. Klara and the Sun is written with such spare elegance and suggests such blurred boundaries that I found it moving rather than trite.
This is a critique of the current American educational system and a call to do better, especially for children of color. It condemns a mindset that parents, teachers, and children should be satisfied if a child merely survives primary and secondary education, and demands that children should get what they need to thrive from teachers and school. The book describes some of the ways that could happen–by teachers (as well as other community members) contributing to creating a “home place” for their students, for example, teaching students in whatever ways possible that they matter. There are chapters that explain the concept of educational survival and what it looks like, the ways racism shows up in education right now, the necessary ingredients of abolitionist teaching, along with examples of abolitionist teachers from the past, and the usefulness of critical race theory for creating a language to speak about the kinds of racism that has been mostly unacknowledged by whites in charge.
Bettina Love, the author, mixes this critique and primer on racism in education with examples of her own experience as a Black girl growing up in Rochester, NY, and her experiences as a teacher and a teacher educator. These anecdotes flesh out what she is writing about in a way that is helpful to someone who hasn't had her experiences, and in this way it is a very personal book. But she is careful to point out that it isn't enough to read a book or attend an anti-racism training for professional development. She says teachers need to get to know and love their individual students personally, in order to be invested in them, to want them to “win.”
This book contains lots of references to events in the news, authors, and educational and critical race theories, all cited with endnotes. It's an inspiring book. There were some places where I thought Beacon Press could have done a better job editing, but I recommend this to anyone who works in education.
Girl Waits With Gun is an enjoyable detective story based on a real family's life in New Jersey in the early 20th century. Most of the detective work in this novel is done by Constance Kopp, who is not actually a detective, just a woman with a past trying to resolve a traffic accident that destroyed her family's buggy. Her efforts draw the ire of the perpetrator and also bring her into contact with other vulnerable people he has harmed. Miss Kopp's sisters pull her in opposite directions: the older sister, Norma, thinks she should let the accident go in order to stay out of the way of the criminals, and the younger sister, Fleurette, wants to dive in and get much more involved in spite of the fact that she is being targeted for kidnapping. Meanwhile, her brother Francis is pressuring Constance and her sisters to move off the farm where they're living and crowd into his house in town where he can keep an eye on them.
One of the things that is so enjoyable about this story is that it acknowledges the issues that women of the time had: vulnerability to men who see women living independently as targets for exploitation, lack of employment opportunities, lack of means (and societal acceptance) for raising children on their own. All of this is present in the story and goes into creating the situation that gives rise to the story. Yet the Kopp sisters are individuals who handle their problems according to their own lights and in the process read like a real, annoying family.
I was sceptical of the amount of help Miss Kopp received from the Sheriff and his deputies, but there is a plausible (unstated) reason for it in the story besides the Sheriff's zeal for the law. Overall, I really liked this book.
From the first sentence of this novel you know that you are in a different world: “When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of Three Tides.” It takes a while to learn that this world is wild, beautiful, and eerily uninhabited except by the narrator and one other person, a man the narrator calls The Other. The Other calls the narrator Piranesi for reasons that he won't explain, but the narrator is sure that Piranesi is not his real name.
Piranesi has a reverent attitude towards the House they inhabit. He has taken the time to explore it as widely as he can, get to know his way around it, learn the patterns of the tides, learn to use what he finds to feed himself and keep warm in the winter, and establish friendly relations with the birds who also live there. The Other, on the other hand, is not interested in exploring or adapting himself to the environment. He is on a search for the Great and Secret Knowledge that he believes is hidden somewhere in the House/World that they inhabit, and he seems to be entirely focused on that. He does take advantage of Piranesi's knowledge when it suits him, and sends Piranesi to find out what he wants to know about various areas of the House. The rest of the time he is dismissive of Piranesi and his interests.
As we get to know this strange world with its two strange characters, questions naturally arise. If there are only two living people in this world, how did they come to be there? Where are their parents? If they haven't been there since infancy, what are their back stories? Are there places in the world that are different from this House with a sea contained in it? Piranesi seems oddly sure that there are no other living people in the world, and untroubled by any questions about where he and the Other came from if there truly aren't any other living people. Obviously this unquestioning acceptance can't last.
Piranesi does start to have questions. As he answers them for himself, the universe of the book opens wider but does not get any less strange. This isn't a mystery book, although reading it is a lot like working on a puzzle–the more pieces you can put together, the better you can see different parts of the picture, which can help you put more pieces together. The way the story is structured, so that the need for information is gently introduced, and then information is given in subtle ways at first, and then in more obvious chunks, makes reading it satisfying the way working on a puzzle can be. Piranesi's story is touching, and the way it reveals itself to him, and to us, only enhances its effect on the reader.
It's been a long time since I cried over a novel, but this one did it for me. Such lovely character development, such a lovely portrayal of the life of a family. Also, the sense of what it's like to live in the context of an epidemic is so strong here. This family, in this context, is more accustomed to illness and death than we are in the 21st century West, but that doesn't make this story less wrenching.
I loved the details of life in a country town in Renaissance England.
An oddity: although the Latin tutor/husband is plainly William Shakespeare, he is never named in the novel. Why not? Every other major character in the novel is named. It seemed needlessly coy.
Otherwise, no reservations about recommending this book, especially if you are feeling numb.
Meh. There were aspects of this comic about the immortal librarian Rex Libris that made me laugh–details about the daily duties of real life librarians alongside of Rex's intergalactic adventures, such as checking to see whether his library owns a book mentioned by another character–but I wasn't charmed enough to want to read any more in the series.
I read Dune (and the rest of the series) a couple of times as a teenager and loved it then. I decided it was time to read Dune again to see what I think of it now.
First, it is much more of a boy-coming-of-age story than I remember. In the case of Paul Atreides, coming of age doesn't mean just becoming a man or stepping into his father's position, it means becoming a Messiah figure for the people of his adopted planet, Arrakis. The focus of the book is really on Paul. I thought I remembered Jessica, his mother, being more of a central figure, but she is central only to the extent that she is focused on him.
Second, the world of Dune is developed in such detail, with a history and political order, an ecology, philosophy and accompanying religions. It's really impressive. However, the character development is disappointing. Jessica, Paul's mother, has something like a personality which shows in the care she takes with bringing up her son, the love she has for Paul's father, Duke Leto, and her fidelity to her Bene Gesserit training (as well as in the instances when she is disobedient to her training). Paul himself, though, is curiously impersonal and cold as a character, even though we spend a lot of time hearing his thoughts. Other characters fare even worse, with the possible exception of Liet Kynes, a planetologist raised to his position on Arrakis by his planetologist father.
It was interesting for me to notice that the sexual politics in Dune were about what you'd expect from a novel written in 1965. This isn't something I would have noticed as a teenager. Men are the leaders and women are pretty much there to bear the children, look pretty, and serve their men. Among the Fremen there's more of an expectation that women will also have occasion to kill their enemies in battle, but they still have delightful customs like women being the prize for challenging a leader and killing him. The exception to all of this is the Bene Gesserit, a female organization somewhat like an order of priestesses, where girls are brought up to master physical and psychic power to be used in service of a secret agenda that involves combining bloodlines to produce a ... what? Kwisatz Haderach, whatever that is. Women who have been trained by the Bene Gesserit are both valued and feared for their skills. Men consistently refer to them as witches, and not in a good way.
The bottom line is, I enjoyed being immersed in the world of Dune again, but was disappointed to realize that the characters were not as rich and the universe not as welcoming to females as I remembered them.
This book has a good premise, but the execution is not so great.
Diana Bishop is the daughter of two witches who were murdered when she was a child. Because of this she believes magic invites trouble, so she doesn't (or tries not to) use her own powers. Instead she becomes a historian of science, earns a PhD, and gets tenure at Yale. The story begins when she's at Oxford's Bodleian Library, looking at alchemical manuscripts. One of the texts she requests turns out to be bewitched. She hastily returns it to the stacks, but not before every “creature” (vampire, witch, or demon) in the vicinity notices that she has managed to call up a very important book that was supposed to have been lost for at least 150 years. Among these creatures is Matthew Clairmont, a 1500 year old vampire originally from France, now working as a professor of biochemistry at Oxford. He pays Diana a visit to find out what she knows...and the romance begins.
In many ways this is a straight up romance novel, with many romance novel tropes: independent, strong willed woman meets brooding, controlling man; forbidden love; independent, strong willed woman somehow needs rescuing all the time, to name a few. But it also wants to be a bit of an intellectual adventure. Matthew Clairmont is investigating the decline of creatures in modern times, so there's a lot of detail (I'm not competent to judge how accurate) about DNA research, tracing relationships between vampires, witches, and demons, and speculation about each species' origins. The lost alchemical manuscript is thought to shed light on these questions, which is why everyone is so eager to get their hands on it.
Then there is the question of why Diana doesn't seem to have the powers that her very powerful parents had. When she does try to use magic, it usually doesn't work very well, or she doesn't have control over it. Other witches are curious about her or suspicious of her, while she is exasperatedly trying to have a “normal” life. It becomes clear that she will need to look more deeply into what happened to her parents in order to understand her current situation, so this is also a bit of a coming of age story.
All of this is really appealing to me, but I wish it was put together better. Matthew and Diana are well rounded enough, but many of the secondary characters are flimsy. They pop up when M and D need someone to interact with, but they don't seem real in themselves. Sarah Bishop, the aunt that raised Diana after her parents were killed, is a lesbian, red haired and combative–that's about all we get. Other important characters get similar perfunctory treatment. There are many details and whole scenes which don't seem to further the story that I wish had been edited out. The overall effect is a jumble of undifferentiated blah-ness from which occasional scenes stand out as moving or interesting.
I will say that I liked the premise of the story well enough that I read the next two books in the trilogy hoping that the writing would get better. It didn't get much better, but I did confirm that I really liked the idea of this story. I won't be reviewing the other two books.
I love a good retelling. The Song of Achilles tells the story of Achilles and Patroclus from the point of view of Patroclus. It follows Greek mythology and the Iliad closely, but fills in details that help a modern reader interpret those old stories. The result is a very moving novel. I especially admired Madeline Miller's ability to depict the gods as real beings acting in human life in a way that I can picture.
This is essentially a story about someone in a precarious spot in life finally catching a break and moving on to more stability. Casey has overwhelming student debt that she can barely afford to make payments on, she's been dumped by her boyfriend, she's not making progress on the novel she's been working on for 6 years, and she is grieving the sudden death of her mother. She works as a waitress at a high end restaurant and lives in what used to be a garden shed attached to the back of a nice house in Somerville. With all the financial pressure and grief, it's not surprising that Casey has anxiety attacks.
Casey's friend Muriel offers to read her novel draft, and from there things start to move. Muriel likes the draft and suggests some changes, which gives Casey new energy to work on it. She finishes the novel and sends it out to publishers to see if she can get a book deal.
In the meantime, she is developing relationships with two different men: Silas, a struggling writer like herself who comes on strong and then disappears repeatedly, and Oscar, an established writer and widower with two young sons, who is a bit overbearing. Neither of these men seem that great to me, but it's clear that Casey will end up with one of them by the end of the book.
I wasn't satisfied with the story this book told, but I did like the details in King's writing. The scenes of waiting tables in the restaurant, of Casey's panic attacks, of babysitting Oscar's kids–all of these were precise, full, and wonderful to read.