Karen
This slender, poetic novel tells the story of Valentine, a boy born in the woods, looking for his lost twin who was stolen away while his mother was in labor. Valentine has named his lost brother Orson and refers to the California woods where he lives as Illyria. The woods are a romantic landscape where flora and fauna have an enchanting presence, and where Val retreats to hidden pools and waterfalls to think through his problems. His mother, Bella, fittingly believes she has fairy ancestors. The setting is the struggle between environmental activists, tree sitters trying to save the redwoods, and logging companies who want to cut down the ancient trees. The novel recalls Shakespeare and Greek myths. Highly recommend.
A young man, a senior in high school, is on his way with a friend to an interview for admission to Princeton when he is diverted to a different sort of interview: an entrance examination for Brakebills College, a school of magic. With his acceptance into the college, Quentin Coldwater leaves behind an unsatisfying life where he felt like a misfit and enters a life where he is surrounded by magically talented oddballs like himself. The first half of the book deals with Quentin's time at the college, and the second half involves a magical land called Fillory, which Quentin and his friends thought was only a fictional land from a series of childhood fantasy books.
This is a coming of age novel, but it is not uplifting or heartwarming the way many coming of age novels are. Quentin is a bit world-weary and the atmosphere is dark. Magic does not automatically bring happiness. The challenge Quentin and his friends deal with is to find a meaningful life in spite of not needing to work hard for the basics. In the course of the book they contend with actual monsters and interpersonal relationship problems, and things don't always turn out well.
I enjoyed this and will probably read more of the series.
I got my copy of this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Thanks to the publisher!
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is told from the point of view of slum children. 10 year old Jai is the main protagonist, and his friends Pari and Faiz, and his sister Runu all play major parts in the story. There are gangs of children who scavenge through garbage for an adult who gives them food, and there are families like Jai's who are living precariously on low wages in the slums, but have so far managed to keep themselves together. Nearby are the “hi-fi” apartment buildings where the well-off live, and where many of the slum residents work in domestic service.
In this story, children from the slum where Jai lives have started to go missing. Jai, who is a fan of TV detective shows, thinks that the police are not investigating as vigorously as they should, and decides that he and his friends can talk to the people the police aren't interviewing and ask the questions the police aren't asking. Over the course of the story, we become acquainted with the people Jai knows, the place where he lives and the conditions there. As more children go missing, the community becomes agitated, and Jai's confidence that he can find out what is happening wanes. Interspersed through the book are the stories that people from the community tell themselves to bring comfort, usually featuring the spirits of the dead who are watching out for the living in their times of need.
The author's postscript on this novel explains that in her years as a journalist in India she encountered many families whose children had gone missing, and that the issue stayed with her even when she moved away from her home country. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is 100% a novel, though, not a piece of reporting. Jai is a wonderful narrator, with enough understanding of his situation that his perspective is enlightening, but with very definite limitations. His emotional progression through the story is touching. The inclusion of the “saint” stories and the djinns accentuate how vulnerable these people are, but also add otherworldly beauty to an otherwise grim landscape.
A monumental book (1120 pages) that took me 3 months to read and knocked me off my reading schedule. Rather than one or two main characters, it has a large caste of characters, including the town and environs of Glastonbury itself. Set in the 1930's, as England is becoming more motorized, there are industrialists and communists, as well as people who are still living a relatively traditional life close to the land. There are adherents of Christianity, believers in the Arthurian legends and Welsh mythology, and atheists. And whether they believe in the legends or not, everyone in the town is aware that Glastonbury is the site of many of those legendary events, as well as the site of a Neolithic lakeside town. The legendary and real history of Glastonbury extends into the present lives of its inhabitants in strange ways. That is partly what the novel is about.
It's not an easy read, which is why it took me so long to get through it. The sentences can be long and abstractly philosophical. I sometimes had trouble keeping track of what was happening in a paragraph because of that. But when Powys focuses on the lives of the human characters, it's magical. His characters are a large collection of men, women, and children from different walks of life, with conflicting agendas (industrialists, communists, traditional farmers, maiden aunts, philandering husbands, unfaithful wives, kissing cousins, messianic town officials, etc). Most of them are real weirdos. Many of them are part of the Crow family, which is in conflict with itself. They are all treated with loving attention by the author, so that you are drawn deeply into their lives and concerns–sometimes against your will.
I mentioned that the town of Glastonbury and its environs is also a character in the story, but there are also other non-human characters, like trees, the sun and moon, lingering consciousness from people who had died in the past, and the First Cause. Another Goodreads reviewer compared them to the gods in Greek myths, which I think is a good way to describe them. The human beings in the story are not necessarily aware of the non-human characters, but they are influential in what happens.
In summary, this is a long, weirdly wonderful book that I feel I barely understood, but I'm glad I persevered and read the whole thing. Bon courage if you decide to take it on.
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.