Devon Trevarrow Flaherty's Blog, page 13

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep began a series of disappointing books that I would read from March into April. While there are things to like about this book, especially for old-style bookworms, the writing is often confusing and distracting and the book is entirely too long. I enjoyed reading it, despite its many faults, but I would hope there are better book-loving books out there to recommend. And while I might remember it and reference it, I do not need to read it again. I won’t, in fact.

Rob is a young, successful lawyer in his city of preference, Wellington, New Zealand. He has a beautiful girlfriend who he loves. A position at a firm downtown. Supportive parents an hour away. And a prodigious, academic brother who reads storybook characters—Sherlock Holmes, (pseudo-)Nancy Drew, a murderous Uriah Heep—into existence, sometimes on accident and in the middle of the night. It doesn’t take long after coming to Rob’s town, for Charley’s abilities and creations to take over their relationship and threaten to take over more—their lives, their town, maybe even the whole world. And what is Rob thinking trying to help out a brother he both resents and belittles when magical problems are way, way outside of his expertise and abilities? Why does he keep coming to Charley’s aid? And why does Charley keep asking him to?

I have a short history of falling for the marketing of a book written expressly for bookish types. Then I read the book. Then I am disappointed. Then I tell you about it. Aaand… this book is no exception to this pattern. Technically I didn’t come across it on my own, but I was thrilled that my speculative fiction book club was cycling into fantasy with a bookish read. I mean, characters read into life by readers? The appearance as characters of Victorian literature greats? A main character who is a genius professor of literature, an expert in Dickens, and has a flat (apartment) which functions as little else than a receptacle for his towers of books? Sign me up! And since it was for book club, surely it was popular enough or good enough to make it on to the ol’ TBR.

As one book club reader put it, “It’s like literary analysis meets fan fiction.” And like another reader put it, “If you engage intellectually too much, you’ll run into trouble.” So I was supposed to just shut up and sink into the book and have a fun time watching my favorite (and not-so-favorite) characters show up on the page and be funny and fun and take me through a story. Just for fun. But that’s not the whole story with this book, because some of the thoughts about literature, reading, and literary criticism are interesting and deep. Our discussion of it included such words as “misanthropic” and “obsequious,” yet everyone either didn’t like the book or they liked it despite itself. In other words, falling into it and calling in entertaining was the only way to enjoy it, to appreciate it. But what about the cleverness? Let it go, Devon. Let it go. (That’ll be funny in a minute.)

And falling into the story isn’t possible, anyway. Why? The writing style. A common attribute of this unfortunate series of books I have just read is bumpy writing. It has been weeks since I have been pulled into a story by clear, fluid writing style. Uriah Heep was constantly distracting, making the process take much longer and just basically annoying me. Either I wasn’t sure what the author had just meant to say and had to go back and re-read, or I was irritated by the way it was said and was thinking about words and not story (and not in a good way). Bumpy. Rocky. Distracting. I couldn’t just lean back and let go.

Here are some basically measurable things: there are typos, actually grammatical and spelling mistakes; there are moments of confusion and confusing syntax (“It was the best she could hope for, the best but one, and that was for the time not to come at all” (p196)); there are spatial impossibilities (often in action scenes); there are character inconsistencies; there is impossible timing, unlikely (haha) scenarios (they go out to pizza after emerging from the ocean), and unintentional absurdness (Rob could see the type of fabric and skin on a hand slightly up a tunnel under the water of a windy bay). The book is too long for what it is, has too many scenes and details that are repetitive or unnecessary. (Many people at club lamented about 100 pages (maybe even 200) they thought should have been cut from the book, and several readers didn’t even finish the book because of its length.) Humor sometimes ends up just confusing, like Parry is referring to something we aren’t in on (“His hair was still windblown from the death trap.” What?). And boy does Parry try so hard to be funny. (Note: sometimes she is.)The writing style is plain. The writing skill is, um, unrefined. And yet. And yet. Did I enjoy reading the book? I actually did.

I mean, this sort of list of complaints could be made against many a popular fiction book that is also, somehow, a fun time. Is it too much to ask that a bookish person write a bookish book for bookish people that is actually good or even great literature? Perhaps. (What came the closest so far? The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, though I would argue this is more historical fiction than meant for book-lovers.) Part of me thinks that the book-loving type would be the most difficult to please but that publishers would think it would sell. But I might be wrong. Book lovers might be—in general—a rather undiscerning lot. Die-hard readers are not the same as English Literature academics. Though they might overlap on the Venn diagram. Many readers read so much that they can’t afford to be very picky. They know what they want and as long as they have a good time…

Parry is an academic, though, and the book did explore some more weighty things than your typical fan fiction. On the literary side, it was a meta approach to literary critique, a little. The storybook characters are never the same twice, for example, because they are translated by a specific person at a certain point in their life from a certain passage. They are translated as they are read, and everyone has a different idea, sees a different thing. The book is, on one level, about reader interpretation. And within all this, there are really clever moments, like a character called Implied Reader, or even authors read out through the lenses of their own stories like in the semi-autobiographical sense of David Copperfield. Or when Charley and Rob have to take on the Jabberwocky and have a hard time making sense of the nonsensical language enough to read something meaningful out of it. Then some of the thoughts and themes seep into universal contemplations about life: is living the same as writing a story and how so?; How are we different from stories?; in what sense are we a reaction to how people around us read/interpret us? We change each other. This is a super important (and fresh) theme.

Also fresh? The centrality of a brother relationship. This book is a love story, but the love is between a pair of brothers. I mean, how often do you come across that? I was really happy to see it. It’s imperfect and complicated, but I was actually crying. Fraternal love, even just platonic love, is a thing I don’t see enough in the books I read. It was hands-down my favorite thing about the book.

What else is there to say? I still can’t decide if the POV character (Rob) is the story’s protagonist. (Actually, there is more than one POV character, including a few chapters from a third (I’m sorry, but random) POV perspective.) In some senses, Charley is the protagonist. The choices of POV are a little loopy, I think. I did not find the plot twists to be surprising. I understand why Parry went with mostly Victorian characters, and why she made up a new character to be like a Nancy Drew (yes, Millie is made up for this book but none of the other storybook characters are): they needed to be in the public domain for this book to even happen. Can you imagine if Parry tried to slip a Harry Potter in there? Lawsuits would be flyin’! Unfortunately, using known and well-loved characters was always going to be a minefield (though I think she skirted around this rather neatly by having people interpret/read themselves into the characters). I found the “real world” characters like Rob and Charley to be much more believable and interesting than all the Darcys and White Queens and Matildas. Though, if I’m being honest, I thought even the “made-up” characters suffered from cliches. Rob was the only one I could really sink my teeth into, full stop.

Along with all the cutting that should have happened (452 tightly-packed pages), I thought the book should have ended earlier. And differently. The first ending, meaning the climax, was satisfactory, inevitable, sensical. Bu the second ending, meaning the resolution, was cheesy and hinged on one off-handed comment about what had to happen (which I found unbelievable). Speaking of the ending, many readers found the nemesis to be a strange one (once you find out). When they said this, I realized that if I give it like five seconds of thought, I feel the same way. Both the real and false bad guys were not set up right. They came from nowhere. They were unconvincing, lacked motivation and proper foreshadowing. Parry should have just stuck with Uriah Heep. BTW, this novel takes place in New Zealand. Parry is a New Zealand author.

And speaking of Uriah Heep, do you need to have read all of Victorian literature to appreciate The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep? No, you do not. You will understand everything just fine, but you are not exactly the target audience and there are things you will miss. Maybe you could just look up a few of the books and/or characters before reading? (Someone in book club also pointed out that Frozen would be an excellent movie to watch before or after reading this one because there are many similarities. Darn it if they aren’t right.)

Characters (some of them are merely mentioned, some of them are main characters, most of them are in between)

Uriah Heep (David Copperfield, Charles Dickens)the hound of the Baskervilles ( The Hound of the Baskervilles , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)Sherlock Holmes (The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol.s 1 and 2, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)Dorian Gray ( The Picture of Dorian Gray , Oscar Wilde)Fagin ( Oliver Twist , Charles Dickens)Heathcliff ( Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte)The Artful Dodger (Jack Dawkins, Oliver Twist , Charles Dickens)Humpty Dumpty ( Through the Looking Glass , Lewis Carroll. At least that’s who I think this character is, in the background. It could just be the Implied Reader.)Monster ( Frankenstein , Mary Shelley)White Witch (Jadis, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis)Darcy ( Pride and Prejudice , Jane Austen)Millie Radcliffe-Dix (The Adventures of Millie Radcliffe-Dix, Jacqueline Blaine, which is a totally made-up character, series, and author)Miss Matty (Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell)Lancelot (Arthurian legend)Duke of Wellington (biography, Simon Fitzpatrick, which I think may be made up though the character was an actual, real person as well as biographical “character”)Dr. Frankenstein ( Frankenstein , Mary Shelley)Ebenezer Scrooge ( A Christmas Carol , Charles Dickens)Griffin ( The Invisible Man , H. G. Wells)Lady Macbeth (“Macbeth,” William Shakespeare)Mad Hatter ( Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , Lewis Carroll)Huck Finn (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain)implied readerAnna Karenina ( Anna Karenina , Leo Tolstoy)Mr. Maui (“Maui and the Sun” and other references)The Scarlet Pimpernel (Sir Percy Blakeney, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Emmuska Orczy)Matilda (Matilda, Roald Dahl)Mr. Tumnus (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis)dragon (A Lion in the Meadow, Margaret Mahy)Scheherazade ( One Thousand and One Nights )Odysseus ( The Odyssey , Homer)The Invisible Man (The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison)Abel Magwich (Great Expectations, Charles Dickens)Estella (Great Expectations, Charles Dickens)butterflies (Aesop’s Fables, Aesop)Jabberwock(y) ( Through the Looking-Glass , Lewis Carroll)Nancy (Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens)David Copperfield (David Copperfield, Charles Dickens)Charles Dickens (implied, David Copperfield, Charles Dickens)Dracula ( Dracula , Bram Stoker)Mr. Hyde ( Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , Robert Louis Stevenson)Daniel Quilp (The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens)Moriarty ( The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Vol.s 1 and 2 , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)flying monkeys ( The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , L. Frank Baum)Bill Sikes ( Oliver Twist , Charles Dickens)crowd of stars (“When You Are Old,” William Butler Yeats)

And a few titles/authors mentioned without specific characters:

Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, Lynley Dodd“Mandalay,” Rudyard KiplingA Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens“The Adventure of the Red Circle,” Sir Arthur Conan DoyleGreen Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss The Princess Bride , William GoldmanAgatha Christie

So that’s it. I liked reading this book but I would not say it is a good book. And plenty of people at book club either DNRed it or didn’t like it. I can see their points. Still, there are some really interesting themes and lots of fun romping around with familiar characters. After you’ve read like thirty classic novels, make yourself a dinner of meat pie, mashed potatoes, mushy peas, and stout pale pudding studded with raisins and approach this book slowly and over time. If you even want to go that far.

“…poetry…. Those postmodern things that read like a dictionary mated with a Buddhist mantra and couldn’t possible make any sense to anyone” (p3).

“’It would be like a self-fulfilling prophecy,’ Charley said. ‘People write about faeiries; because they’ve been written, they’re read out of books; and then they’re in the world, and people write stories about them. We’ve read our own myths into the world’” (p110).

“’She’s from a children’s book,’ Charley pointed out. ‘That makes her by definition more capable than most adults’” (p113).

“…a place can suit a person aesthetically as well as pair of trousers or a jacket” (p114).

“He shrugged. ‘That’s how all secrets are revealed, in the end. Either someone else betrtays us, or we betray ourselves’” (p184).

“’There are no innocent people,’ Dorian said. ‘I know the darkness in their hearts. I’m a creature of the Gothic imagination; more than that, I’m a creature of the Internet. I don’t hold it against them, I’m no better than them. But believe me, Millie, there is no happy ending to read life’” (p185).

“He says that feelings are the mind picking up on things it doesn’t always understand” (p306),

“’Every supporting character is the protagonist of his own story,’ Dickens replied, somewhat haughtily” (p311).

“I am, I think all this has proved, neither as articulate nor as intelligent nor as kind as I need to be, but I’m not a complete idiot” (p440).

“’Well, of course.’ It was almost defensive. ‘That’s what people do to each other every day, and to themselves. Are you the same person who nearly went into a book?’” (p450).

“And for a moment, the space between heartbeats, I felt I could glimpse the world Charley saw. A world of light and shadows, of fact, truth and story, each blurring into one another as sleep and wakefulness blur in the early morning. The moments of our lives unfolding as pages in a book. And everything connected, everyone joined, by an ever-shifting web of language, by words that caught us as prisms caught light and reflected us back at ourselves” (p452).

IMDB shows a series in development based on this book, but I see no evidence of that elsewhere.

I had quite a wild ride with Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo. It is not a long book but I went in knowing next to nothing and it took some time for me to acclimate to the setting and the style and the structure. And then I was tempted to DNF the book but it wasn’t exactly the book’s fault: it covers some very tough ground and I felt like I was being forced to live in a dreamworld of my worst nightmares. Yet I was drawn into the characters and into their world and before I knew it I had so many questions, so many things peeping out at me from behind the family room curtains and the door at the end of the hall… I had to know what exactly was going down here! It’s a little fever-dreamish, yet most of the clouds clear before the final page and while I didn’t have a clue how I actually felt about the book as I read, I finished feeling like I had just read one of the best (most masterful) books I’d read in a while. And that’s saying a lot.

Yejide and Akin fell in love at university and married. Their plans are to have children and walk into the future of Nigeria together as a family. But time passes and there are no children and women start showing up with family members on their doorstep, options for a second wife. But Yejide and Akin have agreed to a marriage without polygamy. Can they withstand the pressures of family and cultural expectations? Or can Yejide get pregnant before the new wife truly inserts herself between them—and in the way of their happiness and love? Can a happy marriage be built on the kind of secrecy and sacrifice that it will require to produce a child?

I read this book for book club. I don’t know that I had encountered it before, but while the title and book cover are good, they’re not the kind to stand out among all those other options. It was published in 2017 and won some awards and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. At that point, it was Adebayo’s debut novel, though her shorts had been published in some of the top literary magazines. I really didn’t know what to expect, but I bought a copy, read the back cover copy, and then dug right in.

I mean, it’s African literature, more specifically Nigerian literature. I have read a limited amount of modern, African novels, which of course includes Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (which was so long ago that it does not a review here nor do I remember it that well). I have not gotten very far on my World Literature lists or my sub-lists, which includes an African list (which puts North Africa on a separate list with the Middle East). Which means that I have some sense of writing from this part of the world, but not a whole lot. As with much of African literature, Stay with Me was written in English, so there was not a literal translation, but there is a lot of literary tradition and cultural context that accompanies any reading and Stay with Me requires a further political understanding of Nigeria to really take it all in. However, Adebayo doesn’t rely completely on an education in the culture preceding the reading. In other words, you’ll get it and you will learn things as you go, you’ll have enough of a sense to picture the setting and to understand the characters even if you are not an African scholar or an expert on Nigeria. However, I wish I had done a little more research to contextualize the book and the specific culture (Ilesa, Nigeria; Yoruba, in the tension between the tradition and modernity) and history (1980s all the way to 2008). I had the feeling that the political moments happening in the background of the story (on the TV, on the street…) were a key to understanding the story as a whole, maybe a metaphor or contrast or something. But I didn’t know enough to fully catch it.

Even without those layers of understanding, I really liked this book and can celebrate it, can recommend it. Which means I’ve come a long way. Why? Because for the first hundred pages or so, I kept thinking “This is torture.” Not because of the writing, but because of the topics and the struggles inside the plot. I mean, both polygamy and losing a child are my worst nightmares and I felt trapped inside Yejide’s pain and frustration dealing with these things. Especially considering she was also trapped by her changing culture and the love that she actually shared with her husband. It was… torture. But the writing was so good. And the characters nuanced and interesting and sympathetic. And the story become more and more engaging as layers of secrecy and mystery built up on what would otherwise be a pretty straight-forward tale of domestic tragedy. I was on the edge of my seat every time I picked the book back up, breathing through the panic attack I was practically having due to the topics, the general scenario of family meddling (codependence?) included.

It didn’t help that I was initially confused about perspective. Many of the synopses include a mention that the story is told from both Yejide’s (the wife) and Akin’s (the husband) perspective. I think this is meant as a nudge, one that I didn’t notice. Because you don’t really figure this out for some time into the book, and the POV flips back and forth without clear indicators (like a title or just a name in the center of the page.) In fact, even after you realize that it’s changing back and forth, you can’t tell right away in some sections which character is giving us their POV. Why not be more clear? I dunno. Does it seem less cheesy to make us figure it out? I suppose it is more “literary” to make us figure it out, but I think that being more clear about it would have been less distracting. Then, now and again, the tense changes to present. Sometimes it goes back and forth. I think the idea is to distinguish between flashbacks and the story’s “present” (I would have to go back and look to make sure), but I found these switches to also be distracting, especially when the writing style is often closer to stream of consciousness than a chronology. (This is true for many, many of the books I have read lately.) So I’m just saying that there is some (in my opinion needlessly) distracting structure to the story, but it’s not pervasive and I did eventually get used to how to read the book.

Then suddenly I realized it was a mystery. Or a thriller. But very subtly in the background, completely submissive to a more literary fiction and African tradition. Which made the pace really start to move, though the political background moments really threw a speed bump in the road. I’m sure there was some reason for them to be there, but it certainly slowed things to suddenly be talking politics in the middle of a domestic mystery. I kinda liked how the mystery only slowly revealed that there was a mystery. I felt like I could trust myself in Adebayo’s hands, somehow. Once or twice I felt like I must have missed something, but it turns out its not that mysterious. Eventually things are spelled out. There is great tension in this book, especially for lit fic.

So the trick is to know what you are about to read. Not only should you probably know that it is a domestic mystery, almost thriller, set in Nigeria in the 80s and presented as African literary fiction, a short read, but that the structure is first person POV back and forth between Ajide and Akin, the husband and wife, and that there are occasional flashbacks and even tense changes (mostly in past) and also that there are chapters that take place in 2018, beginning with the first one (these transitions being abundantly clear). So we see clues about what happened back in the 80s. It’s also really important to realize there are some major triggers here, including the loss of a child, fertility issues, and polygamy. Also abuse and codependent/domineering families. Even though several of those topics are triggers for me, I finished this book thinking that it was the bees knees, like took a breath and dropped my shoulders, That was a great book. There a lot of tragedy and pain, grief and a harsh light on traditional Yoruba culture as it conflicts with a modern one, but it’s told beautifully and really pulls the reader into the space. It is a little torturous (because it’s meant to be), but is a fricking amazing debut novel, still extremely readable and full of dynamic characters and emotion and fueled by secrets and twists.

Ayobami Adebayo (more accurately Ayòbámi Adébáyò, but I’m still missing two dots (under the o’s) that I cannot find on my computer) is really young to have written the book I just read. Sure, it was published in 2017, a few years ago, but it was her debut novel. Her second novel, A Spell of Good Things, was published last year but did not do as well as her first. I am considering reading it, even so. It’s not like it has bad reviews. I do have an eye on her career, at this point. There’s not much else to say. She pops up in literary magazines and residencies and fellowships and I’m glad to have a fresh, skilled, diverse voice joining the TBR. (Like many currently producing authors, she keeps a pretty low profile, remains pretty private. You can see her website HERE.)

“But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love” (p18).

“It’s the truth—stretched, but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?” (p75).

“’If a lie travels for twenty years, even a hundred years, it will take one day—” She raises her right hand, points the index finger at the ceiling. “It will take one day for the truth to catch up with a lie. The truth caught up with you today, Akin’” (p75-76).

“…because a mother does not do what she wants, she does what is best for her child” (p150).

“’So you went to the white man’s school and I didn’t. But we have seen enough of you school types to know schooling is not wisdom, for many of you it is foolishness, like settling for treatment when there is a cure’” (p168).

“I was not strong enough to love when I could lose again, so I could lose again, so I held her loosely, with little hope, sure that somehow she too would manage to slip from my grasp” (p180).

“…already I was realizing that all the rage had been an affectation. Something I’d reached for to use as a defense against shame” (p212).

“Yejide, love is like a test” (p229).

“But that night, because when life laughs at you, you laigh and pretend you are in on the joke, I nodded along with Dotun and tried to act as if I had been smart enough to figure things out by myself” (p230).

“Through Olamide and Sesan and Rotimi, I had been dangled from the edge of a precipice and I was now so weary that I wanted to be dropped” (p231).

“But the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I bit my tongue because I did not want to ask questions. I did not ask questions because I did not want to know the answers” (p233).

I couldn’t help but like this book. It ticked some enormous, interest boxes for me, so even if it was just okay, I would have been engaged. But it was better than okay. It’s a good read and a well-done YA thriller (light on the thriller but heavy on the YA). I enjoyed it, stayed up late reading it, wondering what would happen to the respectful, strong (perhaps naïve) protagonist as the dangers mounted around her (and I was seeing it, but was she?). Set in an in-between place (half Ojibwe reservation and half non-res town, on the border of Michigan and Canada, one leg in tribal culture and one leg in modern Midwestern culture), the main character is also in between (the daughter of a Native man and a white woman, part of two distinct families, just graduated high school and readying for college, and even finds herself on both sides of the law), this is a book about identity and finding it even when you are in transition or without a clear-cut space.

Daunis has graduated high school and she’s supposed to be moving on from star of the local hockey team to pre-medical student at University of Michigan way down state. But her uncle has died and her mother isn’t doing well, which means Daunis is going to stay and go to community college with her best friend, Lily, at least for now. It’s not all bad: she can hang out with Lily, see more of her high school half-brother and her feisty aunt, continue learning from the Ojibwe elders, and maybe even consider applying for tribal membership, which is complicated for an abandoned daughter. But when a cute and kind out-of-towner shows up on the hockey team and Danis becomes his sponsor, she’s going to discover that all the pieces of her crumbling life are connected to what’s rotten in her community. And what’s rotten in her community has drawn the attention of the FBI.

When I bought my daughter Firekeeper’s Daughter off of a table of popular YA, I thought it was probably fantasy. The title? The look of the book? I don’t know exactly how I got to fantasy, but the title and cover do not give away the true nature of this book, which is thriller-crime YA with a cocoon of Midwestern and Ojibwe culture. I mean, even the synopsis that I just gave you doesn’t really hint at the structure of the book, which contains crime, drugs, the FBI, guns, abductions… somehow all of that sits under the YA coming-of-age story set in this half-tribal area in the far reaches of the USA/Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Modern life for Native Americans is more a feature. A teen struggling with life decisions and the terrible things that happen to her are more of a feature. But the draw of a YA thriller is why a kid might actually pick it up and read it. Somehow telling most of the plot would seem like a spoiler, but I guess just know that it starts out like any ol’ YA but it does get to the crime/thriller stuff and that’s where most of the actual plot and tension is built. Ya’ know, to keep the ol’ internal plot (in this case Daunis growing up and finding her place to belong) going.

Some of the more specific things I liked about this book: it feels almost historical in its exploration and revealing of a culture most of us probably aren’t super aware of; it is focused on family and community as opposed to romance; it is respectful of the older characters and even uses them to work together with the teen; it is thrilling, sure, but also charming and interesting and warm; it is authentic to all the cultures and times that it is holding; the characters are compelling and likeable; no one is demonized (ultimately (I didn’t take the “not like other girls reading” so literal or as far as some readers did)). The topics that really drew me in included Native American culture and history, family, America’s drug problems, small town life, teen coming-of-age, and Michigan (I was like fist-pumping the air with every familiar Michigan reference). I did think that the teen characters act way older than they are (which is common in YA and I often argue is aspirational), but this was especially true in relation to sex. Their handling of sexual situations (including in the flashbacks of the novel) were ridiculously mature. And when a rape went unreported, I was fuming—as much for the many young readers as the character. Yes, I understand that the character (and many people) had many reasons not to report it, but that went unexplored, unaddressed. Like it was a non-issue and I wanted to vomit and/or throw the book across the room. (Many reviewers have argued that there are way too many topics, subplots, characters, even pages in this book.) Except I loved this book. And I had to find out what happened. The twists did not surprise me—I saw them all coming. There are definitely some bumps in the narrative and some things about narrator Daunis that people might find off-putting (or about the romantic interest). Writing is overall clear and unobtrusive with occasional cutesy humor and lots of internal, teen dialogue. There is a magic realism/spiritualism thread that is dropped and also a reference to a cultural tradition that seems important, so that the reader is left hanging. Setting is the book’s strong point.

So yeah, I really liked it. It’s fairly typical YA, but I was drawn into the place and both the problems and charm of the setting. A recommend, if this is your kind of book. It has amazing reviews online. It’s heartfelt. Engaging. I was actually bawling at one point. In a good way.

TRIGGER WARNING: Lots of things, actually, including rape. Drugs and alcohol, sex, abduction, suicide, murder, violence, abuse.

This is Angeline Boulley’s novel debut. She is in her fifties and is a registered member of the Ojibwe tribe and is from Sault Ste. Marie (soo saint marie). She was the Director of the Office of Indian Education at the U. S. Department of Education. She published another novel last year, Warrior Girl Unearthed, which also has amazing reviews and takes place in the same world as Firekeeper’s Daughter ten years later and features Dauni’s niece, a heist, and more of the deep dive into small-town and tribal issues. Boulley’s website can be found HERE.

“When you love someone, but don’t like parts of them, it complicates your memories of them when they’re gone” (p205).

“Auntie told me once that a girl needs at least one grown man in her life who sees her worth as inherent” (p207).

“People say to think seven generations ahead when making big decisions, because our future ancestors—those yet to arrive, who will one day become the Elders—live with the choices we make today” (p237).

“Grief is a cruel and sneaky bastard. You love a person and then they’re gone. Past tense. You forget them for an hour, a day, a week. How is that even possible? It happens because memories are fickle; they can fade” (p241).

“The God I pray to is here with us, Daunis. With you, me, and our pancakes” (p288).

There is a limited TV series in the works with Michelle Obama’s production company and maybe Reese Witherspoon (who made the book a Reese’s YA Book Club choice) and is supposedly headed to Netflix. Since 2021. As always, fingers crossed.

I know that technically Easter will have passed by the time it’s April this year (by one day), but that’s not normal, so it’s no wonder I missed it when I was writing the What to Read in March blog. I suppose it doesn’t matter much, anyway, as I have almost no books to recommend for Easter reading at this point in my own history. I believe I will, someday. Even so, since it’s like two days before Easter right now, I’ll give you my only two recommendations, which are children’s books.

The first of those children’s books is the nonreligious of the two. Junie B., First Grader: Dumb Bunny by Barbara Park is part of the Junie B. Jones series of elementary-level (easy reader) chapter books. I like Junie, as did my daughter when she was that age. I have not yet reviewed the Junie B. series, but she’s a slightly more modern take on a Ramona Quimby, with soft writing and a lot of spunk. In this book, she’s struggling with feeling bad about herself. The second recommendation is The Berenstain Bears and the Easter Story, which is a religious picture book. It is by Jan and Mike Berenstain, after Stan had died. I do like the original ones better, maybe just because they are the originals, but the production has at least stayed in the family (I think). I also have not reviewed the Berenstain Bears yet, but it is a very large series of simple picture books with moral lessons that I grew up on (my sister was a huge fan) and then I read to both my kids. Again, they are very gentle, I suppose with less spunk than Junie B.

I will recommend some poetry, though, which I have read reviewed plenty of, for poetry month:

How to Eat a Poem, The American Poetry & Literacy PoetryBrand New Ancients, Kae TempestAsphodel & Other Love Poems, William Carlos WilliamsGlass, Irony and God, Ann CarsonSpinning the Vast Fantastic, Britton Shurley

Some of my favorite poems include “The Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Caroll); “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” (William Butler Yeats); “Kingdom Animalia” (Aracelis Girmay); “A Song in the Front Yard” (Gwendolyn Brooks); “The Afterlife” (Billy Collins); “Falling” (James Dickey);  and “The Long Boat” (Stanley Kunitz). Some of my favorite poets are represented there, too, but I also love Shakespeare and Browning and good, ol’ fashioned, poetry anthologies like The Norton Anthology of Poetry or The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse.

One of these years I will actually read Ben-Hur for Easter (by Lew Wallace) and then, maybe, I will have something to recommend for Easter. The Easter reading list I have in my back pocket is pretty darn small (any recommendations?); even so, I cannot seem to get through this first one. I have started it. Twice. But it is old fashioned and slow. Perhaps the problem is how busy I tend to get this time of year. This year, I doubt very much I will get to it because of a shelf-full of book club reads. (This is the year of the book club, in case you didn’t know.) But yes, Ben-Hur is an Easter novel, and a religious one at that. It actually begins at the Christian Christmas story, but the majority of the story is related to Jesus’s final week (holy week) and one of his Roman converts.

As for much-anticipated publications, we have some exciting ones this month and perhaps you should start thinking about your summer reading (or Spring Break reading, but that’s probably over for you as it is for me).

First, because I love her, is Leigh Bardugo and The Familiar. I have not read Hell Bent, and this is the third book of hers that has left the Grishaverse for a creepier, more real setting, the first one that is a standalone. I will be reading all of these books, eventually, because Bardugo is a master of YA fantasy. Whereas Ninth House and Hell Bent took place in a modern boarding school, The Familiar is Bardugo’s first historical fantasy (YA) and takes place during the Spanish Inquisition (and the protagonist is both magical and Jewish). It seems like everyone is looking forward to this one.All romance readers are also looking forward to Funny Story by Emily Henry, which will probably be this year’s ultimate beach read. I mean, Henry has a previous novel actually named Beach Read , and she has proven to be a giant of the genre. She cranks out one per year and I haven’t yet caught up with Happy Place because I was waiting for the paperback—and an actual vacation. So I’m sure I’ll read that one this summer and, perhaps, Funny People as well. While I’m not a huge romance reader, I do read the most promising titles in the genre, and Emily Henry is my favorite (at least in the non-YA realm). She definitely delivers on the sizzle and sparks and keeping it lighthearted.Speaking of YA, we have mere days before Holly Jackson’s newest will be on the shelf at your local bookstore. An excellent writer in the thriller/crime YA vein, The Reappearance of Rachel Price leaves behind the Good Girl’s Guide to Murder trilogy (which is complete) for the story of one girl whose mother disappeared when she was little… only to reappear during the filming of a true crime documentary. But Bel is not at all sure about her mom or the truth of anything she’s being told. I would say we’ have some’re guaranteed some good twists, here.From the author of The Devil in the White City, we have a new history book titled The Demon of Unrest. The Devil is on my bookshelf and I will definitely be reading it, but this new Erik Larson book looks, well, not only interesting but also timely (released at the end of April, during an election year which will be riddled with talk about partisanship and threats to democracy). It takes place between Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, and the beginning of the Civil War with the crisis at Fort Sumter. (Okay, I know very little about what I’m saying here.) Larson uses historical documentation to give us real people who show up in all their conflicted, complicated glory. So I hear.And another title in the nonfiction arena, we have The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell. I have not read her popular Cultish or Wordslut, but I am intrigued by this one because of the topic. The premise is that our brains are overloaded at this point in time and place and our coping mechanisms are dialed up so high that our magical thinking—believe and it will be so—is being way overutilized. Since she apparently writes such interesting nonfiction, cultural explorations, it’s definitely a book I would read and probably will.

Because of the last book I mentioned—The Age of Magical Overthinking—I am going to recommend a book I have been meaning to read, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, for obvious reasons (ahem, the title). It won the National Book Award in 2005 and I often heard it referred to. It is a memoir which takes place during a time in Didion’s life when everything was upended by the illness and death of those closest to her. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with magical thinking. It is about the grieving of a literary great, and in that way has a connection to writing. There are definitely people who hate this book, but I’m looking forward to reading it myself, hoping that I’ll feel the way about it that majority of the critics did.

I have an extra-full month for book club reads because two of the clubs moved their meetings to the beginning of April from the end of March. Therefore, there are more titles here than book clubs I am currently in. Not that that diminishes how crazy I am to be in as many as I am. Here is what I will be reading this month for the various book clubs, in order of due dates:

I am currently reading Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange. It was just published this past month and I don’t know if a book could be more talked about, at least in the bookish world. Orange’s first book, There, There , came out to much acclaim a few years ago, and this is a prequel-sequel (both) that can stand alone. I was disappointed that he stayed with those characters, actually, but I had been waiting to see how his writing chops would develop, and I guess this is my (perhaps too soon) chance. The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye is a historical thriller that covers racial issues in the 1920s mixed up with crime and a mystery. A Million to One by Adiba Jaigirdar is going to take me from historical thriller to historical heist with YA and maybe a little romance. It’s also BIPOC and sapphic. And takes place aboard the Titanic. I don’t have as much hope for this one based on reviews, and yet it just looks like fun. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, a classic collection of short stories I have been meaning to read for forever from an author I need to read more of. Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult. More race issues tackled by a prolific, popular author who I have read absolutely nothing by. This more recent title is supposed to be one of her best. Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate , a poetry collection by James Tate, is a new book of poems which we are reading in honor of poetry month.The Cabinet by Un-Su Kim is South Korean sci-fi and essentially a short story novel. This one promises to be “strange,” but I love the premise: case files on people with mysterious symptoms that might mean a new species. It won the top literary prize in South Korea.Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau is the only book I’m slated to read this month that I would not pick up and read myself. I’m not quite sure why, maybe because it feels been-done. But I like Almost Famous and it gets great reviews, so who knows? Maybe I’ll love this rebellious, musical, 70s novel with an unveiled reference to marijuana in its title.

I have technically read less than usual in the past month, but I still landed on three books that I thought rose about the others. (The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep almost tipped it to four, but it’s too far under these three titles for me to put it here. You’ll get the review sometime soon.)

I guess I have some mixed feelings about White Noise by Don DeLillo, but not more than my book club. You don’t want to grab it if you aren’t going to enjoy satire and absurdism set in the 80s (and written in the 80s), but if you do enjoy reading that, then this is top-notch. It received the National Book Award and DeLillo has been honored for his life in letters, this being probably his most famous and lauded book. Also, there is a new movie starring Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, and Adam Driver. Don’t expect much of a plot or to like many of the characters; do expect to think about consumerism and death. I loved a few of supporting characters and the crazy, witty dialogue. I also LOLed. Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley was a win-win-win for me. A YA thriller of sorts, it takes place in the upper peninsula of Michigan (partly) on tribal land among the inhabitants of a town that is half-Ojibwe. I mean, there is nothing I don’t get excited about, here. (I’m from Michigan and have some Native heritage and even more interest in Native American culture than actual heritage.) And in the end, it was well-written, engaging. Not perfect, but entertaining and interesting and I got lost in the setting and in the characters. A highly-recommended YA read which is not at all fantastical, though for some reason the cover gave me those vibes. Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo was brutal for me to read. Basically, it consists of several of my worst nightmares and then was written from and for a culture (Nigerian) that I don’t know enough about to read from it easily. However, I can see great literature when it hits me in the nose, and this is it. It is a beautiful book full of mystery and atmosphere and memorable moments. And great writing. It does involve polygamy and the loss of a child, just FYI. This slim book was worth any struggle I had with it.

Do you like cultural satire? Do you like absurdism? How about the 1980s? How about existential musings? Don’t mind it when there isn’t much of a plot? Yet dramatic things happen? If this is you, run don’t walk to read White Noise by Don DeLillo, if you haven’t already. I mean, it’s been around since 1985 when it won the National Book Award. But here I was, forty years later, reading it for a book club. And personally, I really liked it. I laughed, I fell for a couple of the characters, I thoroughly enjoyed some of the dialogue. And you might, too, though most of the peeps in my book club found it to be outdated and, well, took it a little too seriously.

Jack and Babette live in a small, private college town with their (very) blended family, where Jack is a (founding/expert) professor of Hitler Studies. With kids from their toddler years through teens, life is never dull, and it becomes even less so when there is an “airborne toxic event” within sight of their attic window. With visits from various other kids, exes and in-laws, and interactions with other (quirky and creepy) professors and townies, Jack and Babette slowly slide into considering their own deaths amidst all the consumerism and cultural numbing. Jack might actually be dying—the tests are a little unclear—and Babette has gotten herself into a mysterious and sketchy situation trying to avoid the fear of death. Together, they make quite a postmodern pair.

I might have given too much away, but I don’t think so. Because this book isn’t really about the plot, doesn’t have much of a plot to it. Really, there are a handful of subplots that drive us through, but they come and go and we don’t know what event or conclusion we’re waiting for most of the time. In fact, there is a sort of conclusion, but it’s not very traditional. And with a couple scenes tacked on after this conclusion—one of them so random I felt like maybe it was meant to keep us, on purpose, from having a normal denouement—we have left plot-land again by the end.

The point of this book is to think. The point is cultural satire, which means that laughing would also be appropriate. I don’t want to hype it up too much, but my husband kept catching me laughing at the book and saying, “That must be really funny,” or “You’re really enjoying that book.” To either one, I shrugged my shoulders. Because yes and yes, but also it wasn’t that funny (books almost never are) and I was enjoying some parts or aspects of the book, but not others. It wasn’t going to be my next favorite book, and yet I had to admit that I was enjoying it and that it was memorable. Maybe I was liking it despite myself, because in many ways it’s not my style. It’s my husband’s style. I mean, he loves Kurt Vonnegut. Maybe I can get him to read it.

At book club, someone described their reading of it like watching the literary version of a Wes Anderson movie. The characters are stilted (purposefully), almost posed, the dialogue more intentional than realistic, the scenes filled with object placement and saturated moments. But really 80s. (So like a Wes Anderson movie set in the 80s amidst chemical fears, the grocery store one of the more important settings.) It is considered absurdist, but I have definitely seen more absurd. Some readers were like “Those kids are not like real kids” and others were like “Sure they are, just precocious.” There is a flat affect in the story-telling voice (which is Jack’s POV) that belies the drama of many of the situations. And yeah, no one changes. Just, here: don’t expect a real plot, don’t expect characters to change. This is satire. It is fairly absurd. It is what it is.

I agree with other readers that this book can’t age well, but for different reasons than they tend to give. I don’t think it’s about it being set in the 80s or having a postmodern style or dealing with timely things; there are some real universals here. However, I think what hasn’t aged well is the context. It is difficult to know what DeLillo means when we are decades in the future, because we don’t read “Hitler” or “nuclear” or “Elvis” or anything and have exactly the same feelings and references and thoughts as his original readers. Some of it is probably still similar enough to work (like probably Hitler), but I was not always sure I was having the right response. A lot has changed in our culture and in the world since 1985. With his tongue in his cheek, DeLillo needs me to understand what he isn’t saying, he needs me to respond in a predictable way, viscerally. This cannot stay the same over time. It hasn’t and it won’t. Reading an article about this book (or like a SparkNotes) is probably the only way to fully appreciate it and its cultural references at this point (and into the future). But I think overall we can still appreciate it now if we read it with our minds open. (Then again, I bought a used copy that was more marked-up than advertised, and I was appalled—underwhelmed—by the “basic” nature of the comments and underlining. So maybe it is best read now by academic types or when studied in classrooms.) Not every idea presented is supposed to be read as true. Sometimes, quite the opposite. What we are definitely supposed to notice are the repeated phrases, like “the main point is…” and “the radio came on” and sudden, brief paragraphs that include three related products (Visa, Citibank, MasterCard—I made that up, but there is one like it in there), and also the themes (death, consumerism, media, technology, dialogue as opposed to reality, etc). You don’t have to go that deep to enjoy the book, but it is certainly meant to be read that way. Which is why the plot and structure is treated as secondary to other things.

The ending is a thing. Eventually a plot-like thing emerges, which is sorta like a few sub-plots, but overall it remains disjointed. Then one of the main plot-like things comes to a head. And then something else happens out of the blue, introducing crisis-level tension with a random situation. And then there’s a short, hopeful scene. Oh boy. Which one is even the end? Which thing is the climax? They are all related to the themes, I suppose, but do not expect a conventional ending. I am pretty sure that by now you are not, and will be surprised to find that there is some actual drama  (and violence) to tie up some of the loose ends.

So I liked reading this book. Several people in book club just rolled their eyes and sighed as a response. I found it funny and interesting and full of memorable characters and even a few I really liked (Heinrich, Deborah, and Winnie). I won’t soon forget it. I can see why it won the Book Award, but there are aspects of it that aren’t (and can’t) age well, since it’s satire.

Don DeLillo is famous but maybe not the most famous author. His work is clearly postmodern and deals with themes that we see in White Noise, like consumerism and the emptiness of American culture. His work is often funny, sometimes dark. I didn’t really recognize any of his other titles, but they are:

AmericanaEnd ZoneGreat Jones StreetRatner’s StarPlayersRunning DogThe NamesLibra (novelized Lee Harvey Oswald)Mao II (which won the PEN/Faulkner)UnderworldThe Body ArtistCosmopolisFalling ManGame Six (play)Point OmegaThe Angel Esmerelda (short story collection)Zero KThe Silence

(There is a very extensive bibliography of his work HERE.) He received both the Library of Congress Prize and the National Book Awards Medal for overall contributions to the book world. Many of his books have (modern and postmodern) historical settings/relevance (like the Cold War, the assassination of JFK, the Superbowl, 9/11, even the Pandemic), and all of them speak to something(s) in the culture. It is possible I’ll end up reading Mao II someday, but probably not others of his books. Yet they really intrigue me.

“Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content” (p6).

“’Because she thinks if she keeps buying it, she’ll have to eat it just to get rid of it. It’s like she’s trying to trick herself’” (p7).

“Our senses are wrong much more often than they’re right. This has been proved in a laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There’s no past, present, of future outside our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind. Just because you don’t hear a sound doesn’t men it’s not out there’” (p23).

“’Either I’m taking something and I don’t remember or I’m not taking something and I don’t remember’” (p53).

“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone” (p56).

“People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it” (p65).

“Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is the strongest where objective reality is more likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say” (p82).

“Bee made us feel self-conscious at times, a punishment that visitors will unintentionally inflict on their complacent hosts” (p94).

“The power of numbers is never more evident than when we use them to speculate on the time of our dying” (p98).

“…we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die” (p99).

“There are no amateurs in the world of children” (p102).

“Is a symptom a sign or a thing?” (p123).

“It is surely possible to be awed by the thing that threatens your life…” (p124).

“If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their bedrooms fast asleep. Girls especially” (p141).

“’This is the nature of modern death,’ Murray said. ‘It has a life independent of us. It is growing in prestige and dimension. It has a sweep it never had before. We study it objectively. We can predict its appearance, trace its path in the body. We can take cross-section pictures of it, tape its tremors and waves’” (p144).

“In situations like this, you want to stick close to people in right-wing fringe groups. They’ve practiced staying alive” (p150).

“It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain” (p167).

“’Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us’” (p168).

“Panic, the god of woods and wilderness, half goat” (p213).

“…’but I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit’” (p217).

“’Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level’” (p218).

“Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize” (p228)

“’Routines can be deadly, Vern, carried to extremes’” (p237).

“’We don’t want guns in our little town.’ / ‘Be smart for once in your life,’ he told me in the dark car. ‘It’s not what you want that matters’” (p242).

“He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically—a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations” (p246).

“’Are you crazy? Of course. That’s the elitist idea, would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?’ / ‘Well said.’ / ‘This is death. I don’t want it to tarry awhile so I can write a monograph. I want it to go away for seventy or eighty years’” (p271).

“We’re all aware there’s no escape from death. How do we deal with this crushing knowledge? We repress, we disguise, we bury, we exclude. Some people do it better than others, that’s all” (p275).

“We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations.’ / ‘Gorgeous evasions,’ he said. ‘Great escapes’” (p276).

“Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that’s not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control” (p278).

Image from IMDB.com

I liked White Noise (2022, with Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, and Adam Driver), but I feel like I have to justify this. My husband liked it too, but without having read the book he was less committed to his enjoyment of the movie. This new movie has pretty bad reviews from viewers, better with the critics, but I just don’t agree with the haters. Perhaps the movie is best seen when you have read the book? It is true to the book, I thought, both in content (with only a couple added things) and spirit. The thing you have to do when approaching the movie, whether or not you’ve read the book, is understand that it is absurdist satire. In the genre, I feel like it hit the nail on the head, could even be a cult classic. I had issue with some of the acting (though some of it was excellent). I was surprised that Murray had been changed so much (maybe to avoid the Jewish thing) though I was thrilled he wasn’t half as creepy. I was sad that Millie didn’t do her weird hiding thing, but maybe that works best in book form. Yeah, I liked it. And if you understand what it’s doing, things like the interpretive dancing-grocery store scenes in the end credits makes pitch-perfect sense. I will admit that it feels like a strange time to have made this movie, even though the Pandemic was with us still.

Halfway through The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, I was already confident that I was going to like it enough to recommend it. I trusted the voice and was so impressed that even if the ending was not satisfactory, there was still much to praise. I put it on my best reads of February blog, even though I was still reading it a few days into March. Of course, then I finished. And I still appreciate the same things about it that I did before finishing: the engaging writing; the complex and likable characters; the fascinating history, the realism; the clear, clean, sometimes beautiful writing. Even though multi-perspective books are a little overdone—and it could be argued this book didn’t need the second POV—I was fine with moving back and forth between a current plotline and a past plotline. And yes, it did lag some, could probably have been cut down. I was even sometimes confused who certain people were because there were so many. But I had no problem devouring it and enjoying it as a read (despite its brutality as a subject).

Yale Tishman is gay in the 80s; even more—he’s in Boystown in Chicago and it’s 1985 and he’s headed to the first of his best friends’ funerals, the brother of Fiona. Fiona has given him a tip that he follows to her grand-aunt, a woman who was embedded in the Paris art scene in the 1920s and is looking to donate art work upon her death. Yale works as a development director of a new art gallery for Northwestern: the two are connected, but Fiona’s family is unhappy, as are other people involved in the machinery of such a transaction. But does Yale have the time, the capacity for dealing with this amazing, career-making discovery when AIDs is moving like a thief in the night, picking off his friends and leaving carnage in its wake, creeping ever closer to his own bed? In 2015, Fiona is in Paris, searching for her estranged daughter, a daughter with deep connections to those happy and disastrous days of Boystown. Fiona is confronted by the ghosts of her past in her efforts to find Claire. Can she decode the long, long ripples from the 80s to understand where she can go next—and what collateral damage has continued?

Rebecca Makkai is a name I had been hearing in writing circles since Music for Wartime, her 2015 collection of short stories. After The Great Believers in 2018, the occurrences of her name only grew more emphatic and more frequent. By the time she published I Have Some Questions for You in 2023, the book world was definitely paying attention, and despite it getting reviews inferior to both Wartime and Believers, it was promoted very widely and given plenty of “best books of the year” statuses. I guess that’s often how writers’ careers go. So before I went to a Makkai reading for the paperback version of Questions, I read Believers on the recommendation of a friend (instead of waiting for Questions). I am glad I did. I am still going to read Questions, but we’ll see. I should definitely also get to Wartime, though it’s bound to be less popular because most people don’t read short story collections. I read and write short stories.

I love the cover of The Great Believers, artistically speaking, though I find it forgettable. It’s the title that I really find lackluster, however. The Great Believers. I Have Some Questions for You. Sorry, but Makkai’s earlier books had much catchier and easy-to-remember titles. I still hesitate before saying either of these ones, because they’re just phrases, and phrases without anchoring. I’m not even sure where the title The Great Believers comes from. I mean, I can assume, but it’s not very obvious. But we’ve moved past that—people are still hawking them and talking about them all over the book internet, magazines, and podcast world.

Reading about Boystown through the POV of sympathetic characters is rough. Yet Yale (and a few other characters) added levity just by being himself. He’s a wonderful character, well-drawn, and one that I won’t soon forget. My heart was much more in the chapters from the 80s because of my interest in Yale, but wondering about him and worrying about him pulled me through the chapters from 2015. As a matter of fact, the historical aspects and content of the 1980s scenes were much more interesting to me than Paris in 2015, too. I have learned lately just how much I enjoy well-researched historical fiction and I was blown away by my immersion into a life that I had never even really imagined. I was there. And I cared. And I learned so much about the AIDs epidemic, specifically in this population. And I also heard echoes to the present, not just regarding sexual or gender identity (which is obvious) but also about disease and, ahem, epidemics/pandemics. About how we react as a society to all sorts of situations. About vilification, abandonment, fear, the making of monsters, about surviving…

Which leads me to a criticism that Makkai has received (from some) regarding this book. Makkai is not a gay man. She does not, as far as she has said, have a connection with the epidemic except for her love of and residence in Chicago. The criticism is, of course, that she should not be the one to write this story. Well, Makkai is interested in history. She was very interested in telling this story. And she has been glad that telling it has allowed other voices to come forward and tell it in their own ways. The thing is, writers don’t just write about their own experiences. That would be impossible and boring. We use our imaginations and, in some cases, spend years on research to speak for others and to speak to others. Or sometimes just entertain. This book seems tremendously respectful and well-done to me, and it definitely brought me a story I probably wouldn’t have heard another way. If you believe genders, ethnicities, and orientations (etc.—the list would be endless) always need to align for a story to be told, then you are going to critique this. And you’re going to find yourself quite limited. I suggest you rethink your assumptions about voice, sympathy, humanity, universality, and the talents and responsibilities of artists.

Like I already said, I really enjoyed reading this book. It did take maybe too long to tell it. And it is possible it would have worked just as well without the 2015 storyline—or with the second storyline actually being set in the 1920s with the grand-aunt (whose story is told in the background). Yale’s story was much more engaging than future-Fiona’s; I was on the edge of my seat wondering what would happen with Yale and to his friends. If future-Fiona’s story had been in a book by itself, it would have been disjointed and boring and basically lack a real plot. And in the end, I don’t think the past and present came together as well as they could have, probably should have. If they had been tied together better, then we would have left the book feeling like the 2015 moments were indispensable to our understanding of the book as a whole. This is not the case. The mysteries all hang in the 1980s and any surprises that really affect what happens in 2015 are revealed (or figured out) long before the ending. And are kinda fuzzy. We care about the 80s. We are invested in the 80s. The 80s are clearer and full of big, bold characters. 2015, not so much. The 1920s had more in common with the 1908s, more parallels.

It is kinda strange, actually, that the other time in the book is not the 20s. The characters all seem so interested in the stories from the 1920s. Or the three could have been woven together? Because I get  what Makkai was trying to do, showing the psychological and relationship detritus of trauma. But we didn’t quite get there. For what it’s worth, I also found Claire to be an inadequate vessel for the truth she was supposed to be carrying. I didn’t like her one bit and I found her unbelievable as a character. Perhaps she was the big problem with the second story.

I love this book. It will be added to my runners-up list for favorites. I will not forget it, either. I highly recommend it—if you like historical stuff, especially. I learned. I was concerned. I read late into the night. Though it has some excess baggage that should have been cut, it is deserving of its awards and almost-awards (like National Book Award Finalist). And Yale will go down in the blogs as one of my favorite MCs.

Rebecca Makkai has a website HERE. Her books are:

The Borrower (2011, novel)The Hundred-Year House (2014, novel)Music for Wartime (2015, short stories, high reviews, high sales)The Great Believers (2018, novel, high reviews, high sales)I Have Some Questions for You (2023, novel, high sales)

I tried to find a short story or two to read of her online,  but I only found broken links and ways to purchase anthologies and literary magazines.

“You get afraid of one thing, and suddenly you’re afraid of everything” (p36).

“Cecily said something then, but Yale was busy wondering if this was the governing factor of his life: the fear of getting his heart broken” (p52).

“Or maybe Yale had been mad at him a long time, an anger that only surfaced when He was weepy and drunk, like earthworms after heavy rain” (p107).

“He remembered in high school, sitting in assembly and becoming convinced that he might, at any second, stand up and scream. Not because he wanted to, just because it was the one thing he wasn’t supposed to do. But he hadn’t. And this was no different, was it? He was only entertaining a dangerous thought” (p108).

“Well. Ageism is the only self-correcting prejudice, isn’t it?” (p113).

“…you always want to believe you’re important in someone’s life. And sometimes, in the end, it turns out you aren’t” (p172).

“Watching this footage was a great thing to do tomorrow, but not today. Never today” (p182).

“How could she explain that this city was a graveyard? That they were walking every day through streets where there had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy, that when they stepped through a pocket of cold air, didn’t they understand it was a ghost, it was a boy the world had spat out?” (p184).

“You’ll never know anyone’s marriage but your own. And even then, you only know the half of it” (p201).

“He was asking the wrong questions. Watching Julian’s production of Hamlet, he’d been struck by Laertes’ response to Ophelia’s death. ‘O where?’ he’d said when he heard the news. But yes, look, it was right: The details were what you grabbed for” (p207).

“If I told you Picasso died in the war, you’d understand. Poof, there goes Guernica. But I tell you Jacques Weiss died at the Somme, and you don’t know what to miss” (p252).

“He’d be the world’s luckiest man to stand there at the end of it all, to be the one left, trying to remember. The unluckiest too” (p253).

“How the man who was once perfect for you could become trapped inside a stranger” (p310).

“We’d been through something our parents hadn’t. The war made us older than our parents. And when you’re older than your parents, what are you going to do? Who’s going to show you how to live?” (p311).

“You should know we had so  much joy as well! But when you boil a story down, you end up with something macabre. All stories end the same way, don’t they?” (p311).

“I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go? He was gone, so it couldn’t change, it couldn’t turn to indifference. I was stuck with all that love” (p312).

“He said, ‘It’s always a matter, isn’t it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it’s always only temporary” (p318).

MOVIES AND SHOWS

Amy Poehler optioned The Great Believers to make a TV show in 2018. It is 2024, and I see no more news past that, which isn’t great news (ba-da-dum). I kinda sorta remember Makkai saying something about disappointment and optioning at the reading but I might be making that up (aka remembering wrong). It doesn’t look like there are going to be any Makkai adaptations any time soon.

There are reasons people list to say that Stay True by Hua Hsu should not have won the Pulitzer (memoir). I think the most compelling (if also backwards) of those reasons is the anticipation that it builds, which this book cannot live up to. If it didn’t have that Pulitzer hanging over its head, I actually think most readers would like it more than they do. Expectations and all that. Maybe this review will save you from that, by way of pointing out all its faults and telling you that even a crowd of fairly pretentious people at book club were mystified by the Pulitzer here. Then again, most of those same people at least liked the book. I came across as hating the book, but I was really posing a series of questions I wondered about as I read. That constant questioning was made possible because I was never immersed in this book, never taken into a story or drawn into a character, even the main one. But man could I relate. And I didn’t hate it. Overall, I liked it. But there is a line.

Hua Hsu was a Taiwanese-Californian teenager in the 90s. He headed to college at Berkeley in 1995 and made unlikely friends with Ken, a much more mainstream and friendly Asian-American than Hua. While Hua was obsessed with alternative music, non-fashion and philosophy as well as his zine, Ken was a ray of carefree fun. When a tragedy interrupts Hua’s coming-of-age, he begins to document his college life and his friends down to the minutiae, looking for answers in the senseless pain that has found him out.

NOTE: I believe it best if you do not read the description for this book on the back cover or online. It gives away the only real event/climax of the story (or is it the inciting incident?). Major spoiler. If you already have, well then that’s on the publicists or publishers or whomever. I can appreciate if Hsu doesn’t want the story to hang completely on this moment… that’s actually kind of a point he makes by the end of the book. In that case, he doesn’t want you anticipating or dwelling on a scene which, quite frankly, he makes so little of (like in time talking about the actual event and in the anti-drama of the scene itself). That moment in time is not the essence of who Hua or Ken are. (Think of people advocating for killers’ names to be kept out of the media. It’s kind of like that. Their fame is detrimental to the overall process for everyone. In this case, dwelling on that one scene would give it too much weight.) I could be giving too much credit to Hsu for this decision, but I find it a distinct possibility. At any rate, if you want to feel a little traditional tension during this read, if you want to wonder for at least half of the book what will happen, then don’t read descriptions.

Like I half-said, I read this book for a book club. It’s like the cool, hipster book club I go to (cool for older people, okay?), and this is the second book of what promises to be many nose-lifting reads. I finished it like a week before the book club night and was convinced my husband would like to read it, too. I invited him to the club and passed him the book. It is important that I give him some voice here: he is much happier with this book than I am. Basically, he likes it just the way it is. Perhaps without the Pulitzer.

Hua’s voice got to me, right under my skin. In two ways. At first, I was like, Oh my goodness, I recognize this voice! I was this person in high school and into college! Sure, we have some major differences, but we are two years apart in school, both identified with the counter-cultures of the nineties, studied philosophy, and, as a bonus, I was visiting relatives in Berkeley while he went there. I recognized most of the references, was taken back to a time and a place; I was there at the computer console as this infantile internet thing awed us; I was there in the head shops smelling incense and reading the beat-up fliers; I was there surrounded by college philosophy texts. But as I kept reading the book, his voice as a narrator (as opposed to character) is, um, similar. Page after page after page I waited, longed, for some perspective, some second voice to look back on Hsu’s formative years and have some different approach, have something to say about it. And while I will own up to being as insufferable (at least in areas) as the young Hau was, the reader never leaves this insufferableness. Can it be that Hsu hasn’t changed? That he never matured? Unknown. But it certainly sounds and feels like it. At least the book is short.

While I wonder if this teenage tone is intentional, I also wondered if Hsu put the climax in the middle and downplayed it intentionally (as I already mentioned). And I wondered if… and somewhere in there, a member of the club said, “I think you guys are giving this author too much credit.” I laughed, we all laughed. He might be right. He’s probably right. Has Hsu earned my trust with, say, another book? No. Was the Pulitzer making me read too much between the lines? Possibly. Probably. Almost for sure. Or maybe it was the self-consciousness and hoitiness of the voice, itself. Surely I was the one not catching on. I mean, I don’t even have a grungy ‘zine or polyester pants (anymore). I just don’t get him.

Put another way, while Hsu’s making some fun of the teenager he used to be, I still felt contempt coming from the narrator to his teen self, which is ironic because he is making fun of his judgmental, clueless personality. He doesn’t seem to have learned, as his father would say, that these years are necessarily transitional and rocky. Having been a teen much like Hsu, I was floundering, looking for some compassion to seep into his voice, some levity and perspective on himself at an earlier age or at least of the times in general (and all the teens around him and through time). His voice is so caustic. We get it: he’s super smart and he thinks really deeply about everything; but Hua and Hsu (as both character and writer) are tellers. We have to take him at his word for everything—there is no showing, no natural development of people or themes or plots. I am suspicious of this. When other readers express emotional response to this book, I suspect that they take people at their word instead of having to experience a thing.

And as I dug in, I found myself bored as well as offended. Where are the stories? Where are the shades of characters? It’s a straight-up info dump about his parents, his father, their immigration and reverse-immigration, his high school years, followed by college. I’m actually yawning, feeling like I have been assigned an article for school. And it doesn’t change. The pivotal moment comes in the middle of the book and is glazed over. The latter half of the book actually slows down, leaving us nostalgic for the father character we met in the first pages. Then we end with a therapist, which I have argued before is not a satisfactory way to conclude a book, even though it is a great thing to do in life. Good gracious. I know it’s a memoir, but other memoirists have managed a plot arc, nuanced characters, interesting scenes, even descriptions that put is in a time and place. Or at least a unifying theme. I wonder if I am bored and if I don’t know what this book is about because I have already been there before. I uncover themes (immigration, existential crises, friendship…) that tantalize me only to disappear a few pages later, the chronology moved on to whatever next, banal thing Hua was going to hyperfocus on and whine about.

I exaggerate. There are some things I enjoyed about this book as I went, mainly the nostalgia, the honesty of the teenage experience, and Hua’s dad. (Hua’s dad gets five stars.) There were many things I wanted to like about it. But in the end I was more disappointed than entertained. Yet, I respect that the girl next to me in that giant book circle absolutely loved the book—as an Asian-American, no less. I also appreciate that my husband really liked it, just the way it is; I suspected he would, actually. But if you are a little lost for positive words upon closing this book, I extend a hand to you, as well. It’s not you, it’s Hsu. And the Pulitzer committee.

For kicks, among the bad reviews that called the book “flat” and “unending with details,” you can read a short, funny one-star review by Vida on Goodreads.

I also forgot to mention how much I didn’t like the photos in the book. They were sparse and artistically blurry and all that. Not my cuppa for a biography. I want ample and clear photos of who and where and what is being talked about, not the worst photos from some guy’s college album. And the barely-different font for the quotes was a strange (and bad) choice. I doubt everyone even noticed it.

The thing to know about Hsu is that he is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He also teaches literature at Bard College, lives in New York City, and went to Harvard as well as Berkeley. He’s placed short stories at The Atlantic, Slate, and The Wire and even been nominated for a James Beard Award for food writing. We probably shouldn’t mention that one of his areas of expertise is arts criticism.

HERE is a page at The New Yorker where you can read his latest articles.

“I’d heard these songs hundreds of times before. But to listen to them with other people: it was what I’d been waiting for” (p4).

“Assimilation was not the problem to be solved, but the problem itself” (p25).

“’…you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to everyone of us. What do you think?’” (p32, Hua’s dad).

“There are many currencies to friendship” (p44).

“We learn as children that friendship is casual and transient. As a structure, it’s rife with imbalance, invisible tiers, pettiness, and insecurity, stretches when we simply disappear” (p45).

“We weren’t in search of answers. These weren’t debates to be won …. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus” (p49).

“Ken knew how to use people—not in an exploitative way, but he understood what key you sang in. He could inspire you to do strange things, and he knew when to defer. Derrida remarked that friendship’s driver isn’t the pursuit of someone who is just like you. A friend, he wrote, would ‘choose knowing rather than being known’” (p56-57).

“We seek recognition, even if what you want to hear from a close friend is that you’re a one-of-a-kind weirdo that they’ll never truly understand” (p81).

“A spore takes flight by wind, and the whole system survives. The assassin blinks, and the bullet merely grazes the head of state. The planet’s axis shifts imperceptibly, and Earth is ruled by some other species. It’s not even called Earth; there is no language at all. The letter is lost in the mail, the opportunity gone forever. / All my classes in college essentially taught the same lesson: another world was once possible” (p103).

“’It is useless to go looking for goodness and happiness far away,’ [Mauss] concludes. They’re closer than you think” (p105).

“…I found it upsetting you could spend so much time with someone and not realize how small their head was” (p123).

“What was that thing we had learned in our rhetoric class, about Derrida’s ‘deferral of meaning’ and how words are merely signs that can never fully summon what they mean? Yet words are all we have, simultaneously bringing us closer, casting us farther away” (p125).

“Sometimes, things are fucked up. You take refuge somewhere and realize it’s not the dream after all. Cops harass you for no reason; your weary parents’ moods seem governed by forces you can’t yet name. Your otherwise mild-mannered, twenty-one-year-old mentor comes running at you, absolutely hell-bent on glory” (p137).

“Our nation was haunted by ghosts” (p148).

“I think the most depressing aspect of keeping a journal is thinking, or knowing, that one day I’ll be sitting somewhere reading this. Trying to relive some moments, but struck not be recaptured emotions, rather being struck by how damn deep I tried to sound at some point in the past” (p150).

“I humored the possibility that providence was still real, only that it was fickle—that maybe it was some other ghost’s chance to taste victory” (p152).

“I wondered in my journal if death was worse than the knowledge that the world continues outside” (p163).

“To understand the past, we must reckon with the historian’s own entanglements, the way past, present, and future remain forever ‘linked together in the endless chain of history’ …. The only truth is that it’s fucked up the way it is sometimes” (p175).

“All of these miniscule, knowable facts … they couldn’t possible explain why they had done it. No context made their actions ‘inevitable’ or ‘unavoidable’” (p180).

Let me tell you, defending my opinion about this book at book club—despite the gal way across the circle who was one-hundred percent with me—got heated. Literally, my face was super hot, uncomfortably hot. Some people really love this book, turns out, and are willing to contradict anything I say in order to defend it. Which makes some sense to me. It’s not all bad. But when I add up all the problems I had with Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, the sum total is not, well, five stars. It’s also not like one or two. Another Irish title and another very intimate perspective (which we’ll talk about in a mo’), the exploration of the Troubles and some of the storylines were compelling. But cramming all of it into the set-up of an affair between a Catholic and Protestant didn’t work for me. It could have, maybe, in a different world, but not the one we’re given.

Cushla is a young, parochial schoolteacher who picks up shifts at the family bar. She’s also Catholic, a fact that matters greatly as it is the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Violence and tension weave into the normal stuff of life so much, it’s a type of new normal. Until Michael Agnew—a famous lawyer and friend of her late father’s—wanders into the bar while Cushla is bar-tending. And Cushla becomes the next affair in Michael’s string of affairs. For her, it’s an uncomfortable and conflicted journey not just into the affair, but into the world of affluent Protestants and relationships that will complicate her feelings even as violence comes for one of her students and their family.

Let’s just start at the beginning. The title of this book made me think it was a cozy. That and the author’s name. I don’t know that she would change either of these things, but I was not at all expecting the book that this was. I have not read Louise Kennedy before (because there wasn’t anything before. This debut novel has won her many accolades). And the cover doesn’t really look like a cozy, but it also doesn’t look like what it is.

Then a couple pages in, there’s an Eamonn. Not her fault, but that is my son’s name and it’s not one I see all that often, so I was distracted by it and wondering where his character was headed.

Not much further in I started to wonder… and check the title page… and sure enough I had accidentally bought a British English version of a book, again. (I have bought some on purpose, like copies of Harry Potter, but I have also bought used books many times and twice these were accidentally British versions.) This time, in a book that I am told is already full of Irish phrases and word usage even in the American English version, it makes the reading even more difficult. I’m wading through Irish and British English (published in London) unfamiliar words (okay, and some familiar). Whoops.

But by then I knew not all my reading woes were related to the slang and the language differences. Because this book is written in free indirect speech. If you don’t know, that is an official term. Though the book is in third person limited, there is a lack of quotation marks and it’s almost like stream-of-consciousness. Irish writers are fond of this sort of thing. I just reviewed Prophet Song, which is written like this. Bunch of rebels. Or they’re honoring their literary traditions, like James Joyce. And while I got used to it in Prophet Song and ended up adoring that book, I never found myself deep enough in Trespasses‘ story to either start ignoring it or understanding its usage here. Like why can’t I know who’s talking and when, clearly? Is there a point to this obscuring? To this extra work on the reader’s part?

Here’s the rest of it: this book was way too dysthymic for me, for the story. (I can take bleak like in Prophet Song, which was super bleak for a reason). While there are things in the world of Trespasses to be dysthymic about, these were relegated to setting and side-stories. Which means we end up with some dysthymic teacher who has a half-hearted affair with little to no reason for it and definitely no passion that I could feel. And speaking of the affair, when it came down to it, the affair is what did it in for me. I mean, Cushla is this young woman who just throws herself at this married, old dad, knowing full-well what is going on. And it’s not like circumstances even really did it… and as for attraction? Didn’t see that much either. You’re going to have a hard time selling me on an affair anyways, but to ask for my sympathy for the dumb girl who seeks one out despite knowing better? Nah. No thanks. Altogether, I was zero-percent emotionally engaged in the story, despite all of the horrors. Did it want to be shocking and horrifying or did it want to a quirky, indie kinda black comedy thing? I never did figure that out. But it changed genres a few times, and I don’t think it was a smooth transition.

So just like when I talked about this at book club, it sounds like I hated this book. I am beginning to wonder myself if this is the truth. I would have said I liked it okay and had moments when I enjoyed the writing style and some of the side-stories and characters and the sassy and kind Cushla (like as a teacher, mostly), but who knows? Maybe I didn’t like it at all and I just don’t want to say. It’s not true. I gave it four stars (probably wishing there was a 3.5 option). I definitely did go back and forth about it as I read. I hung in there, enjoying a history lesson on the Troubles and the minutiae of Cushla’s life… to a point. But when the ending was a however-many-years-later bow? I was overwhelmed with disdain, partly because it had somehow jumped the genre tracks again and we were back where I started: at cozy.

“It’s not about what you do here, he said. It’s about what you are” (p79).

“And now someone knew she was in a relationship, if that was what it was; mostly it felt like a situation” (p192).

“Cushla felt a tear form at the corner of her eye. She had no father. The only man she would ever want was married already. Then she had a vision of Gina as mother of the bride—as full as the Boyne and telling anyone who’d listen that her own wedding dress was three sizes smaller than Cushla’s—and the tear shrank back into the duct” (p198).

I’m not sure that A Long Petal of the Sea is Isabel Allende’s most lauded work. I have been meaning to read her, but I started here only because it was a book club thing. This is one of Allende’s more recent books (2019, out of the 28 listed on her site; she’s published four since, if you can believe it). It is historical fiction. It doesn’t have the magical realism elements that I was looking forward to in her writing (which she seems to have slowly shed as the decades went by), but I have learned recently that I also very much enjoy great historical fiction. A Long Petal of the Sea is based on Allende’s family history and is definitely historical fiction—great historical fiction that I enjoyed reading. The writing style is beautiful (even through translation), the characters engaging, the story interesting, the history even more interesting… even the structure wasn’t totally straight-forward, giving us a little ride on our way through. It’s a wonderful book.

Victor Delmau was on his way to becoming a full-fledged doctor when the Spanish Civil War scooped him up in its jaws as a field physician. Roser Brugeura was a poor shepherdess when Victor’s father brought her home to train as a pianist and give all the privileges he can offer her. As the Spanish Civil War bleeds into the advancing World War, Victor and Roser are forced to marry to protect her unborn child and flee Spain for France and eventually Chile as part of Pablo Neruda’s ship full of artists. Meanwhile, in Chile, the Del Solars are embroiled in family drama of their own and politically at the other end of the spectrum. When the newly-minted Delmau family and the Del Solar family collide, they’ll forge decades of history through political unrest, a coup, military rule, and another immigration to flee another war… and back again. What makes a country yours? And what makes a marriage—or love—endure?

I have been meaning to read Isabel Allende for many years. Actually, I am fairly certain I read The Stories of Eva Luna when that book of short stories came out. I read it because I knew Allende was a Latin American magical realism author and Eva Luna was a book everyone was talking about. I had not read Eva Luna, the novel that the stories were based on, and I’m not sure I even knew of its existence. I don’t remember if I liked that collection or not, which means some day I will read it again and then review it for you. I would pause to read it now, but I have way too much on my TBR. A large portion of my TBR right now is in thanks to the six book clubs I have joined. (Don’t even.) One of them read A Long Petal of the Sea. Thus, I read it, now, too.

The title refers to a Pablo Neruda poem in which he calls Chile “a long petal of sea and wine and snow / with a belt of black and white foam.” Neruda is a character in this story, though his importance is largely offscreen: as the man who brought the Delmau family to Chile and also as the poet who is quoted at the start of each chapter. Neruda was a real, historical character (a political activist and poet, among other things) but is stretched by fictionalization here, as are all the characters. Some of the characters, too, are composites or based on people who were not part of this particular story. Allende’s grandfather was already in Chile when the actual ship full of Spanish refugees arrived. Her family member was also the president of Chile we see in part of the book. And Victor is based on someone from the ship (the Winnepeg) who told Allende his story as an old man. (Note: the real Victor died six days before Allende had a final draft ready to send him.) The historical events in this novel and the general settings are accurate, though, and I understand Allende did meticulous research over years.

Because of everything above, I appreciate the edition I have (the 2020 Ballantine Books English language edition, the most common one I’ve seen) because of its end matter, including an interview with Allende and acknowledgments that give us Allende’s background and where the story came from, as well as the history of it. All that said, reading this book is not like reading history. You learn things, sure, but in the nicest possible way. You are invested in characters, watching the world and events unfold in their lives. And the language is almost like poetry, itself.

It does get a little meander-y at times, lingers long enough that Allende is telling much more than showing. Like when no one is fleeing from violence, there are long stretches. It might not feel like this except that we’re not always sure where we are going, what questions we have about these characters or their futures. Some readers are fine without a hero’s journey or a three-act story, but I found that without it, I got lost sometimes, hanging on for the history and the beautiful words, which was almost not enough. Of course, the further I went in the story, the more I wanted to know about their eventual lives. But where was I going? I dunno. This wandering didn’t improve upon Allende’s decision to sometimes loop back around, suddenly lurching forward or veering back in time to cover some bit of information. It felt to me like she suddenly remembered something and wrote it down, deciding not to go back and edit it back to a chronological presentation. I liked the loopy feeling of these parts while also finding them inconsistent with the remaining structure.

And because of this wandering, too, some of the characters just fade into the story and, in some cases, fade back out. Like they would in real life. But as a story, this felt strange. There is a perspective character that starts out really strong and important, for example, and then just slowly disappears until we don’t hear anything more about her. And we’re left wondering about the themes she had introduced and the questions she had posed. I’ll just tell you now: concentrate on Victor and Roser—theirs are the stories that stick with us all the way through; theirs are the through-lines.

And speaking of plot, there were a number of people at my book club who were conflicted or didn’t like the ending. For even while there are loose ends as far as story-cohesiveness goes, there is almost too much tied up too neatly. Many of us thought the book should have ended before the last chapter. There would need to be a few clues to the future embedded earlier in the book, but otherwise I think I agree with this opinion. It’s not the kind of book that needs to be tidied up at the end, especially dealing as it does with themes of war, home, immigration, and love. Everything’s a mess. Fine. The unexpected happens. You survive or maybe you don’t. Fine. People are violent and cruel and often left to look after themselves and their own. Fine. I was appalled at the suffering of some and the ambivalence of others, the bravery of some and the cruelty of others. I didn’t need a bow on that besides the conclusion of one marriage.

I guess that lack of traditional plot is why I wasn’t completely enamored with the book, why I felt it lagged at times. Otherwise, like I said, it is a beautiful book and so very interesting. I didn’t know the first thing about the Spanish Civil War when I started. I didn’t know a tremendous amount about modern Chile. (I could have used a few maps, like of Spain, Chile, and South America.) I enjoyed the Neruda quotes enough to order a copy of Twenty Loves Poems and a Song of Despair. I will definitely be reading more Allende. And I would definitely recommend this book, especially for people who can dive into classic and heavier literature (as opposed to cheap, genre reads exclusively). It’s not really that difficult to read, but you will need to have some motivation besides escapist entertainment. Allende’s voice, her writing style, is a great place to start.

Isabel Allende has been a popular author since the 80s. She was born in Peru to Chilean parents and has been a US citizen since the 90s. She’s 81 and still writing, teaching, and doing activism related to the empowerment of women and girls. (Her foundation’s website is HERE.) That’s it in a nutshell, though there is plenty to find out about her online or elsewhere (like in her memoirs or on her websites).

Let’s list her books, in chronological order.

The House of the Sprits (family epic, Latin American, magic realism, one of her lost lauded)Of Love and Shadows (more of the same, about two journalists)Eva Luna (story about a storyteller, won the American Book Prize)The Stories of Eva Luna (book of short stories as told by the fictional Eva Luna)The Infinite Plan (not so magical, not her most popular)Paula (first memoir, about her daughter’s long death)Aphrodite (personal lore mixed with erotic history, not super popular in comparison)Daughter of Fortune (Chile meets America historical fiction)Portrait in Sepia (family saga sequel to Daughter of Fortune)City of the Beasts (first in magical, Amazonian YA trilogy, didn’t do too well)My Invented Country (memoir, combination her life and history of Chile)Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (second in YA trilogy, this time Himalayan adventure)Forest of the Pygmies (final in YA trilogy, this time Kenyan adventure)Zorro (origin story for Zorro, again not one of her most popular)Ines of My Soul (fake memoir of wife of Spanish conqueror of Chile, historical fiction)The Sum of Our Days (memoir number three, more traditional)Island Beneath the Sea (slave story related to Haiti and New Orleans, back to higher ratings)Maya’s Notebook (present-day, epistolary, YA-ish, girl coming-of-age (the hard way))Ripper (YA present day mystery, perhaps her lowest-rated)Amor (compilation of excerpts from her books about love and intimacy)The Japanese Lover (back to historical, Polish and Japanese American immigrant love story)La Ninfa de Porcelana (coloring picture book, magic realism for kiddos)In the Midst of Winter (another immigrant love story)A Long Petal of the Sea (historical fiction (no magic) Chilean story about home)The Soul of a Woman (memoir focusing on coming of age and feminism)Violeta (story of a woman through the history of the twentieth century)The Wind Knows My Name (dual war/immigration story, modern US and 1930s Spain)Perla the Mighty Dog (children’s picture book out this coming May)

Note that Allende’s less-lauded works still rarely fall beneath a 3.5 on Goodreads, and I would say you could read any one and find a pretty good book. I am intrigued by all of them with only a few exceptions (Ripper, Amor, maybe Aphrodite and the City of Beasts trilogy). I am most excited about House of Spirits, Violeta, Paula, Island Beneath the Sea, Eva Luna (and her stories), The Soul of a Woman… and more.

“’Reason is on our side, but that won’t help stave off defeat. We’re on our own, Victor’” (p26).

“’Nothing, not even victory, / Can wipe away the terrible hole of blood’” (p28, from Pablo Neruda).

“Any capacity for compassion had gone: everyone looked after only themselves and their loved ones” (p51)

“He loved her theoretically, like the trabadours of olden days” (p145).

“He would never have admitted even in the deepest reaches of his heart that the main reason for abstinence was not to avoid a sin, but the fear of pregnancy” (p151).

“’Take note: / If little by little you stop loving me, / I’ll stop loving you little by little. // If suddenly you forget me / Don’t come looking for me, / I’ll already have forgotten you’” (p161, from Pablo Neruda).

“Nothing can grow in the shade of secrets, she would say, love needs light and space to flourish” (p171).

“What the poet most wanted was to write without interruption, cook for his friends, and to be left in peace, but that was impossible…” (p211).

“The spotless order of barracks and the artificial peace of fear reigned everywhere” (237).

“Victor wondered where the torturers and informers had been before, as he had never seen them. They seemed to have emerged in the space of a few hours, ready and organized as if they’d been in training for years” (p239).

“Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional” (p254).

“It takes heroic willpower just to keep everything in place. Those are a refugee’s forebodings, said Roser. No, they’re in the forebodings of someone in love, Victor corrected her” (p255).

“…if one lives long enough, circles close” (p266).

“…fear has no shame, as Roser liked to say” (p280).

“The woman beside him also grew old in a few minutes” (p285).

“The proximity of death made the intensity of his love as unbearable as an acid burn” (p285).

“Marriage suits men, although not women” (p289).

“…he also tried to avoid other symptoms of old age: meanness, mistrust, ill temper, resentment, and bad habits such as no longer shaving every day, repeating the same stories over and over, talking about himself, his ailments, or money” (p296).

“Everything hurt, even his hair, but thanks to one of life’s injustices, none of this was visible” (p304).

There have been two or three movies adapted from Isabel Allende novels, but not this one, despite Oprah Winfrey calling it “cinematic.” Wink, wink.

I have seen five movies in the past couple months which are related to books in one way or another. Since the Oscars are creeping up on us and two of the movies have Oscar noms, I thought I should go ahead and put my two cents out there for you.

The first—and arguably most important—of these movies is American Fiction. It is up for writing and acting Oscars as well as Best Picture. I don’t think it is likely to get Best Picture, but it definitely has my (nonexistent) vote (and I have seen most of the movies nominated in this category at this point). In other words, I love this movie. I had been looking forward to it and went to the theater to see it. I enjoyed it even more than I expected to. It is missing the over-the-top and quirky qualities of my favorite movies, but that’s not at all what it was aiming for and ended up being a seriously solid movie (with some quirk, I guess, a couple over-the-top moments).

American Fiction is based on the early 2000s book Erasure by Percival Everett. That this book was written two decades ago is startling when you see the movie, because the whole thing is social commentary and satire and it seems unbelievable that so little has changed since 2000. I do wonder how time-specific the book is compared to the movie remake, but I have not read the book. So I can’t say. Here are the themes of the movie: being a writer in a time when economics/sales drive the field; being a Black writer in a time when publication favors those who write to the stereotypes; forgiveness and loss and family; secretiveness/bottling as an unhealthy lifestyle and relationship-wrecker.

Monk is a Black writer and professor whose writing isn’t taken seriously because it isn’t what publishers expect of him as a Black writer. When he gets fed up with the system, he writes a ridiculously stereotyped novel about Black characters who are poor, fatherless, on drugs, violent and oppressed (and speak in heavy ghetto accent) as a joke. But when there’s a bidding war for the book followed by anonymous fame, Monk’s life becomes a dark comedy of situations and systemic racism. Meanwhile, his mother is suffering from dementia, the neighbor lady is making eyes at him, and his family is falling apart.

For once, a screenplay writer did a decent job of portraying the life of a writer, at least until Monk’s joke goes viral. I mean, many many writers have attempted to write to the market before, and it almost never—never?— ends with six-figure advances and prizes. But the point of this plotline is to make a point about the publishing world as well as being Black in America, and it does that. The acting is wonderful. There are great comedic moments. The plot works all the way through and is accompanied by jazz, an intentional soundtrack choice which feels different and fresh and important to the movie, even if you are not a jazz fan. Some wow moments. Probably my favorite movie of the year.

Then, a few weeks later, I went to see Argylle, another movie about a writer that I was looking forward to for just that reason. I mean, spy movies aren’t usually my thing, but this one featured a meta-story: Elly Conway writes spy novels and lives a quiet, maybe reclusive, life, considering her popularity. But when some random guy sits next to her on the train, claims to be a real-life spy, defends her life against several attackers, and basically kidnaps her to keep her safe, Elly isn’t at all sure where her books end and real life begins. (Note: the publicity material for this movie begs you not to spoil it after you’ve seen it. I was curious to see if I would guess the twist. Actually, it’s pretty good. The twists are, generally, surprises. So yeah, don’t tell.)

Argylle isn’t really on the same planet as American Fiction, but I also really liked this movie. It is absurdist, not in the content really, but in the presentation, and it is supposed to be overdone and, sometimes, laughably so. It plays with the genre stereotypes and ends up, in my opinion, playful. In the meantime, we get a number of good plot twists and a protagonist who is both amazing and looks like a normal woman.

For the record, this movie is not based on a book. The book, Argylle, that you see in bookstores is a gimmick. Go ahead and buy it and read it if you want. I believe it is a traditional spy novel, meant to be what Elly Conway wrote, but not to be the story that is portrayed as the plot of Argylle the movie. If you know what I mean. I don’t really need to read it, thanks.

There are many things the movie got wrong about being a writer and about the writing world, but as the movie progresses, you realize everything is supposed to be a cliché and man, this is a fun movie to watch. So no, bookstores never have huge spaces with vintage leather chairs and colorful banners for book readings and signings, but that is a place in the collective imagination, where all of the moments of this movie live. Maybe not my favorite movie of the entire year, but I liked watching it once and I would do it again, not even checking to see if other people liked it or not because, honestly, I think many people won’t understand the tone this movie is aiming for. Which is riotous and goofy. Loved it.

Shortly after, I took the plunge and saw Lisa Frankenstein, the title of which is a play on Frankenstein (the Mary Shelley book turned horror icon) and Lisa Frank (the colorful kids brand that used to be all over Trapper Keepers) as well as the name of our titular character. I am reluctant to see horror movies, but I will make an exception for campy stuff that I want to see for other reasons. I have seen most of the Frankenstein movies and I am a fan of the original book. I was also drawn to the 80s setting and the romance a la Warm Bodies.

Lisa is an outcast, because she’s new and weird, yeah, but also because she witnessed the brutal murder of her mother and is now dressing in black and hanging out at the cemetery. There is a particular headstone she likes to hang out at, so when the occupant of the grave reanimates he comes straight to her. Murder ensues. And love. And disastrous tragedy.

A play on movies from the 80s and so steeped in 80s references that I’m sure plenty of people were calling uncle (I wasn’t), this is another movie that is meant to be overdone, ridiculous at times. But it’s also funny. And uncomfortable (poking a finger into the side of the villain-as-hero genre). And has some great moments of both enjoyment and enjoyable cringe. Despite the dropping of one of the obvious threads and my scorn for the can’t-die-a-virgin concept, I ended up loving this movie, too. It had nothing to do with Frankenstein, or, a Modern Day Prometheus (the full title of the Shelley book), really, except to use some of the later references (mostly reanimation by electrocution), like from the movies as opposed to the book. Just like Argylle, if you can go into with modified expectations—in this case expecting a wild romp of campy violence, 80s teen movies, and macabre silliness—then you should have a good time. Especially if you’re 44.

Then as the Oscars approached and I had missed it at the theater, I rented The Color Purple to stream. We’re talking, of course, about the 2023 musical movie, not the 1985 movie or the book it was based on by Alice Walker. All of these things are titled The Color Purple, plain and simple. To be honest, I had wanted to see this one on the big screen because I suspected it would be best that way, that it would matter, and I was right. There is a lot of cinematic scope in this movie, including vocalizations that would be best appreciated when surrounded by them in high definition. Alas…

I know this is going to sound crazy, but out of these four movies, I was least impressed by The Color Purple. I mean, it might deserve an acting or costume Oscar, but overall it was a little disjointed and abrupt, uneven in its brilliance. Some of the scenes were, in fact, brilliant. Others were simply not. I wanted to connect to the story, but I felt a little confused about the themes, even. In the end, I think that this version of the story is about, as I saw it put, “Cely as a lesbian icon.” But considering that her growth as a character comes too-sudden and not-adequately-prompted (which could be said double for at least one other character) and the, I’m sorry, but sappy ending… I just couldn’t like this movie as a whole for the enjoyment of some of the parts. Nor for what it had to say, because it just didn’t come together. There is a better-edited version of this movie somewhere in a parallel universe, with just a few re-shot scenes to ease us into character growth. That’s the one that would do justice to the book and the earlier movie. (Note: I read that Alice Walker liked this adaptation. I don’t doubt it. There is a special voice that is caught here, as well as those really great moments.)

And then I was putting all this together and realized another movie belonged here. Go ahead and roll your eyes, I don’t care. But Anyone but You is based on literature, more directly in fact, than Lisa Frankenstein or even Argylle. You may not know it, but this classic rom-com is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. (In fact, there are quotes and references throughout the movie, to the point that it’s over the top in a maybe not great way.) And here’s the thing: I don’t think anyone was trying to be especially brilliant with this movie, and the acting is sometimes pretty horrible, but it is the best rom-com that has come to the theaters in ages. It’s funny. There’s sparks. There’s predictability (a staple of the genre). I was afraid this one was going to disappoint, but it totally didn’t. Lol-ed. Had a nice date night with my husband. Would definitely recommend and watch it again.

To conclude, all five of these movies are worth watching. It’s some of the best cinema of the year, for sure. If you’re okay with movies poking fun at themselves or being hyperbolic, especially, watching any one of these will be time well spent (as opposed to Madame Web. Please don’t see that instead).