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Review: Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

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…I’ve always known on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I’ve just never felt that knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And it’s because of you.

Synopsis
Jason Dessen has a perfectly ordinary life as a physics professor of a middling college and comfortable relationships with his art-teacher wife and teenage son Charlie until he’s kidnapped on his way home from meeting a colleague for drinks. Plunged into an alternate reality of his life where he never married his wife and instead chose the path of professional success, Jason has to decide what he really wants—does he want the impressive but lonely life of professional acclaim or does he want his ordinary, imperfect life back? Once he chooses, can he find the world where he belongs?

Universal appeal, despite the Amazon category
I’m late to the party on this one as Dark Matter has been out for quite some time but after everyone in the MMD Book Club raved about it, I had to get my hands on a copy. Amazon classifies this book as a “Technothriller” and “Science Fiction;” however, this is one of those don’t-judge-a-book-by-it’s-Amazon-category instances. This is one of the few books that seemed universally enjoyed and is a frequent recommendation within the MMD Book Club. I think, in fact, it might be the only book that I’ve never seen anyone say they disliked. The group has a wide variety of members, including readers who steer clear of science fiction altogether who still enjoyed this book. Several of the women in the group commented that it was a book even their non-reader husbands really enjoyed.

Accessibility
In order to understand the plot in Dark Matter, you need to understand the idea of the multiverse—essentially, that the universe you are conscious of living within is but one of many universes. For each choice you make, in another universe you made a different choice. You had Life cereal this morning? In another universe you had Cheerios. In another you never ate breakfast because you actually died in a car accident last week. Dark Matter is set within this infinitely unfolding multiverse. Currently only a theory (since consciousness itself destroys the ability to prove the multiverse—you can only be aware of the universe in which you find yourself), Dark Matter places Jason squarely within a world in which the multiverse has become his reality.

Sound overly complicated? For a book about quantum physics, Dark Matter remains a remarkably accessible book. Crouch explains the concepts necessary for the reader to understand what, exactly it is that’s happening without becoming bogged down in technospeak or losing the reader. I sped through this book, gobbling it up—I even woke up an hour early one morning just to go to Starbucks so I could read it for an hour before I went to work. Despite the speed with which I was reading, I had no trouble understanding the scientific concepts—I never had to go back and re-read to understand the science (despite the degrees on my wall showing I was a humanities major in college). The physics sets the stage but the relationships between Jason and his wife, Daniela, and Jason and himself are what drive the book.

Daniela
While the story revolves around Jason and his journey through the various realities in which he could have lived, seeing Daniela through Jason’s eyes in each of her iterations was a joy (well, except for one…you’ll know which one when you read the book). Crouch manages to strike a balance with her where you see and feel how deeply she is loved, yet, she remains beautifully real. She is Jason’s ideal, yet not unfairly idealized—my favorite description of her was her tendency towards being “belligerently kind” when she’s been drinking. I want to know her, to sit on her couch and drink wine, to hang her art on my walls.

Choice
The choices people make and whether those choices were objectively “good” or “bad” is a pretty common theme within literature and fiction. In placing that plot point within the multiverse, Crouch flips this concept entirely on its head. Want to know how your life would have turned out if you had made a different choice—chosen the job, chosen the spouse, said something different? Within the multiverse you can. The path not taken is a doorway away within an infinite hallway of choices. Crouch reveals that choice is going to be a central part of his book from his dedication of the book “[f]or anyone who has wondered what their life might look like at the end of the road not taken.”

I’m not going to say more as doing so would spoil the book; however, this is the first time I’ve seen this kind of time-bending work so well to establish a universe where a character can see how his choices affected different parts of his life and where the reader quickly understands how that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Writing
I’ve been lucky so far this year in curating books that hit the mark for me in writing. Dark Matter is another one of those books that is tightly written, with perfect turns of phrase here and there that really shine, though the book never becomes flowery. The writing is simple enough to convey complicated scientific concepts, descriptive enough to place you with Jason in each of the worlds he trips across in the multiverse, yet spare enough that the book moves forward at a quick pace without unnecessary words cluttering your path. In some ways, the prose is more impressive in a book like Dark Matter than The Heart where the focus isn’t the writing itself for the sake of writing. For the prose to be so well crafted feels like an extra gift, the cherry on top (if you like cherries…otherwise this metaphor doesn’t really work).

And if the quote at the top of this review isn’t one of the most romantic things you’ve ever read, then do you even have a heart?

Summary
Dark Matter is one of three books so far this year that upon finishing, I had to go buy my own copy because I knew I would need to re-read it and recommend it widely. (I actually took pictures of the pages where I had book darts so I could transfer them into the new book….it was a lot of pictures). Luckily for you, the book is available in paperback; alternatively, it’s still in stock as a book you can add to your monthly box on Book of the Month.

As I noted above, this is a book that people from every walk of life have enjoyed within my book club and it’s got an impressive rating on both Goodreads and Amazon. If you enjoy solidly written fiction and have even a mild tolerance of science-fiction, this is the book for you. But when you stay up all night reading, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Notes
Published: July 26, 2016 by Crown (@crownpublishing)
Author: Blake Crouch (@blakecrouch1)
Date read: June 14, 2017
Rating: 4 3/4 Stars

Review: Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka

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Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.  Thank you to Simon & Schuster and Netgalley for sending me an advance reader copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Nostalgia is my favorite emotion. It’s like, you think you know how to deal with the passage of time, but nostalgia will prove you wrong. You’ll press your face into an old sweatshirt, or you’ll look at a familiar shade of paint on a front door, and you’ll be reminded of all the time that got away from you. If you could live it all again, you’d take a long moment to look around, to examine knees against knees. Nostalgia puts you in this dangerous re-creation something you can never have again. It’s ruthless, and for the most part, inaccurate.

 

Summary
On February 15, the town of Broomsville, Colorado awakes to find that fifteen year-old Lucinda Hayes has been murdered. As the small town swirls with grief and gossip, we follow three characters—Cameron, a neighbor who loved her and may have also stalked her; Jade, a classmate who hated her for being everything she couldn’t be; and Russ, a police officer torn between his duty to serve and his duty to protect, especially to protect Cameron. As more is slowly revealed, the book begs the questions—Who are you when no one’s watching? And can you ever really know someone if you’re only ever watching from the outside?

Classification
At first, I assumed, based on the title, that Girl in Snow was a YA book. A few chapters in, I realized that wasn’t the case. Instead, the title is a nod to the way works of art are named, as we see Lucinda, left for dead on a snowy playground, through the eyes of two classmates/neighbors and a police officer involved in the investigation.

From the first sentences on, the readers knows the central point around which the rest of the book turns is the murder of a fifteen year-old girl, but no one knows who murdered her. Ok, so this book must be a thriller/murder-mystery—indeed, a quick check of Amazon has the book categorized as “women’s fiction” and “literary fiction” and then in the sub-genres of “mystery, thriller, and suspense” within each.

Except, even this genre didn’t fit neatly, or at least, does not follow the typical structure of a mystery/thriller/suspense novel in my book. The bulk of the book follows three characters and the choices they (and others) make when they think no one is watching. Far more time is spent on character development than dropping clues, such that when the killer is identified, the resolution is swift, almost an afterthought to the other sub-stories being told about Cameron, Jade, and Russ. (Which, in the interest of #nospoilers is not say that it isn’t one of them, but simply that the focus of the book isn’t on who did it as much as how these three characters are coping with the murder and the role they have in the event and the resulting investigation).

Characters
The highlight of Kukafka’s first novel is Cameron. It’s never directly stated, but his mannerisms seemed to indicate pretty strongly to me that he is on the spectrum—making collections, storing images, intensely focused, but socially withdrawn. Cameron is obsessed with watching—he prowls the neighborhood at night, watching the inhabitants, especially watching Lucinda. Though they have had almost no actual interaction, Cameron loves the Lucinda he watches. When Lucinda’s body is found, he is immediately a suspect—though he has been careful, he’s less clever than he thinks and people know he’s been watching Lucinda. Even Cameron wonders if it might be him, as the night of her death is missing from Cameron’s memory.

Protecting Cameron the best he can is Russ, a police officer who was Cameron’s father’s partner for years on the force before Cameron’s father was forced to leave in shame. Russ, more than the other main characters, has let what others see of him define who he actually is—with the result that he’s walking around half-alive, still consumed with his missing partner and his promise to keep his son safe.

Finally, we have Jade. I loved Kukafka’s little details with Jade—I may have cheered out loud at the reference to her listening to Box Car Racer and Dashboard Confessional (the book is set so that they are teenagers in the late 90s’/early 2000s’ when I was). Jade is that kid in school who doesn’t seem to have friends but also don’t seem to want them. It’s easier to reject someone before they reject you. She’s prickly and unattractive. And yet, like Cameron, she steals her way into your heart.

The last thing you want is for any of these three to have been involved in Lucinda’s death. Yet Jade hated her, Cameron stalked her, and Russ has hidden evidence to protect someone in Cameron’s family before.

These characters are what made Girl in Snow stand out from the typical murder mystery from me. I usually spend my entire time reading, trying to pick up clues. I can usually figure out the murderer and, often, the motive at least a few chapters before the big reveal. I didn’t find myself doing that with Girl in Snow. Kukafka made me care, desperately, more about who I hoped didn’t commit the murder than about who did. I didn’t spend my time looking for lots of clues, rather I waited for Cameron to work his way through his memory, hoping that when it came back it wouldn’t be him. I won’t say more and spoil the book, but turning this typical view of the mystery on its head was one of Kukafka’s better choices, as the book was richer than your typical mass market paperback murder mystery, though diehard mystery/thriller fans may find the ending rather abrupt with very few clues leading you as to both who the murderer was and why.

In some ways, by choosing the three characters she did, Kukafka chose the three anti-heroes. None of the three of them are likeable. Even the other significant minor characters—Ivan, Ines, and Cynthia—wouldn’t have been terribly likeable had their narrative been added. But then again, the more you find out about someone you’ve been watching, in many ways, the more unlikeable they become. Just as Cameron never got a full glimpse of Lucinda in his hours of watching her, perhaps love is coming to know someone, to find them unlikeable, and choosing them anyway.

Rating
I struggled more with rating this book than with others. As I noted, since it didn’t read like a typical mystery/thriller to me, it didn’t seem fair to judge it against others in that category I’ve enjoyed or think are well done. It was almost more of a straight literary fiction novel that happened to be set around a murder. With that in mind, I gave this book 3 ¾ stars—it’s well-written, tightly-edited, and Kukafka can turn a beautiful phrase, though it didn’t have the pop of something like This is How It Always Is or even Almost Sisters. It wasn’t as stand out as other lit-fics I’ve recently read, so that knocked it down a bit.

However, this was by no means a book that’s finding itself on my running list of “Books I should have abandoned” (looking at you Hillbilly Elegy). I was engaged, I enjoyed the story, and I thought Kukafka did well by her characters. I loved her gentleness with Cameron in particular. If you’ve read any of my other reviews, you know I can get a little heart-eyes over flowery prose—this book isn’t flowery. The prose is well done without being over the top. So while I didn’t love the prose as much as I did in something like The Heart or Exit West, I know those books also drive some readers a little nuts. If that’s you, you’ll do fine with Girl in Snow—it’s beautiful but not showy. If you generally enjoy non-standard murder mysteries and highly character-driven books, I suspect you’ll find Girl in Snow worth your time.

Notes
Published: August 1, 2017 by Simon & Schuster (@simonandschuster)
Author: Danya Kukafka (@danyakukafka)
Date read: August 15, 2017
Rating: 3 3/4 Stars

Review: The Fall of Lisa Bellow by Susan Perabo

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Sometimes in the morning, while she waited for her brother to get out of the bathroom, Meredith Oliver would stand in front of her bureau mirror, lock eyes with her reflection, and say, “This is me. This is really me. Right now. This is me. This is my real life. This is me.”

She would say these things to herself because she liked the moment when she suddenly became uncertain that those things she was saying were in fact true, liked the way it made her feel unmoored, the hole of doubt that opened inside her, and the wind the blew through that hole….And she liked equally—not more and not less, because it was just the same sensation backward—the moment she became re-certain that those things were true—this is me, this is really me—when the hole closed, and the anchor caught, and she could smell the eggs her father was scrambling downstairs.

Synopsis
On a September day punctuated only by an Algebra test, a broken pencil, and not enough time to finish graphing the asymptotes, eighth-grader Meredith suddenly finds herself on the floor of a local restaurant as a robbery becomes a kidnapping and Meredith is the one left behind.  The Fall of Lisa Bellow is the story of what happens next for Meredith and her family as they come to terms with Meredith’s being left behind while still having to move forward.

Relatability
I remember the first time I watched Gilmore Girls, I identified, unquestioningly, with Rory. Many years later, re-watching it before the recent revival, I realized at some point I was far closer in age to Lorelai in the series, and, while I remembered feeling the way Rory did at times, Lorelai’s story lines were suddenly more relevant.

In some ways, my experience with The Fall of Lisa Bellow was similar—I felt the ache of middle school injustice and cliques and could remember how it felt to be where Meredith is (awful…it mostly felt awful), but I identified as strongly with her mother Claire as I did Meredith. I’m in the sweet spot of being able to see myself in both major characters.

In Meredith, I remember the feeling of not fitting in—not entirely sure what it was about me that made me different, just knowing that I wasn’t popular or, frankly, well-liked. Like Meredith, I missed the memo about the Titanic iceberg that is middle school and spent the rest of the time feeling like I was catching up. And yet, there is a point where we see Meredith from her mother’s eyes, talking about the mean girls with her friends. And in that moment, Meredith is one the nice-girls-become-mean in the tearing down of other girls. I see this so much in myself in hindsight. I was one of the nice girls but I was not nice. I was not kind. In seeing this in Meredith, I see this in eighth grade me. It made me feel gentler toward Meredith, knowing we shared this flaw that neither of us could or would see until we were adults, removed from thirteen by enough distance to see the landscape behind.

In the alternating chapters with Meredith’s mother, I could see parts of Claire’s parenting that felt true to me. I’m not a parent but I could see where many of the mistakes she made could easily be my mistakes in the future. The earliest glimpse of Claire’s parenting comes as she examines a patient who made fun of her first-grade son, calling him a “porker.” As an adult, Claire has power, but as a dentist, Claire welds more power than she should—and in a moment of decision deliberately inflicts just a bit of pain on her son’s bully. There’s something shockingly human in the description of this incident. Though the book is written in third person it reads like a confession, but a confession from someone who isn’t sure she’s sorry. She knows she should be, but that’s as close to remorse as she’s been able to come in the ten years since.

For Claire, the problems are now too big for dental retribution. Six months before the book opens, her son Evan catches a line drive foul ball in the eye, destroying his sight and his dreams for a baseball career. Now, with Meredith, not taken but gone somewhere Claire can’t understand, Claire has to fully accept that can’t protect her children and there isn’t always a physical monster she can bring to tears with her sterile tools.

Though there is nothing on paper that should make me identify particularly well with either of these characters, the highlight of The Fall of Lisa Bellow for me was Meredith and Claire, as well as the minor characters of the father Mark and son Evan—in their struggle through grief and loss and almost-loss and guilt for the grief—they make choices that can’t make sense because none of those emotions set the foundation for rational thinking. And yet, I can see the nonsensical choices they each made and see, exactly, how I too would wind up in a stranger’s bathtub, drunk on my own front lawn, unexpectedly in a seat at the popular kid’s table for a fleeting moment.  It is a strength of Perabo’s that though I had little to nothing outwardly in common with her characters, I identified with them so deeply as I read.

Grief
I read a book several years ago about “ambiguous loss,” a phrase made mainstream by Pauline Boss. Ambiguous losses aren’t solid, they’re like a family whose loved one has Alzheimer’s—there’s a death with a living body still walking around, so how do they mourn this non-loss? It’s a loss of expectation in some ways, but deeper than that.  It’s not a loss you can see; it’s not something that prompt the neighbors to pull out the casserole dishes and fill your freezer. Though what Meredith experienced isn’t truly an ambiguous loss—Lisa is gone and Meredith is not—the way Meredith processed what happened—that she is still here reminded me in some ways of ambiguous loss. We all grieve experiences differently, even if what would seem to be the expected emotion isn’t grief. It is in the processing of her experience and the loss of Lisa that Meredith begins to literally see Lisa, to imagine what is happening to her. How Meredith comes to terms with her own trauma, the “lesser” trauma of that day, is simultaneously completely irrational and completely identifiable. Through the ordeal and later, she fixates on a problem she ran out of time to solve in math class—she latches onto the rational problem with a finite solution that she can still solve.

For Claire, the immediate thought is that Meredith is still here—what does she or her family have to grieve? And yet, there is the almost-grief, the difference of eeny-meeny-miney-mo landing on your daughter rather than the other one in the restaurant.

After Lisa is taken within the first few chapters of the book, the rest is how Meredith comes to term with Lisa—a classmate who wasn’t a friend but, in that short moment, was as they both lay on the floor of the Deli Barn. How Claire mourns the loss of her daughter’s innocence while simultaneously struggling with the idea that she, as the parent who didn’t lose a child, shouldn’t be mourning at all.

Because I can’t not-comment on the writing
The Fall of Lisa Bellow stuck with me more than most books I’ve read recently—the larger themes had more poignancy than the other books I’ve read this summer. In this way, while the little details were the high point of the other books, here they were the matting surrounding the larger work—the work was better for the professional matting and framing job, but the work stood on its own.

The themes carried you, swimming in almost-grief and almost-guilt masquerading down the halls of eighth grade, while the word choice and details were the individual steps that got you from one end of the hall to the other. The writing didn’t smother the theme, it wasn’t over the top but it wasn’t so simplistic that it detracted. There were paragraphs to re-read for the way the characters made you feel and others to re-read for the word choice. The Fall of Lisa Bellow was balanced in a way most books rarely are.

Recommended for….
This is a book that drew some strong reactions in the MMD book club—some of us loved it, but I think we may have been in the slight minority. The action happens in the left over parts with the left behind people. It doesn’t move quickly and some of the choices the characters make just aren’t rational—if you’re not in a place where you’re also inhabiting those characters with Perabo, then I can see how those choices, those words, that character’s tone would drive you to pull out your eyelashes waiting for something to happen. Despite the kidnapping plot, this is not a mystery/thriller. The focus is never on the girl who was taken but the girl who was left.

With that said, I loved this book and devoured it in days. If you enjoy well written, traditional literary fiction and character-driven books, The Fall of Lisa Bellow was a highlight of my summer reading and I highly recommend it. This is another book I’ll be acquiring my own copy of for my shelves to lend and re-read in the future.

Notes
Published: March 14, 2017 by Simon & Schuster (@simonandschuster)
Author: Susan Perabo
Date read: June 12, 2017
Rating: 4 ½ Stars

Hindsight / Foresight August 13, 2017

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Mark Solarski

Hindsight this Week

Yesterday was the first day I had off in literally thirteen days–I had a brief due at work and worked a usual workday’s worth of hours last Saturday and Sunday.  Yesterday I didn’t set an alarm (slept in til 8:30!), went to Half Price Books, watched baseball, and got about halfway into my ARC of Girl in Snow.  I would have gotten farther but I found myself glued to my phone, watching the atrocities go down in Charlottesville.  UVA was the other prestigious university in Virginia (I went to William & Mary), so it was surreal to watch the rioting, the initial lack of adequate police response to protect the Black Lives Matter and other counter-protestors, escalating to the death, and then the president’s weak-sauce, half-assed condemnation of both sides.  Girl in Snow is SO very good and I probably could have flown through it yesterday but for being glued to my phone and angry Facebooking.

Speaking of ARCs, it’s an embarrassment of riches over at my house.  I mentioned last week that I got Girls Made of Snow and Glass and Trell.  I also got approved on NetGalley for ARCs of Jessamyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Girl In Snow.   And, of course, I already had the ARC of Reading People for Anne Bogel’s Launch Team.  Because those all come out soon (or just came out), the blog will be heavily skewed towards ARCs for a few weeks starting soon.

With work being nuts, the only book I finished last week was The Alice Network.  It started a little slow and I was afraid at first I’d gotten another Lilac Girls, but it quickly picked up.  It wasn’t quite on the level of The Nightingale, but similar to that, it made me want to read some nonfiction on Louise de Bettignies, aka Alice Duval.  I did start and read a few chapters of Priestdaddy but it was so good, I decided to go ahead and return the library copy and just buy my own copy so I wasn’t rushed in reading it.

I picked up Since We Fell and Eleanor Oliphant is Complete Fine from the library to add to the towering TBR pile.  Boyfriend and I are almost done with Waking Gods and I’ve only got a few hours left in Born a Crime.

I’d be remiss not to remind you about the amazing bonuses that are still available if you preorder Anne Bogel’s Reading People.  The subtitle is “How Seeing the World Through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything” and is Anne’s story of how digging into the 7 personality frameworks changed her for the better. The book explains how you can put those personality frameworks to work to change your life, work and relationships. You can go to ReadingPeopleBook.com to take a free quiz to see what 9 reading personality best describes you–I got the Insider and it pegged me to a “T.”  And, because its all Anne Bogel, came with reading recommendations for my reading type.

If you want to dive deeper, Anne made a class that you can dive deeper into all 9 types and she gives book recommendations for each type. You can get this class free with a pre-order of the book. You can also get a free download of the audiobook (Anne recorded it!).

Foresight for the coming week

I should finish Girl in Snow Tuesday if not today then its on to Girls Made of Snow and Glass.  Despite their similar titles, they’ve got NOTHING in common so it will be a nice change of pace.  Girl in Snow is a murder mystery where Girls Made of Snow and Glass is YA fantasy.  I will have to pick a new audiobook this week.  I started listening to Hum If You Don’t Know the Words because I love books Bahni Turpin reads, but couldn’t get into it.  A bunch of other folks in the MMD book club raved about it after I set it aside, so I may go back.  I’ve also go an Audible credit burning a hole in my pocket that I need to decide what to use it on.  I’ve heard good things about The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie but I also just learned Bahni does Underground Railroad so I may return the physical copy I have of that one and read the audiobook instead.

Have suggestions for what I should read next? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Review: The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson

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“You and me, we have to get on the same page now,” I told her.
“I’ve been on your page since the day that you were born, sugar,” Wattie said, but then she added tartly, “Though all this week I wondered if you might be illiterate.”

Synopsis:
Thirty-eight and pregnant from a one-night stand with a black Batman at a ComicCon, graphic novel illustrator and author Leia Birch Briggs finds herself the eye around which a maelstrom of family chaos rages. Before she can break her news to her family, her sister Rachel’s family life implodes, leaving Leia caring for her teenage niece, even as she has to travel to Birchville, Alabama to care for her ailing grandmother. Shortly after her arrival in Birchville, all holy hell breaks loose around Leia’s beloved grandmother Birchie and her devoted friend Wattie, an African-American woman Birchie’s known and cherished as her best friend almost her entire life. As Leia struggles to keep everything together in her new-found caretaker role, she begins to discover things about herself, her characters, and her family that will profoundly change how she moves forward in her own life.

Don’t judge a book by its flap-copy
If you asked me before I read The Almost Sisters if I had any interest in reading a book about a woman who writes comic books and gets knocked up from a one-night stand at a ComicCon, I would resoundingly have answered, “no.” I don’t read comics, I don’t religiously follow The Avengers movies, and I’m not sure I can correctly sift Marvel characters from DC outside of the major characters in each.

But I am so very glad I picked up this book. I love this book for its believably flawed central character Leia, for the dignity Joshilyn Jackson gave the aging Birchie, and the gentleness she showed with Wattie, Birchie’s closest friend and an African American woman living in a small town in Alabama. If you love women, if you cheer for books that highlight and champion women and their relationships, this is a book for you. The comic stuff is the background around which the main story is built and is still delightful even if you’re a comic outsider—you do not need any existing background knowledge to love this story. (Ok, it might help if you know who Batman and Wonder Woman are, but that’s it.)

Relationships among women
During the recent author chat with the Modern Mrs. Darcy book club, Jackson mentioned that she was inspired with this book to flip the biblical story of Rachel and Leah around—what if Leah/Leia is the interesting sister and the focal point of the story of Rachel, Leah, and Jacob? As Jackson said, “What if you were the one who didn’t get picked, but you’re valuable and good at what you do?—this is what Leia/Leah would look like.”

Though in almost every possible way, I’ve since left that culture, I did grow up heavily immersed in a Southern Baptist church. I had never, in thirty-something years of churching, stopped to think about Leah. The narrative is always about Rachel as the pretty, desirable one; but Jackson is right. Leah is resourceful, successful, and does everything she should do for that time and yet, the focus is Rachel. Though I didn’t see this theme as clearly as I did before the chat with Jackson, I appreciated her eye for the forgotten sister. For giving the woman who is usually left out of the story her own voice and book. Of course, the biblical starting point was just that—a starting point. Unless I am misremembering significant portions of Genesis, Leah never slept with an African American dressed as Batman at a ComicCon and got knocked up out of wedlock so…the analogy is loose and not triggering if you’re in a place where the Bible is not a safe book for you—it’s reqlly quite easy to miss or ignore outside of the characters’ names. Additionally, if you’re completely unfamiliar with this particular biblical story, The Almost Sisters still holds up. You do not need to know the story of Rachel and Leah in the slightest to love this story.

Jackson starts with the relationship between Rachel and Leah and expands from there, exploring the multitude of sister-like relationships between women from the formal step-sister bond between Rachel and Leia to the best friend/companion relationship between white Birchie and black Wattie. Though difficult to describe without giving spoilers away (and I won’t!), Leia’s comic characters Violet and Violence are also intertwined in a way that brings another fun dimension to the idea of female identity relative to another woman. The relationships here are so rich, I feel like this is a book that will hold up to multiple readings, with new little discoveries with each reading.

Gems and Easter Eggs
I loved that though this wasn’t a hoity-toity book—the Library of Congress information in the front of the book tells me this is a “Domestic fiction” and “Contemporary Women’s Fiction” book—pardon me while I pause for an eye-roll at whomever named those categories—but the writing still sparkled. Rather than describing Birchie as simply “having dementia,” Jackson describes her as “deep in the badlands of the brain.” Leia describes sleeping with Ambien-zonked Rachel as “sleeping with a bag of upset cats.” She describes Rachel’s brand of love and help as “so relentless[ ] that I wished I had a safe word.”

I adore a book that defies the (unfairly low in this case) expectations of its genre. Beautiful writing doesn’t have to be dripping poetry and limited to literary fiction. Truly fantastic writing draws you in without making you feel like an outsider. It introduces you to new words, new ways of seeing, and new metaphors. In the ways she writes about these little mundanities of life, Jackson’s writing brings The Almost Sisters to life. I cannot remember a time I so thoroughly enjoyed reading a “Women’s Fiction” book.

I should add here, when speaking of the little gems scattered across Jackson’s writing, that there are also apparently numerous hidden “easter eggs” for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Who. The references to those fandoms certainly fit with the context of ComicCon and who Leia is. While I picked up none of them (not being a card-carrying member of either of those groups), apparently they are there and readers who see them are loving them. As someone who didn’t pick up on them, I appreciated that they were so subtle that I wasn’t left feeling like I was missing something—there was nothing that hit me over the head with the inside reference and made me feel like an outsider. If you didn’t get it, you didn’t even see it and it didn’t detract from the story.

The Second South
I don’t normally go out of my way to describe characters by their race, yet its important for The Almost Sisters that both Leia’s Batman and Wattie are African-American. Layered with the story about the friendships of women is the darker, secondary theme of there being a Second South. The Second South is why the pastor reflexively tries to take Birchie’s hand out of Wattie’s arm, why people see Wattie as the help. Why Leia slowly starts to realize that her child, currently protected by the whiteness of her skin, will face entirely different challenges once out in the world as a mixed-race black boy. I do not want to detract from Jackson’s story by hammering the details here; however, I deeply appreciated that the reality of the racist Second South was a significant theme and was very much acknowledged.

As you may know from earlier reviews on this site for Dreamland Burning and Killers of the Flower Moon, I am often wary of white authors writing black characters or telling stories with moral lessons about racism. It can absolutely be done well but the dangers of it being done poorly (and then everyone patting themselves on the back, thinking their job well done) are high. Again, my perspective is similar if not the same as Jackson’s—I speak from a place of cis, white, able privilege—but I thought Jackson handled the racial overtones at play in The Almost Sisters well. She writes without making any apologies for the Second South. You can tell she loves the South as her own but her brand of love means you don’t sit there and let the cancer grow without calling it out and trying to excise it.

Reading Environment
When I read I try to think of where the reader would ideally be reading a given book. Some books lend themselves to the beach. Some to a cozy armchair with a cup of tea. Some are perfect for my favorite corner table at my local Starbucks. When I try to think of that same thing with The Almost Sisters, I come up with no single option. At the risk of sounding like Sam I Am, this is a book that can be read anywhere (in a box…with a fox…while eating lox….).

The Almost Sisters strikes a unique balance—the writing fizzes like a glass of happy champagne—yet Jackson is making serious points that ring true about racism in the South. The book is simultaneously airy and heavy. The writing makes it a book for the beach, the themes a book to spark discussion in many a book club.

Notes
Published July 11, 2017 by William Morrow (@williammorrowbooks)
Author: Joshilyn Jackson (@joshilyn_jackson)
Date read: August 3, 2017
Rating: 4 ¼ Stars

Review: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Posted on by lisaannreads


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The boy’s eyes flew open.
-roger bevins iii

Strange here, he said.
Not strange, said Mr. Bevins. Not really.
One gets used to it, said the Reverend.
If one belongs here, said Mr. Bevins.
Which you don’t, said the Reverand.
-hans vollman

Synopsis
Lincoln in the Bardo unfolds over the course of the night in which President Lincoln buries his beloved son, Willie. As Lincoln traverses the graveyard in his grief, the reader comes to know a myriad of souls inhabiting a second layer of the graveyard—those buried there but not yet moved on to what is next. As Lincoln’s story is told by an overlap of historical sources, the voices of the Bardo rise and fall over one another, setting out a shadowy world of pain, fear, and longing. As the night passes, the Bardo’s inhabitants come together as one—for as much as they fear the matterlightblooming phenomenon that heralds a soul’s departure from the Bardo, they know Willie, sweet, innocent Willie, does not belong in this third place.

The danger of high expectations
As with many other books, I came to Lincoln in the Bardo with exceedingly high expectations. It had been hyped by all of the snooty places I find good books—NPR, Time, The Atlantic, and my coworker Peter. While I’ve never read them, Saunders’s success with short stories made everyone go mad for his first novel before it was ever published. The cover flap uses words like “literary master” and “most original, transcendent moving work yet.”

It would likely have been impossible for any book to live up to the hype created for this one. This expectation colored my initial reaction to the book—having expected the highest highs, something less made me feel that it was awful. Having had more breathing room from the book and having flipped through it again preparing for this review, it is an excellent book–particularly in the writing if not the structure. It’s not a book I’m likely to forget anytime soon.

Structure
As to the structure, when I was younger, I used to dream up fake histories to insert into daydreams, thinking up books that blended the history with the action of my characters. In Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders has taken that structure that hasn’t worked in far less capable hands (including my own, chubby five year old hands) and somehow made it work.

To craft Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders takes excerpts from what a few quick Google searches appear to be actual historical sources and blends them together into a narrative. The narrative pieces themselves connect and read in some places like a conversation between historical sources. In the concept and on the written page, the effect is remarkable—I’m not sure Saunders tells any of his own narrative about Lincoln’s life outside of the graveyard with his own words (unless some of the sources aren’t real—admittedly, I didn’t check them all).

On audio, however, this format works significantly less well. The citations for the historical sources break up the flow of the audio so frequently but so quickly that they become confusing. After the first cite, the citation for an historical source simple becomes “Author, op. cit.” In the written book (as you can see to the right), it’s fine. The eye can skim past with little interruption. In the audio, a different voice reads the citations so that seemingly out of nowhere the voice of what sounds like a preternaturally calm flight attendant interrupts the story to say “Leech, op. cit” and before you can wrap you head around what she just said, the next reader is talking and reading the next quote. The voice is jarring enough that it can’t easily be ignored and, as a result, I’m sure I missed much of the first several chapters of the book.

And yet….the audio.
I would not, however, go so far as to say that this is a book that doesn’t work in audio. On the contrary, the alternating, non-historical sources—the voices Saunders actually wrote–make this one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to. An impressive cast of voices including Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, Ben Stiller, Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon, Bradley Whitford, Bill Hader, Megan Mullally, Rainn Wilson, Keegan-Michael Key, Mary Karr, and Don Cheadle all voice various souls stuck in the Bardo with Willie Lincoln. It is in this conversation between these souls that the audiobook shines head and shoulders above the physical book. Almost ever voice seems perfectly chosen for its character, adding depth and dimension to the anguish and obsession experienced by those in the Bardo. Here too, where Saunders was able to stretch his creativity, the writing shines and there are moments like the quote above that made my exquisite-writing-loving-heart skip a beat.

Developing his cast of characters
Warning of a teeny, tiny spoiler that you find out fairly quickly in the book……
::look away now if you’re a spoiler-stickler::
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One of the particularly creative choices Saunders made with the Bardo-ians, was to have the bodies of his Bardo inhabitants be reflective of what they were obsessed with at the moment of their deaths. Nick Offerman’s character, Hans Vollman, was a gentleman who married a woman much younger than he. Rather than force himself on her, he let her slowly, slowly come to love him…unfortunately for him he died before they ever consummated their marriage. As a result, Vollman is obsessed with sex with his wife so his physical body is naked with a penis several feet long. Roger Bevins III, another character, having committed suicide but regretted it at the last moment, is many-eyed, many-nosed, and many-handed, obsessed with the sights, smells, and touch of things he can no longer experience. This choice on the part of Saunders is unlike anything I’ve seen and adds a dimension to his characters that is unexpected and, on the whole, well done.

Edgy for the sake of edge
There are, however, some choices that it seems Saunders made for no other reason than to be edgy. Vollman’s character is an excellent example. If he were naked and simply erect, this would have conveyed the same idea without Saunders repeatedly mentioning that his gigantic member is swollen and wagging around, three feet long. Similarly, a pivotal moment in the book is told from an outside perspective of four characters who are midst orgy. Telling of the event from outside makes sense and is well-done…but the characters being midst orgy feels overdone. Like it was difficult to work sex into a book about an eleven-year old boy grieving his father but, gosh darn it, you can’t have a book without sex. These random, unnecessary, adult details that serve no purpose but to shock are the result.

Reading along
I’m not sure I’ve ever thought this about a book before now, but the best way to experience Lincoln in the Bardo, at least for the first several chapters, is to listen to the audiobook while following along with the physical book. The physical book alone loses the power the impressive cast puts behind Saunders’s characters while the audio alone is incredibly hard to follow until you’ve wrapped your head around Saunders’s structure of his historical quotes with citations. Because of the odd structure, this isn’t a book I would recommend for anyone that doesn’t like books that aren’t a little frustrating—for Lincoln in the Bardo shows its genius when you push past the confusion and surrender to experiencing Saudners’s mad world-between-worlds.

Notes
Published February 14, 2017 by Random House (@randomhouse)
Author: George Saunders
Date read: May 18, 2017
Rating: 3 Stars upon initial listen, 4 Stars as I sat with the book

Hindsight / Foresight August 6, 2017

Posted on by lisaannreads


Mark Solarski

Hindsight this Week

It’s been a busy week at work so my reading has slowed down–I managed to finish only Almost Sisters and the ARC of Reading People, both of which should be on the blog in the coming weeks.  I started The Alice Network today and am already sucked in–even though I spent the entire day today (Saturday) reading and briefing for work (and will all day Sunday as well), I can’t wait to jump back in and keep reading.  Today has affirmed that reading for work and reading for fun are two entirely different experiences.

I got two ARCs in the mail yesterday and today–Girls Made of Snow and Glass that I mentioned last week from Top Shelf Text and Trell, an ARC about a African-American man wrongly convicted of homicide written by one of the Spotlight Team reporters at the Boston Globe.  Two very different books but I’m excited about both.  They’re both being released in September, so I’ll likely post those reviews towards the very end of August or beginning of September, closer to their release days.

In other acquisitions, I picked up Woman No. 17 from the library and purchased Six of Crows, Stamped from the Beginning, and The Judgment of Richard Richter (Kindle First choice for August).  At the rate I acquire Kindle books, I’m ensuring I’ll never run out of things to read before I die.  For my Book of the Month selections I got the new John Boyne, The Heart’s Invisible Furies as well as a copy of Dark Matter as an early birthday present from Boyfriend.

Boyfriend and I are still slowly working our way through Waking Gods when we’re in the car together and I just started listening to Born a Crime by Trevor Noah.

Foresight for the coming week

I should be able to knock out The Alice Network and Priestdaddy this week.  I’ve got American Street and Fraulein M. waiting as well as my coworker’s copy of The Underground Railroad that I really need to start.  One day my TBR won’t be dictated by my library due dates…but it won’t be any time next week.

Have suggestions for what I should read next? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Review: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Posted on by lisaannreads


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I open my mouth to respond. A sob comes out. Daddy is moved aside and Mama wraps her arms around me. She rubs my back and speaks in hushed tones that tell lies. “It’s alright, baby. It’s alright.”

Synopsis
The Hate U Give explores the aftermath to a girl, a family, and a community after one of their own—a black teenage boy named Khalil—is brutally murdered by a white cop. The novel follows sixteen-year old Starr, a witness and passenger in the car the night of the murder, as she struggles to find her voice and what it means for her to be a black teenager living in 2017.

Not For Me
I hesitated in writing this review—The Hate U Give isn’t about me and it isn’t for me. Even if I hated this book (which I absolutely don’t), it wouldn’t really be my place to say that anymore than it’s my place to critique “Lemonade.”

They. Weren’t. Made. For. Me.

In fact, I decided early on that if I were going to give this book any less than five stars, that I would simply refrain from rating it at all. Turns out, that wasn’t a problem.

The Hate U Give sucked me in quickly with a fast-paced narrative and a likeable main character who was easy to identify with, even as a white person who did not grow up in anything like Starr’s neighborhood. Starr is studious, funny, and athletic—she has universal appeal and it is easy for most readers to see something of themselves in her. I didn’t identify whatsoever with her love of basketball, but her studiousness and teenage worries over friends hit home for me.

There are, however, many things in the book that will likely make a white audience uncomfortable—the foremost example to me being Starr’s father’s lauding of the Nation of Islam. It is to Thomas’s credit that she wrote a book that can be so universally read; but at the end of the day this is a book for black readers. It should make you squirm a little if you’re white. That squirming can be good for you—why does this make you uncomfortable? Is the reason you’re uncomfortable about you or is what’s happening here actually wrong? (Spoiler alert: the answer is probably the former).

I do think this is a book everyone should read so (obviously, since you’re here) I went ahead with my planned review, with the recognition that there is probably a lot that went over my head and that I didn’t understand that would resonate with a black audience. It felt like the lesser of two evils to review the book and hopefully bring it more attention than to refrain. (Feel free to disagree with me in the comments.)

Title
The title “The Hate U Give” comes from a Tupac reference to “Thug Life”—The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone. The hate, the vitriol, even the malignant neglect the vast majority of white society gives to African Americans starting when they are very young ultimately comes back to effect everyone. It isn’t just the black community that is hurt by Khalil’s death in this book. Through Starr and her siblings, the effects of the murder reach into their predominantly white school. Parts of the city literally burn as riots break out.

To be sure—my point here is not “treat black people nicer so that you can have nicer things yourself, dear white person.” However, it is shockingly easy for white America to look at the problems coming from predominantly black and poor neighborhoods and blame the people that live there without ever thinking about white America’s systemic racist policies and decisions that resulted in the ghettoization of black Americans. White people are not innocent of the problems that created black ghettos; therefore, white people are not innocent of the resulting poverty and crime.

It is hard to ignore the larger societal issues at play when Thomas gives you the back story of why Khalil may have been selling drugs before his murder and why another character named DeVonte joined a gang. It’s not so easy as their making bad decisions or being bad people. Thomas doesn’t completely exculpate them, but by putting specific, likeable faces on issues like drug dealing and gang-banging, she invites her reader to question their biases to see that good people can make bad decisions for good reasons. And that these same people are far more than what a single bad decision defines them as.

Michael Brown. Philando Castile. Eric Garner. Sandra Bland.
Through the experiences of Starr, Thomas puts a face on those left behind when black people are murdered by those who are sworn to serve and protect. To be sure—each of the more than one thousand African Americans killed by cops each year has a story, a name, and people who love them. Unfortunately, with talking heads screaming at each other in the media, the story the reader gets here with Khalil is not one we get to see for the vast majority of those murdered, at least not without a lot of effort to dig and cut through the crap. We don’t see Michael Brown’s struggle to provide for his family, even though he isn’t yet a man himself. We don’t see the agony the witnesses in the Eric Garner case went through to decide whether to testify or not—and the danger of any decision to “snitch” that might result. We don’t see the impact, months later, on the family of Sandra Bland. Not like this. Not in this detail.

Through fictional Khalil, Thomas brings home every name that crossed the headlines over the last few years and reminds us that each black boy and each black woman was, at the end of the day, human and loved. That it is a tragedy when any life is taken at the hands of the police.

Time Capsule Book
Because of its timeliness it is easy to see why some critics are referring to The Hate U Give as a new classic and a book with staying power. I’m not sure I agree it is a classic, largely because there are many references to things like Tumblr that are quickly going to become dated. To me, the book read like a “Time Capsule” book. By that, I mean The Hate U Give is a snapshot in time of 2017 where this real, pervasive injustice is happening far too often in modern society. This book will stand through time as representative of where we are as a country and a people now. I could certainly be wrong (and would not be disappointed if I am!); it is just difficult for me with the speed at which technology changes to see many modern books as “classics” if the technology and references in them are going to become dated and lost in a few years. I loved the Jessica Darling books as a teen myself, but they don’t hold the same appeal to the YA audience today because so many of the little situations that arise wouldn’t happen nearly the same way today with the advances in technology we’ve made since the ‘90s. Because of this, I see The Hate U Give as less likely to be studied the way we study Jane Austen now in 2217, though it absolutely deserves attention and should (and, I hope, will) stand the test of time as a powerful snapshot of society in 2017.

Things Black People Deal With But Shouldn’t Have To 101
Though this book certainly wasn’t written with a white audience in mind, Thomas is masterful at explaining things like code-switching to the audience—

I should be used to my two worlds colliding, but I never know which Starr I should be. I can use some slang, but not too much slang. Some attitude but not too much attitude, so I’m not a sassy black girl. I have to watch what I say and how I say it. But I can’t sound “white.” Shit is exhausting.

—without sounding heavy-handed to those who already know what things like code-switching are. If I did not have mixed-race friends who consciously moderate their accent based on their audience, I don’t know that I would know what code-switching is, and I certainly didn’t know what it was when I was in high school.

As a black student at a predominantly white school, Starr has to be aware of how she comes across—because black children are seen as more culpable and less innocent than white ones, because she is one of a handful of black kids in her school and therefore her actions will be imputed to all black people (but only her negative actions, of course), because she doesn’t want to affirm stereotypes. Starr thinks more about her state of being on a daily basis than most white folks likely do in a month.

This short explanation plus the extended examples of code-switching in The Hate U Give are but one example of Thomas making the book accessible to readers of all ages so that maybe those who aren’t familiar with these ideas can begin to see all of the little ways people of color experience life differently, through no fault of their own. (Thomas also expertly explores the harm of microaggressions through one of Starr’s friendships).

While we (white folks) should be doing more hard work to root out our biases and discover our blind spots, I do think books like The Hate U Give can be a good non-threatening way to begin to recognize issues like microaggressions. Regardless of whether you are beginning because you are actually a young adult for whom this book was written or whether, like me, you grew up sheltered in a predominantly white town, it is often less threatening to be confronted with something you are wrong in through narrative fiction. This doesn’t mean you get to stay in your safe fictional world forever; however, it is better to begin with something like The Hate U Give than to never begin. Reading books like The Hate U Give teaches readers empathy and I defy you to read this book and not feel for Starr, Khalil’s family, and their community, regardless of where you stand on Black Lives Matter.

Fangirling hard for Bahni Turpin
I listened to The Hate U Give on audio. I would be remiss if I did not rave about the excellent choice of narrator for Thomas’s work. Even before listening to this book, I had an audiobook voice crush on Bahni Turpin, the narrator here. I would listen to her read food ingredient labels. She also read A Piece of Cake, a memoir I read earlier in the year by Cupcake Brown, a woman who grew up in the foster system and was a heavy drug user for years before getting clean and becoming an attorney. Admittedly going from the voice of drugged-out, screaming Cupcake to having that voice also be Starr threw me a little for a loop. I had to remind myself for the first few minutes that Starr was a good girl in this story. (Case in point for my undying love of Bahni Turpin—the fact that Bahni is one of the readers is what pushed me to use my most recent audiobook credit on Hum If You Don’t Know the Words.) Bahni is genius as Starr and makes the audiobook for The Hate U Give a real standout. She is breathtaking in her voice acting as teenage Starr and moved me to tears several times.

Summary
If this weren’t already abundantly clear, I think this is a book everyone should read. Because of some language and violence, the book skews a little older YA than most of its genre-mates but still has a strong appeal and well-developed narrative for adult readers.

Notes
Author: Angie Thomas (@angiethomas)
Publisher: Balzer + Bray (@balzerandbray) (imprint of HarperCollins @harpercollinsus)
Audiobook narrator: Bahni Turpin (@prospertunia)
Date Published: February 28, 2017
Date Read: July 9, 2017
Rating: 5 stars

Review: Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

Posted on by lisaannreads


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“You know lily of the valley is poisonous, right?”
“So don’t eat it. At least not until you’ve finished speaking. Or if the crowd turns on you.”
 
Synopsis
Set on the eve of the German invasion of Poland, Lilac Girls tells the little-known story of the Rabbits of Ravensbruk–women who were the subject of cruel Nazi medical experiments.  Told in alternating chapters from the viewpoints of a Nazi doctor, a Polish teenager involved in the underground, and an American socialite dedicated to helping those less fortunate, Lilac Girls spans twenty years, exploring the long-lasting effects of both cruelty and hope on the human spirit.

Writing Style and Scope
I usually love WWII literature.  I studied history in undergrad and took every course I could on WWII and the immediate post-war years in Eastern Europe.  I adore All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale.  I read Mischling earlier this year and thought it was fantastic.  I came to Lilac Girls with high expectations, and that may have been part of the problem.

Overall, Kelly’s writing style completely missed the mark for me. There are witty moments (like the quote above); however, the entire book isn’t quite so snappily written. On the whole, Kelly’s word choice and writing style is pedestrian. There isn’t anything particularly unique or beautiful about the way that Kelly writes.

I do say this with the caveat that Kelly has accomplished something most people haven’t—she’s published an actual book. I have friends who are authors and I have seen the grueling work that goes into writing a book so I do not say this as if just anyone could write a book. It is an accomplishment that Kelly wrote a book like Lilac Girls and it was a worthy effort of her time to tell this particular story. There are many women in my online book club who read and enjoyed it and many people on Goodreads have rated it highly. My enjoyment of a book, however, is very tied to the language and so, for me, Lilac Girls fell flat.

I actually struggled a bit to find the selection I wanted to use as the quote for the book above in keeping with my usual format. There were a few witticisms here and there and there was an extended passage when one of the Rabbits goes to her death that was the only truly beautiful passage that made me pause—but it was far too long to quote.

In scope, Kelly was ambitious—the novel covers something like twenty years in under 500 pages. This passage of time does odd things to the pace and the narrative skips ahead several months at a time consistently. I do not think the book needed to be any longer by any means; however, the passage of time was not always clear (time was marked with years alone) so it was sometimes strange to see how much a character, place, or season had changed since the last chapter. I was constantly flipping back and forth, trying to determine where the character had left off last in time and approximately how much time it seemed had passed since then. Passing time this way made the book read unevenly.

Related to the swift and somewhat uneven passage of time, there were also a handful of asides when Kelly seemed to think she needed to throw in a bit of background note that read oddly, as if the characters were suddenly hitting pause and turning to the reader to explain some bit of history. Because Kelly didn’t have time or space to flesh the events out more evenly or naturally, she has to stop here and there and stage whisper to the reader the background of some event that happened in the intervening time between chapters. If this writing choice were more consistently used throughout the book, it might be one thing, but it seemed to be a device Kelly used infrequently and jarringly when she couldn’t think of another way to convey a piece of information.

Rabbits of Ravensbruk & Narrator Development
I commented on Instagram when I finished that I probably should have quit reading the book when I was 100 pages in and was feeling like the book was becoming a bit of a slog. The only thing that actually kept me reading was the Author’s Note. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the Rabbits themselves were real, though I hadn’t heard of this particular atrocity at Ravensbruk before, but was fascinated to hear that Herta Oberheuser and Caroline Ferriday were both real characters. (Well…that and book-quitter-guilt. But I’m working on overcoming that!) The pull to find out whether or not Herta would get her just desserts and what happened to Caroline were the only things that kept me reading. I didn’t particularly care about them as fictional characters but knowing they were real gave me enough motivation to keep going.

I searched Amazon after finishing and was a tad disappointed to see that there doesn’t appear to be a biography of Caroline Ferriday—I’d like to know her real story, and not just this fictionalized one. She was a fascinating woman—a former Broadway actress and socialite who used her connections, money, and social capital to enormously charitable ends, working to bring the Rabbits to the US for medical treatment for their lasting injuries after Ravensbruk and working to get them reparations from the German government.

I did find Kelly’s choice of character viewpoints to tell the story of the Rabbits interesting. Caroline and Kasia are whom you would expect for narrators in this kind of story.  I did, however, struggle a bit with Kasia’s voice. Kasia ages from sixteen when the book starts to forty. I would expect her voice to mature but there were moments—like when Kasia describes the medical “examination”/violation when she arrived at Ravensbruk—when Kasia’s teenager voice sounded way too old if it was supposed to be contemporary, teen Kasia talking and not adult Kasia looking back.

For the third narrator—Herta Oberheuser—to be a villain gave it a slightly unexpected twist. It always felt icky (as it absolutely should!) to read her section. She was an unrepentant Aryan-supremacist and her chapters read like it. I don’t say this to complain—Kelly gave Herta a few moments where we could see some internal struggle but didn’t apologize or temper her anti-Semitism. You do not like Herta and you aren’t supposed to. There is no apologist writing here.

American Evils
Kelly also deserves kudos for presenting the United States accurately, rather than sugar-coating our own misdoings. When I learned about WWII in school (which, admittedly, is becoming longer and longer ago), the United States was pretty consistently always presented as the White Knight. I applaud Kelly for using her characters to challenge this perception. In particular regarding immigration caps during the war, Kelly indicts Roosevelt and others for having knowledge of Hitler’s Final Solution including knowledge of the death camps, yet still turning away hundreds of thousands of refugees, essentially condemning them to certain death. In particular, she mentions the MS St. Louis—a ship of 900 German Jews turned away from our border in 1939. Over a quarter of them wound up dying in death camps after being forced to return to Europe.

Kelly also makes a point during a scene of the Nuremberg trials to mention American experiments on unwilling participants as well. Indeed, American doctors throughout history have also wrongfully tested various medications and treatments on prisoners and people of color without their informed consent, the most recent and well known being the Tuskegee Syphilis Studies which only ended in 1972.

Kelly could easily have left out these details as they had no bearing on the overall plot of the book. Many readers would have been none the wiser. It is to her credit that she did make a point several times to raise American complicity in medical testing on involuntary subjects and our government’s turning its back on refugees during the war. We may have won the war, but there were certainly moments where we could have acted more honorably to save many more lives.

Conclusion
While I would probably never personally recommend this book to anyone, I do see its general appeal. To the extent that a novel about atrocities committed in Hitler’s death camps can ever be considered “beachy reading,” that’s what it seems to me. It’s a book you buy in paperback, dog-ear the corners, splash some pool water on by accident, and then throw on a shelf when you’re done. The language is easy to digest and no one is tripping over three-dollar words.

The thing is, I like my three-dollar words. If the writing style and word choice aren’t important to you, the underlying story here and the character of Caroline Ferriday are compelling enough for the book to be enjoyable. For me, I found myself wishing the same story had been told by a more skilled hand.

Notes
Published: Ballantine Books
Author: Martha Hall Kelly (Instagram: @marthahallkelly)
Date Read: July 28, 2017
Rating: 2 stars

Hindsight / Foresight July 30, 2017

Posted on by lisaannreads


Mark Solarski

Hindsight this Week

I finally managed to knock out Lilac Girls, just in time for it to be due back to the library today.  I probably should have abandoned this book–it’s not particularly well written (it’s not bad, it’s just not great) and it’s hard not to compare it to books like All the Light We Cannot See or The Nightingale–standout books in recent WWII fiction.  The writing turned it into a bit of a slog.  Flipping to the end and reading the author’s note to see that two of the characters and the situation were based in real life helped and the second half picked up.  But I did invest an entire week in a book I didn’t love.

I mentioned before, but I’m on the Launch Team for Anne Bogel‘s Reading People (out in September) and just passed the halfway point last night.  I need to step it up and finish it here soon so I can post a review.  I’m enjoying it so far (leaning towards a four star review).  There are some pretty exciting pre-order bonuses detailed here.

I still have all of my library books on hold but am finally coming to a place where I can breathe again.  I’ve got Fraulein M. and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine en route to my library and three books still in my possession to finish before they are due.  I’m almost done with We Are Never Meeting in Real Life on audio which is hilarious but 100% NSFW, really at any moment.  Swinging from rage-listening to Hillbilly Elegy to laughing so hard I was crying at We Are Never Meeting in Real Life was a bit of audiobook whiplash but was probably what I needed to pull me out of my funk.

The reading snob in me was pretty thrilled with the Man Booker Long List announcement this week.  I adored Exit West (still my favorite book of 2017) and, while it wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, was not at all surprised to see Lincoln in the Bardo.  I already had 4321, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Swing Time, and The Underground Railroad on my TBR list with the Roy and Whitehead in my actual house, ready to be read.  History of Wolves looks like something I need to add to my list. The long list had decent minority representation which was pleasant to see.  I cannot imagine Roy, Whitehead, and Hamid not making the short list.

Finally, just this morning, I heard that I won a book Madeleine at Top Shelf Text that isn’t out until September–Girls Made of Snow and Glass–that looks excellent.  I’ve really liked the books I’ve read this year published by Flatiron Books and am really looking forward to this one.

Foresight for the coming week

I’ll be finishing Reading People so that I can get that on the blog in the next few weeks.  The MMD book club is discussing Almost Sisters towards the end of the week so I’ll be getting on that pretty quickly so that I can participate in the author chat with Joshilyn Jackson this week.  (Speaking of–the MMD book club is open again to new members and the fall picks were just announced.  You can check it out here.)

After that I’ve got both The Alice Network and Priestdaddy waiting (expired) on my Kindle that cannot be connected to wifi until I finish, so those are on deck.  I’m have some trepidation about Priestdaddy but wanted to at least give it a try.

Have suggestions for what I should read next?  I’d love to hear them in the comments!