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Review: Refugee by Alan Gratz

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They only see us when we do something they don’t want us to do, Mahmoud realized. The thought hit him like a lightning bolt. When they stayed where they were supposed to be—in the ruins of Aleppo or behind the fences of a refugee camp—people could forget about them….

Mahmoud’s first instinct was to disappear below decks. To be invisible. Being invisible in Syria had kept him alive. But now Mahmoud began to wonder if being invisible in Europe might be the death of him and his family. If no one saw them, no one could help them. And maybe the world needed to see what was really happening here.

A calm came over Lito, as though he’d come to some sort of understanding, some decision. “I see it now, Chabela. All of it. The past, the present, the future. All my life, I kept waiting for things to get better. For the bright promise of mañana. But a funny thing happened while I was waiting for the world to change, Chabela: It didn’t. Because I didn’t change it. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.

Synopsis
According to UNICEF, almost fifty million children are uprooted from their homes, with 28 million fleeing conflict in places like Syria, Yemen, and South Sudan. Refugee tells the story of one such child—Mahmoud, feeling Aleppo after his home is destroyed—interspersed with the story of a Jewish child, Josef, on the MS St. Louis in 1939 and Isabel, a Cuban child fleeing for Miami in 1994. Refugee puts faces on the millions of children who, throughout the modern era, have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in lands not their own.

Briefly, if you are unfamiliar—the MS St. Louis was a ship containing over six hundred mostly-German, mostly-Jewish passengers fleeing a fledgling Nazi Germany. Though the ticketholders held valid Cuban visas, by the time the ship arrived, the visas had been used as a political tool and were cancelled, through no fault of the ship’s occupants. Cuba and the United States ultimately turned them away. The ship’s passengers wound up unloading in Belgium, France, and the UK. Many of the Jews aboard the ship were later rounded up as Germany invaded France and Belgium, with many perishing in concentration camps. Josef was a fictional passenger on this ship.

For many years in the modern era, particularly in the nineties, many Cubans fled their home countries in search of a better life—a life with enough food and education for their children. The “Wet Foot, Dry Foot” rule, in place until very recently, essentially held that if a Cuban was picked up at sea (with wet feet), he or she would be returned to Cuba via Guantanamo Bay. If the refugee made it to the coast of Miami—had “dry feet” when caught, he or should would be granted amnesty. Thousands upon thousands fled, with an untold (large) number drowning on the way. Isabel is one such child, fleeing Cuba in a ramshackle boat held together with string and chewing gum.

The current Syrian refugee crisis is one of the largest refugee crises of the modern era, with over thirteen million Syrians displaced, including five million outside of the country. Mahmoud tells the story of one such boy whose family chose to take the risk and leave, walking, swimming, and nearly drowning their way through Turkey, Macedonia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany.

Everything is Connected
As is common with a book like this, you begin to realize that the stories are connected—both in theme as well as with tangential characters. I won’t say more about the characters because I don’t want to spoil that part. From reading, however, I kept having a line from Ecclesiastes come back to me—“There is nothing new under the sun.” The current Syrian refugee crisis is nothing the world has not seen before. The question is whether we will behave better this time—when the modern MS St. Louis comes to our shorts, teeming with Syrian refugees, will we do better this time? Or will we send them back to almost certain death? I am afraid, with the current political climate and the most recent iteration of the travel ban, that we are headed to a repeat of history. History does not look kindly upon those who turned away the MS St. Louis, and I do not see how it will look kindly upon us for these failures.
 
Middle Grade Books
I typically struggle a bit with middle-grade books since they don’t tend to hold my attention. Thematically, I usually enjoy books with a bit more struggle than is appropriate for the typical middle-grade book. Language and writing are also vital for a book to hold my interest. Middle grade can thus rarely fully capture me—which is fine; these books aren’t really made for me.

With that said, I had no such struggles with Refugee. Though the language stayed on-grade for middle-grade readers, it held my attention and I fairly well devoured this one. The day after I finished, I recommended it to a coworker as a book he could read with his son, since it would capture both of their interests. This is considered a young YA or mature Middle-Grade book and would thematically be a bit much for the younger end of the YA spectrum.

Accuracy
Gratz includes a lengthy author’s note with his sources and explanations of how he developed certain characters (For example, Josef’s father is an amalgam of two actual passengers on the MS St. Louis).  While I am not usually a fan of white authors telling the stories of people of color (as Mahmoud and Isabel are), Gratz seems to have taken pains to ensure accuracy and to be culturally respectful.

Additional Recommended Reading
I read this book for the Diverse Books Club books this month. Other books in the “flight” of books included Inside Out & Back Again and Music of the Ghosts. I loved the first and the review is here. I’m starting the second this week and can’t wait to dive in—it is set in Cambodia when people were fleeing the Khmer Rouge. I don’t know enough about the time in history and reading accurate historical fiction is one of my favorite ways to begin to learn more.

I also highly recommend Exit West—It is still my favorite book of the year so far and would have received a glowing, five-star review on this blog if I hadn’t read it several months before actually starting to write these reviews. Though the country is unnamed, the crisis so closely mirrors Syria as to essentially clearly be about the current crisis. Exit West raises interesting scenarios—in Refugee and in history, the US was able to turn away the MS St. Louis. Countries like the US are still able to turn away current Syrian refugees, while countries within the contiguous EU are currently trying to control the flood. In Exit West, doors appear to take refugees across borders. By going through a door, they are suddenly in London, San Francisco, etc.  Exit West imagines a world were we have to live with and address refugees who cannot be kept out.

Notes
Published July 25, 2017 by Scholastic Press (@scholasticinc)
Author: Alan Gratz
Date read: October 12, 2017
Rating: 5 Stars, in the running for top five books of the year

Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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All her life, she had learned that passion, like fire, was a dangerous thing. It so easily went out of control. It scaled walls and jumped over trenches. Sparks leapt like fleas and spread as rapidly; a breeze could carry embers for miles. Better to control that spark and pass it carefully from one generation to the next, like an Olympic torch. Or, perhaps, to tend it carefully like an eternal flame: a reminder of light and goodness that would never—could never—set anything ablaze. Carefully controlled.

Domesticated. Happy in captivity. The key, she thought, was to avoid conflagration.
This philosophy had carried her through life and, she had always felt, had served her quite well. Of course, she’d had to give up a few things here and there….Rules existed for a reason: if you followed them, you would succeed; if you didn’t, you might burn the world to the ground.

Remember, Mia had said: Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.

Once Burned…
I almost didn’t pick up Little Fires Everywhere because I felt so burned by Ng’s first novel—Everything I Never Told You, which I read earlier this year. I loved Ng’s writing style and “complicated family” is a theme I will eat up. I appreciated the struggle she set up for Lydia and her mother, Marilyn. In that book, you know immediately that Lydia is dead and you spend the rest of the book backtracking to figure out why. The “why” is revealed in the final chapter, at which point I think I threw the book down. I felt manipulated and would rather have had an ambiguous ending where I didn’t know what I happened to Lydia. (As a side note, Everything I Never Told You would probably make a good book club offering precisely because the ending is controversial. I’m not going to recommend it otherwise because my feelings are still hurt; however, it is a book that will generate different opinions and big feelings, perfect for some bookish debate.)

But then Little Fires Everywhere came out and I remembered that even if I was mad at Ng for emotionally dragging me through the lake with Lydia, I really liked her writing style. I also want to make a point to read more authors of color. And she featured characters of color. And it would be nearly impossible for her to set me up for the same kind of disappointment again. So I bit the bullet and used my Book of the Month credit on Little Fires.

Thankfully my book gamble paid off. I enjoyed Little Fires Everywhere, including the ending this time.

Location, Location, Location
The book is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the first master planned community. While you usually hear of setting talked about as a character when the setting is atmospheric—foggy and wild—Shaker Heights is definitely its own character, though it is as far on the opposite end of the atmospheric spectrum as possible from “wild.” Shaker’s identity is defined by rules and boundaries, with strict zoning codes and housing regulations, down to the colors each home within a specific neighborhood could be painted. As one of the characters noted, the founding of Shaker Heights was based on “the underlying philosophy being that everything could—and should—be planned out, and that by doing so you avoided the unseemly, the unpleasant, and the disastrous.”

Characters
Elena Richardson, the mother of four of the five children at the center of the book, has internalized the Shaker way to heart—she has given up on dreams and risk and lived her life solely within the boundaries. She is safe. She is as happy as she thinks she can be. It is against this foil that we meet Mia, wild and free, artist and mother of Pearl (literally). Interestingly, Ng has us met Mia through others—there is no chapter I can recall where Mia really talks about herself. Instead, we discover her character as she interacts with her daughter Pearl as well as Eleana’s daughters Lexie and Izzy. (Indeed, it is precisely Elena’s rules and structure that drives her own daughters to Mia.) We discover Mia’s past as Elena’s discomfort and internal outrage over Mia’s freedom (though Elena wouldn’t call it that) puts her on a destruction course to discover who Mia really is.

While Little Fires Everywhere isn’t a YA book, Ng’s other main characters were strong, well-developed teen characters. I loved Mia’s daughter Pearl—I loved that she was nerdy but was still able to get the guy. Her struggles and navigating of new friendships in town felt believable. She didn’t make all the wrong choices, nor did she make all the right ones—she was a good friend to some but made some choices that hurt others. She was an internally diverse enough character that there was something in her that it seems most readers could identify with—nerdy, shy, had friends, got the guy, hurt some people, had a complicated but loving relationship with her mother.

Eleana’s two daughters are opposites—Lexie is the high-achieving rule-follower in her mother’s mold while Izzy once tried to free all the cats at the Humane Society and gave all of the not-black clothing her mother bought her to the homeless the next day. This seems to be the way of things—kids respond to (overly) rigid boundaries in two main ways—some kids kill themselves to meet the standards while others chafe and rage against them. Yet here too, they are each believable characters—Ng does an excellent job making them multi-dimensional and not just tropes. While Izzy has been drawn to Mia from the start, when Lexie falls short of the standard, it is Mia to whom she turns, not Elena.

Race
Under the main story line revolving around Elena and Mia is a subplot surrounding the termination of parental rights of a young, uneducated, poor Chinese woman and a rich white couple desperate to adopt the baby. Through existing friendships, Elena and Mia are pulled into this conflict on opposite sides, with the teenagers also splitting to take sides. This subplot, while creating conflict that enables Ng to flesh out Elena and Mia’s characters even more and set up conflict with the teen characters, also provides opportunities to make still salient points about race.

The lawyer for the Chinese mother Bebe scores points in court by pointing out that there are no Asian dolls in the rich couple’s house, though the reader also learns that this is because major companies like Matell have done a terrible job at representing anything other than the “norm” of whiteness.

Elena is able to think she is open-minded and not racist because she “doesn’t see race” which is another common completely unhelpful thing white people say.  By not “seeing race,” Elena and the rich couple aren’t being good and charitable; they’re destroying part of the child’s identity. Whether you see race or not, it’s there. The question is whether the present diversity is recognized and celebrated rather than ignored, like a dirty little secret no one talks about. Elena is able to pat herself on the back for this and think she has no problem with race when it’s clear she does—she has a problem with anything that doesn’t follow the rules and highlights difference.

Shaker Heights itself also can’t have a problem with race since the town officially embraced integration, refused to allow racial covenants, and prevented white flight. Yet, even for all of this, we’re still told that Bebe’s lawyer was one of two Asians in his class and was expected to marry her by all his classmates since they “match.” While Ng’ first novel (set in the 70s) had more overt anti-Asian racism, Little Fires Everywhere features the microaggressions and assumptions still present today. While the tiki torches of Charlottesville have demonstrated that overt racism is clearly still alive and well, books like Little Fires Everywhere show us what “benevolent racism” still looks like in most places, even the most perfect of places.

Benevolence
While not as frequent as the commentary on racism, one of the other points Ng makes that hit home for me was about Elena’s “benevolence”—how she forced people to accept philanthropy they would rather not accept. So often, its easy for me as a well-educated white woman to think I know what is best and to thus foist myself onto someone, thinking I’ve solved the problem without listening or having the person themselves weigh in on what they actually need. Like discarded t-shirts in a third world country, benevolence is often far more about the giver than the receiver. Not terribly surprising, either, is the fact that Elena keeps score. Does it really count as benevolence if you’re always waiting for the opportunity to cash in on the favors you’ve forced people to accept over the years?

Writing Style
I love Ng’s writing style–it’s not overly flowery or showy (she refers to the fires set in the house as looking like they had been set by a “demented Girl Scout” who had been camping in the house), but you can tell Ng has honed her craft to find just the right words. The writing is relatable but polished, falling cleanly into the LitFic category as opposed to simply contemporary fiction.  (Of course Amazon has it categorized as Women’s Fiction —what does this even mean?!?).   Compared to the first novel, Ng’s writing seems to have found a more solid footing—she seems confident of her voice and so Little Fires Everywhere felt like a stronger read to me. I can’t wait to read what she comes up with next.

Notes
Published September 12, 2017 by Penguin Press (@penguinpress)
Author: Celeste Ng (@pronounced_ing)
Date read: October 8, 2017
Rating: 4 ½ stars

Review: The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall

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Disclaimer: I was provided a free copy of The Best Kind of People in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to LibraryThing, Ballantine Books, and Zoe Whittall for the advance copy.

The Best Kind of People

When someone is your husband or father, that’s simply who they are. You don’t stop to question too much about them unless you’re given reason to, and they’d never been given reason to.

Synopsis
George Woodbury, beloved teacher and literal school savior after stopping a would-be shooter several years before, has just been accused of sexually assaulting several high school students on a school ski trip. The Best Kind of People follows George’s family—his wife Joan, a local nurse; his son Andrew, who escaped the small town several years before; and his daughter Sadie, still a student at the high school. While delving into the victim-blaming and misogyny inherent in these cases, The Best Kind of People largely focuses on George’s family and the choices they make to survive.

One of Those Books
While it’s not the kind of thing anyone in their right mind daydreams about, having a close friend or spouse accused of this kind of crime is the kind of thing I think most people assume they know how they’d react to. I’d go so far as to say the comment threads on online news articles are proof of this—everyone has an opinion and everyone knows which side they’d be on if this were their life. In The Best Kind of People, Whittall takes that sense of reader righteousness and crumbles it all to pieces. There are no easy answers, characters waffle (understandably) on whether they should stand by their husband/father or not and make some bad choices. If the comment threads in news articles are black and white, The Best Kind of People is the spectrum of real-life grey in the middle.

Character Development
While his choices start the book, overall George is a minor character—Whittall makes it clear that he’s charming but doesn’t spend enough time on him to charm the reader. The main characters in the book are Joan and Sadie, with Andrew as a supporting character. With that said, though Whittall doesn’t come out and say one way or the other and the evidence is relatively sparse in the early chapters, my bent was to assume George did it. There are several girls who have nothing to gain from this kind of attention, combined with little things that Whittall includes that just feel…off. Whittall deliberately sets this up as the starting point—the reader is primed to assume George did, in fact, attempt to assault these girls. It is with this foundation that Whittall slowly reveals Joan and Sadie to us.

The easy way to go would be to encourage pity for Joan, to act like her sister Clara and tell her to leave George immediately. Yet, Joan struggles with leaving George. There are financial considerations on top of their twenty-plus years of life together. She has literally slept next to this man for more than twenty years and woke up to discover he was apparently never who she thought he was. The cheap score here would be for Joan to be simply two-dimensional—poor Joan still standing by her man or fiery Joan leaving scorched earth behind her in her attempt to leave. Instead, Whittall shows her struggle—she is alternately weak and strong, making choices that I don’t think I would make but that make sense in the moment (and maybe I would if I ever found myself in that horrifying place). The audience connects with Joan—cheers with Joan, cries with Joan. I would go so far as to say she has nearly universal appeal—the reader is invited to identify with Joan.

I couldn’t decide whether to hug or strangle Sadie at times, which probably means that Whittall did a fairly accurate job in rendering an American teenager. Sadie seems to have it all together, yet there are little indications, even before the accusations against her father, that Sadie isn’t entirely alright beneath the surface. While I identified more with Joan, I wanted the best for Sadie—she tugged at my heart. I knew Joan would be ok, but I was never sure about Sadie and held my breath for her until the end.

The oldest child, Andrew, is featured far less than Joan and Sadie but his inclusion adds more layers to the crimes committed by his father. The reader discovers early that Andrew himself was in an inappropriate relationship at 17 with his 25 year old coach. It’s clear that George’s crimes are not even the slightest morally ambiguous…but what about Andrew’s relationship with his coach? I have my opinion, but here too, is another question Whittall builds into her book. George is clearly on the wrong side of the line…but where is the line?

“Liberal Bias”
Besides the subject matter—which might generally be too triggering for some—the only “turn off” I could identify in the book was a bit of bias. The Woodbury family from the beginning is fairly liberal—the family would seem to universally identify as feminist (though George’s membership card is being revoked immediately) and Andrew is gay, with no real issue with his parents on that point. The family fits the stereotype of moneyed New Englanders. This isn’t terribly obnoxious in and of itself—it adds a layer of conflict for this to be a family that would otherwise believe the victim in this scenario and I appreciated the nuance this choice gave to the book.

The only place this “bias” feels like more than simply a character-development choice is with the inclusion of the “Mens’ Rights” group and the talk about them. When the Woodbury case gains attention, the Mens’ Rights vermin come crawling from their little holes and basements to support George—a development Joan can’t stand. In discussing their ridiculous propaganda in favor of her husband (even as she stands by his side), Joan makes a comment about people in the ring wing having “low IQs.” The comment is in line with Joan’s character and it’s a comment made in the privacy of her home to her teenage daughter; however, I can see it being a touch too far for some readers since it is the only thing that feels like a personal attack on a belief a reader might identify with….Though conservative readers may not make it deep enough into the book to find this comment since the feminism and homosexuality might have turned them off well before this point.

Conclusion
The book does go through the result of the trial of the criminal charges as well as provide a resolution for Andrew, Sadie, and Joan. Each of the endings feels true—while this is not the only way for the book to have ended, these are realistic choices these characters would have made when faced with the totality of the circumstances.

Because of the moral ambiguity in some of the character’s choices (not George’s—that’s not morally ambiguous) and the quietly decisive but arguably controversial way the book ends, this book would make an excellent book club selection—I suspect people will have some opinions about the last few chapters. I also think it’s the kind of book that is going to be somewhat polarizing, giving the group a good mix of opinions on the family member’s choices—everything from Joan’s standing by/not standing by George, to Joan’s parenting choices, to Sadie’s lifestyle choices (literally—not using that as a euphemism), to Andrew’s youthful romance.

Overall, this was the kind of book I love—tightly written, politically/socially relevant, character-driven, complicated families, and morally ambiguous at times. I highly recommend for anyone who can handle these topics without being triggered.

Notes
Published September 19, 2017 by Ballantine Books
Author: Zoe Whittall (@zoe_whittall)
Date read: September 27, 2017
Rating: 4 ½ stars

Review: Emma in the Night by Wendy Walker

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We believe what we want to believe. We believe what we need to believe. Maybe there’s no difference between wanting and needing. I don’t know. What I do know is that the truth can evade us, hiding behind our blind spots, our preconceptions, our hungry hearts that long for quiet. Still, it is always there if we open our eyes and try to see it. If we really try to see.

Synposis
Three years ago, sisters Emma and Cass went missing. On the day Emma in the Night opens, Cass turns back up on her mother’s lawn with a story of captivity and escape. Cass insists that Emma and her young daughter, born on the island where the sisters were held, is still there awaiting rescue. Leading the FBI’s efforts to untangle what happened is forensic psychologist Dr. Abby Winter, a woman still healing from the wounds the case left when it was fruitlessly investigated three years prior. Dr. Winter never got over the conviction that Judy Martin—Emma and Cass’s mother and a textbook narcissist—was involved. But how would Judy be tied to the couple who kept Emma and Cass hostage on the island? The more the bureau digs, the more the stories –including Cass’s—begin to unravel. Why is Cass lying? And who else is?

POV Characters
The story is told in alternating chapters by our omniscient narrator following Cass and Dr. Winter/Abby, though the chapters following Abby fell flat for me. I’m not sure if the author spent more time with Cass (I didn’t count pages and am not going to now), if she was better developed, the first-person narrator for Cass helped, or I simply identified with her more. The end result for me, however, was that Cass felt more well-rounded and I cared about what happened to her. In contrast, Abby’s trauma is obliquely referenced but doesn’t ever feel well fleshed out. For the reader to really appreciate how this case affected Abby, rather than vaguely referencing her (also narcissistic) mother and telling us Abby substitutes alcohol for sleep, Walker needed to show us. Because of the reference to her background with no real flashbacks or substance, the book almost read as if it were a continuation in a series and the reader should already know Abby’s background rather than a new stand alone book with a fleshed out character. I did, however, appreciate that Dr. Winter and her partner Leo could have a history as friends, work together through the entire book, and keep their friend boundaries. The book would have been way too messy had this become a romantic relationship.

Though I found her more compelling overall, I did find Cass’s voice inconsistent through the narrative. Particularly in the first 2/3 of the book, she comes across as very childlike though she’s 18 when the book opens. This could be explained by her being emotionally stunted by her narcissistic mother and three years in captivity, yet Cass’s decision-making and her voice age up quickly to that of an 18 year old in the last chapters of the book after the truth is revealed. This did not feel like part of Cass’s manipulation, but rather an inconsistency in the writing.

Emotionally brutal plot
While Emma in the Night is, relatively speaking, not a physically violent/graphic thriller overall, it is shockingly emotionally brutal. As the novel progresses, more and more of Judy Martin’s background and her treatment of her children is revealed. At times, these stories of Judy’s pathological choices are as disturbing as graphic scenes of violence. This is not a book I would recommend for friends who are survivors of child abuse themselves or work closely in that field—this would not be an escapist read.

Along the same vein, even for a psychological thriller, the lengths the various characters go to manipulate each other is extreme, though nothing quite like Gone Girl. The book has the feel of an unreliable narrator because of how manipulative each of the characters are, though Cass never lies directly to the reader. While Cass’s sections are written in first person, Abby’s are an omniscient third person, which lends to the odd/untrustworthy feeling of the entire narrative.

Accuracy
If you’ve read some of my other reviews, you know that accuracy in mental health portrayals can make or break a book for me. I’m not familiar with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, so it was harder for me to judge those aspects here. It rang true for the little I know and I didn’t see anything in the DSM that would make me question whether Judy’s portrayal in Emma in the Night was inaccurate.

I did struggle some with Cass. As I noted, her voice shifts about 2/3 of the way through the book and she makes some choices that would have seemed out of character or even impossible in the early chapters. In contrast, her explanation as to how she could have gotten used to life over the last three years ring true—people, especially children, can be remarkably resilient. We can also be our own worst enemies at times when evaluating what we deserve. Cass’s monologues for the earlier parts feel accurate to me for someone who had survived trauma. With the later parts, however, I do not see how this woman-child possibly gained perspective and made some of the choices she made without serious therapy. I hope for her sake, she got some when the book ended.

In Sum
Overall, this was another easy palate cleanser. (I may be the only person I know who treats thrillers like palate cleansers, but my usual fare is either LitFic or deals with heavier topics like racism or transphobia). But I digress—Emma in the Night isn’t perfect, it isn’t high fiction, but it isn’t trying to be. It is a much-better-than-average contribution to the thriller genre and has a unique twist with the in-depth look at narcissistic personality disorder and how it may (or may not) have contributed to what happened. The book isn’t too neat or terribly unbelievable but has a definite ending. There’s more than one twist, which makes figuring out everything going on more of a challenge or surprise, depending on how you read thrillers. I recommend Emma in the Night for fans of the genre or anyone looking to pick up a dark, fast-paced thriller that doesn’t read like a police procedural—with the caveat about the subject matter mentioned above.

Finally, if you’re like me and occasionally wonder what on earth made you go to law school, it’s always nice to see a lawyer succeed at something more interesting than being a lawyer. On days when I almost can’t take it anymore, I can comfort myself with the idea that maybe I too could become a novelist like Walker.

Notes
Published August 8, 2017 by St. Martin’s Press (@stmartinspress)
Author: Wendy Walker (@wendygwalker)
Source: Book of the Month (chosen by guest judge Krysten Ritter @therealkrystenritter)
Date read: September 18, 2017
Rating: 3 ½ Stars

Review: Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki

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I was sick of memoirs and the swagger of survivors, the way they mounted the past above the mantel for all to ooh and aah over.

Set Up and Synopsis
Right before Woman No. 17, I’d had an odd run of books. It happens—I get in a rut and don’t love several books or I love all of them and I’m anticipating the run of goodness ending. More recently, I’ve somehow wound up on a run of books about racism—either directly or tangentially (Sing, Unburied, Sing, The Color Purple, Stella by Starlight, Trell, American Street) such that I needed something more pop than folk to reset and pull me out of the hole I had inadvertently dug myself with a series of serious books.

With Woman No. 17, it was a bit of a roller coaster right before—several good, one amazing, several “meh.” I knew I had the string of books starting with Sing, Unburied, Sing coming so I wanted something a little mindless. I thought I was picking up a thriller. That’s what Woman No. 17 sounds like, right? A serial killer is on a spree, but he’s going to mess up on woman number 17….

Not even close.

“Woman No. 17” is Lady Daniels, a would-be writer currently separated from her husband, estranged from her mother, and in need of a nanny for her youngest child. Newly reinvented “S,” walks in to fill this void, spending her days as nanny and confidante to Lady and her nights drunkenly reinventing her mother’s life as an extended piece of performance art. As S. grows closer to Lady’s older son, Seth, it’s only a matter of time until all of the plates S. is spinning to keep up her façade spin out of control. While the book is engaging and will keep you glued to your seat, there is no serial killer running amok in the Hollywood Hills.

As an aside, if you ever needed proof that I occasionally pick books without reading the synopsis and solely because they’re Book of the Month picks or ones critics are talking about, this would be it. I do, however, feel vindicated that another Amazon reviewer thought they were also getting a mystery/thriller but also wound up pleasantly surprised.

Mothers & Identity
I certainly won’t claim it is universal, but the most fraught relationship many women have is with their mothers. Women No. 17 takes the typical tension and turns up the voltage by ten.

Esther Shapiro—now S. Fowler, after her mother’s maiden name—reinvents herself as her mother—from the roots of her hair to the tips of her liver—inhabiting her mother’s personality and mannerisms down to her functioning alcoholism. Lady has spent her life trying to escape from her own mother, whose interference in Lady’s early life far exceeded simple “meddling.” Even Lady’s husband, Karl, and his twin sister Kit have their own mommy-issues as adults who grew up with a parent who had a favored and disfavored child.

In exploring Lady and S.’s relationship with their mothers, Lepucki delves into how each woman’s identity was formed—and with S. how she is actively creating an identity for herself that mimics her mother’s. Lepucki hits the reader over the head with this theme of identity and mothers’ involvement–to me, this was the only area Lepucki was heavy-handed and could have pulled back a bit.

As the book progresses and Lady takes S. (and thus, the reader) into her confidence, her façade drops bit-by-bit until it isn’t entirely clear who Lady is—even to herself. Her birth name is Pearl—a name she rejects with the nickname “Lady.” On top of these, she is also Woman No. 17—the subject of one of Kit’s famous photographs. By giving her three different names, making clear she is different things to different people, Lepucki hammers the idea that Lady is not one coherent person, nor does she know who she is.

With the focus on identity and how mothers shape the women we become, Woman No. 17 becomes a fascinating character study of both Esther/S. and Lady and, tangentially, of the mothers they are trying to become and escape from at the same time.

Writing
The writing is snappy (Lady refers to her mother at one point as a “spiritual landfill in heels”) without being flowery or show-offy. The snap hits the right mark, flowed naturally, and didn’t leave me feel like Lepucki was trying too hard for the quirk. The writing is gritty in places, reminiscent of the imperfections and streaks in classic films. The grit fits the noir style—this story would be out of place if cleaned up by squeaky-perfect writing.

Ending (No Spoilers)
Books as dark and psychologically twisty as Woman No. 17 usually seem to end with no real resolution—the authors aren’t sure how to give the characters resolution, particularly something that might be a happy resolution, without having to also give them years of therapy to be believable and so—the books usually end without the reader knowing where the characters go from there. For a book of this twisty vein, Lepucki does a remarkable job providing a believable resolution for her characters. Lady and S.’s ends aren’t disingenuously happy but also aren’t so bleak as to be unsatisfying. They’re believable with enough hope for the future of both to be satisfying.

Audience
Woman No. 17 gets remarkably varied reviews on Amazon. This may be because others also judged the book by the title (and the cover doesn’t help) and thought the book was a thriller. Others seem to have found the characters too weird—I understand this to a point. I hope there aren’t a ton of people running around with S.’s pathological need to become her mother, manipulating and lying to everyone around them. There’s only so many of those folks society can take before we all fall to chaos. Similarly, several reviewers found many/most/ok all of the characters deeply unlikeable.

It’s dark without being bleak, Hollywood Noir without any actual crime. It doesn’t suffer from an ambiguous ending and, upon completion, it’s clear Lepucki knew where she was going. The book has a clear arc (in hindsight, not as much when reading) and is tightly crafted along this arc. As long as you can handle dark books with morally ambiguous characters and don’t have triggers regarding mother-daughter relationships, I’d recommend this book. While they are very different thematically and in style, I’d recommend Woman No. 17 particularly for readers who enjoyed The Fall of Lisa Bellow—there’s a similar undercurrent between the two that I think gives them a similar appeal.

Notes
Published May 9, 2017 by Hogarth (@hogarthbooks)
Author: Edan Lepucki (@edanlepucki)
Date read: August 26, 2017
Rating: 3 1/2 Stars

Review: The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

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“Lili,” Eve asked impulsively. “Are you ever afraid?” Lili turned, rain dripping off the edge of her umbrella in a silver curtain between her and Eve. “Yes, just like everybody else. But only after the danger is done—before that, fear is an indulgence.” She slid her hand through Eve’s elbow. “Welcome to the Alice Network.”

Synopsis
Loosely based on the true story of a female-run spy network during World War I in France, The Alice Network follows Eve, a young spy working in the network, and Charlie, a woman searching for her beloved cousin shortly after the Second World War. The book flashes back and forth between Eve as a young woman in the network and Eve as an older, broken woman helping Charlie on her quest. Adding to the drama, Charlie is not the upper-class socialite her family tries to force her to be and is running from her own demons. Raising questions of what it means to serve and to save, The Alice Network is a compelling story about the largely overlooked contribution of a daring group of women during the Great War.

The Power of Solidarity of Women
The Alice Network is, above all else, a story of the power and bravery of women. The actual Alice Network run by Louise de Bettignies (“Alice Dubois”) is credited with saving the lives of more than a thousand British soldiers during the nine months of the height of its operation. She even obtained advance information on the German attack on Verdun, but the military officials in charge refused to believe the information. Verdun was ultimately the longest lasting and one of the most costly battles during World War I.

One of my favorite quotes from the book is a quote from Louise de Bettignies taken from a primary source written by someone familiar with those in the network.

“Bah.” Lili gave a wave of her hand, a hand so thin it was nearly transparent in the sunlight. “I know I’ll be caught one day, but who cares? I shall at least have served. So let’s hurry, and do great things while there is yet time.”

While The Alice Network is a work of fiction and Quinn admits she took quite a bit of license with the story, I wish there were more books like this. I wish any of the history classes I took in high school or college had bothered to include the contributions of women like these.

Characters
In the flashbacks, Quinn makes you care for Eve and Lilli/Louise/Alice deeply. The book stays true to the end result of the network and the woman who ran it, with these pages being some of the most emotionally wrenching of any book I’ve read recently. (This is not a book to be read in public as you draw closer to the end—the notes I kept while I read say “Damn you Kate Quinn for making me cry in a Starbucks.) I tried to find more on Louise de Bettignies after I finished The Alice Network but there seems to be very little out there. This is not terribly surprising but is frustrating and makes books like The Alice Network all the more relevant.

During the alternating scenes with Charlie, Eve is older and broken. She survived the war physically but little is left of her spirit—as the journey to find what happened to Charlie’s cousin Rose unfolds, so does Eve’s story, so that the flashbacks are presented as Eve telling Charlie and Finn (Eve’s handsome Scottish handyman….you can guess where that’s going to go) what happened to her. The deeper the trio travels into France, the deeper the reader gets into Eve’s story and the closer the reader gets to the traumatic events that led her to be the woman she is today. I occasionally found Charlie annoying, though I started to see her more as the vehicle through which the reader saw and learned more about Eve. With the book structured as it was, you get both Eve’s interpretation and story of what happened to her as well as an outsider’s view of who the woman Eve is now. The back-and-forth telling helped make Eve a more well-rounded character and gave you a “hook” to want to know how Eve of WWI became this broken Eve after WWII.

There was a clear villain (besides generally the Germans) and Quinn was masterful at making him so evil he was almost serpentine. My skin would crawl when he was on the scene and my heart would cheer each time Eve outwitted him or used him in the spy ring.

The Spies
As to the three spies you meet in the book, The Alice Network simultaneously emphasized both the amazing cunning and skills of the spies like Lili/Louise/Alice and Eve as well as their ordinary-ness. Besides learning multiple languages at early ages, there is nothing particularly extraordinary about the lives these women led prior to being called up to service in the Network. Fictional Eve was a secretary, a square peg in a round hole, wanting to serve her country more directly than was typically allowed for women during the First World War. Louise was a poor aristocrat from a family with nothing left but its titles. And yet, women like these did something extraordinary, risked their lives in the service of others.

War Novels
By setting The Alice Network when she did, Quinn wrote both a World War I novel (Eve’s chapters) and a World War II novel (Charlie’s chapters). While I haven’t reviewed many on the blog, I am a big fan of a well-done World War II novel. I adore The Nightingale and All the Light We Cannot See and have read many of the other significant WWII novels published recently. (Knowing what a well-done WWII novel reads like is one of the things that made Lilac Girls so disappointing.)

So where does The Alice Network fit within the spectrum of recent WWII novels? Quinn isn’t quite Kristin Hannah or Anthony Doerr but her writing was heads and shoulders above Martha Hall Kelly in my estimation. I enjoyed Quinn’s writing, but there wasn’t anything in particular that made me pause to re-read a paragraph or turn of phrase. Her writing was, however, clear, engaging, and relatable. It has mass appeal—it won’t be accused of needing an editor but no one is going to accuse it of being too high-brow either. It did get off to a bit of a slow start but a little over a third of the way in, the pace picked up and I didn’t want to put the book down.

Minor annoyances
I appreciated that the author made Charlie interested in math—any time I see a girl into STEM in a book I want to cheer. I’m not a STEM-er myself but since this particular interest in underrepresented, I like seeing it. For Charlie, however, Quinn went a little over the top. Charlie thinks in math equations that bordered on silly, detracted from the story, and impaired my ability to take Charlie seriously.

Sample equations included “One scribbled address plus one dash of resolve multiplied to the power of ten,” “Rose plus me equaled happiness,” and “bullets plus blood plus threats of imminent death equaled a certain intimacy.” There were one or two that were funny (“boy plus girl multiplied by whiskey and proximity” made me chuckle) but on the whole they were overdone and made Charlie seem frivolous rather than serious. In the end, silly equations multiplied by eyerolls equals a negative star.

My only other hangup in the book is how frequently one of the pregnant characters drank. She was frequently drunk and I was worried her child was going to be born well-pickled. Some Googling tells me that it wasn’t until the early 70s that doctors identified Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and a connection was solidly made between drinking and pregnancy, so this character’s drinking like a fish may have been consistent with the times. I just couldn’t take it, though. We know better now and so it seemed something that would be highly distracting to modern audiences. There are times when this character needs to be less inhibited so I could have been okay with it a few times but this too reached the point of frustration and distraction.

Conclusion
Tiny spoiler coming up—scroll if you want to skip it.
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The book does wrap up somewhat neater than is likely for someone who has suffered what Eve and Charlie have, though I don’t begrudge Quinn for the happy-ish ending. The Alice Network is a book that is going for mass appeal and isn’t the kind of book that ends with misery and woe. There are so many other things in novels that require the suspension of belief, that this relatively happy ending for Charlie and Eve doesn’t feel like a terrible stretch, even if aspects of it felt a bit too easy.

Notes
Published June 6, 2017 by William Morrow (@williammorrowbooks)
Author: Kate Quinn (@katequinn5975)
Date read: August 9, 2017
Rating: 4 Stars

Review: Trell by Dick Lehr

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Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for a review.  Thank you to Candlewick Press, Dick Lehr, and LibraryThing for sending me an advance reader copy.  All opinions are my own.

Around the time I started to walk, I also started asking Daddy the same question at the end of our weekly visits. Every time, the same question, like if you put a word bubble next to me in every photo from when I was a toddler through elementary school, the question was the same, year after year.

“Daddy,” I would ask, “when you comin’ home?”

Synopsis
Based on an actual event in Boston in 1988, Trell tells the story of a man wrongfully convicted for the murder of a child from the point of view of his teenage daughter. Since shortly after her birth, Van Trell Taylor (“Trell”) has only known her father in jail. For the last fourteen years he has insisted on his innocence to no avail. After legal avenues prove to be dead ends, Trell begins to hound a local, washed up investigative reporter to revisit the rush to convict her father. As Trell and the reporter begin to uncover serious flaws in the conviction, they come to realize that someone else doesn’t want the truth to come out and will do anything to stop them.

White Savior
While technically well written and well paced, the story in Trell is, in many ways, less about Trell and her family and more about the role of the reporter in the story. This isn’t terribly surprising since the Dick Lehr, the author of Trell is a former investigative journalist on the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe.

This set up raised a bit of a conundrum with me. I’m typically leery of white authors trying to write the stories of black communities; however, in the case of Trell, the book is loosely autobiographical. Lehr himself re-investigated the 1988 shooting death of teenager Tiffany Moore in Boston as a reporter at the Boston Globe. As a result of that reporting, the wrongful conviction of Shawn Drumgold was overturned in 2003 after he had served fourteen years in jail for a murder he didn’t commit. Rather than tell this story as a straight autobiography from the position of the white reporter, Lehr reimagined the story from the point of view of a family member of the wrongfully convicted man. This choice made the story more compelling and enabled Lehr to write it as a YA book, though of course this also meant a white man was writing the voice and story of a black teenage girl. He does, as far as I could tell, manage to avoid anything seriously problematic in his writing of Trell. She is one of the only black kids at an all-white school she goes to on scholarship, but this is a trope Angie Thomas is also guilty of in The Hate U Give, so it’s a little hard to fault Lehr for using this one—and this is also a reality for a lot of kids wanting to escape neglected schools in the inner-city.

In the course of developing the relationship with the reporter, Trell becomes interested in journalism. These bits are a touch cheesy (not over the top—this is YA after all, so the bar is a bit higher for it be over the top) and contribute to the overall “journalist will save us” vibe. Lehr does do a good job making Trell be the driving force—it isn’t the journalist uncovering clues. Rather, he’s the one showing Trell certain techniques and where to look so that she is usually the one making the discoveries, not the journalist. If this weren’t the case, I think I’d have more problems with the book. Lehr clearly made an effort so that, while the book is all about the journalism, it’s also all about Trell.

The “White Savior” aspect of the book would probably bother me more if I didn’t know Lehr himself investigated the Drumgold conviction and contributed to its being overturned. This story and the role journalists played in uncovering injustice deserve to be told and Lehr is one of the better ones to do it.

Policing Black Communities
Lehr is sensitive to the climate and the realities of the view of the police in communities where Trell lives. When a significant crime happens today in a community of color, we all shake our heads with the news pundits and question why no one called the police sooner or why seemingly no one will come forward now. Lehr addresses this head on at one point, with Trell explaining how people have seen police misconduct in person in many of these communities or known someone affected by police misconduct. When you add the penalties that come from “snitching,” there is very little reason for many people to trust the police’s ability to do the right thing or, even if they are, to protect them.

This wasn’t something I ever thought about until relatively recently. In many ways, the death of Mike Brown and my friendships with an African-American woman and a biracial Latinx woman were what started to open my eyes. Issues like those in Trell, The Hate U Give, and American Street were not ones that ever would have crossed my radar when I was the intended audience of YA books. I wish I had been able to read books like these when I was in high school, rather than having to read adulthood to really see the injustices faced by communities of color, including injustices at the hands of law enforcement.

Audience
The book is clearly a YA book and is readable for ninth grade and up—possibly a little younger for advanced readers. Language-wise, I don’t recall anything offensive. So long as a juvenile reader is prepared for the thematic elements in Trell, this book would appeal to a slightly younger audience than something like The Hate U Give or American Street, though I think it also holds the attention of older YA readers. Because of where Trell lives and how the homicide happened, there are repeated references to drug use and gangs—nothing graphic (no one actually does drugs in front of Trell) but also not subtle. Drugs and gangs aren’t glorified and one of the characters who lives in a house where a lot of the drug dealing and gang activity happens clearly wants to get out. I probably would have found this book shocking when I was in school but with everything on television, kids today are substantially less sheltered than I was twenty years ago. I don’t personally think there’s anything problematic here.

Writing
It wouldn’t be a book review on this blog without a comment on the writing. Lehr writes like a journalist, even when writing narrative fiction. This isn’t a bad thing—each word is carefully chosen, the sentences are clear, and the narrative moves forward in a coherent and deliberate pace, with a clear climax and resolution. There’s nothing flowery in Lehr’s writing but there’s also nothing distracting. This isn’t a book where I felt I wanted to re-read sentences but it’s also not a book that made me wish he’d had a better editor.

Summary
Trell isn’t a perfect book but it’s still one worth reading. I probably won’t keep my copy but I hope it gets into good hands in the Little Free Library I’m going to drop it off in. I’m glad I read it and do see myself recommending it. I think it raises important issues that are still immediately timely and it’s also an easier book to recommend on these issues if I know someone will be put off by the language in something like American Street.

Shawn Drumgold Sources
Original Boston Globe article raising concerns with conviction
Drumgold awarded $5 million for wrongful conviction

Notes
Published: September 12, 2017 by Candlewick Press (@candlewickpress) (Happy Book Birthday, Trell!)
Author: Dick Lehr
Date read: September 2, 2017
Rating: 3 1/2 Stars

Review: American Street by Ibi Zoboi

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My cousins are hurting. My aunt is hurting. My mother is hurting. And there is no one here to help. How is this the good life, when even the air in this place threatens to wrap its fingers around my throat? In Haiti, with all its problems, there was always a friend or neighbor to share in the misery. And then, after our troubles were tallied up like those points a the basketball game, we would celebrate being alive.
But here, there isn’t even a slice of happiness big enough to fill up all these empty houses, and broken buildings, and wide roads that lead to nowhere and everywhere.

Synopsis
Seventeen year-old Fabiola and her mother came to America to live with her cousins and aunt, to start over with the “good life” in America. Yet, as Fabiola crosses into customs, her mother is left on the other side, detained and not able to enter. Fabiola is forced to go on without her, to begin to live the “good life” without her mother. Yet this “good life” isn’t anything like Fabiola imagined. Fabiola must learn to navigate life in Detroit as she seeks help from her spirit guides to make her family whole again.

Audience and Privilege
While I’m rating American Street as a four-star book, this is another book, much like The Hate U Give that ultimately wasn’t for me. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it—I absolutely did and plan to recommend it within my friend-group widely. That’s also not the say the author doesn’t want white readers, but simply to say that at the end of the day, if I hadn’t enjoyed this book, it’s not my place to review it poorly. The experiences of Fabiola and her cousins in American Street are representative of real lives—people who live lives I cannot imagine and who make choices I have never had to make, largely because of the color of my skin and the place of privilege I occupy. If I didn’t like the book because I didn’t relate to it or understand it, then that is reflective of me and not the book.

(FTR–I do appreciate the irony in my reviewing books written by authors of color while simultaneously questioning white authors who write about the experiences of people of color as with Trell and Killers of the Flower Moon. There are enough white authors trying to speak for people of color that I never want to take someone else’s place to speak their story. Even in reviewing books, there are inherent biases at play—even as I try to be aware of my privilege and how it can drive my reactions to books, no one is completely aware of or able to separate themselves from their privilege.)

I did not, however, want to skip reviewing this book. While I don’t have a large audience, I do want my blog to serve as a place to find books you might otherwise not read. I try to read widely and have pretty diverse taste (so long as its well-written!) so it is my hope that there is a little something from everyone here.

With that in mind, I decided to go ahead and review American Street so that perhaps, Reader, you might pick it up when you would have otherwise missed it. I wouldn’t have picked it up myself if Jennifer Latham, author of Dreamland Burning, hadn’t recommended it during her author chat for the MMD book club at the beginning of the summer.

Naiveté
One of the things that made American Street so powerful for me was the author’s use of a limited point of view to tell a far wider-reaching story than the reader realizes at the beginning. The entire story is told from the point of view of Fabiola, a recent immigrant from Haiti whose mom is detained when they try to return to the United States where Fabiola was born seventeen years before. Because there are some ways in which it is obvious—clothing, makeup, culture—that Fabiola is Naïve—with a capital “N”—it is easy to see only those little things and miss the forest for the trees. Because the reader’s view is limited by Fabiola’s ability to experience and grasp what is going on around her, the events of the end of the book are all the more shocking. Fabiola didn’t see them coming and so, to a large extent, I didn’t either. I’m fairly good at picking up surprising twists or at least knowing one is coming, and I did not see where this book was going to go until I was almost on top of it. And then I desperately wanted to be wrong. Zoboi’s use of point of view here was masterful and not something that is this well done very often.

Characters and Magical Realism
To make sense of the word around her, Fabiola connects the people around her to her lwas, or Haitian spirit guides. For some characters, this makes them more sympathetic and adds a layer of richness to the character development—her cousin Donna is Ezili-Danto—the lover and the beauty who is also the warrior. Two sides, one person. For others, like Bad Leg, the homeless man across the street, seeing him as the lwa Papa Legba imbues the book with a layer of magical realism that then opens the door to events that are not entirely realistic, yet still fit within the larger scheme and story of the book.

Immigrant Experience
Much of the charm of American Street comes down to Fabiola’s experiences as being out of her culture.   While the slips are frustrating to Fabiola, they are charming to the reader and serve to remind readers how young she is–both literally and in experience.  Fabiola, while naïve, has been well-loved by her mother and well-cared-for. Her cousin’s home—literally on the corner of American and Joy streets—was the Promised Land where everything would better. So when Fabiola is dropped into this intersection, without her mother, into a foreignness she did not expect, she has to remind herself to be happy, to smile because this is the “good life.”

My heart aches for her in these moments. I know what it is to have small disappointments result from my expectations not meeting reality, but the magnitude for Fabiola is staggering. For Fabiola, it is another earthquake—the foundations cracked, the earth roiling under her feet. Yet even in Haiti during the earthquake, she had friends and neighbors, her mother. Here she has no one. Fabiola has to navigate not only what it means to become an American but also how to life a life different and more disappointing than the one she imagined for herself when she and her mother planned to come to America, all without seeming ungrateful to her cousins and aunt who barely have enough to provide for another mouth.

“YA”
Like The Hate U Give or, to a slightly lesser extent, When Dimple Met Rishi, this is a YA book that skews towards older/heavier themes. Some of the common elements of YA are here—Fabiola is besotted with Kasim, a teenage boy equally smitten with her. He “invades” her every thought and takes her on some dates that teenage boys would do well to take notes on. The limited sex scenes are just that—very limited—and tastefully vague. I don’t think there’s much to worry about there.

My labeling the book as being more of an older YA book, however, stems from the larger themes. Here as in Sing, Unburied, Sing, there are characters selling drugs, yet as with Ward’s characters, these characters are nuanced, with good reasons to be making these choices (even if they are, ultimately, the wrong choices). There is also violence throughout the book, as the neighborhood is rough and Fabiola’s cousin Donna is in a volatile, abusive relationship. These themes and violence would make me hesitate to recommend the book to anyone under sixteen, and even then, if a teenager were reading this, this would be a book to read and unpack together.

Summary
This is a book I highly recommend, particularly for people who are trying to read more diversely. Fabiola is lovely and it is difficult for the reader not to feel deeply empathetic for her and want the best for her. The events of the book are rough, but frankly, so is life for many teenagers living in Detroit in 2017. The book is well-written, though the dialogue is accurate for how teenagers would speak (so the vocabulary would be NSFW).

Reviews by people of color
If this review intrigued you, you should also check out the reviews from Rich in Color and Epic Reads.

Notes
Published: February 14, 2017 by Balzer + Bray (@balzerandbray), an imprint of HarperCollins (@harpercollinsus)
Author: Ibi Zoboi (@ibizoboi)
Date read: September 3, 2017
Rating: 4 ¼ Stars

The beautiful metal print in the background of the picture in this post is by artist A’Driane Nieves.  Her work can be found here.

Review: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

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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.

“There’s things you think you know that you don’t.”
“Like what?”…
“Home ain’t always about a place. The house I grew up in is gone. Ain’t nothing but a field and some woods, but even if the house was still there, it ain’t about that.” Richie rubs his knuckles together. “I don’t know.”…
“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where my family lived…it’s a wall. It’s a hard floor, wood. Then concrete. No opening. No heartbeat. No air.”
“So what?” I whisper….
“This my way to find that.”
“Find what?”
“A song. The place is the song and I’m going to be part of the song.”

Synopsis
Thirteen year-old Jojo wants nothing more today than to be with Pop—for Pop to see him as a man and for his mother Leonie to leave him at home where Mam has only a few days left.  Instead, he’s being dragged north with his three year-old sister to retrieve his father from the state penitentiary, with a stop along the way for his mother and her friend to retrieve the drug that pulls her farther and farther from her family. When they finally reach their destination and return home, Jojo’s father Michael isn’t the only thing the family brings back from Parchman. On the way back, Jojo begins to see the form of a boy named Richie who served time in Parchman with Pop many years ago and whose story only Pop knows the end of.

Pacing and word choice
As the book opens, Jojo is at home with his Pop, Mam, and little sister Kayla—the pacing slow, but not quite languid, the stuff of long conversations. When his mother Leonie insists the children come on the trip across the state to pick up their father in Parchman, the language stretches—the words paving the way for the long drive. There is, in fact, very little in the way of action through the entire 3/4 of the book. Instead the long stretches of road serve as the backdrop for character studies of Jojo and Leonie. As the mother and child return home, the writing becomes almost frenetic—the language shorter and choppier as the action takes over, the river of words becoming foaming rapids, pulling the reader frantically to the conclusion. This pacing adds to the atmosphere of the climax scene, leaving the reader as breathless and wrung out as Leonie and Jojo themselves. It’s not surprising to hear that Ward is a professor of creative writing as her spot-on pacing in this book is masterful.

The word choice in Sing, Unburied, Sing is also perfect for the book. The grammar—dropping articles, “sleep” for “asleep,” making plural words singular—transports the reader immediately to somewhere in the rural South without making the book difficult to read or having to rely on gimmicky written Southern accents. The descriptions place the reader in the deltas of Mississippi with the sun blazing its curtain call as it drops below the horizon. It’s descriptive without being flowery, so while there were times I went back to re-read a paragraph just for the word choice, this is not a book that will annoy or trip up readers who care less about these things.

Character study
Sing, Unburied, Sing is character-driven rather than plot-driven. The book opens with Jojo, imitating his Pop, trying to show he can be a man, even as the killing of a goat turns his stomach. Over the following days, Jojo will become a man in the blink of an eye—a blink that Leonie misses.

Alternating with Jojo’s chapters are those of Leonie’s. Jojo’s perception of his mother is limited—as the child of a drug addict, he has been let down or left out so often it is hard for him to see any good left in his mother. Her chapters serve to humanize her, to bring the reader to empathize with her, to hope with her when she tries, to feel her disappointment when she fails. It is a testament to Ward’s writing that she can make the reader love even this flawed woman, dying by her own choices, particularly given that in interviews she expresses her own distaste for Leonie as a mother.

Less prominent initially as he is left behind on the journey, Pop is a character the reader comes to love. He is the solid, the constant, the care left in Jojo’s life. He is the reason that when Jojo becomes a man, he will become like Pop rather than his own father Michael. And yet, as the reader discovers, even this quiet, solid man is deeply flawed, haunted by choices and a mercy he chose to administer many years before.

Finally, there is death. Death literally lurks in Sing, Unburied, Sing, appearing as Leonie’s murdered brother Given who appears to her only when she is high; as Richie, a boy inmate when Pop was in Parchman himself; as a bird with scales; as Mam wasting as cancer snacks on what’s left of her.

Black death
In many ways, it is not merely death that lurks in the corner of each page, but specifically Black death. There are many ways throughout U.S. history that white people have not typically had to die—we have not been lynched, we have not been cut into tiny pieces while still alive, pulled from our beds to face false accusations, had our medical needs neglected until it is too late when our cancer is finally found. It is not just death, but Black deaths that creep silently closer in Sing, Unburied, Sing until they are the forefront, as heavy in the trees as grackles on a line. Like the cancer invading Mam’s body, you know death is lurking, you see it in the pages but you do not realize the magnitude. While you were looking at one particular manifestation, the others were coming up silently.

While many of the manifestations of death in the book are quite obvious—Mam’s cancer having nearly eaten through her, gone-too-soon Given, the ghost-bird-child Richie—Leonie’s character in many ways is a walking death. Leonie, child of Mam and Pop and mother-too-soon of Jojo and Kayla, was introduced to drugs by her longtime boyfriend Michael. She struggles, she fights, but by the time the reader meets her, her universe of available choices is hamstrung by her drug addiction. I am not suggesting that Leonie bears no responsibility for her own choices, but there is poignancy is seeing Leonie’s life becoming walking death after having been introduced to drugs by her white boyfriend. That it is black lives who are often disproportionately impacted by white choices.

What is Mercy?
With the rising specter of death comes the question of mercy. What does it mean to be merciful in the face of death? What is the difference between getting to choose the mercy of death versus having it thrust upon you? When mercy comes, does it comes differently for lives well lived versus those barely started?

And what of the mercy-bringer? If you were being merciful, is there still guilt? And how much? Are you more guilty if you weren’t asked to be merciful and less if you were? Does that actually matter?

None of these questions were answered, leaving an unsettled aftertaste when the reader finishes. Of a meal that filled, that mostly satisfied, but of a flavor you’re trying to grasp even as it fades.

In Sum
Sing, Unburied, Sing is not a book that sits lightly or that passes as you turn the page of your next book. Ward raises questions that remain unanswered, leaving the reader to draw her own conclusions of death and mercy, life and guilt. For readers who prefer more plot-driven books, Sing, Unburied, Sing may not be the best book. This is also not a book for someone who dislikes ambiguity.

For readers of literary fiction who love a character study, who are looking to read more from authors of color, who are willing to be unsettled and still love a book, I highly recommend Sing, Unburied, Sing. I know I’ll be pushing Salvage the Bones up my reading list after having read this offering of Ward’s.

Notes
Published: September 5, 2017 by Simon & Schuster (@simonandschuster) Preorder available on Amazon
Author: Jesmyn Ward
Date read: August 29, 2017
Rating: 4 ¼ Stars

Review: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

Posted on by lisaannreads


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No one’s been in my flat this year apart from service professionals; I’ve not voluntarily invited another human being across the threshold, except to read the meter. You’d think that would be impossible, wouldn’t you? It’s true, though. I do exist, don’t I? It often feels as if I’m not here, that I’m a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I’d lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock.

Synopsis
Every day of every week, Eleanor Oliphant lives by the same schedule, eating the same foods, wearing the same clothes. She is, of course, completely fine with this until, one day, her uncomplicated, regimented life is disrupted by people she doesn’t seem to be able to shake. What the reader comes to quickly see, however, is that Eleanor’s regimented loneliness kept more than just other people at bay.

Expectations
I picked up Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine thinking it was going to be a light-hearted story about a socially awkward woman, charmed and brought of out her shell. Like an Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, or The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, but with an even more awkward protagonist. The flap-copy did nothing to disabuse me of my belief—the only hint of there being something darker being the reference to her heart being “profoundly damaged.” But sure—flap-copy hyperbole and this is going to be a charming story to read after a few heavier novels.

Eleanor Oliphant was altogether not what I expected. While it was cheeky in the writing, there was ultimately very little light about it. The reader quickly discovers that Eleanor has survived a catastrophic event and most of her idiosyncrasies are a result of that event. As a result, this book was heavy in a way I did not expect. As such, I’ll admit that the shock of the book being unexpectedly dark colored my rating of it—even in hindsight I do not think the flap-copy summary does justice to the book and I can see other readers being similarly turned off after thinking they were getting a different bill of goods in this book.

Trying too hard
This might be one of the first times I’ve ever said this, but the writing in Eleanor Oliphant was SO cheeky, it felt like the author tipped too far to the extreme of quirk and was just trying too hard. I loved it at first—Eleanor’s inner monologue and tongue in cheek jabs made me hoot out loud until it quickly—like chapter two quickly—became too much. It felt like every interaction Eleanor had with anyone, either something she said or thought became an opportunity to show how other and smart she is, how proper and different. We get it. She’s weird. She abides by old social conventions and doesn’t understand new ones.

Likable-enough Characters
The best parts of Eleanor Oliphant are the characters themselves and the balance Honeyman strikes with the likeability of both Eleanor and Raymond, Eleanor’s coworker/new friend. Neither is particularly likeable on the whole, but she doesn’t push as hard on them as characters as she did with her writing so the balance here is better. Eleanor is not an entirely or, even mostly, sympathetic character for much of the book. Yes, she is at times unfairly disliked and made fun of by her coworkers (which, should never be ok) but you also very clearly see how she brings some of the disdain upon herself. There are social mores she doesn’t know to abide by, leading her to be the butt of awkward jokes but there are also some that she just doesn’t give a damn about. In other words, she was a real person. More flawed than most but not altogether either good or bad. There were times I initially questioned whether I really wanted to keep reading and it was only Eleanor herself (despite her overdone inner monologue) that made me keep going.

Similarly, Raymond is not the perfect novel leading man. He smokes, dresses somewhat slovenly, and is not in terribly good shape. Yet he’s undeniably loyal to Eleanor, for reasons I wasn’t entirely clear on—but you want this for her so you’re willing to go with it. Every so often it’s nice to have a romantic interest that isn’t dark and dashing but simply feels like someone you’d run into on the street. That’s Raymond.

It would have been easy to make Eleanor entirely unlikeable, a la Girl on the Train, or Raymond too likeable, yet Honeyman managed to avoid both of these pitfalls.

Resolution done well
The one other aspect of the book that I thought was particularly well-handled was Eleanor’s underlying trauma and how she reacts to it throughout the book. I am not going to give spoilers so there is not much more I can say; except that I thought the handling of it was well done and accurate as far as my experience and exposure to these sorts of things goes. I hate few things more than mental health poorly handled but felt Honeyman did an admirable job making Eleanor’s struggles believable.

Little things
Finally, Honeyman does have several paragraphs or small runs where I wanted to take note. There’s one particular section in chapter 8 where Eleanor muses on whether men feel the same pressure to look good than women do that made me want to cheer and read it twice. There’s also a section toward the end where the reader is invited into Eleanor’s musing on what it means to care for and love a pet that made my dog-collecting heart flutter. There were not as many of these as I found in something like Almost Sisters, where the point of the book seemed to be to make these kind of points, but they were refreshing to find in a general fiction book and brought the story and Eleanor a little more to life for me.

In Sum…
Ultimately, if I read this book under different circumstances, with different expectations, and without a looming library deadline, I probably would have liked this book more. Other readers may find the balance of cheek delicious instead of irritating. It ultimately wasn’t the right book at the right time for me, but I can still see myself recommending this to other readers, depending on their tastes and book needs at the time.

Notes
Published May 9, 2017 by Pamela Dorman Books (@pameladormanbooks) / Viking (@vikingbooks)
Author: Gail Honeyman
Date read: August 23, 2017
Rating: 3 ¼ stars