Short, Short, Long

Two short novels, both from Ireland:

Foster     Claire Keegan     (2010, 2022)  This gem-like novella is already part of the school curriculum in Ireland, and now, twelve years after its initial publication, the full version is finally available in the United States. Keegan compresses an enormous amount into 92 pages, as she did with her acclaimed novella Small Things Like These. In Foster, a young Irish girl is taken to live with relatives at the beginning of summer. It’s unclear if the arrangement is permanent or temporary, and the tension of this uncertainty hangs over the narrative—as do mysteries about the girls’ birth parents and about her foster parents. Keegan is able to evoke panoramic scenes with spare sentences like this one, on the first page: “It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road.” The dialogue is similarly spare but revealing of character. Don’t miss this book. (The movie version, The Quiet Girl, is also excellent—in the Irish language, with subtitles.)

The Queen of Dirt Island     Donal Ryan     (2022, 2023)  In rural County Tipperary, widow Eileen Aylward shares her modest house with her daughter, Saoirse (pronounced something like SUR-sha), and her widowed mother-in-law, Mary. Their story spans the mid-1980s to the early 2010s and includes feuds, romances, deaths, and run-ins with the Irish Republican Army. Through it all, they hang on by loving each other fiercely, even though they yell at each other a lot. You might classify this book, which is divided into two-page mini-chapters, as a very long prose poem—the language is that rich. And toward the end, a delightful element of meta-fiction also enters the narrative. For another exquisite piece of writing from Donal Ryan, check out his linked short stories in The Spinning Heart, which I reviewed on this blog back in 2018.

And a long novel, from the United States:

Commitment     Mona Simpson     (2023)  Walter, Lina, and Donnie Aziz are teens in California in 1972 when their struggling single-parent mother, Diane, becomes severely depressed and is institutionalized. Walter, who is starting college at Berkeley, leaves Lina and Donnie in the care of a devoted family friend, Julie. The novelist tracks the lives of these five people over the next decade and a half, delving by turns into decisions by each of Diane’s three children, often in intricate detail. The narrative structure made me want to know what would happen in the next chapter—and the next—but  this long novel does require (ahem) commitment on the part of the reader. I think it’s worth the time to observe how bravely the characters face adversity.

Author Focus: Curtis Sittenfeld

The sophisticated and sassy author Curtis Sittenfeld burst onto the scene in 2005 with her novel Prep, about life in an elite East-Coast boarding school, and she’s been going strong ever since. Sittenfeld has a knack for naturalistic dialogue and page-turning plots. Here are my reviews of five of her books; two of the reviews are reposts.

The Man of My Dreams     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2006)  This early work by Sittenfeld (right after the blockbuster Prep) explores the fears and fantasies of a young woman, from high school into her late twenties. Hannah Gavener is not a very likeable person, but the reader develops sympathy for her because she’s so self-doubting. She desperately seeks a male partner, hoping that marriage and children and domesticity will solve all her problems, but the men in her life either smother her with care or don’t care for her enough. I found the ending of this novel structurally unconvincing, but the insights into a young woman’s mind are worth the read.

Eligible     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2016)  Part of the propulsiveness of this novel lies in its being a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Set in Cincinnati in 2013-2014, Eligible follows all five of the Bennet sisters (Jane, Liz, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia) as they pursue or fail to pursue multiple romantic options. Their father is as droll as Austen’s Mr Bennet, their mother as ditsy as Austen’s Mrs Bennet. I gulped down the chapters, anxious to learn how Sittenfeld had transformed the next bit of early-18th-century narrative to 21st-century sensibilities. (One major approach: lots more sex.)

You Think It, I’ll Say It     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2018)  The ten short stories in this collection reveal Sittenfeld’s wide-ranging understanding of women’s roles in romantic relationships, in parenting, in the workplace, and even in volunteer activities. As each story presents a different set of characters, human foibles are certainly on display, but so is human compassion. I especially like that many of the offerings are set in non-coastal places such as Houston, Kansas City, and St Louis, underscoring the ordinariness of the plots, even though some of the plots are pretty zany. Of course, zaniness is a characteristic of twenty-first-century life.

Rodham     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2020)  What if Hillary Rodham had not married Bill Clinton in 1975? This alternate version of Hillary’s life starts out hewing pretty closely to well-known facts—Hillary goes to college at Wellesley and then to law school at Yale, where she meets Bill. But at that point the novel follows a different trajectory, with Hillary as an unmarried law professor and politician (and Bill on another path also). Throughout, the portrayal of Hillary is, for me, totally believable, and the dialogue is especially realistic. Sittenfeld takes readers on a fun ride through the ”what ifs” with Rodham.

Romantic Comedy     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2023) Go behind the scenes in 2018 at The Night Owls, a not-very-disguised version of Saturday Night Live, to meet Sally Milz, a comedy writer in her late thirties who has often been disappointed in love. Meet a guest host of the show, pop star Noah Brewster. Watch Sally develop a crush on Noah and then accidentally insult him so that their light flirtation ends. Next, skip to the year 2020, in the depths of the COVID pandemic, and read emails between Noah and Sally. Speculate on whether this romance will re-blossom. As befits a late-night comedy show, the scripts that Sally writes can be raunchy, but Sittenfeld’s depiction of modern America is spot on.

Short Stories

When you’ve had a long day but want a mental getaway before your head hits the pillow, consider turning to a collection of short stories for a quick dose of fiction.

• First, two books of regular short stories:

Blank Pages and Other Stories     Bernard MacLaverty     (2021)  MacLaverty now lives in Scotland, but he grew up in Northern Ireland, and his fictional characters live on both sides of the Irish Sea. As I’ve noted in my review of his novel Midwinter Break, he focuses on the intricacies of ordinary domestic life, among people of the middle class or lower middle class. Some of these stories are set in the present day, and some reach back into the 20th century. There are no wild rides here, but there are plenty of introspective observations, in spare and lovely prose.

You Think It, I’ll Say It     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2018)  These ten stories reveal Sittenfeld’s wide-ranging understanding of women’s roles in romantic relationships, in parenting, in the workplace, and even in volunteer activities. As each story delves into a different set of characters, human foibles are certainly on display, but so is human compassion. I especially like that many of the stories are set in non-coastal places such as Houston, Kansas City, and St Louis, underscoring the ordinariness of the plots, even though some of the plots are pretty zany. Of course, zaniness is a characteristic of twenty-first-century life. (For a Sittenfeld novel, see my review of Rodham.)

• Next, some short stories that are put together as a novel:

The Seamstress of Sardinia     Bianca Pitzorno     Translated from the Italian by Brigid Maher     (2022)  Although this book was published as a novel, it’s more a series of interlinked short stories about a young woman who lived at the beginning of the 20th century on an island off the coast of Italy. Pitzorno evokes Old World charm while detailing the extreme social and financial stratification that the unnamed seamstress faces as she hand-crafts clothing and household linens for her wealthy clients. The female supporting characters are mostly competent and feisty; the male characters are mostly corrupt and lecherous. The seamstress is advised by one woman, “Don’t ever let any man be disrespectful to you.” (138)

• Finally, short stories that are sort of essays, too:

How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership     Wendell Berry     (2022)  This book is the 14th in a series of novels and short-story collections that celebrate rural life in the American South. In this collection, Berry further fills in the cast of characters from his fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and environs. Central to the stories is Andy Catlett, who, like Berry himself, was born in 1932. The narratives cross the border to essay form, and often to threnody, as Berry laments the industrialization that has nearly obliterated the old agrarian ways. I had not read any of the previous Port William books, but I easily picked up the threads, and I treasured Berry’s majestic and evocative prose, which is also in evidence in his acclaimed nonfiction on environmental issues.

A Grab Bag of Novels

Historical Fiction, Medieval Variety:

The Maiden of All Our Desires     Peter Manseau     (2022)  We can’t escape our involvement in planetary calamities, as the 14th-century inhabitants of a small, isolated convent in the north of England discover. This novel is set on a single day, during a fierce December blizzard, twenty years after the peak of the Black Plague. (There are multiple flashbacks to the plague years, including one very violent scene.) Several lives and past lives intersect, including that of the abbess, the former abbess, the resident priest, one of the nuns, and a young woman who lives in the nearby forest. The novelist evokes the period effectively, with gorgeous descriptors. I predicted the denouement early on, but I couldn’t help wondering how the nuns managed to brave the blizzard without cloaks!

Modern Families:

Hello Beautiful     Ann Napolitano     (2023)  William Waters had a terrible childhood in Boston. When he goes off to Northwestern University in Chicago on a basketball scholarship, he meets Julie Padavano and her gregarious Italian American family, which includes her three sisters. He begins to think that his life is turning around, but his dark past is only temporarily tamped down. All sorts of trouble ensues. The novelist echoes some of the themes of the four sisters in Little Women, however it isn’t necessary that you pull out your tattered copy of Louisa May Alcott’s classic to appreciate the well-drawn characters in Hello Beautiful. The Padavano sisters’ love for each other—and for William—shines brightly as they work their way through the decades of their lives to the chapters that conclude in 2008. And you don’t have to understand basketball, either.

Story of a Bad Guy:

The Complicities     Stacey D’Erasmo     (2022)  How might the people who surround white-collar criminals, such as the charismatic con man Alan, be complicit in their crimes? Readers get insights into several of Alan’s relationships. When Alan goes to prison, Suzanne, his first wife, divorces him and tries to reinvent herself. Lydia, his second wife, has survived a terrible accident and is a recovering alcoholic. Sylvia, his mother, is an aging free spirit who wants to reconnect with her estranged son. Noah, Alan’s adult son, always remains loyal to him. I found the shifting narrative viewpoints sometimes hard to reconcile, but the characters here are well developed, and the moral issues are thought-provoking. Oh, and a beached whale plays a major role.

Dystopian Fiction (Story of Extremely Bad Guys):

The Testaments     Margaret Atwood     (2019)  Dystopian novels and movies creep me out, but I had to read Atwood’s Booker-prize winning sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (published in 1985), which I reviewed recently. For decades, fans begged Atwood to explain how her fictional society of Gilead (theocratic, brutal, corrupt) finally fell, leading to the restoration of the United States. The “testaments” of the sequel title are documents written by three women—two of them are within Gilead, and the third, though in Canada, is unknowingly linked to events in Gilead. The narrative moves from one testament to another at a brisk pace, so I kept turning those pages even as I shuddered at the gruesome atrocities depicted. The highly skilled Atwood has written this sequel with meticulous care, offering truly sobering parallels between Gilead and the United States of the early 21st century.

Contemporary Novels by Reliable Authors

Lucy by the Sea     Elizabeth Strout     (2022)  Pulitzer-winner Strout has helped her readers examine many of the complexities of the human condition in her eight previous highly acclaimed books. Now, in Lucy by the Sea, she looks at the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, through the eyes of Lucy Barton (a character she’s developed in My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, and Oh William). Lucy’s ex-husband, William, is a scientist who sees how dangerous the coronavirus is. In early March 2020, he insists that Lucy leave New York City for a rental house on the coast of Maine. In first-person narrative, Lucy details the interactions she has with family and friends during 2020 and early 2021. Lucy by the Sea is the first discussion of the pandemic I’ve read that truly captures the sense of desperation and loneliness that the pandemic has wrought. One quote: “I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone.” (245)

The Master Bedroom     Tessa Hadley     (2007)  Kate Flynn is brilliant, brash, and beautiful—never boring. She takes a leave from her teaching job in London and goes back to her home town in Wales to care for her elderly mother, who has dementia. Kate’s entanglement in the lives of old friends allows the author to explore the complexities of desire, ambition, and generational ties. I’ve been bingeing on the well-crafted books by Britain’s Tessa Hadley; they are among my favorites, as you can see in this recent post.

The Sweet Remnants of Summer     Alexander McCall Smith     (2022)  In this 14th offering in the Isabel Dalhousie series, it’s a warm September in Edinburgh. Isabel and her “dishy” husband, Jamie, get themselves involved as mediators—or possibly interveners—in two interpersonal dramas in the worlds of art, music, and wine. Glimpses of Isabel’s personal life, and of her job as editor of a philosophy journal, punctuate the gentle, easygoing story. I’ve reviewed novels in this series previously. The setting and the characters rank high for me in McCall Smith’s voluminous catalog of titles.

The Popularity of Historical Novels, Part 2

I posted last week about the publishing trend over the past two decades toward historical novels. This week my focus is a specific historical period: the decade after World War II, a time of immense cultural change, both in a devastated Europe and in the United States, which sent soldiers to the war. I recently read two novels set in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The Tobacco Wives     Adele Myers     (2022)

In 1946 North Carolina, a war widow dumps her daughter, Maddie Sykes (age 15), at the house of Aunt Etta, in a town totally dominated by the tobacco industry. Maddie is expected to assist Etta with sewing gowns for the wives of local executives, but when Etta becomes seriously ill, all the work falls to Maddie. She rises to the challenge, all the while dealing with a secret that she’s stumbled upon about the harmful health effects of tobacco. (The total obliviousness of the characters to the hazards of smoking seems incredible today, but it was the norm until near the end of the 20th century.) Despite some anachronisms and unlikely coincidences, Myers draws her characters well and propels the plot along with realistic dialog.

Jacqueline in Paris     Ann Mah     (2022) 

It’s a historic fact that Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy, and even later, Onassis) spent her junior year of college, 1949-1950, studying in Paris. Although Europe was still recovering from the destruction of WWII, Paris was magical for Jackie O, as she attested many times. Novelist Mah spins out this year in France, reconstructing and imagining the details, as Jacqueline attends lectures, dances in jazz clubs, falls in love, and encounters the post-war conflicts between democracy and communism. Any fictionalized version of the life of a famous person is risky. This one hits the mark and is highly recommended.

In the archives of the Cedar Park Book Blog I found a number of other novels set in post-WWII Europe. Click on the title to be taken to my review. 

Freya     Anthony Quinn     (2017) The friendship of two British women, traced from the end of World War II through the 1960s, with insights into feminism, marriage, and culture.

The Women in the Castle     Jessica Shattuck     (2017) Hardscrabble life in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, with reflections on the rise of Hitler.

The Italian Party    Christina Lynch     (2018) As effervescent as the Campari-and-soda drinks that the characters order constantly, but the sunny picture darkens as we learn the many secrets of an American couple living in Siena, Italy, in 1956.  

The Right Sort of Man     Allison Montclair     (2019) In post-WWII London, two bright women start a marriage bureau and end up solving a crime. Spunky and sparkly. This is the first in the Sparks and Bainbridge Mystery Series, which includes A Royal Affair (2020), A Rogue’s Company (2021), and The Unkept Woman (2022), all of which I’ve reviewed. For best enjoyment, read the books in order.   

The Popularity of Historical Novels, Part 1

If you look beyond science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels (as the Cedar Park Book Blog does), your options for current fiction reading are weighted heavily toward the historical. Why? This podcast from On the Media suggests a few possible reasons. For example, fiction can draw attention to neglected parts of history. And some authors want their work to be more timeless, not dated by references to modern technology, which changes rapidly.

So it isn’t just my imagination that historical novels have been proliferating for the past two decades! In my scanning of book-lovers’ sites such as The New York Times, BookPage, and Goodreads, I’ve found that history is hot. In particular, there’s recently been a glut of novels about women spies during World War II. I haven’t reviewed many of these spy novels because they’ve proved too violent or sad for my taste—plus I don’t like to get stuck in one time period with my reading.

Over the past six years, I’ve featured a wide range of historical novels and historical mysteries, set from ancient times up into the 20th century. This week, I scoured the Cedar Park Book Blog archives to highlight some of my best-loved historical reads, in random order. Click on the title to be taken to my full review!

News of the World Paulette Jiles     (2016) In post-Civil-War Texas, a traveling performer agrees to make a dangerous journey to deliver an orphan to her aunt and uncle. (The film, with Tom Hanks, is also terrific.)

The Hearts of Men     Nickolas Butler     (2017) Starting in 1962 at a Boy Scout camp in northern Wisconsin, this novel follows a boy’s difficult life in a complex United States.

Where the Crawdads Sing     Delia Owens     (2018) The Marsh Girl roams the lush swamps of coastal North Carolina and meets both friends and foes. Evocative nature prose and a devilish mystery.

Peculiar Ground     Lucy Hughes-Hallett     (2018) A densely layered novel set on a fictional Oxfordshire estate in 1663, 1961, 1973, and 1989. Features walls—border walls, the Berlin Wall, walls of inclusion, walls of exclusion, and many others. 

The Light Between Oceans     ML Stedman     (2012) In the 1920s, a lighthouse keeper and his wife, on a remote island off the coast of Western Australia, find an infant in a boat that washes ashore.  Melodramatic but worth the anguish.

The Golden Age Joan London     (2014) In 1953, two adolescents with polio meet in a rehabilitation center in Perth. A moving story that won top prizes in Australia.

The World Of Tomorrow     Brendan Mathews     (2017) Rollicking action at the fabulous New York World’s Fair, in June of 1939, when the Great Depression has eased and World War II was still unimaginable to Americans.

The Ninth Hour     Alice McDermott      (2017) The pros and cons of being Catholic in early 20th-century Brooklyn. Exploring the intersections of morality, religion, and culture in resonant language.

Little Fires Everywhere     Celeste Ng     (2018) Teens in late-1990s Shaker Heights, Ohio, confront incendiary issues of the upper-middle-class: bigotry, greed, and a disdain for those who diverge from the norms set by their communities. 

Pachinko     Min Jin Lee     (2017) A sweeping saga about the struggles of Korean immigrant families in Japan throughout the twentieth century.

A Gentleman in Moscow     Amor Towles     (2016) The amazing adventures of a Russian aristocrat under house arrest in a Moscow hotel from 1922 to 1954.

The Last Painting of Sarah de Vos     Dominic Smith     (2016) The story of a painting and its impact on families in three settings:  The Netherlands 1636-49 (dark, burgher-ruled); New York, 1957-8 (shiny, jazz-filled); and Sydney, 2000 (sunny, cosmopolitan).

West     Carys Davies     (2018) Preposterous plot, peculiar characters, spare language, in a tale that’s akin to ancient myth, set on the North American continent in about 1815.

Barkskins     Annie Proulx     (2016) An expansive account of two French Canadian families and their relationship to the forests of North America over three centuries. Love all those trees!

Watershed     Mark Barr     (2019) In 1930s rural western Tennessee, an impoverished agrarian community is confronted with technology that will profoundly change lives.

Varina     Charles Frazier     (2018) A fictionalized version of the troubled life of the second wife of Jefferson Davis, set in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

The Vineyard     María Dueñas     (2017)     Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García A swashbuckling historical romance that travels to Mexico, Cuba, and Spain in 1861.

The Fortunes     Peter Ho Davies     (2016) Interlocking stories about the experiences of Chinese immigrants in America over the past century.

In a special category, four historical murder mystery series:

The Marco Didius Falco Mystery Series and the sequel Flavia Albia Mystery Series     Lindsey Davis     (1989-present) Complex, fast-paced, satirical, and outrageously funny mysteries set in first-century Rome. Bonus: Learn some Roman history and geography.

The Brother Cadfael Mystery Series     Ellis Peters     (1977-1994) Meet the brilliant and compassionate monk Cadfael, who lives in a monastery in 12th-century Shrewsbury, England, tending his herb garden and rooting out evil.

The Dame Frevisse Mystery Series     Margaret Frazer     (1992-2008) Dame Frevisse, a nun at a fictional Oxfordshire convent in the 15th century, is a practical and clever sleuth, solving personality clashes as well as crimes.

The Roger the Chapman Mystery Series     Kate Sedley     (1991 to 2013) Roger is an engaging, burly fellow with a large backpack of wares. He tramps all around England in the 15th century, unravelling mysteries. 

My recent posts on this blog have also had lots of short reviews of historical fiction. For example:

Historical Fiction, 7th Century to 20th Century

Strong Women of Yore

Historical Fiction Sequels That Can Stand Alone

Among My Faves: Tessa Hadley

British author Tessa Hadley’s writing just keeps getting better with each successive book that she produces. Her plots focus on families, marital relationships, friendship, and the impact of grief. Her characters are primarily middle-class or upper-middle-class British people who are artists or writers or teachers. I find her prose to be both lucid and rich in its deep searches into motivation, desire, and personality. In this review, I take a look at two of Hadley’s books.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories (2017) is a collection of ten short stories, seven of which appeared previously in the New Yorker magazine. To give you a sense of Hadley’s writing, here are selected quotes from four of the stories:

From “An Abduction” 

“Something was revealed in her that was normally hidden: an auburn light in her face, her freckles startling as the camouflage of an animal, blotting up against her lips and eyelids. . . Her family called her pudgy, but she just looked soft, as if she were longing to nestle.” (9) 

From “Bad Dreams” 

“In the lounge, the child paddled her toes in the hair of the white goatskin rug. Gleaming, uncanny, half reverted to its animal past, the rug yearned to the moon, which was balanced on top of the wall at the back of the paved yard.” (118) 

From “Under the Sign of the Moon”

“All the time he was setting out these platitudes with such solemnity, Greta felt sure that they weren’t the real content of his thoughts, just as her own sceptical, condescending cleverness when she argued with him wasn’t the real content of her thoughts either. This conversation took place on the surface, while their real lives were hidden underground beneath it, crouching, listening out, mutely attentive.” (185) 

From “Silk Brocade”

“.  . . on the white walls there were prints of paintings by Klee and Utrillo and a gilt antique mirror with a plant trailing round it. Morning light waited, importantly empty, in the cheval glass.” (205) 

In Hadley’s 2019 novel, Late in the Day, two couples have been friends for decades and are now in their fifties. At the beginning of the book, Lydia’s husband, Zachary, dies suddenly. In deep shock and grief, Lydia comes to stay with Alex and Christine. Hadley explores how each of the three misses Zachary desperately, but she also delves into the interpersonal relationships of all four characters—relationships that have evolved through many changes in their lives. For this she shifts back and forth in time, looking at pivotal events. Again, I offer some key quotations:

“Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses. Or failed to.” (118)

“Both women felt some balance of power in their lives had been restored in relation to their men, after the initial blow of becoming mother to young babies, which had knocked them back; now their children filled them out rather than depleting them.” (161) 

“And we were terribly bored by the Manifesto, couldn’t understand a word of it, we preferred historical novels, really. (236) 

Earlier short story collections by Tessa Hadley include Sunstroke and Other Stories (2007) and Married Love and Other Stories (2013). Earlier novels are Accidents in the Home (2002), Everything Will Be All Right (2003), The Master Bedroom (2007), The London Train (2011), Clever Girl (2013), The Past (2015), and Free Love (2022). I’ve reviewed Free Love on this blog.

Add some of these titles to your list of books to buy or to request from your library!

Historical Fiction, 7th Century to 20th Century

Haven     Emma Donoghue     (2022)  A priest and two monks in seventh-century Ireland seek to escape the evils of civilization on a rocky island, uninhabited by humans, in the North Atlantic. Like Robinson Crusoe, that granddaddy of all survival fiction, this novel keeps you turning the pages to find out how the characters stay alive in a very challenging, isolated environment. I caught a few historical inaccuracies, but never mind those. For a couple hundred pages, the narrative is a slow burn, with vivid descriptions of the natural world. Then comes the devastating conclusion, which will leave you holding the book (or Kindle) in stunned silence.

The Prophet’s Wife     Libbie Grant     (2022)  In the early-19th-century, a wave of religious fervor swept through America, marked by revival meetings, emotional fervor, and belief in supernatural events. Several religious movements emerged, including the Latter-Day Saints, also called Mormons. The author here, herself a former Mormon, presents a fictionalized version of the development of this church, through the life of Emma Smith, wife of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith. Emma’s questioning of the authenticity of her husband’s mystical visions, though speculative, is fascinating. (The historical Emma’s opposition to the church’s practice of polygamy, however, is documented.) I found the narrative somewhat long-winded, but every few pages a passage of startling beauty stopped me in my tracks. And I learned a lot about the Latter-Day Saints.

The Sleeping Car Porter     Suzette Mayr     (2022)  Climb aboard the train that will take you across the vast expanse of Canada in the year 1929. Meet your porter, the mild-mannered Baxter, a closeted gay black man who is brutally overworked and constantly deprived of sleep as he serves the passengers in his assigned sleeping car all day and all night on multi-day runs. (He gets so tired that he hallucinates.) Baxter has been fascinated with people’s teeth since he found an abandoned dentistry textbook. He’s saving his wages to go to dental school, but he constantly fears dismissal from his job for minor infractions. I’m the granddaughter of a railway engineer. I love trains, and I couldn’t put down this inside look at the passengers, the crew, and the world teetering on the Great Depression.

The German Wife     Kelly Rimmer     (2022)  Historically, when WWII ended, hundreds of German scientists were quietly resettled in the US under a program called Operation Paperclip. By 1950, Huntsville, Alabama, had become a center for the development of American space technology, which was greatly advanced by these German scientists. The German Wife is a fictional exploration of how two families—one German, one American—were affected by Operation Paperclip. How did ordinary German people, especially Jews, live day-to-day during the period 1930-1950? What was it like to work for the Nazi rocket program? What decisions did German scientists make to save themselves and their loved ones? Was it right for the American government to grant the scientists immunity from prosecution? Some choices in life are ethically very clear. The other choices are the ones that this novel probes. For another take on post-WWII Germany, see my review of The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck.

Strong Women of Yore

By chance, I recently checked out from my local library three very different novels, all of which featured smart women who refused to be pushed around.

• In sixteenth-century Ireland:

My Lady Judge     Cora Harrison     (2007)

Mara is a “brehon”—a combination of investigator, prosecutor, judge, and law professor—in the west of Ireland in the sixteenth century, when the ancient Celtic laws have not yet been obliterated by English law. With loving detail, Harrison presents the rocky terrain of the area called the Burren (near Galway) and the complex kinships of the inhabitants. The huge ensemble cast moves through a murder-mystery plot that is full of red herrings and that resembles a modern police procedural. This is the first of the Burren Mystery series, which stretches to 14 books; I plan to read more.

• In 1946 London:

The Unkept Woman     Allison Montclair     (2022) 

As I’ve noted in my review of the first book in this historical mystery series—The Right Sort of Man (2019)—Montclair’s dialogue sparkles and moves her plot along at a brisk pace. Once again with The Unkept Woman, we’re in post-WWII Britain. Two enterprising young women, Iris Sparks and Gwen Bainbridge, run a marriage bureau, but they get themselves involved in murder investigations much more often than they’d like. Iris was a spy for Britain during World War II, and her past associations keep intruding on her postwar job. Gwen is a grieving war widow trying to rebuild a life for herself and her young son. See also my reviews of A Royal Affair (2020) and A Rogue’s Company (2021), and please read these four books in sequence.

• In 1950s and early 1960s California:

Lessons in Chemistry     Bonnie Garmus     (2022) 

In this bitingly satirical page-turner, Garmus re-creates a time period in America when women were expected to be compliant housewives who produced plenty of offspring. The lead character in Lessons in Chemistry, Elizabeth Zott, will have none of it. She’s a brilliant chemist at the (fictitious) Hastings Research Institute, where she’s treated like shit by all her male colleagues save one: Calvin Evans. Calvin is also a brilliant chemist, and the two fall in love. I can’t tell you more of the plot without spoilers, but I can assure you that the incidents of discrimination and harassment that Elizabeth endures are not exaggerated. Garmus deserves all the good reviews she’s received.

Dystopian Fiction: A Commentary

Our Missing Hearts     Celeste Ng     (2022)

The Handmaid’s Tale     Margaret Atwood     (1985)

I ordered the latest Celeste Ng novel from my library reluctantly, because dystopian novels set my teeth on edge. But I had reviewed Ng’s previous non-dystopian works (Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere) very positively, and I did not doubt her ability to deliver quality prose, so I steeled myself for a dystopian world of her creation. It was well worth all the cringing that I did.

The setting for Our Missing Hearts is an undefined time, not too long after the present day, in the Boston area and in New York City. Bird Gardner, age twelve, and his father scrape along in a grim student dormitory on a campus that closely resembles Harvard’s. Bird’s father had been a linguistics lecturer but now shelves books in the campus library.

The two keep their heads down and try not to attract attention in a society that has adopted a law called PACT, Preserving American Culture and Traditions. Under this law, Asian Americans suffer particular discrimination, and children deemed at risk of “anti-American” indoctrination can be forcibly removed from their parents. In Ng’s dystopian society, the PACT law is accepted by most of the public as a reasonable response to a previous period of civic unrest and economic crisis. Those who resist PACT are severely punished.

Bird’s mother, who left the family three years before the start of the story, was Asian American, and hence the lives of both mother and son are at risk. As Bird sets out on a journey to find his mother, the novel builds to a chilling climax.

Ng explains the basis of her plot in an Author’s Note at the end of the book: “There is a long history, in the US and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control.” She cites the compulsory separations of families in the years of slavery, the punitive boarding schools where Native American children were placed against the will of their parents, and the recent seizures of refugee children at the southern border of the US. These are well-documented cases, and Ng’s fictional world in Our Missing Hearts doesn’t exaggerate the dangers of such abuses of power.

As one character muses, “Is anyone listening out there? Are people simply rushing by? And how much of a difference can it really make, just one story, even all these stories taken together and funneled into the ear of the busy world. . . It is hard for anything to be heard and even if anyone hears it, how much of a difference could it really make, what change could it possibly bring . . . “ (299)

Our Missing Hearts joins the ranks of the classics of dystopian fiction that I read in high school and college: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (published in 1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). And, then, of course, there is The Handmaid’s Tale, which Margaret Atwood published in 1986. Until this week, I had never read Atwood’s bestseller. (Okay, okay. I really dislike dystopian novels. Even though I lived in Toronto in the 1970s, when Atwood was an up-and-coming Canadian writer and could often be spotted on downtown streets, I never got past her initial fiction offering, The Edible Woman.)

The video streaming adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale that started in 2017 has amplified Atwood’s message, bringing her warnings to a much wider public. But the original novel, which focuses on the subjugation of women in the realm of Gilead (a remade United States), is even more disturbing than Our Missing Hearts. I was struck by Atwood’s prescience, nearly four decades ago, in constructing a fictional world that predicted toxic destruction of the global environment; extreme fundamentalist censorship of written and visual materials; inequitable stratification of society; and, most shockingly, pregnancies forced on women.

Why do people write dystopian novels? Why do they create alternative histories? It’s often to send a message about totalitarian societies. The emphasis of the work can be political, economic, scientific, environmental, technological, religious, or a combination of these aspects. Dystopias are usually constructed by those with left-wing views, but they need not be—witness Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. I reviewed this 2016 novel which, despite the horrors of racism and poverty that Shriver depicts, is fascinating in its exaltation of a libertarian utopia that contrasts with the dystopia that she fashions.

I don’t plan to read a lot more dystopian fiction. It gives me nightmares. But I take the point that citizens in democratic societies need to be vigilant and activist if they want to protect their civil rights—indeed, their human rights. And authors like Atwood and Ng have chosen fiction as their medium of alarm, not articles in the New York Times. 

Two Historicals, Two Contemporaries

So that I don’t get too mired in the past with my reading material, I like to alternate historical and contemporary novels. First, reviews of two historicals:

The Giver of Stars     Jojo Moyes     (2019)  I’m late to the parade of Jojo Moyes’s bestselling popular novels, but I blazed through this one. The fast-moving plot is drawn from the actual existence of a cadre of women in Depression-era Appalachia who rode on horseback to deliver library books to people living in isolated cabins, a project of the federally-funded WPA. In her fictional take, Moyes deposits an outsider into rural Kentucky—the English bride of a mine owner’s son—and tells the story mainly through this woman’s eyes. There’s small-town gossip, domestic violence, religious fervor, racial animosity, moonshinin’, patriarchy, friendship, union bustin’, political corruption, and some true love.

The Cloister     James Carroll     (2017)  In NYC, the Metropolitan Museum’s medieval art department is housed in The Cloisters, which resembles a medieval monastery. On a rainy day in 1950, a Catholic priest ducks into The Cloisters and meets a docent who is a Holocaust survivor from Paris. Before WWII, she worked at the Sorbonne with her father, researching the 12th-century philosopher-monk Peter Abelard’s opposition to the Catholic church’s anti-Semitism. Carroll’s novel pivots back and forth between the 12th century and 1950. You’ll settle in more easily if you know a little Latin and if you know about Abelard’s love affair with the philosopher-abbess Héloïse d’Argenteuil. Even without that knowledge, you’ll find both stories powerful.

Next, two contemporaries:

Groundskeeping     Lee Cole     (2022)  Owen and Alma are both aspiring writers in their late twenties who meet at a small college in Kentucky. He’s a groundskeeper, and she’s on a one-year writing fellowship. They fall into a fraught relationship that is made more difficult by issues of social class and privilege. I didn’t recognize most of the music that they listen to, but the writing here is very fine—complex plotting, deft character delineations, rich setting descriptions.

Joan is Okay     Weike Wang     (2022)  All of us know what’s going to happen in the intensive care units of hospitals in New York City in the spring of 2020. We know that ICU physicians like Joan are going to be in the thick of the COVID pandemic. But in 2019, Joan can’t predict this. She’s dealing instead with the expectations of her boss (who rewards her workaholism) as well as the expectations of her Chinese American family (who want her to get married and have kids). She also has a strangely intrusive neighbor and an oddball work colleague. Still, Joan is okay, even when COVID hits. This short novel packs a punch. And don’t miss my review of Wang’s previous novel, Chemistry.

Historical-Fiction Sequels That Can Stand Alone

These three sequels are also very good as novels in their own right. In each case, I did not read the previous novel but caught on quickly.

Bloomsbury Girls     Natalie Jenner     (2022)  In 1950 London, World War II still looms large, and the patriarchy is in full swing. Three bright women who work in lowly jobs in a bookstore try to see their way forward, both in their careers and in their love lives. This fast read has weaving through it a satisfying mystery about a rare book, plus cameo appearances by real-life characters such as Samuel Beckett and Daphne du Maurier. The story is a sequel to the author’s popular The Jane Austen Society (2020).

The House of Fortune     Jessie Burton     (2022)  Burton transports us to 1705 Amsterdam, eighteen years after the time period of her award-winning novel The Miniaturist (2014). The backstory might be a little clearer if you’ve read The Miniaturist or at least seen the PBS series based on it, but The House of Fortune is nicely plotted and engrossing on its own. Thea, a young woman living in genteel poverty in a house straight out of a Dutch Masters painting, falls for a set painter at the city playhouse, but she’s pressed by her Aunt Nella to marry a wealthy lawyer. A touch of magic imbues the tale when exquisite miniature dolls and ornaments begin to appear.

The Air We Breathe     Andrea Barrett     (2007)  In a public tuberculosis sanatorium in rural New York during World War I, well-drawn patients and caregivers are involved in romance, learning, mystery, and vigilantism, leading to a dramatic climax. The author is renowned for her incorporation of science into her fiction—not to be confused with the genre of science fiction! Here she ranges widely, from archaeology to x-ray technology. This novel continues the stories of families portrayed in Ship Fever (1996), winner of the National Book Award.

Two Fiction + Two Nonfiction

First, two works of fiction, both about financiers:

Trust     Hernan Diaz     (2022)  Diaz explores the trustworthiness of narrative through four different takes on the same story, about a fictional early-twentieth-century Wall Street financier. First, a novella captures the style of Edith Wharton, then an unfinished autobiography reveals its author’s vanity and arrogance. A memoir by the autobiography’s ghost writer gives another perspective, and finally the diary of the financier’s wife provides a new twist to the tale. Diaz navigates these disparate genres with stylistic ease, as he asks, Whom do you trust to tell you the truth?

The Magnolia Palace     Fiona Davis     (2022)  I reviewed Davis’s 2016 novel, The Dollhouse, on this blog in 2017, and The Magnolia Palace is the fifth novel that Davis has churned out since then. Her signature formula includes an actual iconic building in New York City as the setting and two fictional young women, living decades apart, who are involved in a complicated mystery. The Magnolia Palace is a lightweight, entertaining romp, set in the Frick Collection, a fine art museum that was formerly the home of Henry Clay Frick’s family. The two women are models, one in 1919 and one in 1966. Brush up on your art history!

Next, two collections of essays:

These Precious Days     Ann Patchett     (2022) Patchett provides plenty of  insights into her family background and her fiction-writing process in these essays. (See my reviews of her novels Commonwealth and The Dutch House.) The title piece, and the longest, starts with Patchett reading Tom Hanks’s short story collection, Uncommon Type. She admires the book (as did I; see my review) and, through a series of coincidences, gets to know the actor and his assistant, Sooki Raphael. Sooki ends up as a long-term houseguest of Patchett and her husband at the beginning of the pandemic. Patchett writes a moving account of their unexpected and rewarding friendship.

Happy-Go-Lucky     David Sedaris     (2022)  For fans of David Sedaris (count me in), every new collection of his essays means a couple of evenings of sure-fire good reading, unveiling the vagaries of family relationships. (See my previous commentary on his body of work.) Happy-Go-Lucky focuses quite a bit on the last years of David’s nonagenarian father, Lou, and on the impact of the COVID pandemic. The stories are honest, touching, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes disturbing. There is simply no other essayist who is as irreverent and candid and downright funny as David Sedaris.

Sure It's [Fill in the Blank], But . . .

Sure it’s alternate history, but . . .

Rodham     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2020)  What if Hillary Rodham had not married Bill Clinton in 1975? This alternate version of Hillary’s life starts out hewing pretty closely to well-known facts—college at Wellesley, law school at Yale, where she meets Bill. But then it takes a different trajectory, with Hillary as an unmarried law professor and politician and Bill on another path also. Throughout, the portrayal of Hillary is, for me, totally believable, and the dialogue is especially realistic. Take a fun ride through the ”what ifs” with Rodham.

Sure, it’s time travel, but . . .

This Time Tomorrow     Emma Straub     (2022)  On the day that Alice turns forty, she’s reassessing her life goals—and getting very drunk. Unexpectedly, she’s transported back to her sixteenth birthday, in 1996. I don’t usually read time travel novels, but Alice is so endearing that I went with the premise. And Straub is writing a love letter to New York City as much as she’s exploring family bonds and the quandaries of aging.

Sure, it’s melodramatic, but . . .

When We Were Young     Richard Roper     (2021)  Two men who are turning thirty get together fourteen years after an acrimonious argument separated them. Joel is a successful TV comedy writer in London, with a glamorous actress as his girlfriend. Theo considers himself a failure, both in his career and in his relationships; he lives in a shed in his parents’ back yard. The melodrama and emotion are heavy here, but the insight into the hearts of these two young Brits is worth the read.

Sure, it’s got lots of tragedy, but . . .

Count the Ways     Joyce Maynard     (2021) 

The many sad and shocking events that punctuate Eleanor’s life are traced here from her childhood in the 1950s and 1960s up to nearly the present day. But I didn’t find this book depressing. Eleanor balances her career as an artist and children’s book author with her role as wife to her woodworker husband, Cam, and mother to their three children. Her musings on motherhood, in which she delights, touched me profoundly. The characters surrounding Eleanor are also deftly portrayed.

Fiction, Again

The Gravity of Birds     Tracy Guzeman     (2013)   An art history professor and an art authenticator in New York agree to search for missing works by a renowned painter and end up involved in a cross-country missing persons mystery. They discover that the two sisters depicted in the paintings had a troubled relationship with the painter thirty-five years in the past. I stayed up until 2 am to finish this poignant and complex novel.  Thanks to Cinda Hocking for the recommendation!

The Great Passion     James Runcie     (2022)   No, it’s not a love affair between two people but rather Johann Sebastian Bach’s “St Matthew Passion,” one of the greatest of all choral compositions, premiered in Leipzig in 1727. In this novel, the fictional Stefan Silbermann, as an adult, looks back on his year as a boy soprano and aspiring church organist studying with Bach. He narrates his experiences with the boisterous Bach household and with the brutal boarding school where he lives. Musicians should especially appreciate the details, but all fans of historical fiction should appreciate the portrayal of eighteenth-century Germany and of “The Big Guy,” JSB.

We Are the Brennans     Tracey Lange     (2021) Moving the plot along mostly through convincing dialog, Lange creates a vivid picture of the present-day Brennan family, pub owners in a town north of NYC. An estranged adult daughter comes home to recover after a serious car accident and gets retangled in family life, with some mystery and some romance enlivening things. The character names are odd, but the story is a winner. 

Whereabouts     Jhumpa Lahiri     (Written in Italian and translated by the author)            (2021)  Lahiri delivers a powerful if unconventional short novel, about an unnamed middle-aged single woman in an unnamed European city. Each of the 46 brief chapters is a precisely rendered, first-person vignette of some aspect of the woman’s daily life—she’s in her office or at the museum or on vacation or at the coffee bar. Altogether, the vignettes give the reader amazing insights into her personality and her life’s trajectory. 

The Kindest Lie     Nancy Johnson     (2021)  The racial tensions that trouble the US play out through the stories of two families in the months near the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Ruth Tuttle, a successful Black engineer, can’t move forward with her life in Chicago until she finds the baby whom she was forced to give up when she gave birth at age 17 in an industrial town in Indiana. Her search reconnects her with her family and with the family of a young white boy nicknamed Midnight. The author tackles difficult issues of race, class, poverty, and social justice forthrightly and eloquently.

French Braid     Anne Tyler     (2022)  Meet four generations of the Garrett family, from 1959 to 2020, mainly in Tyler’s favorite locale, Baltimore. The Garretts exemplify what families ideally do for one another: in the words of one character, “. . . ‘hide a few uncomfortable truths, allow a few self-deceptions.’” The family members are convincingly portrayed and their stories are memorable. Hang on through that first chapter, which seems slightly disjointed. This is a splendid book.

History and Mystery: Short Reviews

First, a few historical novels.  

Free Love     Tessa Hadley     (2022) You can rely on Hadley’s novels to unflinchingly probe the dynamics of modern British family life. In this one, she travels back to swinging 1967 London to observe the conventional Fischer family falling apart in the wake of the sexual revolution. The shocking liaisons and their aftermaths drive the plot, but I found myself lingering on the evocative metaphors in Hadley’s descriptive settings. Who knew that British weather could be so beautiful?

The Sense of an Ending     Julian Barnes     (2011)  Tony Webster, a retired Briton who is amicably divorced, receives an unusual legacy that brings to mind painful scenes from his time in secondary school and at university. This ruminative short novel about memory, regret, forgiveness, and revenge was made into a movie in 2017.

Violeta     Isabel Allende     (2022) Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle. The prolific Allende has been criticized in some reviews for lack of character development in Violeta. I don’t agree. Violeta Del Valle tells her captivating life story in first person, from her birth in 1920 during one pandemic to her death in 2020 during another. The backdrop is the political upheaval of this century in the history of an unnamed South American country that is very much like Chile. See also my review of Allende’s In the Midst of Winter.  

Next, some mysteries, one of which is a historical mystery and two of which take place at weddings! 

A Comedy of Terrors     Lindsey Davis     (2021)  I’ve reviewed the Flavia Albia mystery series as among my favorites, and this entry is no exception. Although the novels have more violence than I usually tolerate, the first-century Roman ambience is irresistible, the rapid-fire dialog brings the characters fully to life, and the plots will challenge the most sophisticated mystery reader. As an added treat, A Comedy of Terrors, set during the celebration of Saturnalia (the winter solstice), features the holiday revelries of private investigator Flavia Albia and her extended family.

The Guest List     Lucy Foley     (2020)  A British power couple are staging an elaborate wedding on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, but this is no rom-com. It’s a cleverly plotted murder mystery that unfolds with a see-sawing narrative from the standpoints of the wedding planner, the bride, the best man, the sole bridesmaid, a plus-one guest, and the groom.  

Destination Wedding     Aaron Stander     (2020) This is the eleventh of the Sheriff Ray Elkins mysteries set in the northwest of Michigan’s mitten. On the shore of Lake Michigan, severe weather causes havoc for the wealthy guests at a wedding and almost conceals a concurrent suspected murder and art theft. The local color can’t be beat, and the copyediting problems that marred previous titles in the series (as noted in my review) have been mostly resolved.

Just Fiction

A Town Called Solace     Mary Lawson     (2021)  Step back in time to 1972, and head to a small town in northern Ontario, Canada, for a tender story of loss, loneliness, and hope, told from the perspectives of three characters: a hospitalized elderly woman, an eight-year-old girl whose older sister has run away, and a thirty-something man facing divorce and joblessness.

Five Tuesdays in Winter     Lily King     (2021)  I usually prefer the expansiveness of the novel format, but each of these ten stories creates a universe of characters and life experiences. Settings range from New England to the North Sea, from the 1960s to the present. See also my review of King’s novel Writers and Lovers. 

Crossroads     Jonathan Franzen     (2021)  In 1971-72 Chicago, middle-aged clergyman Russ Hildebrandt and his wife and four children come under the microscope as they struggle with faith, sex, drugs, Vietnam, and rock ‘n’ roll for 580 detail-heavy pages. This is classic Franzen, with unforgettable characters, and it’s the first book of a projected trilogy.

Small Things Like These     Claire Keegan     (2021)  With prose reminiscent of the early work of James Joyce, Keegan’s novella fictionalizes a piece of the history of the Irish “laundries,” where unwed pregnant women were enslaved by the Catholic Church until 1996. In rural Ireland at Christmastime in 1985, a middle-aged family man stumbles upon evidence of such abuse at a local convent.

Fresh Water for Flowers     Valérie Perrin     Translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle     (2020)  This European bestseller is part mystery, part romance, part memento mori. Violette Toussaint, a cemetery keeper in a small town in Burgundy, provides informal grief counselling to mourners as she looks back on her own life and tries to fashion a future for herself. The translation is awkward at points, especially because of the British slang, but the meandering story is heartwarming.

Wish You Were Here     Jodi Picoult     (2021)  Are you ready for a novel set in New York City (and Galápagos) in 2020, right when the coronavirus pandemic breaks out? The societal details are all too familiar, but the story takes unexpected turns, yanking the reader along. The disjointedness of alternate realities reflects our times.

Fiction and Nonfiction: Brief Reviews

Every week, the fiction that I check out from the Ann Arbor District Library gets ruthlessly culled. By the time I’ve read twenty or thirty pages, I know if the story is too violent, the prose too banal, or the characters too obnoxious for my taste. Less than a quarter of my weekly haul ends up being reviewed on this website; reviews of three novels that passed my tests are below.

In this post I also offer three nonfiction titles. I read less nonfiction, and it’s usually in the categories of biography, memoir, cultural studies, or cooking. Here I’m branching out with a book on gardening, one of my passions. Happy reading!

Fiction

Matrix     Lauren Groff     (2021)     In the second half of the 12th century, in England, the bastard daughter of royalty is banished to an impoverished convent. Groff conjures up this life story for Marie de France, about whom very little is actually known—except that she is the author of highly influential surviving medieval poems. The constructed milieu of this novel is believable, the tale mesmerizing, the language incandescent. See also my review of Groff’s Fates and Furies.

The Other Bennet Sister     Janice Hadlow     (2020)  Plucking Mary, the middle of the five Bennet sisters, out of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Hadlow imagines how her adult life might have played out. The probings of Mary’s emotional struggles are beautifully rendered, and tone is totally Austenesque. But you don’t need to be an Austen fan to enjoy this gentle, lovely story.

The Vanishing Half     Brit Bennett     (2020)  In this complex exploration of connectedness and concealment in late 20th-century America, light-skinned Black twins go their separate ways as teenagers. The twist here is that one twin decides to pass for white and marries a white man, while the other marries a Black man and remains within the Black community. Each has a daughter, and the paths of these cousins cross in unexpected ways.  

Nonfiction

Bloom’s Best Perennials and Grasses:  Expert Plant Choices and Dramatic Combinations for Year-Round Gardens     Adrian Bloom     (2010)  The title says it all, and the photos are magnificent. This is the book for the gardener who wants to move from ordinary garden-center plants to the next level of gardening, selecting specific varieties based on growing conditions and design preferences.

Hidden Valley Road:  Inside the Mind of an American Family     Robert Kolker     (2020)  Between 1945 and 1965, Don and Mimi Galvin produced twelve children, six of whom were eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic. This exhaustive chronicle of their family life in Colorado, against the backdrop of shifting treatments for schizophrenia, is both heartbreaking and riveting.

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet     John Green     (2021)  These essays, adapted from the acclaimed podcast of the same title, explore and rate wildly diverse aspects of our geological era, the Anthropocene, including teddy bears, sunsets, Indianapolis, plague, and sycamore trees. John Green bares his soul with humor, intelligence, and compassion. Thanks to Vera Schwankl for recommending this extraordinary book!