The Cue Card

Greetings. I hope you are all staying well, sheltering in place. It’s not easy, but it’s the best thing we can do for the foreseeable future. Have you been able to concentrate enough to read much, or have you been too distracted by the news? It seems to come and go with me. Some days are more conducive to reading than others. I try to tell myself to keep a handle on the anxiety, while doing other things. 

Lately, I’ve turned off the TV news and have been tied up doing taxes, applying for Canadian citizenship (yea! I could get dual citizenship if this works out), doing my boot camp class virtually, going for dog walks, and talking with family and friends via Zoom. Oh it’s a new world out there, but it’s best to try and adjust. I’ve enjoyed keeping in touch with blogging friends during this time and knowing how each of you are doing in your part of the world, so write when you can. 

Now I’ll leave you with reviews of a few books I’ve finished recently. (Two were e-book reads, and two were audiobook listens.) 

Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA by Amaryllis Fox / Knopf / 240 pages / Oct. 2019

Why I Picked It Up: I think I first saw this memoir on Kathy’s blog over at Bermuda Onion and then found it as an audiobook at my library. The author narrates the audio and does a pretty good job of it as I was drawn in from the get-go. I’m also a fan of the show “Homeland” — and the movies based on the John le Carre novels — so all of the true-life books coming out recently by female CIA agents who signed up after 9/11 are sparking my interest.

Synopsis: This is a memoir by a woman who was recruited while she was doing graduate studies at Georgetown University, at age 22, into the CIA. It describes her youth, her college years at Oxford and abroad, where she met and interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma; her recruitment by the CIA while at Georgetown and training at “the farm”; and her eight years as an agent in the field tracking and trying to infiltrate terrorist arms networks to thwart nuclear attacks. 

My Thoughts: The author’s life certainly makes for fascinating material. And her book is quite revealing even for its little tidbits into life at the very secretive CIA. How did she even get to publish it?  Well apparently she gave the manuscript to the CIA for a year and when they didn’t do much with it …. she made their minor changes and went ahead and had it published without their final approval, Whoa. 

It’s a memoir that’s pretty engrossing for its glimpses into her training at the CIA and for her years as a spy in the field. The main mission she describes in the book is her contacts in various overseas locations with a Hungarian arms dealer who has links to al-Qaeda and its intentions to detonate a nuclear device. You’ll want to stay tuned to find out how her interactions with him play out, but thankfully a detonation of such a device is averted.

It’s one of those books that will make you worry with its descriptions of what goes into a nuclear bomb and how nuclear materials are missing from the former Soviet Union, and how terrorists around the world are trying to get and use them. A few parts of the memoir come off a bit CIA insider-y and flew by me, but other parts are about her personal life (two marriages during these years) and her work, which takes a big toll on it. Towards the end she has a baby with husband #2 in China and continues to do dangerous work even with the baby by her side (yikes!)… until eventually she gives up the job. 

I thought it was interesting though scary to think about. It’s a slim book and I felt a bit of it was padded and just filled with her thoughts about trying to gain trust and peace and how her attitude about the work changed over time. It could be construed in places as thin on material or lacking in more detailed missions but apparently the author has said that it was meant more as a coming of age story than an operational CIA one. So you might take that into account. Despite these caveats, I still found it pretty eye-opening and worthwhile. 

Separation Anxiety by Laura Zigman / Ecco / 288 pages / March 2020

Why I Picked It Up: The cover made it look light and fun (yes I’m a dog person) and something maybe easy to read during Covid-19 … though I think it ended up being darker than I expected.

Synopsis:  This is one of those woman-on-the-brink kinds of stories. And when we first meet middle-aged Judy Vogel — she indeed seems to have gone through a lot in a short time. Her parents’ recent passings have taken a sad toll on her as well as her teenage son’s need to be free and independent of her, and the separation with her husband, who still lives in their house because they can’t afford to get a divorce or live separately. 

Her best friend is also sick with cancer, and Judy — once an author of a successful children’s book (made into a PBS series) — struggles from writer’s block and hasn’t written anything meaningful in years. Instead she writes for a living small, infomercial-like pieces for a health/happiness website that she can almost do in her sleep. So when Judy finds a baby sling in her basement … and ends up putting the family sheltie in it … and caring her around like a therapy dog, can you really blame her? 

My Thoughts: This sad, pained, and angry woman is undergoing a crisis and depression … but her daily misadventures are told in a pretty snarky amusing way, which reminded me very slightly of the humor in Maria Semple’s 2012 novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette.” At times it’s a little whiny and other times right on. 

Judy’s life continues to snowball downwards … leading to run-ins at her son’s Montessori school and at a writer’s retreat seminar … but it ends after an event with a hopeful upturn that put a smile on my face. Maybe Judy is finally able to appreciate what she has …. and of those people she meets and has around her. And while it features a dog slung around her throughout the story … it’s not much about the dog. 

The German House by Annette Hess / Translated by Elizabeth Lauffer / HarperVia / 336 pages / Dec. 2019 (in Germany in 2018)

Why I Picked It Up:  I think I heard about this German debut novel through the blogosphere and it looked alluring. I listened to it as an audiobook and the narrator has a pretty strong German accent, but it seemed to fit well with the main character of Eva Bruhns. 

Synopsis: “The German House” is a coming-of-age story about 24-year-old Eva Bruhns who lives with her parents (who own the German House restaurant), and her sister who is a nurse, and her younger brother Stephan and their dog. It’s 1963 and Eva is offered a job to work as a Polish translator at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, which she doesn’t know much about and which her family and fiance don’t want her to get involved with. But Eva accepts the job and comes to learn plenty during the long trial about the atrocities committed there and secrets from the past. 

My Thoughts: It’s an engaging slow-reveal-kind-of story that explores complicity, guilt, and justice — and also has quite a few side plots going on too: about whether Eva will marry her fiance, her sister’s relationship with a doctor at the hospital, the prosecutor David Miller’s life, her parents, and even fires that are being set in the city. 

Much of it kept me interested … though at times the novel’s abrupt transitions between the characters and side plots made it feel clunky and some character turns perhaps require some suspension of disbelief. Eva is at times annoyingly naive at first …. though her character undergoes quite a rough coming of age during it. At the end, some character side plots are resolved while others are more left up in the air. All in all the parts about the real-life trial and its testimonies seemed well researched and were effectively brought to life.

The Cactus League by Emily Nemens / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / 275 pages / Feb. 2020

Why I picked It Up: It should be baseball season right now but sadly it isn’t. Still I thought I’d give this short novel a whirl to get some old baseball, spring season spirit going. It’s also a debut novel by a promising writer who’s the editor of The Paris Review and was reviewed favorably by Susie at the blog Novel Visits.  

Synopsis: The novel’s nine chapters — or nine innings I suppose — delve into various characters all having to do with a major league baseball team’s spring training in Arizona. The chapters interconnect in a way showing various sides of the star player — Jason Goodyear — during preseason. There’s chapters involving the team’s batting coach, a baseball groupie, a sports agent, a team owner, an injured pitcher, baseball wives, the stadium’s organist, a rookie, and a 7-year-old fan. 

My Thoughts: The structure of “The Cactus League” reminded me a bit of Elizabeth Strout’s novel 2008 “Olive Kitteridge.” Its chapters feature the lives of separate characters … but interconnect in a way involving the team and the player Jason Goodyear. In that way it’s like interconnected short stories yet it is a novel.

I found “The Cactus League” pretty easy to jump into and thought it captured a picture of the competitiveness of spring training, the atmosphere, and a glimpse into these various people connected to the team’s spring training in Arizona, but it all seemed a bit dark or shady. Most were not really likable to me, and it didn’t exactly conjure a sense of baseball’s excitement or goodness. 

It felt more like the seedier side or greedier side of a ball club, though there were tinges of redemptive aspects to it. I also didn’t care for a prelude by a sports reporter that came at the start of each chapter. These parts didn’t jibe for me. I liked some character’s chapters better than others, so in that way it felt a bit uneven. But by the end you certainly get a sense of how flawed Jason Goodyear is … and yet how also human and good as well.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these books or authors — and if so, what did you think?

Hi. I’m not sure where to begin but I hope everyone is staying safe and staying put at home. We are holed up here in western Canada and just going out for dog walks a couple times a day and only essential grocery shopping. It doesn’t look like we are near the peak of this pandemic, so everyone just hang on and stay in … so we can try to flatten the Curve of this. The next few weeks will be crucial apparently. Luckily the sun came out today, which was nice. It had been snowy earlier in the week as you can see below.

Meanwhile we’ve watched a few Oscar nominated movies at home recently … finally getting to “Knives Out,” “JoJo Rabbit” and “Bombshell.” Have you seen any of these? All three seemed worthwhile.

I especially liked Thomasin McKenzie’s role as the Jewish girl in “Jojo Rabbit” — she follows up the excellent movie “Leave No Trace” with another good part — and Cuban/Spanish actress Ana de Armas makes her mark as Marta, the nurse in “Knives Out.” (I hear Ben Affleck is dating her these days after their upcoming movie together “Deep Water,” hmm.) Though perhaps we liked the potency of “Bombshell” the best out of the three. Wow Charlize Theron really nails the role of one-time Fox anchor Megyn Kelly. I could barely tell it was Charlize! It’s a movie that will make your skin crawl in parts. Kudos to Gretchen Carlson who ultimately blew the whistle on Fox News’s former CEO Roger Ailes and his awful harassment, good gawd.  And now I’ll leave you with reviews of two books I finished lately. 

It’s been too long since I picked up a Tracy Chevalier novel — not since her bestseller “Girl With a Pearl Earring” in 1999, but I’m glad I finally did. I listened to her 2019 novel “A Single Thread” as an audiobook and I enjoyed walking to it. At first I thought the story was too slow with its “gentle pace” and that nothing was happening, but then the more I went on I found the story pretty immersive and quite soothing … during these times. 

It’s set in England in 1932 and Violet Speedwell, age 38, is still hurting after the loss of her brother and fiance who were killed fighting in WWI. Her mother, who she looks after, is grumpy and embittered and her other brother Tom, who has a family, thinks she should get out more. Violet finally saves up enough to move away to Winchester … where her life as a single woman begins to improve with her lodging at a boarding house and her work as a typist at an insurance company and with an embroidery society at Winchester’s grand Cathedral, where she begins to make friends. Eventually she meets a 60-year-old male bell ringer at the cathedral who strikes a chord with her … and yet he’s married.

The story has a bit about embroidery and church bell ringing to it — but you need not be enticed by these to like the overall story; still they add some interest to it. I like too how the story explores the independence of women’s roles in it … mothers, wives, sisters etc…. in an era where these roles often seemed so confining and stifling. It tells of the Lost Generation from a women’s perspective … in which Violet is viewed as a spinster but she tests that mold … by getting her own place and job and by following her heart and her friends. She has the good fortune to meet Louisa Pesel (who was a real-life embroidery pioneer of the day, see more about her here) who shows her the way and teaches her how to stitch pretty cushions and kneelers for the cathedral. 

It’s a gentle tale with a cast of characters still gaining their footing after the Great War — that has conflicts and resolutions along the way — but one that felt gradually uplifting and appealed to me during these stressful pandemic times. 

Next up, I read the slim memoir by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and her late husband James D. Houston about her family’s years when they were relocated with thousands of other Japanese-Americans by the U.S. government after the attack on Pearl Harbor to Manzanar internment camp in California.

“Farewell to Manzanar” came out in 1972 and is often required reading in many high school classes, but for whatever reason it was unknown to me until I saw it in a bookstore window when I was in Ketchum, Idaho, in February. The library at Ketchum was doing a lecture series with various authors on U.S. internment camps during WWII … mainly because one of the 10 camps — Minidoka — is nearby and this marks the 75th year since the U.S. internment camps closed in 1945. At one time the camps across the West held as many as 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry.

I’ve read novels about such heart-wrenching experiences — in “Snow Falling on Cedars” by David Guterson and the “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” by Jamie Ford — but this was my first memoir account of it and it was pretty eye-opening.

The author was 7 by the time her large family (she was the youngest of 10) was relocated to Manzanar interment camp at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California in 1942 and left around the time she was 11. At first the conditions there were very poor and harsh and her father took to drinking and abusing her mom. A couple years later the family switched to another block building and things improved and they grew a bit more accustomed to their life behind the camp’s fences. 

It’s sort of a coming-of-age tale told by the author decades after she left …. and tells of her family before, during, and after internment … and how the experience affected her when she was young about her race and identity over her whole life. The family also disintegrated quite a bit during their time at Manzanar, especially with their father, and it is sad in that respect and in other ways … such as how it took their livelihoods, respect, and dignity away. 

It’s a subtly told but powerful story, which taught me quite a bit about this unjust and terrible policy in our nation’s history and what it did to people living in the U.S., as well as in Canada, which had many internment camps too. My only quibble with the memoir is that although the author remembers a lot about her life then, she is writing about it many decades later … so it seems to skip, or is less detailed or muted of her time a bit near the end. Still it is a true tale worth visiting and knowing about. 

Sometime I’d also like to read the novel “Obasan” by Joy Kogawa, who wrote her book based on her family’s experiences at an internment camp in Canada. My husband recommended this one to me. 

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these books or seen the movies I mentioned? And if so, what did you think? 

Take Care & Stay well Everyone. 

Well the news seems pretty dismal these days, but we will continue to hope that the world can get a handle on the virus. Perhaps the coming of spring or summer might help along with all the quarantines.

I’m supposed to travel on Tuesday to Vancouver, B.C., to play in a senior tennis tournament of all things, which was planned long ago, but I’m not sure if that is a good idea or will even happen now. I will evaluate it as the time gets closer. As Dr. Fauci of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases warns: things will get worse.

Hmm, tell that to my book assistant dog Stella, who’s always ready for a walk at a moment’s notice. I guess we can always hole up at home and read books and listen to audios … and hopefully those who can … can work from home. Good grief, it’s starting to sound like a “Station Eleven” kind of pandemic, though perhaps it reminds me a bit more of Ling Ma’s 2018 apocalyptic novel “Severance,” in which the protagonist is eventually the last one working in her office building. Worrisome days for sure. 

Speaking of which, I did finish one post-apocalyptic kind of novel this past week and I didn’t even plan to pick up the genre, but it just came in for me at the library. The timing was all too apropos. “The Second Sleep,” which I listened to as audiobook, was my first novel by British author Robert Harris, who often writes historical thrillers, and I was not disappointed. The storytelling was good and the plot was interesting.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that as the story opens in 1468 with Father Christopher Fairfax on horseback sent to a village by the bishop to bury an old priest … one initially thinks it takes place during the Middle Ages ruled by the all powerful Church … but soon enough little clues pop up that these Dark Ages are not exactly in the past. 

Other oddities begin to unfold that perhaps the old priest, who might have been murdered, was part of a heretical movement whose volumes he has on his shelves. And there’s a strange tower in the woods called the Devil’s Chair where human remains are found and where Father Fairfax and a few townies begin to suspect has hidden relics of the past world, which they propose to dig up. Oh, I was lured in by these mysterious circumstances.  

It’s a novel that reminded me a bit of the 1968 movie “Planet of the Apes” … since astronaut Charlton Heston you remember — marooned on a planet with the Apes — comes upon destroyed relics of our own civilization (the Statue of Liberty) … which are in pieces due to an apocalypse while he’s been gone, which has occurred and killed off humans. “The Second Sleep” is a bit like that … in which our civilization has gone through something hundreds of years before … and relics are found by those living in a Dark Age who try to figure out what has happened. It’s an interesting plot and involves an endearing protagonist in Father Christopher Fairfax, who begins to doubt himself as a priest among other things. The action-laden ending felt a bit abrupt to me, but I wonder if that might mean there’s a sequel in the works. I guess only time will tell. 

Before that, I read Nina Willner’s terrific 2016 family memoir “Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall,” which I think I first heard raved about by JoAnn at the blog Gulfside Musing. I’m so glad I got to it as it sheds more light on living through the Cold War from 1945 to 1989 perhaps than any book I’ve ever read. 

In it the author recounts her family’s story starting with her grandparents, who had a large family of nine children in a German village, but whose lives change again in 1945 after WWII, when the Soviets take over the eastern half of Germany and enforce their rule of communism over the populace. 

One of their kids (the author’s mother Hanna) escapes to the West and ends up raising a family in the U.S. but has very little communication or knowledge for 40 years of how her family is faring in the closed East Germany. Her parents and the remaining kids in turn are blacklisted after Hanna’s escape and have run-ins over the decades with the communist authorities. Yet their perseverance to keep together as a family and their will to survive despite the very harsh conditions under the totalitarian regime — with its minimal food rations and supplies and all of its spying tactics — are pretty incredible.

This story movingly tells of both sides of the family in the East and West and illuminatingly sheds light on the history of the Cold War and what people went through there. The author writes well about the human story within the framework of history. I’d recommend this book to just about everyone as it pretty much blew me a bit out of my seat … in an eye-opening way.

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these books, and if so, what did you think?  Most importantly, stay safe everyone.

We are headed out soon over hill and dale to meet up with my sister’s family for a ski long weekend in Idaho. It should be an adventure to get there in our loaded up car, but there’s a window of clear weather ahead, so we will go for it.

Our dog Stella, my book assistant, will be coming too and will get to see her half-sister Lab dog, Sadie, who my sister has. These dogs like the snow and the cross-country skiing, and it should be a festive time with a full household there. 

Perhaps while in Ketchum, Idaho, we will get to visit the memorial and grave of author Ernest Hemingway, who is buried there. Apparently Papa Hemingway, as he was known, loved visiting the town of Ketchum and the area for decades starting in 1939 and he bought a house there with his fourth wife Mary Welsh in 1959.

It was there at his Ketchum home where he worked at a standing desk on the posthumously published works, “A Moveable Feast,” “The Dangerous Summer,” and “Islands in the Stream” … until he died on July 2, 1961, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His house there is private so I don’t think it can be toured. But since I like his books, I plan to bring one or two of them along for the ride and read from them while there. What about you — do you have a favorite Hemingway novel?

And now just a flash about the novel I recently completed. It was Ben Lerner’s book “The Topeka School,” which made the Best Books of 2019 lists at both the New York Times and The Washington Post and I listened to as an audiobook. It was said to be a prequel to Lerner’s prior novels “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04,” the latter of which I thought was quirky and amusing. But unfortunately “The Topeka School” was a bit of a slog to me.

It describes the formative years of a character named Adam Gordon (who’s based on the author), growing up in Topeka, Kansas in the ’80s and ’90s and his parents’ lives who are psychologists at a renown foundation. Adam’s a champion at debate (on the school team and at state competitions) but suffers from migraines due to a childhood concussion.

The chapters of Adam’s adolescence alternate with those of his parents: Jonathan (who has an affair with his wife’s therapist) and Jane (who’s trolled for her bestselling feminist book), and later an older Adam, who looks back on his life and family as a writer living in Brooklyn. There’s also chapters featuring a teenage outsider named Darren, who’s mentally troubled and whose involvement in Adam’s school clique ends disastrously in violence.

What to make of it all? The author has said he wanted to write a family saga that also shined a light on broader social implications about the prehistory of the Trump era. And how masculinity in a red state juxtaposed with his family’s background in psychotherapy and talking about one’s feelings. The book’s themes deal with language and therapy, juxtaposed with bullying, masculinity and violence. At least that’s what I gather from it. 

It’s not an easy read because the story to me didn’t have much of an arc. It’s a bit scattered and seemingly episodic into the lives of the Gordon family and lacked to me much suspense or a storyline to egg me on. And like quite a bit of “autofiction,” which is a fictionalized kind of autobiography or memoir, which this novel is, it can sometimes feel like navel-gazing at its most minutia, where everyday lives or inner lives can be described in the most mundane detail … enough to put one right to sleep.

Autofiction these days is very popular, with such authors as Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgård, Jenny Offill, Ben Lerner and many more … writing about their lives in such fictionalized ways. While I like some of it and think parts can be profound, I can only seem to take it in small doses then have to flee to novels with more of a storyline. There were glimmers for me of interest and brilliance in “The Topeka School” but also parts that felt like a long winter’s nap.

What about you do you like reading autofiction? And have you read Ben Lerner or any of these other authors — and if so, what did you think?

Hi. We’ve had much milder temperatures lately … the weather went from -25F the week before to 40F this past week … Wow what a huge difference it makes. We’re happy here again, see Stella at left with her trusty ball and the city skyline in the background. And it’s staying light a tad bit later nearing 6 p.m. Have you noticed? This is all positive news though we still have to get through February. So perhaps let’s not celebrate the coming of spring just yet. 

Meanwhile this week I’ve been reading about all the controversy and backlash against Jeanine Cummins’s immigration novel “American Dirt” for which she was reportedly paid an advance of more than a million. While various authors, including some Latino writers, have highly praised the thriller-type book for being a moving story that gives some insights into why we desperately need immigration reform, other Chicano/Latino writers have slammed Cummins for propagating stereotypes and appropriating the story of Mexican migrants and exploiting their suffering. Uh-oh, cultural appropriation has been at the forefront of battles with authors these past many years … and apparently Cummins isn’t Mexican and she doesn’t speak Spanish. But she has said she did five years worth of research for the book and traveled to Mexico and throughout the borderlands to get a feel for it. 

Others are mad that Cummins’s novel is getting huge attention (such as being picked for Oprah’s book club) instead of more authentic ones. As Chicano author David Bowles has said: “There is nothing wrong with a non-Mexican writing about the plight of Mexicans. What’s wrong is erasing authentic voices to sell an inaccurate cultural appropriation for millions.” Ouch. In addition David J. Schmidt in an article for the Huffington Post wrote he was bothered that “American Dirt” had in it borrowed elements from such authors books as Luis Alberto Urrea and Sonia Nazario. Hmm really? He says her book “leans much more heavily on these preexisting works than on any original research.” Check out his article here.  

So this is where it stands now. I guess in a perfect world, people would be able to read both: literary fiction from “authentic” authors and thrillers from those who care and research an issue and want to make a point. I still plan to read “American Dirt” but will have in mind others whose immigration stories I should get to as well. As critic Ron Charles of the Washington Post wrote: “If “American Dirt” … motivates some Americans to fight against this country’s immoral immigration actions along the Southern border, then more power to Jeanine Cummins. And once engaged in that struggle, these readers might move on to better books.” Hmm. What do you think about this controversy?  Will you read it?  I guess I can see both sides of the hoopla and I’m still thinking about it. For now I’ll leave you with a couple of reviews of two novels I finished lately. 

The Innocents by Michael Crummey, 304 pages, Doubleday, 2019

Synopsis: After sickness overcomes their parents, a pre-adolescent sister and brother are left orphaned and alone in a place their parents built in an isolated cove on Newfoundland’s northern coastline in the 1800s. The two must contend with their own survival amid the harsh, isolated natural conditions, and eventually their own physical awakenings. 

My Thoughts:  It’s true I have only read two of Michael Crummey’s five novels but already he could be my favorite Canadian author writing these days … although I also like Margaret Atwood, David Chariandy and various others. Crummey hails from Newfoundland and lives in St. John’s, which is a world away from where we are in western Canada. I’d really like to visit the eastern Canadian coastline sometime. Crummey writes amazingly about the natural world, and past ways of life, and the two novels I’ve read of his combine these elements.   

In this novel “The Innocents” I felt like I was right there observing these two sibling orphans amid their daily lives in their isolated Newfoundland cove in the 1800s. Their speech, the conditions, their need to get food from their little boat, and their isolation all conjure up the atmosphere of the place and water and waves of their cove. From comments on Goodreads, I guess that some found the novel slow-going, but I found it quite captivating and not very long. I was curious about their survival and arduous lives and the nature surrounding them. 

As the two kids age into their later teenage years, the storyline of their relations does not exactly go where you want it to go … though it explores the situation quite subtly …. of these two very isolated people left very young with no guidance or much human contact. They’re young’uns rather innocent to know too much better, and the story follows the tensions between them realistically. It’s not a matter you like to think about … but the author makes their lives very believable and you wonder what will become of these two in the cove and if they will come to leave.

I’m glad Catherine over at the blog The Gilmore Guide to Books also read and liked “The Innocents.”  See her review here. And here is my review of Crummey’s enjoyable 2014 novel “Sweetland.” 

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett / 354 pages/ Tin House / 2019

Synopsis: When a father who is a taxidermist suddenly passes away, his adult kids and wife who live in a small Florida town find their worlds rocked with grief and change. The protagonist Jessa, 30-ish, her father’s favorite, takes over the family’s taxidermy business but seems to be having a rough go of it, as well as her brother Milo, a father of two who has little interest in work, and their mother who seems to be in a full-on crisis, making art of animals posed in provocative positions. In addition, siblings Milo and Jessa are longing for the same woman, Brynn, who they grew up and fell in love with … but who has left them, skipping town years before. 

My Thoughts: I listened to this novel as an audiobook read by Jesse Vilinsky who does a good job inhabiting Jessa’s narrative as she tries to right her family’s downward trajectory after the death of her father. It alternates between the present — with her continuing his taxidermy business and trying to keep her family from derailing — and the past with her longing after the love of her life, Brynn, who became her brother’s wife, but skipped town on both of them. 

This is a family on the brink kind of story though a bit quirkily told … and it keeps you waiting to see if Jessa, her brother Milo and her mother will be able to recover and rebound. I liked the present-day story of the family a bit more than the alternating past one. It’s definitely a different kind of tale with a lot of the taxidermy trade — cutting up of dead animals — and the physical relationships of the gay protagonist Jessa, who’s in love with the same woman her brother is. I told you it has a different take. (Therefore beware if you’re uncomfortable about reading about dead animals and gay relationships.)

I realize taxidermy might make for an interesting metaphor for a novel … of dissecting lives etc. … but it proved a bit too much for me at times; I’m a little overly sensitive about animals and this story has a lot of dead ones in it. The author also seems to overdo a bit the smells and tastes in the novel of gross stuff like … blood, vomit, periods, bodily fluids, dead gunk, you name it … it’s probably in here. She definitely likes to get to the tangible aspects of things. 

Still “Mostly Dead Things” did make a few Best of 2019 lists such as at The New Yorker … and the author seems talented and has a fresh sense of seeing things … so I’m glad I made it through the novel — even if it was a bit too much for me at times. I’ll be curious to see what Arnett writes next. Surely it’ll be a bit strange and funny/quirky I think. 

That’s all for now. What about you have you read these novels — and if so, what did you think?

Well it’s simply too cold to go outside this week, though I have been out in brief dashes. We’re in a deep freeze up here, which apparently won’t be ending till Sunday. Good grief, I don’t even want to say what it is … but it’s around -30C / -20F.  It won’t reach above 0 degrees F this week, so it’s best to bunker down. The photo of my dog and book assistant at left was actually taken in November (she never gets too cold for walks, but also likes to steal time when inside in front of the space heater). I don’t think I could take a decent photo this week as my hands would probably freeze off, but I am continuing with indoor tennis and some time at the gym along my usual chores. 

I hope everyone is staying well and doesn’t have our conditions. Knock on wood. I’ll leave you with some reviews of books I completed lately. The first two are from January and the bottom three are novels I finished in December.  I need to get these off my chest. 

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy / Bloomsbury / 208 pages 2019 

Synopsis: In 1988, a young British historian Saul Adler, 28, who’s planning on going to the German Democratic Republic (the GDR) to do research and leave his photographer girlfriend Jennifer behind, gets grazed by a car in the crosswalk of Abbey Road, which seems to alter his life’s trajectory. Years later in 2016, Saul is hit in the same crosswalk and his memories while hospitalized return to his time in the GDR decades before. 

My Thoughts: Ohh this is a sly and odd little novel, which I listened to as an audiobook performed well by British actor George Blagden. You get a picture of Saul’s life — his youth in England that wasn’t very happy with his bully brother and communist father — and his sexual life and time in the GDR getting involved with his German translator (Walter) and the man’s sister (Luna). It’s a bit interesting Saul’s stay behind the Berlin Wall and those he meets there. You get a sense of the people’s secrecy and all the surveillance by the Stasi. Jump forward to 2016 in the book’s second half, and you find out more about what happened to Saul thereafter and those he had relationships with.  

I wasn’t totally sure what to make of it all — the two accidents decades apart in the crosswalks and the story’s various layers — but it seems to make some interesting parallels between Saul’s personal life and the political history then, contrasting such dynamics as East and West, feminine and masculine, past and present and life and death. It’s a story that’s thought-provoking and well written — even if it’s at times a bit bewildering. I found it quite visual amid its East and West settings and sad and with regrets.   

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom / Grove Press / 304 pages / 2019 

Synopsis: The author’s debut memoir presents her family’s story (Sarah being the youngest of 12) about their lives in New Orleans East, an area far from the limelight of the city’s center, which they were uprooted from in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina.  

My Thoughts: This memoir received a lot of accolades at the end of 2019, making the Best of 2019 Lists of various publications including The Washington Post and The New York Times so I was eager to get my hands on it. I found it to be many things: a memoir, a family history, and a story about Katrina and New Orleans. The first part (pre-Katrina) deals with her parents’ and family’s history and about being the youngest of 12 siblings and half-siblings, growing up in their dilapidated, crowded Yellow House in New Orleans East. Her life eventually takes her away, as she pursues college in Texas, then working for Oprah’s magazine in NYC, and a job abroad in Africa. 

The second half (post-Katrina) involves the displacement of her family and so many others and the awful mess that came after the devastating hurricane. She returns to New Orleans to help family and work and eventually becomes disillusioned in a job in the office of Mayor Ray Nagin, which she leaves after six months. 

I liked much of the author’s factual reporting about the area and what happened, and felt for her family in losing their home and everything they went through. My only qualm with the book was it’s a bit here and there, and I felt it could’ve been a bit more focused and edited … the various anecdotes of her brothers became a bit too much. I did get her sense of the strong love she has for her family and the city she grew up in despite her misgivings about all the things wrong with it. I appreciated the author’s perspective, though thought some of the book could’ve used more honing.  

After the Flood by Kassandra Montag / Morrow / 432 pages / 2019

Synopsis: This debut novel takes place a 100 years into the future where most of Earth is covered by water and people live on boats or in mountaintop enclaves. A mother named Myra, who lives on a boat with her second daughter Pearl, intends to make a journey to find her missing first daughter (Row) who her husband has absconded with. 

My Thoughts: I enjoyed listening to this one as an audiobook read by Hillary Huber. The plot — of Earth being covered mostly by water in a century’s time — I’ve been told is pretty unscientific … even if the polar ice caps were to fully melt they wouldn’t amount to that — but still I went with it. 

The journey of Myra and her daughter Pearl is quite an undertaking and they run into some wily characters along the way and face various hardships. I will refrain from being more specific but you get the gist: it’s a grim outlook. The author does well describing their world and inner turmoil. I found it quite visual and suspenseful even though it’s a long story. It’s a post-apocalyptic survival tale that is about a family being pulled apart … and a mother’s never-ending quest to find her missing daughter, which held my attention from start to finish. 

Nothing More Dangerous by Allen Eskens / Mulholland Books / 304 pages / 2019

Synopsis:  The story features 15-year-old Boady Sanden who navigates the racial tensions of his high school and Jessup, Missouri in 1976. He lives with his widowed mother and becomes friends with a black boy named Thomas who moves in across the street with his family. But when Thomas’s father becomes head of the town’s largest factory, threats and bad things begin to happen. The two boys also find a body in the woods and start to investigate, making them targets of the bad seeds in town. 

My Thoughts: I enjoyed this coming-of-age, small town crime story that’s been compared to William Kent Krueger’s novel “Ordinary Grace” and reminded me slightly of a male teen version of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Eskens has a nice touch drawing in the reader and the suspense of it builds until a final reckoning that shapes their lives forever. My only slight criticism is that the boys in the story seemed a bit younger acting than 15, though perhaps that’s a bit due to taking place in 1976? All in all, it was another enjoyable tale for me from Allen Eskens, whose first novel “The Life We Bury” remains my favorite. 

Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams / Gallery/Scout Press / 336 pages / 2019

Synopsis:  This debut novel features a 25-year-old Jamaican-British woman living in London, known as Queenie, whose breakup with her white boyfriend Tom sends her on a downward spiral of self-destruction and bad choices. She then gets suspended from her British newspaper job and her self-esteem and mental health plummet … until she seeks therapy that helps rebuild her life. 

My Thoughts:  I’m not sure if I was the right person for this novel. During Queenie’s downward slide, there’s a lot of casual sex with a multitude of partners — some of which is abusive and was hard to take. Her fall is a bit of a darker storyline than perhaps the novel’s marketing of being like a black “Bridget Jones,” or “Sex and the City” would have you at first believe. 

I was rooting for Queenie to bounce back and luckily towards the end she finally sees a therapist, which enables her to very slowly rebuild her life with her family, close friends, job, and treating herself better. This part was easier to like with her grabbing the reins of her life and asserting more control. The novel involves various issues including interracial dating, black lives matter, abuse, racism, complicated family and friends, mental health and self esteem … it covers much ground. In the end, Queenie’s transformation is a thankful reprieve. 

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read any of these, and if so, what did you think?