SPEAK NO EVIL

Speak No Evil, Uzodima Iweala, HarperCollins, 2018, 152 pp

 

 

What is it with human beings always trying to fix each other and make us all the same so we fit into a box of being and looking the "right" way? The latest example that keeps coming up on my radar is gay conversion therapy. Not that this is a new human endeavor. It just keeps coming up.

 

I recently saw the movie, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Cameron, a teenage girl who is attracted to girls, gets sent to a gay conversion camp run by religious people. Camp is bad enough but Gay Conversion Christian Camp? What could be worse?

 

Speak No Evil revolves around the teenage son of Nigerian immigrants in Washington, DC and the white girl who is in love with him. When Niru becomes aware of his sexual orientation (gay), his father drags him back to Nigeria to the village church where he is prayed over so he can cast the evil from himself. That scene is like a compressed version of the one in James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain. 

 

Of course, Niru is not cured. He just has to go underground while still living at home. When Meredith realizes why Niru does not return her advances, she flips and supports, even encourages, his inclinations because first and foremost they are best friends. Tragedy ensues. Nearly everyone in the novel is destroyed in some way.

 

This is a powerful novel, full of surprises that creep up on the reader. I finished it almost a week ago and it took me all this time to figure out what it meant to me. I still don't have it all figured out, except that it behooves no one to play God. 

 

 

(Speak No Evil is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. The paperback will be published on March 5, 2019 and is available for pre-order.)

 

 

 

 

 

HAZARDS OF TIME TRAVEL

Hazards of Time Travel, Joyce Carol Oates, HarperCollins, 2018, 324 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: "Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before.  Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating. 

 

 

My Review:

I am well aware that Joyce Carol Oates is not every reader's cup of tea. I happen to find her brilliant. I have read 18 of her books. I know people who feel as I do about her and I feel friendly towards those people. So I am not so much recommending this novel to any but those JCO lovers. I am wanting to share my thoughts with my JCO tribe.

 

Ms Oates, as far as I know, had not gone in a post apocalyptic/dystopian direction before. I know she likes to try new things and doesn't worry if she comes out on top of any specific genre. It is exciting to see how she goes about putting her own stamp on whatever she attempts.

 

In the novels and stories of hers I have read so far, the thing she always, always does is explore emotional and psychological trauma. Hazards of Time Travel follows a female high school senior who has grown up in a future, extremely tightly controlled society. She dares to think for herself in the Valedictorian talk she will give at graduation. Her punishment is banishment to an earlier time, loss of her family and even her own name.

 

Despite her intelligence and daring, she has been so impregnated with the concepts of her upbringing that her resulting fears never leave her. She is not ever going to be free, whether she stays in 1950s Wisconsin or is allowed to return to her own time and place.

 

All the details are exactly right. I would not expect anything less. But those details are not just used to orient the reader in the story. They are used to show that the details of daily life, the details of behavioral control, mind control, the details of love and loss, are the very things that keep us trapped, alone, depressed and fearful.

 

Then there are some odd sentence structures. For me those sentences put me in the minds of the characters. We don't think in carefully constructed sentences, do we? We certainly don't feel emotion in them. Brilliant!

 

Hazards of Time Travel seems like a Trump timely novel but, according to Ron Charles in his Washington Post review, JCO had started the novel in 2011 and finished it before the 2016 election. I like to think of novelists as our modern day prophets. This book is an example of that.

 

 

(Hazards of Time Travel is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

DIRTY BLONDE AND HALF-CUBAN

Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban, Lisa Wixon, HarperCollins, 2005, 298 pp

 

 

I read this for my One Book At A Time reading group. We all mostly are drawn to a Cuban setting but due to some reviews I read, I had my doubts this time. So much so that I almost skipped the whole enterprise. I am glad I didn't.

The writing is not great, at least for a novel format. As it turns out, the author had a series on Salon.com called "Havana Honey," loosely based on her experiences in Cuba. She developed that into a novel which explains the writing style to me.

Alysia Briggs, a privileged American young woman, bound for college and a career in diplomacy, had made a death bed promise to her mother to find her real father, who is Cuban. The summer before starting college she decides to go and fulfill her promise. At the time, travel between America and Cuba is heavily restricted but her American "father" pulls some strings.

Alysia arrives in Cuba and all the cash she brought with her is promptly stolen. Because she is on a two month student visa, she is not allowed to have a job. She quickly learns that not much in Cuba is as it seems, that many women (and men) have a second job as sex workers, and she ends up joining them as a way to make some cash. She makes a friend who is a surgeon by day, earning less than $100 a week, and is one of the "jineteras" on the side. The woman becomes her mentor. Their clients are wealthy tourists.

In some ways the novel is a companion to my recently read Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn. Except while that book was sad this one is more lighthearted. Eventually I got involved in all of Alysia's adventures as she learned the trade while continuing to search for her real father.

Most of all I liked the story for its look into what life in Cuba was like in the early 2000s. It was eye-opening! I also learned that not all sex workers are abused slaves, as the news would suggest. Not that I don't abhor the practice of indentured women; I do. However, since the beginning of time, women have practiced prostitution as a solution to making a living. I have decided that the distinction is worth making. In any case, what has happened to the Cuban people is the bigger crime.

Once again I took a chance on a book and came away with new knowledge about the world.

A PERSONAL MATTER

A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe, Grove Press, 1969, 165 pp (originally published in Tokyo, Japan, 1964; translated from the Japanese by John Nathan)

 

 

By chance I read another translated novel, not from my challenge but from the 1964 list for My Big Fat Reading Project. Bonus!

 

Back in 2010 I read this author's 1958 novel, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. As far as I could tell, that was his first novel. In both books the writing is powerful and clearly influenced by Western literature while putting the reader smack into 20th century Japan.

In A Personal Matter a frustrated intellectual named Bird is awaiting the birth of his first child. The child is born with a brain abnormality. If he lives he will be handicapped for life. Bird's mother-in-law is desperate to keep the newborn's condition from his mother. She is afraid it will frighten her only daughter too much to try for more children. 

Bird is ashamed to have produced such a child. He is not happy in his marriage but his job was gotten for him by his father-in-law and he is rather terrified by the mother-in-law. Should he just let the child die and lie to his wife about it? Should he approve an operation that may still leave him a vegetable?

He takes refuge in the arms of a former girlfriend. Over the period of a week, when the child's life hangs in the balance, Bird struggles with his conscience. He has long harbored a dream to visit Africa and had planned to make the trip shortly. Now everything is in chaotic flux.

 

In this, as well as other Japanese literature I have read, most of which was written in post WWII times, the country's traditional culture is in crisis due to its defeat, the end of the Emperor, the American occupation and the beginnings of democracy. It is as if the entire ancient culture is suffering from PTSD.

 

A Personal Matter is gritty, sometimes grotesque, especially when it comes to sexual matters. Bird's former girlfriend is a deeply immoral being and an enabler for his plans to deny responsibility for his baby. Yet there is a sort of dark humor and a psychological viewpoint to the plot, both of which make it feel as modern as any American novel from the 1960s.

 

At first I was put off by the characters and the ways they approached their problems, but the pace is fast, almost frenetic, and I became hooked on wanting to find out what Bird's decision would be. In an author bio, I read that Kenzaburo Oe himself had a disabled child. Perhaps that is why the story felt so real.

 

The author continued to write about the effects of the atomic bombing of his country and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. 

(A Personal Matter is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MY KIND OF GIRL

My Kind of Girl, Buddhadeva Bose, Archipelago Books, 2010, 138 pp (originally published in India, 1951, translated from the Bengali by Arnuava Sinha)

 

 

I have always read some translated literature in my mix of books. This year I decided to create a challenge to read one translated novel a month. I did make a list of countries, especially ones from which I had not read much, but then I remembered I had quite a stack sent to me some years ago, without charge, by Archipelago Books. Being me, I felt guilty for never having read and reviewed those so I started with the one on the top of the stack.

 

My Kind of Girl takes place in a cold room one December night. Four strangers have been given this room in a Bengali train station to wait out the hours while some rails are being repaired. All these men have is coffee and a few blankets.

A young couple, obviously deeply in love, maybe on a honeymoon, come to check out this room but go away. After some discussion about how these young people probably want to be alone and a bit of reminiscence about being that young and that much in love, each of these middle-aged men tells the story of his first love.

The pattern of this novella is based on the great story-cycles of the past such as The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron by Boccaccio. The difference is this is Bengali in the 1940s and the tales take place in the 1920s when India was still under British rule. It was a time when traditions concerning marriage and women were beginning to change.

Each of the four stories is as charming and various as are the ways of the human heart. Though the point of view is decidedly male, or perhaps because it is, I was captivated by this look into young men's hearts told by looking back from their older selves.

Buddhadeva Bose (1908-1974) was a celebrated and award winning writer who brought modernism to Bengali literature, as well as a translator of European literature.

I am off to a good start on my challenge.

WASHINGTON BLACK

Washington Black, Esi Edugyan, Alfred A Knopf, 2018, 334 pp

 

 

Back in 2014 I read this author's amazing second novel, Half-Blood Blues. I said in my review that I would never forget it and I have not. With Washington Black she has outdone herself.

 

Esi Edugyan has a fine pedigree. She was born in Alberta, Canada to Ghanaian parents. Her first novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, which I need to read, explores those roots. All three of her novels deal with the complex particulars of racism and their psychological effects.

Washington Black was born into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation in the mid-19th century. All he knows is hard labor in the fields and the unspeakable brutality of the plantation owner. When he is brought into the master's house to serve the master's brother as an assistant, he experiences for the first time kind treatment from a white man. He also discovers he has an ability and passion for drawing.

Christopher, his new master, is a naturalist, inventor, and an abolitionist. The Wilde family however is full of troubled eccentrics and the safety Wash feels with Christopher is still disturbed by a constant fear of violence to himself and his people.

The plot includes the many travels of Wash with Christopher all the way through the American slave states and on to the most remote outposts of the Arctic. Wash is never secure. He is trailed by a slave catcher and then abandoned by Christopher in the Arctic. That trauma is only the beginning of his wandering and the rest of the story traces Wash's struggle to find safety for himself and his talents while he searches within himself for the reasons he has been so often abandoned.

How does the least free, the most betrayed of men find freedom? What is freedom? Can a man keep reinventing himself against all odds and find a way to heal his psyche from all he has experienced?

Esi Edugyan writes with incredible intensity and grace. Her sensitivity to human feeling is as deep as, if not deeper than, many authors I have loved. She has filled in her picaresque frame with truth and took me on another journey I will not soon forget.

(Washington Black is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

LITTLE BIG MAN

Little Big Man, Thomas Berger, The Dial Press, 1964, 440 pp

 

 

Books as great as this one make me happy that I spend much of my reading time on older novels. I started My Big Fat Reading Project initially as a method of learning American literature. While the project has expanded to include 20th century literature in general, it is surely accomplishing that original goal.

 

Thomas Berger, who died in 2014, was born in Cincinnati, OH, in 1924. He wrote 23 novels and though he was admired by critics and had many devoted readers, he is most widely known for Little Big Man due to the 1970 movie adaptation starring Dustin Hoffman.

I was impressed by his two earlier novels, Crazy in Berlin and Reinhart in Love, for their satirical take first on WWII army life and then on a soldier attempting to re-enter American society after the war. Little Big Man, while retaining that satirical bite, is historical fiction.

Set in the mid-1800s on America's Great Plains, still very much the Wild West, it is the life story of Jack Crabb who is looking back from the age of 111. As a boy he was captured and adopted by the Cheyenne.  He returned to white civilization in his teens but forever had a bond with the Cheyenne and claims to be the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn, also known as Custer's Last Stand.

I have no doubt that the history in the book is accurate. It is also exciting. That history however is a frame on which the author examines the systematic conquest of the West by white settlers and the American government. Due to Jack Crabb's intimate knowledge of the Cheyenne, much of this examination is accomplished through the eyes of the Native Americans who suffered through what was nothing less than genocide.

The most interesting aspect of Berger's tale, for me, is his insight into the clash of cultures. It is not that the Natives were peace loving nature freaks but that the two approaches to living were quite diametrically opposed. Berger accomplishes this explication with humor and heart.

When I was a girl, I was fascinated by the Annie Oakley I saw on TV. I wanted to be her and organized all the kids in the neighborhood to re-enact her story almost every day one summer. Our bikes were our horses. 

Due to that early infatuation I have read my share of Westerns and seen many of the movies. By 1964, when Little Big Man was published, I was finishing high school and had moved on to present day teenage concerns. Had I read this novel then I would have looked back on my Annie Oakley days and laughed. Those Indians we learned about in school and on TV were the white man's version.

Now we have novels written by Native Americans but Little Big Man may have been a bridge to that. In it you can learn quite a bit about the views and ways of the peoples whose lands we stole. Though it was perhaps an inevitable historical progression, I feel it was a loss to humanity that continues to play out in our post colonial times. Little Big Man may be the most enlightening and entertaining Western I have ever read.

(Little Big Man is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ONCE UPON A RIVER

Once Upon A River, Diane Setterfield, Atria Books, 2018, 460 pp

Like countless other readers who loved The Thirteenth Tale, I impatiently awaited this new novel. I did not expect to be disappointed but I had somehow forgotten the precise effect Diane Setterfield has on a reader. She makes me feel I am drowning in story though I always stay afloat.

So much to love in this novel. The setting in and around an ancient inn on the river Thames in the mid 18th century. The way every character is as unique as the various people one meets in life. The mystery of a small girl child who appears at first to be dead by drowning but comes to life. 

Best of all, the story itself, a story made of stories, that twists and turns like the Thames, that ends with every loose end tied up and with everyone getting what they deserve and sometimes with what they wished for.

This is a short review for me but I don't want you to waste time reading my words. I want you to have time to read this wonderful novel. I was indeed bewitched.

MY SISTER, THE SERIAL KILLER

My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Doubleday, 2018, 192 pp

 

 

Do you follow the annual Tournament of Books, hosted by The Morning News? I have participated in it to varying degrees since 2010. I don't always read all the books in play (16+) but I enjoy following the results. Best of all, I have discovered some pretty great undersung authors.

 

When the list of books came out for the 2019 Tournament I had only read five of them. I am planning to read several more by March when the fun begins. That is how I came to read this one.

My Sister, the Serial Killer is set in Nigeria, written in English by its Nigerian author. It has been called a satire. I can see that it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek as far as society in Lagos goes. The story is over the top improbable but its underlying angst was not what I would call funny.

Two sisters still live at home, daughters of an abusive, now deceased father, and a delusional mother who spoils the younger sister and has charged the older one with protecting her. The big secret between these sisters is that the younger, when she tires of a boyfriend, just kills him. No remorse, no sense of having done anything wrong. The older helps her get rid of the bodies and the evidence. After the third murder, that younger sister qualifies as a serial killer.

The chapters are short and cinematic, but each packs plenty of action and emotion while filling in the back story and creating convincing characters.  I read it because it was short and readily available on my library's eBook service.

Surprise! It was a super fun read even though the story is serious.

(My Sister, the Serial Killer is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A KIND OF ANGER

A Kind of Anger, Eric Ambler, Atheneum, 1964, 311 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: Six weeks ago, Lucia Bernardi fled the Swiss villa where her lover was murdered—and then she vanished. No one can find her: Not the police, who want her for murder; not the tabloids, who want her for her story; nor the real killers, who desperately want the papers she spirited away from the scene of the crime. Disgraced reporter Piet Maas stumbles upon Lucia, in hiding in the south of France. There he must decide whether to publish her story—reviving his career but guaranteeing her death—or to join in her perilous extortion scheme, and risk both their lives for the promise of profit.

 

 

My Review:

This is the third Eric Ambler espionage thriller I have read. It was the best of three. I like Ambler because he is less dour than Le Carre, less trashy than Ian Fleming, and less serious than Graham Greene. His stories fall a bit outside the usual Cold War plots.

 

Although the book is over 50 years old, it has some chilling similarities to current times. No social media but the tabloids complicate the plot. A Kurdish revolutionary scheme with connections to oil magnates. A protagonist whose failed literary journal haunts him.

 

Lucia as the femme fatale is smart and operates in a moral gray area. Can she and her sympathetic journalist pull off their extortion caper and cause competing political zealots to lose on both sides?

 

Good stuff! 

THE LOST QUEEN

The Lost Queen, Signe Pike, Simon & Schuster Inc, 2018, 515 pp

 

 

My first book finished in 2019 is a wonder of romantic historical fiction set in sixth century Scotland. I first came to know of Signe Pike eight years ago when I read her lovely memoir Faery Tale, wherein she went on a journey to honor her recently deceased father as well as to determine whether or not fairies are real.

 

That endeavor led to her continued research on Celtic history and folklore. The Lost Queen is the first in a trilogy about a Queen lost to history. She includes new historical research into the origins of Merlin and King Arthur.

I have always loved books about the Arthurian legends and particularly about the clash between the old Celtic religion and Christianity as it was brought to the British Isles by the Romans. Here we have a new look at the roots of those legends and plenty of clashes!

 

In the ways of coincidence in my reading, I had recently read Julian by Gore Vidal which features a similar clash of Christianity with the Old Religion of Greece and the Middle East, defining the life of a short-lived Roman Emperor. In our time we are experiencing an ongoing clash between Islam and Christianity. All so fascinating to me.

Languoreth is the titular queen in this novel, though she is not yet a Queen. Here we learn of her early life as the daughter of a petty king under the High King Tutgual. The lands where these men rule are near the Firth of Clyde and today's Edinburgh.

Languoreth has a twin brother, Lailoken, who is being trained as a Wisdom Keeper or as we call them today, a Druid. Their bond is deep and Languoreth longs for the freedom he has compared to her destiny: to be married into some royal family so as to protect her family lands and ally her father with more power. Naturally she falls in love with a Celtic warrior but must marry a prince.

If you have read The Mists of Avalon you will feel right at home in The Lost Queen, even though it is set almost a century earlier. If you have read Outlander you are familiar with the blazing romances that can catch fire between adventurous individuals of older days.

Reading this book is to be swept into a romantic adventure filled with thrilling history. There is enough enchantment to make you wish you could have lived there and then.

JANUARY READING GROUP UPDATE

Taking stock here at the beginning of a new year, I see that I am a member of 5 active reading groups. Two meet every month and the other three are usually bi-monthly. I continue to be enriched by our discussions and, truth be told, these groups are the core of my social life. I have also found true friends with whom I interact with on a regular basis. I have been in reading groups for a couple decades now and though there are pitfalls in such an enterprise, a good group is invaluable. 

Some of my groups take time to look over the past year and vote on our most successful and loved book. Here are the results:

Tina's Group: The Weight of Ink

One Book At A Time: Silver Sparrow

Bookie Babes: The Child Finder

Happily I am in complete agreement with those picks.

What were the best reads/discussions you had in 2018 in your reading groups, either IRL or on-line?

The January line-up is small and I have doubts about the One Book At A Time choice. I have already read and discussed The Bookie Babes selection in at least two other groups but it is a book that surely provokes discussion. I am looking forward to the pick for Molly's Group.

One Book At A Time:

 

 

Molly's Group:

 

 

Bookie Babes:

 

 

Have you discussed any of these in groups or read them? What are your groups discussing in January?

HORSE LATITUDES

Horse Latitudes, Morris Collins, Dzanc Books, 2019, 308 pp

 

 

This was the last book I read in 2018. It has an interesting publishing history. Since it was the December, 2018 release for the Nervous Breakdown Book Club, the author was interviewed on the related Otherppl podcast, where he talked about that history.

 

Morris Collins wrote Horse Latitudes during the first decade of this millennium and had it published by MacAdam Cage, an indie publisher located in San Francisco. Immediately after publication the company went out of business so no promotion was done. In 2016, Dzanc Books, another indie, agreed to reissue the book and it will finally be released in January, 2019. The reality of the life of a new author!

The horse latitudes are two belts of sub-tropical high pressure that circle the earth at 30-35 degrees north and south latitudes. The book is set in and around Guatemala which lies in the northern of those belts.

Ethan, a young New York photographer, flees to Central America after his marriage ends in his wife committing herself to a mental institution. He is filled with guilt and loss and figures a change of scene might do him good.

You know that advice about not making major decisions in the midst of a huge life upset? Ethan makes several disastrous decisions and lands himself in the middle of an impending revolution in a Central American country. He agrees to find the missing sister of Yolanda, a sex worker he met in Mexico.

I found Ethan's story engrossing. Following United States CIA interference in Central America, supposedly to fight communism but in actuality to protect American business interests, from the 1950s and on to today, most of those countries have been politically, economically, and socially destroyed. In fact, those policies are a main cause of the immigration disaster (can you say "wall?") we are experiencing today.

While this is a nightmarish story of an innocent, inexperienced white American male in the jungles and decimated towns of the region, it is also a psychological and political thriller. It might be a tad too ambitious and overwritten but not since Gore Vidal's Dark Green, Bright Red have I read such a horrifying and politically astute novel. I could not put it down.

(Horse Latitudes is available for pre-order in paperback from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TOP 25 BOOKS READ IN 2018

My Bookshelves

I had a great reading year. I surpassed my overall goal to read 144 books. I completed a self-created challenge to read a book a month from the last 12 years of my TBR lists. I also read a book a month from my Nervous Breakdown Book Club subscription. I fell short in terms of reading as much as I had planned from my ongoing, unending challenge known as My Big Fat Reading Project.

As far as these favorite 25 books go, I made my decisions based on not only how much I loved the books but on how much they challenged me to learn new things, to understand myself and others more completely, and to savor the many ways that stories can be told.

 

My new 2019 challenge is to read a book a month set in another country by an author who lives there and writes in their own language. For me that means the book has to be translated into English. I have made a tentative list, subject to change as the year unfolds.

I will put the stats at the bottom of the list. Stats are fun and enlightening but can also be boring. Feel free to skip them.

All the books on the list have been reviewed here on the blog.

All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews

Appassionata, Eva Hoffman

The Bear and the Nightingale, Katherine Arden

Becoming, Michelle Obama

The Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch

Call Me Zebra, Azareen Van de Vliet Oloomi

Circe, Madeline Miller

Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich

Gold Dust Woman, Stephen Davis

The Golden State, Lydia Kiesling

The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas

How To Be Both, Ali Smith

The Ice Palace, Tarjei Vesaas

Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart

The Map of Salt and Stars, Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner

Miss Burma, Charmaine Craig

The Overstory, Richard Powers

The Power, Naomi Alderman

The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, Cherise Wolas

The Secret River, Kate Grenville

Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones

Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik

Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver

The Weight of Ink, Rachel Kadish

Stats: 146 books read. 135 fiction (not counting poetry and plays). 86 by women. 11 nonfiction including history, biographies and memoirs. 50 for My Big Fat Reading Project. 11 translated. 

Were any of the books on my list also favorites of yours?

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for visiting my blog and most especially for leaving comments. I maintain this blog as a labor of love. The best reward is your comments.

BOOKS READ IN DECEMBER

I read 10 books in December, pretty much my December average. I surpassed my goal to read 144 books in 2018. I read 146! I will give you the stats and favorites of the year in my next post. For bloggers the beginning of January is almost busier than any other time of the year!

 

My other goal for December was to write the reviews of every book I read and post them on the blog. All year I have been about 6 books behind. I almost made it. Only one to go, which means that for all but the last on the list, you can find the reviews already posted here. It also means I wrote 145 reviews last year and let me tell you that is the hardest part of this whole endeavor. If you are a blogger I am sure you agree.

Stats: 10 books read. 8 fiction. 7 written by women. 2 nonfiction. 1 memoir. 3 for My Big Fat Reading Project. 1 mystery. 1 historical fiction.

Authors new to me: David Grann, Michelle Obama, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Morris Collins.

Places I went: Various states in the US, Great Britain, the Roman Empire in the 4th century, Jamaica, Guatemala, Mexico.

Favorites: Becoming, Unsheltered and Julian.

No least favorites. I found something to like or admire in each book I read.

I hope your December reading was good and fun. Any book I missed that you feel I must read?

HERE COMES THE SUN

Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Dennis-Benn, WW Norton & Company, 2016, 345 pp

 

 

For my last review of 2018, I bring you this amazing debut novel. It was the September, 2016 selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club, a subscription and a case for why I continue to subscribe there, because I get books I might otherwise not have heard of let alone read. 

 

I went from reading The After Party directly to Here Comes the Sun, only to find that it is another novel about a mother trying and failing miserably to protect her daughter, in this case two daughters. This time though the setting is Jamaica and the social strata is near the bottom instead of the top. Also, the older sister tries and fails to protect the younger though in different ways than the two best friends in The After Party. Those similarities made me think about how human frailties show up just about everywhere and in many kinds of lives.

For many upscale Americans, Jamaica is a tourist destination and that fact plays a part in the story. For many indigenous Jamaicans their island country, still part of the British Commonwealth, is a mix of those involved with a growing economy and those struggling to move out of poverty. The family in the novel represents that same mix.

Margot, the older sister, was taught by her single mother to trade sex for survival. She has a mid-level job at a resort hotel but her main earnings come from late night sexual encounters with hotel guests. At that she is supremely successful and she uses those earnings to ensure her younger sister Thandi finishes at her private Catholic high school and goes to college and beyond to become a doctor. No one asks Thandi if she wants this but it seems to be the best way to give her a chance at life, higher social status and security.

The plan goes right off the rails. Here Comes the Sun is a tragedy of large proportions. Not one of these three females gets what she wants despite Herculean effort. Not a novel for those who like happy endings where hard work, intelligence and talent pay off for women. It is however another true picture of the failure of post-colonial globalism and interference by foreign governments.

Why read it? Because the writing is incredibly good and it is a microcosmic story showing the shameful underside of our supposedly wonderful, prosperous, democratic macrocosmic world. 

Yet Nicole Dennis-Benn is so far having a happy ending. She was born and raised in Jamaica but emerged from the underside and now lives, writes and teaches in Brooklyn, happily married to her wife. Her second novel, Patsy, will be published in 2019. I will read it!

(Here Comes the Sun is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE AFTER PARTY

The After Party, Anton DiSclafani, Riverhead Books, 2016, 369 pp

 

 

This was my final selection for my self-created 2018 challenge to read a book a month from the last 12 years of my TBR lists. I have mixed feelings about it. I absolutely loved this author's debut novel, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. This second novel, though it mines similar themes, did not quite measure up to the wonder of the first one.

 

Set in the 1950s uber-rich Houston, TX, neighborhood of River Oaks, it is almost a psychological thriller. Joan Fortier and Cece Buchanan have been best friends practically since birth. When Cece's mother dies, she is taken in by the Fortier family at 14 years of age, since her father had abandoned his wife and daughter and remarried. 

As they move through high school, Joan becomes stranger and wilder every year while Cece becomes obsessed with their almost sister-like relationship. Thus the plot revolves around why these two act the way they do and whether or not Cece will follow her friend into self-destruction or take advantage of her good fortune to create the life she wants.

It is also a story about the truly horrible things mothers do in trying to keep daughters "pure" and "acceptable" and, truth be told, safe. An age old problem that is always made more tricky when the daughter is into sex and rebellion and not at all interested in being pure or acceptable. The Yonahlossee Riding Camp For Girls was another version of that story.

I can't quite put my finger on why I liked The After Party less. The plotting was tight and good, though the characters were less well drawn. The atmosphere of oil wealth and privilege was clearly well researched but this time the author seemed more removed from the scene and her research overwhelmed the emotion. I found the ending weak and not completely believable.

Still, I do admire the author's unflinching ability to take on the disastrous results when mothers fail to help their children navigate puberty. That is how we end up with the whole ridiculous scene we still have when it comes to sex. Patriarchy is the more guilty party but Matriarchy follows close behind. OK, I said that, though I also think an enlightened matriarchy could solve the whole thing in a few generations.

(The After Party is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

JULIAN

Julian, Gore Vidal, Little Brown and Company, 1964, 502 pp

 

 

Though it took me a full week to read, this is an excellent piece of historical fiction. Gore Vidal was known for many things. One of those was his historical fiction, it being one of the several ways he examined corruption and militarism in government. He does this brilliantly in Julian.

 

Julian the Apostate was Emperor of the Roman Empire from 361-363 AD. His attempts to re-establish pagan polytheism and counter political subversion by Christian monotheism were short-lived though they continued to resound for centuries. This fictional account shows how he grew from a child who feared for his life into a philosophy student and then became Emperor against all odds. It was then that militarism overcame him as a means to complete his aims and he was assassinated, after which Christianity became synonymous with the failing empire and then became an empire of its own.

 

The novel is a fascinating account of life in the fourth century from Rome to Gaul to Constantinople to Persia. It is written as Julian's memoirs so all the political and religious upheaval is seen through his eyes. Interspersed are comments and correspondence between Julian's mentor in philosophy, Libanius (who is attempting to write a biography of the man) and Priscus, Julian's former close compatriot who had the memoir hidden away. These asides open up the story to other viewpoints, a good thing because Julian is in some ways an unreliable narrator.

 

Having studied this period of history in Will Durant's Caesar and Christ, it was wonderful to get inside Julian's mind. I read slowly because philosophy, of which there is plenty from Aristotle to Plato and onward, requires a certain kind of attention. I confess that I skimmed over the many battle scenes but the author does painlessly show Julian's military genius.

If you like ancient history, Julian is not to be missed. The parallels with our time are startling and worrisome.

(Julian is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

LIBERTY FALLING

Liberty Falling, Nevada Barr, G P Putnam's Sons, 1999, 321 pp

 

 

One more post before it is officially Christmas Eve, because I am determined to end the year with all the books I have read reviewed! 

 

Mystery writer Nevada Barr was a ranger at various National Parks and has written 19 novels set in the parks. This one is her seventh and I have been reading them in order. I read them in the spirit of reader activism during these days of the current administration's tactics favoring profit over preservation when it comes to our supposedly protected national lands.

Liberty Falling takes place at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis National Monuments on Liberty and Ellis Islands. Park ranger Anna Pigeon, the protagonist in all of the novels, is on leave of absence to be with her beloved sister Molly, in intensive care after a case of pneumonia turned dangerously complicated. Since park rangers are relatively low paid government employees, Anna is staying with a friend on Liberty Island.

 

As she often does, Anna finds herself in emotional turmoil, fearing she will lose her sister and abhorring the crowded confines of New York City where her husband died many years ago. When she is not at Molly's bedside, she prefers exploring the overgrown abandoned hospitals, medical wards and old staff quarters on Ellis Island.

Then the tension builds further after Anna tumbles through a crumbling staircase in one of those buildings. Was it an accident?  A young girl falls to her death from a Statue of Liberty lookout. Was she pushed? Finally a park administrator dies from a similar fall and Anna goes into full investigator mode because though she is officially on leave, investigating is what she does wherever she is.

If you have read the earlier books you may remember a certain FBI agent who has been romantically involved with both sisters. He shows up too! I say this every time I read another Anna Pigeon story but the author has once more outdone herself with her plotting, her dives into the psychological depths of her characters, and the intricate building of suspense.

Liberty Falling is set in the late 1990s so the Twin Towers still loom but terrorism within the United States shows its ugly face before Anna solves the several mysteries that have entangled her. Nevada Barr is firmly in my top three favorite female crime novelists alongside Sara Paretsky and Tana French.

 

 

(Liberty Falling is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LITTLE GIRLS

The Little Girls, Elizabeth Bowen, Alfred A Knopf, 1964, 307 pp

 

 

I don't think people read Elizabeth Bowen much anymore, except for a few of my friends on Goodreads. She began publishing novels in the 1930s, a bit prior to where My Big Fat Reading Project begins at 1940. I have read three of her novels now. I began with The Heat of the Day, found in a used bookstore in Ireland in 2005. Then I read her atmospheric A World of Love, set in a crumbling Irish manor house. 

 

The Little Girls was published in 1964, the year I am currently, though slowly, reading. As in the two others I have read, I had to slow down and adjust to her sentences. Not many authors these days write sentences which require the reader to pay attention. I fear that a deadly combination of MFA programs, bestsellers that take no more effort than watching TV, and lowering literacy rates (I know, I am a snob) have put us out of the habit of following such sentences. However, in the way that a soft spoken person draws you closer, so does she pull you in towards her carefully developed characters.

Three British women who were friends in school just before the outbreak of WWI are brought back together by the eccentric Dinah in the early 1960s. Their reunion is fraught with all their old rivalries and escapades. The novel moves between those two time periods, a commonplace in many of today's novels though it has been done before and in this case both are equally compelling.

It took many pages for me to identify the three characters because Bowen is (deliberately?) vague as to who is speaking and each one has a nickname as well as a new last name in the present time. Again, she was requiring me to pay attention and pulling me in, page by page, as to how and why those three little girls got up to such pranks and why that might affect them later.

By the end, I felt I had known these women for years. I loved the way she showed that we don't change much, that our embryonic personalities in childhood stay with us as we mature, though with age comes an ability to better understand those we have known since those early years.