Category: What I’m Reading

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Monogamy: A Novel by Sue Miller (Rating 5) – Under Small Tremors an Earthquake of Emotions. Monogamy: A Novel by Sue Miller is the story of a community anchored by a marriage. At the center is Graham, expansive, enthusiastic, greedy by his own admission, but equally generous. Readers also hear from his first wife Frieda, who still loves him, and their son Lucas; Graham’s best friend Bill, with whom he owns a bookstore in Boston; the many friends who frequent the store and attend Graham’s parties; and Graham’s daughter Sarah, who he had with Annie, his demure wife of thirty years. Ultimately, however, this book is Annie’s story. When Graham suddenly dies (not a spoiler; it happens in the first chapter), Annie a photographer, is plunged into grief. The world she inhabits was constructed by Graham, and despite momentary twinges, she was willingly absorbed into his orbit. How will she exist without him? Months after Graham’s death, Annie discovers he was unfaithful. Her grief is obliterated by rage. As others continue to mourn, Annie distances herself, like a photographer hiding behind a camera. A seemingly small encounter finally allows her to reclaim her grief, and her life. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire Miller’s interweaving of voices, attention to the details that build our individual and shared lives, and above all, her gift for quietly probing small tremors beneath which lie an earthquake of emotions. Monogamy is a snapshot that, when developed, reveals a big picture.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of This is How We Leave by Joanne Nelson (Rating 5) – Learning When, and Why, to Stay. Joanne Nelson’s memoir This is How We Leave, is about saying goodbye to a past that was far from good and accepting that the present doesn’t have to be perfect to be good enough. Nelson reveals the ghosts of her childhood with refreshing, and sometimes uncomfortable, honesty. As a writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I appreciated the authenticity of her prose as she invites readers to accompany her on this searching journey. Generations of people in Nelson’s family left: the men physically; the women, including the author, emotionally; and her mother absenting herself in alcoholism. Although her home was plagued by physical abuse and drinking, readers from a variety of dysfunctional families will recognize elements of theirs in Nelson’s childhood struggle to understand why hers differed from that of her peers, and her adult need to belong. Without sugar coating or sentimentality, Nelson’s journey arrives at a satisfying place that doesn’t entail denial, withdrawal, or running away.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Actress by Anne Enright (Rating 3) – The Stage Curtain Stays Down. Anne Enright’s novel Actress is three fictional biographies in one. First is the life story of Katherine O’Dell, the title character. Second is Norah, her daughter and the memoir’s “author.” The third, and Norah’s motivation in writing the book, recounts their mother-daughter relationship. Norah undertakes this task upon reaching the age at which Katherine died. She excavates the verifiable details of her mother’s life from an early and fast rise to stardom to the too-early decline imposed by a youth-hungry public. In Katherine’s case, public humiliation was accompanied by private descent into madness. Norah’s overriding question is “Where did reality end and performance begin?” Applied to her and her mother, were they as close as she imagined or was it an act and, if so, by whom? Norah reaches a satisfactory conclusion about her own life as a wife, mother, and novelist. But to my mind, she never answers that question in regard to her mother and their relationship. As a writer who has often tried to unravel the complex dynamics between mothers and daughters (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I know that pat answers are neither possible nor rewarding. Yet allowing for, and even welcoming, ambiguity, Actress never raises the stage curtain more than a few inches. In dramatizing this story, I wish Enright had lifted the curtain higher and better filled the stage.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of In the Fullness of Time by Carolyn R. Russell (Rating 5) – Transporting and Transforming. Carolyn R. Russell’s fantasy novel In the Fullness of Time will transport you to the near future, make you mourn for a lost past, and transform your beliefs about how to rise above devastation. Inventive and imaginative, the book is intricately plotted, populated with intriguing characters, and set in strange yet eerily recognizable environs. As the plot shifts, so will your loyalties and expectations. Abandon yourself to the author’s machinations. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I can vouch for the fact that Russell has the literary skill to earn your trust on this fantastic and frightening journey.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Apeirogon: A Novel by Colum McCann (Rating 4) – As Exhaustive and Exhausting as the Search for Peace in the Mideast. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, about a pair of grieving fathers — one Palestinian and one Israeli — who have each lost a young daughter, moves like the Middle East peace process itself. The novel stumbles forward, stalls, retreats, goes off on tangents that alternately fascinate and bore to the point that you want to ignore and push past them. Mixing rat-a-tat revelation with lengthy exposition, the book inflames your brain, wrenches your gut, and ricochets your emotions from despair to hope. The last of these, hope, remains alive because of the unexpected bond between the men, friends and brothers who cross boundaries in the pursuit of peace. As a writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admired the inventiveness of this hybrid form of storytelling, a complex weave of straightforward narration, backwards loops, and intricate, superimposed embroidery. In truth, reading the book is as exhaustive and exhausting as the search for peace in the Mideast. Don’t give up.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Time is the Longest Distance by Janet Clare (Rating 5) –As Stark and Breathtaking as the Australian Outback. Time is the Longest Distance by Janet Clare is a journey of self-discovery as stark and breathtaking as the Australian Outback. Lilly, in her mid-forties, having led an unexceptional and unsatisfactory life in California and New York, learns a secret about her birth that upends her world. In search of a past she never knew was hers, she heads to that other end of the world to meet her unknown father, half-brother, and niece. The surprises continue to come but Lilly, no longer a passive recipient, is now complicit in generating them. As a writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I appreciate Clare’s masterful pacing in introducing each shock. Embarking on the adventure of a lifetime, Lilly, the pampered city girl, crosses the rugged Outback to find out what kind of person her father is and instead learns who she is. The answer is not what she, or readers, expect. Nor is her basic nature easily accepted by Lilly, or us. Yet each revelation rings true. After all, if we’re honest with ourselves, we too never cease to ask “Who am I?” “How did I get here?” And most important, “Where am I going?”

My Amazon and Goodreads review of The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (Rating 3) – Not Enough Rounds on the Watchman’s Shift. Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, which tracks the lives of a Chippewa elder and his niece, was disappointing. I wanted more chapters (rounds) devoted to Thomas, the title character, and his fight against the U.S. Government’s Termination Bill to “emancipate” Indigenous people from their land. The novel is set in the 1950s, with an historical nod to the 1890s, but it echoes today. Erdrich makes clear what the Turtle Mountain clan will lose if the bill passes, namely a way of life that cohabits with nature, respects tribal wisdom, relishes language, and survives on irreverent humor and serious love. Erdrich wrote this book as an homage to her grandfather and her reverence for his strength and determination flow like spring sap through its pages. That said, the story of young Patrice is less compelling, even though hers ends on a hopeful note. Erdrich has a talent for weaving recurring characters within and across her books but in The Night Watchman, she is overextended. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I know that “killing your darlings” is hard, but necessary. Like the ghosts that populate her writing, however, Erdrich can always make these other characters come alive in future books. I just wish she’d given them a diminished role in this one.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of A Plan in Case of Morning by Phill Provance (Rating 5) – Master of Intensity. In A Plan in Case of Morning, Phill Provance wields words, minces memories, and excavates emotions with agility. His amalgam of poems, prose, epigrams, and enigmas is filled with dreams and questions about youth, manhood, and the final accounting. Bubbling up from the flow of words is the push-pull of human relationships; anger bumps into love, tough rubs against tender, and hope flickers in the face of disaster. Provance has a gift for imagery. As a writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I savored creations such as “teeth a perfect replica of Nebraska” and “crow’s feet [that] cinch like drawstring bags.” This collection is intense; take it one entry at a time. Do NOT plan when you’ll read the next piece, just grab and wrestle with this roiling and rollicking volume when you will.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Rating 5) – A Father’s Caution and Pride. For years, I felt guilty that I delayed reading Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates after it came out in 2015. Now I’m glad I waited until 2020, when America is confronting its embedded racism with unprecedented intensity. The book’s impact on me was jarringly powerful in the aftermath of the recent deaths of so many Blacks at the hands of police, their disproportionate number of COVID-19 cases and mortality attributable to inadequate health care, the children unable to “attend” school virtually because they lacked access to the necessary technology, and countless other injustices. The statistics are long-standing, but awareness of their enormity by non-Blacks is new. I am among them. As the mother of an adult daughter, I have been especially haunted by the murder of Breonna Taylor. When her mother, Tamika Parker, described Breonna’s death as a slap in the face, I felt the blow. During my forty-year career in early education, I worked with Black children a decade younger than the son who Coates writes to, but I saw the same hope and fear in their faces. As a fiction writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I portray characters of diverse backgrounds, including Blacks, imagining the ever-present threats they face. Coates cautions his son, but also imbues him with pride and courage. This honest, painful-to-read book reminds me that I, that we as a society, have barely scratched the surface understanding the insidious effects of racism. We need to dig deep within ourselves and our systems to root it out.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler (Rating 4) – Methodical Man Edges Toward Human Mess. Meet methodical, meticulous Micah Mortimer, the protagonist of Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the Side of the Road. Tyler has a knack for making off-putting and slightly off-kilter characters sympathetic. Micah is not unlikeable, just not particularly endearing, until you find yourself liking this earnest but clueless forty-something computer tech a lot. Micah is the neat, reserved member of a large, messy, and affectionate family. His search for the right woman is plagued by bugs he cannot detect, let alone solve. Tyler is herself meticulous rendering Micah’s routine-driven life from his early morning runs to which day of the week he assigns to each housekeeping chore. She assigns him quirky traits: an imaginary internal traffic cop (rather like a lonely child’s imaginary friend) who pats him on the back for nicely executed driving maneuvers; talking to himself using “zee Franch acksant” when he cooks his simple meals. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire Tyler’s ability to create a total life for her characters. I suspect that she, like me, moves in with them while she settles them on the page. Above all, Tyler is adept at taking a small life and finding its universal measure, in Micah’s case the search for human connection. At a time when readers are satiated on Zoom and hungry for in-person contact, Redhead by the Side of Road is a satisfying and lively companion.