Category: What I’m Reading

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Tender Cuts by Jayne Martin (Rating 5) – An Astonishing Range of Subjects and Emotions. The collected vignettes in Tender Cuts by Jane Martin cover an astonishing range of subjects and emotions. Many are mournful, depicting lives filled with bitter regret. In others, protagonists exact sweet revenge against those who have hurt or disappointed them. Tales that flow with melancholy break your heart, while quick jabs break the rhythm of your breathing. Each vignette is economical without being skimpy. After reading one, you never want more or wish for less. For example, in “Stepping Out,” Martin animates a coat rack and sums up a woman’s life in one finely observed paragraph. The success of brevity lies in finding a single word or phrase that captures a larger truth. As a writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I appreciated Martin’s skill at finding le mot juste or succinct combination of words that manage to encapsulate multitudes. Together, the short pieces in this compact book comprise a full and satisfying meal. Readers won’t go away hungry after consuming these tender cuts, and the satisfactions of dining on a memorable meal will endure.

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Wayward: A Novel by Dana Spiotta (Rating 4) – A Wayward Woman Finds a Way Forward. Samantha (Sam) Raymond, the protagonist of Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward, is a well-to-do white woman whose reaction to going through menopause is extreme and yet entirely natural and predictable. Rarely do novels feature women in their fifties going through “the change,” and more rarely do they receive the attention Spiotta lavishes on Sam: ferocious and gentle, serious and funny, perplexed and insightful. Set in the aftermath of Trumps’ election, Sam’s own upheaval is contemporaneous with the country’s dislocation. She responds by impulsively buying a crumbling old house in a questionable area of downtown Syracuse, and leaving her kind husband and distancing teenage daughter in the suburbs. Sam fixes it up the house while seeking to repair herself and the world. Sam’s thoughts often dwell on her dying mother and growing daughter. As an author myself, who often writes about complex family relationships (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I was impressed by Spiotta’s ability to capture the push-pull of the mother-daughter bond. My only criticism of the book is that the social commentaries — the “smart” ruminations Spiotta is known for — sometimes became trite and tedious. I was eager to get back to Sam’s story. Likewise, the few sections written from her daughter’s point of view were distracting. What resonated was the honesty of Sam’s position, a middle-aged white woman looking for meaning in her own life and the national psyche. She doesn’t find a pathway to the latter, but in the continuity of women, from grandmother to mother to daughter, the wayward Sam finds a way forward for herself.

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Careless Love by Steve Zettler (Rated 5) – A Carefully Constructed Tale. Imagine being told by your mother as she confronts the end of her life that the person you thought was your father was not the man half responsible for beginning yours. (Not a spoiler; readers learn this at the novel’s outset.) With little to go on, the narrator of Steve Zettler’s carefully constructed novel Careless Love sets out to discover not only who his real father was, but also the identity of the man who killed him. His dogged pursuit uncovers a cast of often unsavory, but always intriguing, characters. Set in Hawaii, the sordidness of the lowlifes contrasts sharply with the pampered lives of the privileged guests at the beach getaway where Grace and Lee, the narrator’s parents, have each retreated to escape their respective demons. Likewise, the flashbacks to the grim realities of the war in Vietnam are in stark contrast to the sweet romance between these central characters. The detective work brings to mind an absorbing film noir production. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire Zettler’s deft blend of plot and personality in this entertaining and revelatory tale.

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Something Wild by Hanna Halperin (Rated 5) – Scary, Scarring, and Salving. Hanna Halperin’s novel Something Wild is about female desire and the fraught relationship between women and men, but mostly about the complex connections between women: mothers and daughters, and sisters. If the book has a flaw, it’s that the men are one dimensional. Yet, in a sense, these stereotypical men only highlight how complex and worthy the women are. Halperin questions what draws them close, what drives them apart, and what ultimately pulls them back together. Sisters Tanya and Nessa, close as children, became distanced from each other after a traumatic sexual encounter as teenagers. As adults, they discover that their stepfather Jesse is abusing their mother Lorraine. Sex and violence — something wild — simmer below the surface of every page and, inevitably, erupt. Yet, despite these big events, the book’s impact lies in its small moments: a big sister showing her little sister how to insert a tampon; the women warming each other’s feet under a treasured blanket. Halperin throws rocks into the water, but waits to watch the ripples they generate. Not that the book lacks for plot — its momentum never flags— but it plumbs the depths rather skimming the surface. As a writer who also observes ripples rather than hurling rocks (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I appreciated her ability to linger, to wonder whether calm can ever be restored after a traumatic or tragic event. In this scary and scarring account, sisterly love is the salve that heals.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of From Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind All-of-a-Kind Family by June Cummins with Alexandra Dunietz (Rating 4) – A Testament to the Power of Children’s Literature. From Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind All-of-a-Kind Family by June Cummins with Alexandra Dunietz, is a thoroughly researched and insightful biography about children’s book author Sydney Taylor, née Sarah Brenner. Taylor, best known for her All-of-a-Kind Family series, was a pioneer, the first to present a Jewish American family — religious yet assimilated — as the main characters. Like Taylor’s books, which drew on her experiences growing up, Cummins’s biography is also a historical recap of immigrant life on the Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century, of particular interest to me because it portrays the place and time of my parents’ childhoods too. Further, the book reflects on how the evolution of children’s literature, and the publishing world in general, dictate what is acceptable (i.e., marketable) for authors to write. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I share Taylor’s wariness and resistance to such constraints. Her defense of her work’s authenticity and enduring values, which Cummins forcefully presents, is admirable and inspirational. Perhaps most appealing is the story of the lifelong closeness and entanglement of the five real-life Brenner sisters, and the support of Taylor’s husband, as uncommon in its era as her books. This comprehensive biography is a testament to the power of children’s literature to confirm identity, educate the young about diversity through engaging storytelling, and create new generations of enthusiastic readers.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Ever Rest: A Novel by Roz Morris (Rating 5) – Moving Past the Refrain of Loss. In Ever Rest, Roz Morris forges an unlikely alliance between rock climbing and rock music to create an absorbing novel about an outsized figure whose life shaped people’s identities and whose death leaves them hanging off a cliff, teetering over an emotional abyss, and grasping for an artistic foothold. Twenty years before the book opens, rock star Ash perished while he and his bandmate Hugo were climbing Mt. Everest. Ash’s body was never recovered, leaving his girlfriend Elza, Hugo, and another band member Robert, equally lost and bereft. Grief counselors use the term “ambiguous loss” to describe the absence of a loved one when there is no body to offer definitive proof they have died — they may have disappeared in a disaster, never come home from school, or not returned after running an errand. The book’s central question is whether recovering Ash’s body will allow those who revolved around him to move past the refrain of his death to compose new verses for their own lives. As a fiction writer myself who balances multiple points of view (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admired Morris’s deft blend of perspectives, which provide insight into those driven by their obsessions and the loved ones they in turn drive to anxiety and despair, exasperation and confusion. Her impeccable research into music-making music and mountaineering ground this soaring novel in both worlds. The memorable characters in Ever Rest will remain on readers’ playlists long after the book’s last peak is summited and its final note is sung.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Girl A: A Novel by Abigail Dean (Rating 5) – Dodging Shadows from the Past. Girl A by Abigail Dean is the indelible story of the aftermath of extreme child abuse on a family of siblings, told from the adult POV of the second oldest. Thirteen-year-old Girl A, the identity given her in the initial police report, is the one who escapes from the house where she and her six siblings are held hostage by their parents, leading to the release of the others, their father’s suicide, and their mother’s incarceration. Although we learn the horrors of their imprisonment, the novel’s focus is on how the surviving children reintegrate into society, with varying success. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I was impressed by the earthly complexity of the almost other-worldly characters Dean creates. “Survivor” is the term applied to a person who emerges from a trauma, alive. But the word is less a noun than a process, a fluid state that ebbs and flows as the individual steps forward while dodging shadows from the past. Although Girl A (Alexandra, or Lex) is the narrator, she initially tells us more about the siblings she reconnects with after the death of their mother than about herself. Perhaps that’s the point. If Lex survives only by running from herself, how can she possibly tell others who she is? Is she a reliable observer of her siblings, or is her view tainted by distorted memory and blocked by the walls she has erected? We do eventually discover the illusion Lex must maintain to sustain her fragile existence. Extreme as this falsehood may seem, acts of denial enable us all to survive after pain we would otherwise find unbearable. Even after closing the book, readers will be shadowed by Girl A.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Truth Like Oil by Connie Biewald (Rating 5) – Thoughtful, Deep, Honest. Connie Biewald proves in her thoughtful, deep, and honest novel Truth Like Oil, the Haitian proverb that “Truth, like oil in water, rises to the surface.” We meet Nadine Antoine, a Haitian immigrant who is the single mother of two teenage sons, and the Boston-area friends who replace the family she left behind. Nadine’s big secret is that her sons have different fathers, neither of whom the boys have met. She has devoted herself to raising them alone, on her small salary as an aide in a nursing facility, where she cares for a once-feisty white woman felled by a stroke. Nadine frets about her capabilities as a mother, her children’s well-being, romantic overtures from her patient’s son who was also the boys’ high school coach and mentor, memories of an uncle’s abuse, and loneliness. Her sons navigate their own push-pull worlds. For the older son, this means deciding whether he can accept a white girlfriend; for the younger son, resolving a debate between aligning himself with his drug-dealing friends or choosing the respectable future his mother envisions. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admire Biewald’s deft interweaving of opposing forces: old and young, Haitian and American, mainstream and marginal. Biewald strings together three phrases — I love you. I’m sorry. Thank you. — and astutely observes that they say it all. I loved this book, was sorry to reach the end, and thank Biewald for a compelling story.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight by Julia Sweig (Rating 4) – Believability and Surprise. I have always been fascinated by LBJ. I was a college freshman when he became president following JFK’s assassination. LBJ’s Great Society, notably the Head Start program, was the impetus for my lifelong career in early childhood education. Like other youth opposed to the war in Vietnam, I turned against LBJ. Years passed before I was able to credit his compassionate and far-sighted social and economic agenda. Julia Sweig’s biography, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight, enriched my perspective. For example, like others, I assumed LBJ’s decision not to run for a second term in 1968 was forced by the backlash against his foreign policy, unaware that (spoiler alert) he and Lady Bird first discussed his exit back in 1964. Although he chose to run then, bowing out in 1968 had been in their plans for years. Likewise, I discovered that Lady Bird’s campaign for “beautification” (a term she despised) was inextricably linked to the Great Society’s broader recognition of the physical, emotional, intellectual, and creative toll of living in a blighted environment — her true concern. Readers of this detailed account will also learn about Lady Bird’s vital role managing her husband’s black moods and speaking on behalf of women’s empowerment, and feel the heartbreak of seeing their hard-won domestic legacy dismissed. As a writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I value the ability to combine believability with surprise in a narrative. Sweig’s behind-the-scenes look at Lady Bird provides both. Her absorbing history remains relevant in the ongoing struggle to balance domestic needs and foreign policy.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of My Heart: A Novel by Semezdin Mehmedinovic (Rating 5) – Life’s Irregular Beat and Steady Flow. Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s autobiographical novel My Heart is literally and figuratively about the life-giving organ of its title. Divided into three sections, the book begins with Sem’s heart attack, ends with his wife Sanja’s stroke, and in the middle recounts a long road trip Sem takes with their adult son Harun, whose restless heart pumps with an energy that is dwindling in his aging parents. Threaded through the book is the intense love that beats in the author’s heart for this tight-knit family. My Heart is also about memory. In the first story, the author remembers little of his heart attack. Told the medication he must now take may cause further memory loss, Sem is obsessed with remembering the first place the family lived after emigrating from Bosnia. This prompts the trip from Maryland to Arizona with his son, a photographer who creates, rather than retrieves, memories. Harun’s time-lapse pictures reveal wonders the eye alone cannot see. Sem’s insight on this journey is that while we remember places, they retain no memory of us. Recall, or its lack, is most prominent in the novel’s third section. Sanja’s stroke has obliterated large swaths of her memory. Sem hopes that returning from the hospital to the familiarity of home will restore the missing images and events, but again place is not a repository for memory. Robbed of once-known words and ideas, Sanja, like their son, creates new, often entertaining ones. Finally, the novel is about place itself. An immigrant, Sem is forever an outsider in America. His identity cannot be rooted in a place. Fortunately, the core of his being is the family he carries in his heart. A model for a person who ages well, My Heart is gentle and reflective, but not passive. As a fiber artist and writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I admired Mehmedinovic’s ability to interweave multiple themes in a subtle tapestry that will touch the heart of readers who contemplate the irregular beat and steady flow of their own lives.