Category: What I’m Reading

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.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of The Angle of Flickering Light (Rating 5) – Addicted to the Addicted. Gina Troisi’s honest and unsparing memoir, The Angle of Flickering Light, is a slant approach to addiction. Less about her own substance abuse problems, this brave journey instead looks at why she was attracted to men whose love affair with drugs exceeded their love for her. Her self-worth damaged by an abusive father and stepmother, Troisi compensated by rescuing others. Inevitably her ministrations failed to heal either them or herself. Addiction, be it to heroin or heroism, is an escape route that eventually hits a roadblock. Troisi’s feat is that she finally stops trying to circumnavigate her inner barrier and uses pointed writing to chip her way through it. Flickering light alternately casts shadows and illuminates. Troisi chooses brightness over darkness. As a writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I applaud Troisi’s literary gifts as she clears a path for herself while paving a connection with readers.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Fake Accounts (Rating 2) – False Hype for a Worthless Recounting. The nameless narrator in Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts comments, “I can’t help but feel the books of collected tweets you occasionally see displayed on tables at Urban Outfitters would be better as novels or memoirs that contain no tweets.” Oyler should have taken her protagonist’s advice. The fake accounts in this book — her boyfriend’s conspiracy blog, the outlandish profiles the narrator creates on dating apps, her rambling observations about life — don’t attain novel or memoir status. Noteworthy characters and a memorable story are absent, while the social media posts lack originality and insight. I offer this judgment not only as a disappointed reader, but also as a conscientious writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page). The raves for Fake Accounts strike me as “false” hype for a worthless “recounting.” Reading it was akin to wasted hours scrolling online.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Things That Crash, Things That Fly (Rating 5) – A Good Storyteller with a Good Story to Tell. Scott Gould’s memoir, Things That Crash, Things That Fly, speaks to everyone recovering from an experience — in his case a divorce — that has left them blind-sided and angry, in search of explanations and revenge. On the eve of a trip to Italy, including the small village where his wife’s family is from, she announces that she will leave him when they return. Readers recognize her sadism, but in his desperation to remain married, Gould is in denial until a “piercing” revelation (I won’t spoil it by revealing more) releases his rage. Wallowing in post-divorce misery, Gould returns to Italy to investigate the death of a young American World War Two bomber and tarnish his ex’s reputation. A good storyteller, with a good story to tell, Gould has an outward-looking eye for detail and an inward-looking eye for reflection. As an author myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I appreciate the dexterity with which Gould interweaves these two perspectives. In search of revenge, he experiences gratitude. In search of closure, he instead opens himself to new people and possibilities. Gould discovers that the dead soldier is kept alive by the stories of the villagers. Likewise, this return journey is a resurrection for the author. He tells his own tale and in the end, the book and its author soar.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of My Year Abroad: A Novel by Chang-Rae Lee (Rating 3) – Bifurcated, Half Good. My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee, is the story of a year in the life of Tiller Bardmon, a twenty-year-old, motherless, one-eighth Asian, upper middle class dropout from a New Jersey college town. In this bifurcated tale, part of Tiller’s year is spent living semi-anonymously with an older woman who is in a witness protection program and has a young son. The unlikely threesome form a quasi-family, and Tiller becomes a father figure to the boy, who possesses an uncanny talent for cooking. Tiller has spent the earlier part of the year in China, taken there by a wealthy Asian-American businessman, who is both mentor and father figure. His adventures abroad range from exotic to kinky to torturous. “Adventures” implies an exciting journey for the reader, but Lee’s overlong and fanciful descriptions of bizarre figures and unbelievable events were boring. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I found the author’s riffs to be self-indulgent. By contrast, Tiller’s tame domesticity, in the company of fully drawn characters, especially the young boy, was moving and engaging. A better book would have truncated the unconventional experiences abroad and remained stateside, delving deeper into the creation of an unconventional family.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offill (Rating 3) – Reader Interest as Unsustainable as the Planet. Weather, a novel by Jenny Offill, is as satisfying as twee appetizers without a main course. In other words, not at all nourishing. Lizzie is a happily married woman with a well-adjusted young son and a brother who struggles with addiction, although not in crisis mode. Having dropped out of graduate school, she works in a university library and assists a former professor obsessed with climate change. Nothing changes for Lizzie. She has momentary twinges of fear about how to prepare for ecological disaster, but her life remains inert. The existential dread isn’t even very dreadful. Perhaps that’s the book’s message, that we fret yet do nothing. But as packaged in a somewhat random assortment of social-media length blurbs, the readers’ interest is no more sustainable than the planet. This quippy style seems to be a trend in recent fiction. It’s no longer experimental, and in the case of Weather, not even very imaginative. As an author myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), who prefers books with well developed characters and engaging narratives, I worry that writers and readers like me are doomed to extinction.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands (Rating 5) – Family, Fanaticism, and Flight. Having myself written stories and novels centered on WWII (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I was eager to read The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive by Philippe Sands. The author’s grandfather, a Jew, narrowly escaped death during the Holocaust. My own curiosity took a deeply personal turn when I read in the Introduction that Otto Wachter, the book’s subject, was the SS Officer who ordered the extermination of the entire Jewish population of the Polish city of Lemberg, the birthplace of Sands’s grandfather. My maternal grandparents, who came to America in the early 1900s, were also from Lemberg (then called Lvov in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; known as Lviv under Russian control). My grandmother’s sister (my great aunt) along with her husband, children, and grandchildren were among those Wachter sent to their deaths. So Sands’s quest became mine. The Ratline is actually three stories in one. The first narrative is a family saga about the love between Otto and his wife Charlotte, who shared his virulent antisemitism and turned a blind eye to its extremism; and the loyal attempts of their fourth child Horst, who barely knew his father but feels duty-bound to defend and find good in the man. Horst insists in the face of irrefutable evidence that his father was a humane administrator of civilian life, who had nothing to do with the Nazi death camps. Second, the book is a Nazi atrocity story about a man whose name deserves to be as well known as more familiar ones, like Himmler. The extent to which Wachter, a fanatic anti-Semite, was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands is laid out in chilling detail, supported by documents and photos. While the Holocaust is the best known material in the book, it never ceases to horrify. Third, Sands tells a postwar story of Vatican and U.S. collaboration to aid the flight of Nazi war criminals to Argentina, or elsewhere, via the Ratline of the title. This tale was the most eye-opening for me. Driven by their shared animosity for Russia and communism, the Church and the CIA ignored Nazi atrocities in exchange for information on their Cold War enemy. Rare is the source interviewed by Sands who admits this assistance was motivated by hatred for the Jews as much as for the Reds. I doubt this disgrace will ever be fully acknowledged or held to account, but Sands has written a remarkable book that will sear its record into readers’ minds and hearts. Deftly integrating storytelling and facts, The Ratline is a valuable and unique addition to Holocaust literature.

My Amazon and Goodreads review of GO: A Memoir about Binge-drinking, Self-hatred, and Finding Happiness by Jessica Bell (Rating 5) – The Healing Power of Creativity. Jessica Bell’s memoir is a straightforward story of a young woman’s journey from alienation to self-acceptance. She tries to connect with family and peers, while seeing herself as a disconnected and divided soul. Her struggles with alcohol, and her mother’s parallel fight to overcome drug addiction, are told in stark, often painful incidents. Ultimately, this book is about the healing power of creativity. Through making art, fiction, and above all music, Bell defies despair and builds a satisfying life that gives her a cohesive identity. As an artist and writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), this book resonated with me, but it speaks to anyone who yearns to discover their own form of expression and make peace with their soul.