A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Book Review: The Age of Miracles

“One thing that strikes me when I recall that period of time is just how rapidly we adjusted. What had been familiar once became less and less so. How extraordinary it would seem to us eventually that our sun once set as predictably as clockwork. And how miraculous it would soon seem that I was once a happier girl, less lonely and less shy.”

As far as 11 year-olds go, Julia in Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles has it pretty good when we meet her. She lives with her parents in a normal middle-class California suburb, where she goes to school and plays on the soccer team with her best friend, Hanna. Hanna is at Julia’s house after a sleepover when the news breaks: the earth’s rotation is slowing. At first, it’s not a big difference: an hour or two more per day. But it doesn’t stay that way for long. It keeps slowing: an additional 6 hours, and then 12, and more and more. No one knows how to stop it, or what to do.

The world starts to break into factions: the majority of people follow government pressure to maintain a 24-hour day regardless of what’s happening outside, while others choose to live in sync with the sun. Julia watches the latter group, like her one-time piano teacher, being targeted and attacked by the clock-timers. And it’s not just what’s outside that’s distressing: her father is suddenly unreliable, while her mother suffers from a vague illness that strikes many as the days continue to lengthen. Her grandfather, who she’s close to, gets wound up in conspiracy theories. Hanna’s family briefly moves to Utah with several other Mormon families, but once she comes back she has a new best friend and wants nothing to do with Julia. And Julia longs for her crush, Seth, to notice her and despairs that he never will.

This is as much a coming-of-age story as it is a post-apocalyptic story, which works out very well for it. The implications of the broader social upheaval are certainly intellectually interesting, but it’s the way Julia is impacted that gives the reader an emotional connection to it. Growing up is terrifying in its own ways, and I enjoyed the parallels between Julia becoming an adolescent and the crisis the world is facing: the world is actually ending, her parents don’t understand what it’s like to be her, and her growing understanding that those parents are human and all-too fallible. It doesn’t feel too on-the-nose, but rather adds depth to the story.

The strength of the book really rests on Julia as a character, and Walker does a mostly very good job of writing her: she’s appealing, smart, and observant, if maybe a little bit too precocious for her age. It’s written as though an older Julia is recalling her childhood, and that lends it a sense of nostalgia and longing that’s well-realized. For a book that’s about an apocalyptic scenario, it’s rooted in ordinary and relatable human feelings, where the terror of seeing whales beaching en masse is counterbalanced against the excitement of your crush finally taking an interest in you. I really liked it and found it well-written and compelling, and would recommend it!

A Month in the Life: March 2025

Essentially halfway down, halfway to go with session! The bad news is the hardest part, with the deadlines and the long hours, is what’s on the horizon still. But the only way out is through, so onwards we go.

In Books…

  • Win At All Costs: I technically finished this one on the last day of last month but did not have time to update that post so here it is! If you watch any sort of distance running event, even very casually, you probably know that it’s unusual for Americans or Europeans to win them anymore. Alberto Salazar, a one-time champion of the New York and Boston Marathons, teamed up with Nike to try to reverse that slide, launching the Nike Oregon Project in 2001. Salazar, already controversial as a coach after one of his athletes failed a doping test in the mid-90s, wanted to bring American athletes back into the winner’s circle by pushing against the limits of doping rules. This is (or should be) unsurprising: world-class athletes are always looking for an edge, for something that will make them just that much faster or stronger, knowing full well their opponents are doing the same. Salazar and Nike recruited athletes like Galen Rupp, Kara Goucher, and eventually Mo Farah with deep pockets and the promise of innovative, cutting-edge training methods. And they achieved results…but flirting with disaster for long enough almost inevitably leads to actual disaster, and the Nike Oregon Project shut down for good in 2019 after USADA banned Salazar for anti-doping violations. Matt Hart published this book just about a year later, and in hindsight, it would have benefited from giving the situation more time to breathe. But only two years after the success of Bad Blood, the appetite for stories giving a behind-the-scenes look at white-collar corporate malfeasance was high, so he struck while the iron was hot. What the book lacks, and suffers for the lack of, is a smoking gun. Hart has quite a lot of circumstantial evidence, enough to make it clear that something was rotten in the state of Denmark (or Oregon, as it were), but relies on the reader to connect the dots. It of course beggars belief that virtually every high-level athlete recruited by the Project had thyroid disease requiring medication, that many had severe enough asthma to require steroid treatment. Goucher’s treatment bu Nike during her pregnancy, having her salary withheld despite gamely making appearances and being rushed back to racing to regain the financial support her family required, is appalling. Salazar’s use of his own children as guinea pigs regarding the absorption of topically-applied testosterone is obviously questionable. His use of weight-related criticism to express displeasure with and exert control over his female athletes is gross. While it’s clear that Salazar was an unkind person who toed ethical lines as a coach, there’s no big explosive reveal here. It’s well-written enough, though I suspect it would be most interesting to those who have more than a passing familiarity with the people involved (I am only vaguely aware of the running world). My interest level in it waxed and waned, it starts to feel quite repetitive at points. It’s far from necessary reading, but if you’re a reader interested in sports and doping, it’s solid enough!
  • Maddaddam: Both of the two previous books in this trilogy end at more or less the same place…Snowman, once known as Jimmy, has become a quasi-mystical figure to the Crakers, a genetically engineered group of humanoids developed by Jimmy’s former best friend Glenn (or Crake) before Glenn deployed a deadly epidemic through pills sold as pleasure enhancers that wiped out nearly all of humanity. After sustaining an injury to his foot, which becomes infected, Snowman has fallen into a coma. Toby and Ren, both at one time part of a fringe religious group called God’s Gardeners founded by Adam One, managed to survive through isolation, but have found each other (and a handful of other survivors) when they come across the Crakers and Snowman. Margaret Atwood then takes us on two timelines, one back once again to the before times to trace how we got here, this time through Zeb (Ren’s one-time stepfather, Toby’s sort-of boyfriend, brother to Adam One), and the second moving forward as Toby’s group joins up with the Crakers and tries to heal Jimmy and deal with the violent men who threaten them all…all including the humans, the gentle Crakers, and the mutant pigs Jimmy was injured fleeing from in the first place, engineered with human brain tissue to provide transplant material that has rendered them even more intelligent than pigs already are. There is a lot to like here, including Atwood’s prescience in portraying a way that the world as we know it could plausibly end (the exploration of the nihilistic church led by Adam and Zeb’s father centered on supporting the oil and gas industry is particularly sharp) and a real sense of humor in rendering the stories that Toby tells the Crakers trying to explain the world in which they emerged and the figures that populate it, which she and the reader can tell will become central to the mythology they will develop. The story finds a good balance between the sweeping scope of the origin story it recounts and the small human dramas that make up real life, like Toby’s uncertainty about Zeb’s level of commitment to her. But it starts very slow. Though it was published four years after The Year of the Flood, it picks up right where it left off and I struggled to get reoriented in the narrative despite having read that book only about a year ago. I found it hard to get invested in Zeb until it was more obvious where his story was going, and even then it takes what feels like a few too many twists and turns to tie it in to both the Oryx & Crake and The Year of the Flood narratives. What grounds the book is the story of a group of smart, wary survivors trying to figure out if and how to have hope for the future, even after the end of the world. An incredible trilogy, capped off by a good-but-not-great ending chapter.
  • Dream Count: Chiamaka is a bit like Emma Woodhouse…handsome, clever, and rich. The daughter of a very wealthy Nigerian family, she has spent much of her adult life based in the United States, where she dreams of a career as a writer and an all-consuming love. Her best friend Zikora is also a Nigerian living in America. She’s become a very successful lawyer but longs for a husband and children to complete her life. Chiamaka’s cousin Omelogor, on the other hand, spends most of her life in Nigeria apart from an ill-starred stint in graduate school in the US. Kadiatou, the woman who takes care of Chiamaka’s home, is the only woman the novel follows who is not from Nigeria. A widowed Muslim from Guinea who underwent female genital mutilation, she wants nothing more than to raise her daughter in peace. Each woman is followed in turn, with their stories overlapping relatively little. Trapped inside in the early days of the pandemic, Chia thinks about the men she’s loved before, from the years she spent with art history professor Darnell, who treated her (and allowed his academic friends to treat her) with casual cruelty and disdain, to her broken engagement to the solid, steady Chuka, who she cares for deeply but does not thrill her. Zikora, living through the birth and early days of her child, reflects on her own former lovers, including the absent father of her son, and learns more about her mother than she ever thought she might. Kadiatou lives through hardship after hardship, finally winning some security in her life until an unexpected assault turns her whole world upside down. And Omelogor wonders if she’s really as content as she thinks she is with her life as a single, childless woman in her mid-40s, having finally escaped the profound depression into which her failed stint in graduate school plunged her. I had been so excited when I found out Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was publishing a new novel a decade after Americanah, which I and so many others loved. I’d vaguely recalled a small hubbub a few years back about some comments she’d made about trans people that were a bad look, but I hadn’t heard anything since and assumed it was in the past. But the book makes very clear that Adichie is still feeling the sting of the criticism she faced. Virtually every Western progressive is portrayed in a negative light. Darnell is awful to Chia for no reason, making her feel small and ignorant, openly resenting her and chastising her for her wealth while being sure to accept any offered largesse. But it’s in Omelogor’s portion of the book, in which she takes a leave from her career in banking to do a master’s program in America, where things struggle the most under the weight of serving as a proxy for Adichie’s criticism. Omelogor has come to believe that pornography is too often used, especially by men, to learn about sex, teaching lessons about denigration of women. She wants to study the educational role of the material. But…she doesn’t seem to actually have any ideas about it, besides that it is “bad” in this context. There’s no indication she intends to do any sort of original research about how and when young people first encounter porn, or how they feel about its role in the development in their romantic lives. But when her advisor pushes back on her underbaked idea, she’s portrayed as the one who is out of touch rather than Omelogor. Omelogor’s classmates criticize her work as a banker and denounce its immorality without any apparent interest in asking any questions or learning about any actual moral issues in banking, content to rail against it as an established, uninterrogated evil while also hypocritically participating in it. These other students are also depicted as coddled, with one getting an extension on an assignment due to their dog having an ear infection. Omelogor comes in as confident, even sometimes brash, but by the end is depressed and drinking too much, unable to find a foothold among these people and their slippery words, their implied refusal to live in reality. While Omelogor isn’t generally depicted as being above criticism, she is clearly meant to be the sympathetic party in this portion of the book but doesn’t actually come off as especially sympathetic. The whole storyline also doesn’t go anywhere…Omelogor returns to Nigeria, to banking, and apart from talking to her friends about whether they learned about sex from porn, doesn’t seem to take any continued interest in the subject. The best portion of the book for me was Zikora’s, in which her understanding of who her mother is and what she has lived through undergoes dramatic, unexpected shifts as she herself becomes a mother. I found it affecting and rendered with nuance. Chia’s portion has some lovely prose and moments of sharp insight (the way Chia’s thrill of excitement at talking to a publisher about putting together a collection of her writing curdles into dismay as she realizes that what the publisher actually wants is a memoir about African tragedy instead of stories of a rich girl traveling in fine style), but I found myself reminded a bit too much of Carrie Bradshaw in the tale of a writer in love with the idea of love who follows up a romance with a narcissistic commitment-phobe who breaks her heart by seriously dating a down-to-earth man who is straightforward about his desire to marry her, only to leave him because she longs for the intensity of instability. And then there’s Kadiatou, who Adichie writes about in her author’s note as having been inspired by Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel room attendant raped by then-IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Despite having critiqued in Chia’s story the editor who is only interested in the worst parts of Africa, Adichie creates a story focusing on the worst parts of life as a woman. Kadiatou is raised in a patriarchal social model in which her uncle’s family takes charge of her own when her father dies, she undergoes genital cutting, her beloved sister dies of an unspecified and untreated reproductive condition, she is married off to a man she does not love because her family will not consider the man she cares for, her husband is not kind to her, and on and on. I have no doubt that there are many women for whom this is their lived experience, completely unremarkable to them for its ordinariness. But it doesn’t make for especially compelling storytelling. Adichie is a gifted prose stylist, the writing in this book is often stunning. It’s good overall, often very good, and I enjoyed a lot about reading it. But at the end of the day, I wanted so much for it to be great and it just was not.
  • Bone Gap: This is a book I likely never would have heard of but for positive word-of-mouth. Bone Gap is a small town in rural Illinois where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Everyone knows that pretty, flighty Didi O’Sullivan picked up and left several years after the death of her husband Hugh for a rich man in Oregon, leaving behind her two sons. Everyone knows that Sean O’Sullivan had to give up his dreams of being a doctor to work as an EMT and raise his little brother, Finn. Everyone knows that teenage Finn O’Sullivan is even more beautiful and even more odd than his mother was. Everyone knows that one day out of the blue a lovely young Polish woman, Roza, appeared at the O’Sullivan’s home and they took her in. Everyone thinks they know that both Sean and Finn were in love with her. And everyone knows that one day Roza disappeared. Finn claims to have seen her be taken, but he can’t describe the man who took her, so no one knows what really happened. It’s two months later now, but Sean is still barely speaking, barely looking at his brother. Finn is trying to focus on studying for college entrance exams to give him a way out of Bone Gap, where he’s referred to as often as not as “Moonface” or “Spaceman” for his dreamily disconnected manner, but he’s distracted by his crush on Petey, the daughter of the local beekeeper who is mocked for her unconventional looks. And Roza? She’s trapped in a nightmare, being held captive by a cold-eyed man who sees in her only a beauty he wants to possess. The through-line throughout the book is perception, who sees what and how. The web of love and guilt and resentment with which Sean and Finn perceive each other, the way Roza is perceived by men who see only her allure and not who she is, the way Petey learns from others how to perceive her own features and it makes her afraid to trust Finn’s interest in her, the way the people who live around them look at all of them and pass judgment. The characters are rendered with sensitivity and understanding. What kept this from being truly excellent, for me, were the magical realism elements of the story. It’s not a style that I tend to find especially appealing, though I think it can be effective. And it’s not that this is particularly poorly rendered, but just…it doesn’t feel necessary. It doesn’t add anything to the narrative or increase its power. Very much worth the read, but it could have been even better.
  • Everything I Never Told You: Lydia Lee is the center around which her family turns. Chinese-American James Lee, a Ph.D. student, met WASPy beauty Marilyn Walker in her first year of college and their instant connection changed the trajectory of both their lives forever. James has always felt himself to be an outlier, has always wanted desperately to assimilate, and sees in Marilyn the undeniable American-ness he’s craved. Marilyn loves science and dreams of being a doctor, even in the early 1950s, defying the expectations of everyone…especially her dedicated homemaker mother. She is proudly, defiantly different and is drawn to James because he’s unlike anyone she’s ever known before. When she becomes pregnant before she graduates, they marry, vaguely aware of but not fully understanding the way the family they create will permanently set them apart. Despite his brilliance, James is passed over for a professorship at Harvard, his alma mater, and finds a university job he’s grateful to have in small-town Ohio, where the Lees are the only Asian and only mixed-race family in town with their three children: Nathan, Lydia, and Hannah. Lydia, their second child and first daughter, becomes the focus of the dreams her parents have never quite been able to achieve: her father wants for the her popularity and social ease that have always eluded him, her mother dreams of seeing her daughter enroll in medical school. And then, when she’s only 16, Lydia disappears unexpectedly…only for her body to be discovered in the local lake shortly thereafter. She had never learned how to swim. The fissures laying underneath the surface of her grieving family are suddenly thrown into sharp relief, and the narrative follows them both backwards, to see how it all began, and forwards, as they threaten to pull apart at the seams. This is the kind of debut novel that’s exciting to read, because while it is obviously a debut in some ways, Celeste Ng clearly has a knack for balancing plot and character work, with the mystery of how Lydia died giving the tale momentum, and the sharply observed family dynamics providing texture and emotional resonance to the Lees. They are not the picture of suburban contentment they might at first appear to be. Firstborn and only son Nathan, called Nath (which I spent quite a lot time wondering was pronounced to rhyme with “bath” or “lathe”), studious and ambitious, reminds James of everything he doesn’t like about himself, while Marilyn focuses so much on righting the generational wrong of her gender having ultimately derailed her goals that she can’t fully devote herself to her son. It is to Lydia, with her all-American blue eyes, that both of them look to be everything they always wanted to be but couldn’t. Hannah, whose birth reconnected her parents when it seemed they might be on the verge of a permanent break, has always been a bit of an afterthought and her lower visibility makes her a deft observer of what lingers unsaid among the others. Ng does an impressive job conveying how the role of family golden child is as much a gilded cage as anything else: her parents are so busy trying to make her into a popular high achiever that they can’t see her being pressed, like Giles Corey at Salem, under the weight of their expectations. There are some things that don’t quite work. We understand what drew the parents to each other in the first place, but we don’t see enough of the happy times in their lives to make the times when their marriage might flounder have the impact it really should. Similarly, most of the time the reader spends with the Lees are in times of duress, so the idea that they were a relatively happy family prior to Lydia’s death is told more than shown. I had questions about aspects of Marilyn’s character that felt like something the narrative should have engaged with but it did not. I’m usually a proponent of tighter editing, but I feel like this could have used another 50-ish pages to round it out. Nevertheless it’s a very good book and a very impressive debut!
  • Woodworking: Erica Skyberg is having a bit of a rough one. She’s just gone through a divorce, and her ex is already in a new relationship…with a baby on the way. She still has feelings for her ex, who happens to have just been cast as the lead in the play she’s assistant directing, so that’s awkward. Oh and also she’s just figured out she’s trans, something she has spent the last few decades of her life trying to not have to acknowledge. She hasn’t told anyone yet…until she trades spots with another high school teacher in small-town Mitchell, South Dakota, to take over detention duty because Abigail Hawkes is in detention. Abigail has just transferred to Mitchell for her senior year after having had to leave her parents’ home and move in with her sister because she’s trans. Erica has never known anyone who might understand what she’s experiencing, but when she shares the truth with Abigail, the two start to develop a connection as the only transwomen in Mitchell. Abigail, who ordered her hormones over the internet, is living as herself and navigating her senior year of high school, her relationship with her older sister Jennifer, a budding friendship with overachiever Megan, and a potential relationship with Caleb, a sporty type and the son of Brooke Daniels, a wealthy local mommy working on the campaign of a transphobic state legislative candidate as well as being the primary director of the play Erica is working on. As one might imagine, complications ensue. I’ve been following Emily St. James’s writing since she was at The Onion AV Club and have generally found her a smart, insightful cultural critic. It’s not always easy to navigate a transition from that form to something like writing novel-length fiction, but I shouldn’t have been concerned. St. James’s writing is fantastic. Some aspects of the storytelling didn’t quite work for me, but she writes her vivid characters with humor and a tremendous empathy. Each of the women she follows in her narrative has a distinctly different perspective and a voice that rings true. Having read some of her writing about her own transition previously, it seems like she’s writing from a place of personal experience in many ways when it comes to Erica, who has to work hard to find the courage to live as herself knowing the effect it will likely have on not only her career as an English teacher, but her increasingly complicated relationship with her ex-wife Constance and her role in the community at large. The internal struggle between a safe but stifled life in the closet and the possibility and terror of what might come next if she does come out is beautifully rendered. My favorite character was probably Abigail, who wields a sharp sense of humor as armor but is far from a snarky teenager stereotype. She’s vulnerable in the ways most teenage girls are, and she makes mistakes, but her energy practically bursts off the page. I appreciated the way St. James let her characters be messy in ways that feel very true. They screw up, they do things that are hurtful to others…they act, well, like people. They are not meant to be completely virtuous depictions, because being trans doesn’t make you inherently better (or worse, obviously) than anyone else. One of the aspects of that messiness, though, was the relationship between Erica and Abigail, which I found to be hard to sit with. To be clear, there’s absolutely no suggestion of any attraction between them at any point. Rather, it is the way that Erica, a woman in her mid-30s, comes to be emotionally dependent in some ways on Abigail, who is 17 and a student in her class. Regardless of the gender of anyone in that scenario, that’s a not-great dynamic. It’s not uninterrogated in the text, other characters raise it and Erica acknowledges the truth of it. But I still found it a sticking point in my ability to really get emotionally engaged in the story, which was very compelling in many other ways. That quibble aside, this is a very good book, and a very promising debut novel. I can’t wait to see what St. James writes next!
  • The Emperor: In 1974, Haile Selassie was deposed as Emperor of Ethiopia after a 44 year reign. Four years later, Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski published this look back at the final years of his rule, conducting interviews with many of the palace functionaries who were there at the time and shaping them into an oral history to narrate how it all came crashing down. It’s not a pretty picture: Selassie surrounded himself with greedy, flattering acolytes who competed viciously with each other for powerful posts which would enable them to  embezzle resources from the vast numbers of the country’s poor. The occasional honest man who came to prominence was quickly cut down by this pack of wolves. There was astonishing waste, like an entire luxurious palace constructed for the Emperor in the countryside only visited once, and astonishing poverty, with tens of thousands of Ethiopians dying of starvation. Palace functionaries lay much of the responsibility for Selassie’s overthrow at the feet of the small but growing educated class. who agitated against the horrifying stagnation and corruption they saw playing out. The combination of student protests and military unrest created an unsustainable situation for the ruling class, emptying the palace of officials (mostly by throwing them in jail) and then, slowly but surely, of household staff and personal servants (mostly just sent home). This is a pretty short book, and I found myself turning to Wikipedia several times to get more context for some events like the famine, but its strength lies in the oral history formatting and I don’t know how he would have been able to give additional context without undermining that. I also tried to keep in mind that this was originally published only a few years after Selassie’s overthrow, when the events that inspired it would have been much more in the realm of common knowledge. It’s the kind of non-fiction that doesn’t overly trouble itself by trying to pretend objectivity, but the trick that makes it work is that the interviewees are almost uniformly supportive of their late Emperor while still damning him with what they reveal in their defense of him. It’s remarkably consistent in some important ways with accounts of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia as the little father who was deceived by his evil ministers, and if he realized the truth of what they had been doing, he surely would have set things right…this language is applied almost verbatim to Selassie, and is all the more resonant as a reference because Kapuscinski was writing as a citizen of Communist Poland. The internet seems to think there is real reason to believe that the book was meant to serve a dual purpose as a satire of that country’s governing leadership, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. From the United States in 2025, there seem to be parallels to our own moment as well. An interesting read.

In Life…

  • Session continues: I am always tired, I am super stressed, I very rarely get to work out or do anything healthy. We’re very close to halfway done but the easy half is behind us. I can’t wait until June.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Spring 2025 To-Read List

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the books we’ll be reading this spring! An unusually high amount of non-fiction for me up this spring, ranging from a history of the early years of Nazi rule to an oral recounting of the making of one of my favorite movies. I’ll also finally be reading the dragon book!

Woodworking: I’ve been following Emily St. James since she was writing about TV at The Onion AV Club and I am super excited to read her debut novel!

The Emperor: African history is a serious gap in my knowledge base so I’m looking forward to this recounting of the final years of Haile Selassie’s rule as emperor of Ethiopia.

The Scientist in the Crib: I don’t usually read a lot of parenting books, but watching C learn and grow has made me really curious about what we know about early learning!

Prophet Song: This is my book club’s selection for April, and though I likely won’t be able to go because of session I do like to read along.

Fourth Wing: Everyone but me has read the dragon book so it’s time.

The Coming of the Third Reich: I’ve long had this read planned but it will be especially…interesting to read right now, I think.

Things Left Unsaid: I love coming-of-age stories and this one about two young people who used to be friends coming back together in London feels very up my alley.

Ada Blackjack: This is a true story, about an Eskimo woman who accompanied several men into the Arctic as a guide but was the only survivor of their journey and it sounds fascinating.

As If: I love Clueless so much, of course I have to read a book all about it getting made.

The Accursed: I read Blonde in high school but haven’t tried Joyce Carol Oates since and this gothic novel seems like it could be fun!

Book Review: The Hours

Existing in the world as a woman has never been easy. Even today, when women are freer and more independent than ever, we’re still relentlessly policed for how our hair looks, how our bodies look, whether we smile enough. Women in the professional world know the delicate balance we must strive to achieve between being forceful enough to not be railroaded while not being aggressive enough to attract male ire. When women become mothers, they’re expected to be the primary parent even if that’s not what they or their partner want, and be involved enough to be interested but not so involved that they smother their child’s independence. Sometimes it feels like a mean-spirited game, in which there isn’t so much a way to win as just a way to lose less badly.

The ways the world traps women are highlighted by Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. It follows three women, all connected by Mrs. Dalloway. There’s Virginia Woolf herself, as she begins to be inspired to write the book. There’s Laura Brown, a pregnant 1950s housewife who can’t understand her own dissatisfaction with her loving husband and adoring young son, who’s reading the book. And then there’s Clarissa Vaughan, who shares the name of the novel’s protagonist and has been teasingly called “Mrs. Dalloway” for years by her ex-lover and dear friend Richard, who is dying of AIDS. Like in Mrs. Dalloway, each character’s story takes place over a single day.

For each woman, that one day is their life in miniature. Woolf doubts herself in the wake of a mental breakdown that has driven her husband to insist on a move to the countryside, but carefully nurses the inspiration that has come to her for her new book. Her sister and nieces/nephews come to visit and Woolf feels inferior to her, as she does not have the family that their social world celebrates as the pinnacle of female achievement. Having that perfect domestic situation, though, doesn’t make Laura Brown happy. Faced with the same demands to be a cheerful spouse and mother, she wants desperately to find her situation idyllic, but the pressure of putting together a birthday party for her husband causes her such distress that she leaves her child with a neighbor and takes a hotel room for a few hours to just have some space to read. Vaughan is also preparing for a party, a celebration for Richard having won a literary prize. As she’s getting ready, she reflects on the path her life took, the failure of her romance with Richard during a heady summer in which they and Richard’s boyfriend lived together and tried to sort out their own sexualities and romantic ties.

This is a book I’d been meaning to read for a long time, but wanted to hold off until after I’d read Mrs. Dalloway itself. Which was the correct call: reading this book without having any real background in that book would have robbed it of a lot of context and power. And whew, what power this book has! It’s a short read, about 250 pages, but it packs a punch. Cunningham’s writing is incredible: his prose is smooth, elegant, rich. Though each woman’s story is allocated only about 70 pages, he builds deeply-felt characters who feel three-dimensional and real. And the way he structures the book, with alternating chapters, works beautifully. It highlights the parallels between them, as well as making each one feel fresh when it gets its turn.

The only flaw I would say this book has is that while it’s admirable, it wasn’t something that I felt a particularly strong emotional connection to throughout. Moments, like Laura in her hotel room, really struck me and stayed with me, but there was something removed about the way Cunningham wrote about existential despair. I never got truly pulled in to and transported by the narrative, but I don’t know that it’s fair to criticize it for that as it never seemed to be the kind of book that was trying to do that. Otherwise, though, it’s incredibly well-done. Writing a book that explicitly seeks to have itself compared to Mrs. Dalloway is a big lift, but Cunningham achieves it. I highly recommend this book!

A Month in the Life: February 2025

About one month down, roughly three to go to get through the 83rd Legislative Session! It turns out session with a baby is a very different ballgame than session with a toddler, so the whole family is adjusting in real time.

In Books…

  • Last Night at the Viper Room: The subtitle on this one (“River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind”) made me expect something that was about the Hollywood of the era examined through the lens of the life, films, and death of River Phoenix. That turned out to be a mistaken apprehension. Instead, this book serves overwhelmingly as a glowing biography of River, who lived an atypical life for anyone, much less a movie star. Born to hippies John and Arlyn Bottom (who eventually changed their surname to Phoenix) and followed by four other children, River spent many of his childhood years in Venezuela with the Children of God cult, infamous for its encouragement of sexual behavior in children. Despite acknowledging that River often lied in interviews, author Gavin Edwards decides to regard as true the claim that River made to have been molested at age 4, locating this as the center of the trauma that the actor was trying to bury with drugs. River’s brother Joaquin has refuted the claim, and honestly the childhood he had would have been traumatizing either way: both before and after the family left the group, he and his siblings sang on street corners to earn enough money for five children and two adults to scrape by. The pressure he was put under to earn what he and his loved ones needed to survive continued once they returned to the United States, as River started to appear in commercials and television shows. He had a real and untutored talent: Stand By Me, of course, made him a star, and he was just 18 when he was nominated for an Oscar for Running on Empty. He never spent a single day in a classroom, either for regular school or acting lessons, and Edwards traces his addictive behavior to his instinctual Method acting technique…and a desire to bond with his increasingly distant father, an alcoholic. What seems to have started out with booze and weed as a young teenager turned into an on-and-off heroin habit, and while Phoenix was capable of delivering great performances still (as in My Own Private Idaho), he became increasingly less engaged with his film career. He was only 23 when, as many know, he died after overdosing on a speedball at The Viper Room, a club infamous for being owned and regularly frequented by Johnny Depp in his peak indie-cool Tim Burton era. There are asides, every so often, about Hollywood at large and River’s contemporaries, but they are separated by long segments devoted exclusively to River. There are so many places this could have gone to root itself more deeply. The long history of the exploitative nature of child stardom, and the ways parent-child dynamics in families even much more stable than the Phoenixes can go awry when your 14 year-old is paying your rent. There are some nods to the drug culture at the time, with references to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the rise of “heroin chic”, but the connections are only surface-level. Similarly shallow references are made to the changing ecosystem of the movie industry, with Quentin Tarantino and the Weinsteins beginning their ascent. But it’s never tied together, never critically examined. Nor, for that measure, is River himself, who is portrayed as an open-hearted, sensitive idealist, in an almost “too pure for this world” way. Apart from not being what I wanted it to be, I just don’t think it succeeds in creating a compelling narrative, so I can’t recommend it.
  • Orbital: The International Space Station orbits the Earth sixteen times every twenty four hours. Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel follows one day in the lives of six astro/cosmonauts, who are Russian, American, British, Japanese, and Italian, and whose vessel is never explicitly named as the ISS but obviously is intended to be. They float. They think about their loved ones. Chie, the Japanese astronaut, learns that her mother has died and she will not be back in time for the funeral rites. They make reports back down to earth about the progress of an enormous, destructive typhoon. As a different team of astronauts make a journey to the moon, many on the ISS reflect on their professional envy, their childhood dreams of stepping on that satellite unlikely to ever come to fruition even as it brought them to their current situation. They all watch a movie together. It’s a meditative book, focusing less on the astronauts themselves than the reflections prompted by their experiences watching the earth from orbit. It recounts moments both small (the way they all share food, despite strictures against so doing) and large (watching the typhoon tear across populated areas), emphasizing the power of human connection, despite or even because of the pure chance that creates those connections. Harvey’s writing leans heavily on the wonder of it all, the way the astronauts come to find their daily experiences becoming mundane but the sight of the pale blue dot from their windows retains the power to shock them back into awe at the perspective they get to see, one beyond the understanding of all but a very lucky few. If I’m being completely honest, I’d say I’d hoped for this book to be mind-blowing and was slightly disappointed to find it merely quite good. Despite its abbreviated length (only a little over 200 pages), by the end it managed to feel like it was getting a bit repetitive. There’s a loveliness to the prose but it taps the same well over and over. I liked it but did not love it.
  • Doctor Zhivago: Yuri Zhivago is a traumatized child when the book bearing his name begins, having found himself an orphan after the loss of his beloved mother. His father, a once-wealthy man, had left them behind long ago to spend all his money chasing pleasure. He finds himself in the charge of his uncle Nikolai, who eventually places him with a Moscow family, the Gromekos. Yuri is raised as a beloved member of that comfortable family, eventually marrying their daughter Antonina and completing his studies to become a doctor. Another unfortunate child brought to Moscow is Larissa Guichard. Her father is also dead, leaving her and her brother in the care of their mother Amalia. Amalia is the mistress of the powerful and well-connected lawyer Komarovsky, who helps the family establish themselves while also starting to groom Larissa (or Lara, for short). As she grows into a beautiful teenager, he begins to abuse her and fancies himself in love with her. She does not have feelings for him and in order get out of a situation she is increasingly unhappy in, throws herself into marriage with Pasha Antipov, the son of an imprisoned revolutionary who has long-since adored her. Both are starting to find some stability and happiness when their lives are upended by the Russian Revolution. Pasha feels trapped in his marriage to Lara despite his love for her and escapes into military service, where he goes missing. Lara trains as a nurse and searches for him, winding up working in the same camp alongside Zhivago, where they finally become acquainted as part of the same medical team after having had glancing encounters in their earlier lives in Moscow. A few years later, Zhivago and his wife and children travel to a remote town in the Ural Mountains where they once owned a large estate, which has of course been nationalized but where they hope to escape from the perils of the city to live simply on the land. Lara has also ended up there with her daughter after Pasha’s reported death, and it is then that the two begin an affair, which is broken off when Zhivago is kidnapped by a band of Red partisans to serve as their doctor in their continued warfare against the Whites. He escapes, however, and is reunited with Lara…but their happiness cannot last. This is certainly an important novel, but for me, it wasn’t an especially good one. For as much time as the narrative spends with Lara and especially Yuri, their inner lives are not well-developed. As a reader who enjoys character, I was hoping to be immersed in Yuri and Lara’s perspectives of a fascinating time, when their world shifted irrevocably under their feet. How do they find the strength to go on without succumbing to despair? What do they really think of the battles between Red and White? In this book so reknowned for their romance, why, even, do they love each other? These questions aren’t ever really answered, because what drives Yuri and Lara doesn’t seem to be what Pasternak is interested in exploring in his narrative. Instead, what I got from it was a portrait of the chaos and trials of living in the post-Revolutionary world as an adult who had come of age before it had happened. Like presumably many Russians, there was tentative hope for the world that could have emerged from the ashes, destined to be forever unrealized because the world that actually came to be took a decidedly worse turn. I’m not sure if it was my translation (I read the Peavar/Volokhonsky), but I felt like both the plot and prose were resisting my attempts to enjoy them. The narrative doesn’t have a lot of momentum, and the writing lacked a sense of sweep that would have given its epic ambitions more oomph. Like many Russian novels, this one will likely be confusing to those without context around Russian naming conventions. I’m relatively familiar with them and even I noted at least a few times when the same character was referred to by two different diminutives within just a sentence or two. I did learn much more about the time of the civil wars following the Revolution than I had before. It’s not that I don’t appreciate having read this, I do. I just wish I’d actually liked it more.
  • The Favorites: Katarina Shaw is only four years old when she watches, rapt, as American ice dancer Sheila Lin and her partner, Kirk Lockwood, win a gold medal at the Olympics. She begins skating shortly thereafter, dreaming of being just like Sheila…even more so when she makes an unexpected comeback to the next Games, snagging another gold despite having become a mother of two in between. Kat wants to be an ice dancer just like her hero, but her small rink outside of Chicago is not teeming with potential partners. At least, not until she’s nine and Heath Rocha, a foster kid at the rink for a hockey program for underprivileged youth, spots her from the stands and is entranced. The two team up, despite him having no resources at all and Kat’s family having scant few themselves, and fall in love, bonded close together by Kat’s goal of skating glory and their hardscrabble circumstances. They manage to qualify for US Nationals when they’re 16, hoping against hope they can leverage their performance skills (he, especially, has some real deficits in the actual skating) and electric chemistry to grab the attention of a sponsor. Instead, they attract the attention of Sheila Lin herself…now the coach of her twin children, Bella and Garrett. Lin offers them a place in her exclusive ice dance school in Los Angeles, training alongside the siblings. Saying yes changes their course of their lives forever as they start to rise in the ranks, climbing ever closer to the Olympics and maybe even the gold medal Kat has wanted as long as she can remember. But nothing is fair in love, war, or figure skating. A retelling of Wuthering Heights, Layne Fargo mixes in a dash of Taylor Jenkins Reid, a bit of the dynamism of Canadian ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, and some Tonya Harding vibes to freshen up the story for the modern era. I read Wuthering Heights back in high school and didn’t especially enjoy it. Its depiction of a set of characters who make each other romantically miserable felt melodramatic even as a teenager. so I enjoyed the ways Fargo changed some of the dynamics within the narrative with her book. Kat and Bella Lin are rivals, and Heath is a component of that rivalry, but ultimately they compete more over their shared ambition to win everything they can as skaters. Kat’s relationship to Heath is profoundly important to her, but achieving what she can on the ice is even more so. It’s definitely a page-turner, the oral history plot device and relatively short chapters give it a lot of momentum. But honestly, I failed to really get drawn into the story the way I was hoping, in part because of the relatively shallowness of the characters. Each has a few defining features but the only one whose head we really get into is Kat’s, where we find little but drive towards gold. As a person who does seriously watch figure skating, I was prepared to be irritated by an unrealistic depiction of the sport, but though there are some relatively minor quibbles, Fargo gets the broad strokes right. It’s an enjoyable read, perfect for the beach or an airplane!

In Life…

  • My sixth session began: I honestly do enjoy my job but it’s been hard. Since C abandoned his nap several months ago, he goes to bed very early so there are days when I hardly even get to see him and I feel a lot of guilt even though I know it will be over soon.
  • C is three!: He’s sweet and silly and growing so so fast! It’s hard to believe that it has been three years already since he was born. It feels like just yesterday that he was fresh and new and had no idea what it meant to be alive in the world and now he’s a whole person with his own thoughts that he feels very free to share with us (including demands for “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga)! I can’t wait to find out who he continues to become.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Set in Another Time

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re highlighting books from time periods other than our own. I’ve gone back through my read list and picked ten books I really enjoyed set in all different times and places!

Catherine, Called Birdy (the Middle Ages): This is smart and funny and surprisingly well-rooted in actual history. Teenage Catherine may be anachronistically high-spirited and rebellious, but it’s a winning middle-grade book that will actually teach readers something!

The Butcher’s Daughter (the English Reformation): I’ve read a ton of books set in the Tudor era so knew about the closing of the religious homes but had never really thought about what might have drawn young people into that sort of environment…and how they would have coped with having their lives ripped away from them. A different and interesting perspective!

The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B (the French Revolution): The woman who became Empress of France as the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte saw the very dark side of the French Revolution, being imprisoned after her first husband fell out of favor with the Jacobins, who eventually executed him, and coming close to being executed herself. A compelling look at a very tumultuous time.

Persuasion (Georgian-Era England): Any of Austen’s novels would have worked here, but Persuasion is my favorite. It’s a very specific part of the English experience of that era, with little evidence of larger movements of the outside world (though Wentworth’s achievement of status is tied to his service in the navy during the Napoleonic Wars, this is not dwelt on), and tightly focused on country gentry, but it paints a rich portrait of that little world.

The Killer Angels (the American Civil War): This book depicts the Battle of Gettysburg from both sides and really goes deep into its characters, providing rich context to the social environment of the Civil War, especially that of the officers. I learned a lot more about the time than I’d known before I read it and really enjoyed it!

The Children’s Book (the Belle Epoque): I think technically this term is meant to refer to French history specifically, but this book beautifully captures England in the years leading up to WWI and the peace, prosperity, and frivolity of that era that were ripped away when the war began.

The Shining Girls (the Great Depression): While this book takes place in several timelines, one of the major ones follows a drifter during the Depression, really emphasizing the rootlessness and desperation to survive of that time through the eyes of an unusually unsympathetic character.

Life After Life (the London Blitz): The book’s central conceit, that an English woman lives her life over and over again, really shone for me in the portions that take place during the Blitz, exploring the fear and devastation from multiple perspectives.

Midnight’s Children (the Partition): One of the most significant events of the 20th century is masterfully explored in this masterpiece novel that traces 1,001 children born in the hour India becomes independent and is also torn asunder. Every time I read about Partition I want to read even more, I can’t believe how little I learned about it growing up!

Oryx and Crake (the near future): This is just one take on what might be in store for the world but felt (and still feels) frighteningly prescient.

Book Review: Soon The Light Will Be Perfect

Middle school, as a whole, remains one of the worst experiences of my life. I was socially awkward, chubby, awash with hormones and feelings I struggled to control but that more often controlled me. I was angry and lashed out frequently. I’ve never done so poorly in school in my life. The best thing that happened was that it ended. And I got over it! I’m something resembling a reasonably well-adjusted adult now…but hoo boy, middle school me did not seem like she was going to get there.

A lot of people struggle with those years between proper childhood and being a real teenager. Even in the best of circumstances, your body is changing, your friendships start to change, and the outside world starts to intrude. Unfortunately, the unnamed 12 year-old protagonist of Dave Patterson’s Soon The Light Will Be Perfect is not living in the best of circumstances. His family, living in rural Vermont, is trying desperately to claw out of poverty, having just moved into a house from the nearby trailer park, but his father’s shaky hold on his job in a munitions factory is causing a lot of stress. Causing even more stress is his mother’s diagnosis of cancer. The family leans heavily on their deep, conservative Catholic religion for strength, but despite the fiery pro-life rhetoric the church espouses, even the priest seems to be questioning his faith.

While his mother gets sicker and sicker over the course of the summer, the boy and his older brother are often left more or less to their own devices. The brother, about to start high school, begins to rebel, buying NWA albums and spending hours talking to his girlfriend on the phone. The boy acts out in his own way, including being drawn into the orbit of a pretty, troubled girl his own age named Taylor who’s just moved into his old trailer park with her mother. The family is teetering on the edge of a break, and it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge.

This sounds epic, right? There is a LOT going on here: religion, parents and children, siblings, first infatuations, child abuse, poverty, social class, cancer. But the book is only about 250 pages long. Which is really where it fails: it’s overambitious and unfortunately, under-executed. A book of this length should be tight, focused. Instead, Patterson hops from heavy theme to heavy theme, never giving any of them room to breathe or develop. It feels more than anything like an early draft, where he’s got the major plot points he wants to hit on the page and will come back and fill in all the rest of it later…and then never did.

Which is a pity, because while he’s not a masterful prose stylist and some of the symbolism is pretty clunky, there are some good elements here. While I did not think the technique of leaving the narrator unnamed was effective in this case, Patterson does solid work in building the character, and everyone in the book is rendered with sympathy. The dynamic between the family members feels real and is often moving. As a whole, though, this book just didn’t come together. I can’t in good faith recommend it to anyone.

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