A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Book Review: Without A Prayer

Sometimes the idea of someone to outsource thinking about the Big Decisions to seems like an appealing one. Not that I can imagine myself being someone who got involved in a cult, but it’s not totally inexplicable to me that people do. Charismatic people always draw an audience, and there are plenty of vulnerable people in the world who are susceptible to their sway. We live in a complicated, confusing world where bad things often happen for no apparent reason. If someone told you they had the answers, wouldn’t it be tempting to believe them?

Church is supposed to be a safe space. That it often isn’t is something we all became that much more aware of in the wake of the Catholic clergy sex abuse revelations. But still, when nineteen year-old Lucas Leonard walked into his church in upstate New York in October 2015, he almost certainly expected to walk back out again. He didn’t. Susan Ashline’s Without A Prayer tells the story of how the teenager came to be beaten to death by a group that included his own parents and half-sister, and that means exploring the larger narrative of the World of Life Christian Church. Never more than a small group that broke off from a larger Pentecostal congregation, the Church came to be led by the Irwin family (first father Jerry, then daughter Tiffanie after his death), who exerted increasingly tight control over their flock, demanding both money and unswerving loyalty.

Of course, the rules that applied to the rest didn’t apply to the Irwins. While parishioners sat through long sermons, where members who had broken rules were publicly shamed and all contact between members of the opposite sex (including within families) was more and more harshly condemned as “molestation”, the Irwins wandered in and out freely. The Irwins also worked to control the relationships of their congregants by requiring constant texting with leadership about violations committed by themselves and others, and trying to steer them towards pre-determined marriages. One that took was Bruce and Deborah Leonard, both of whom came in with children from previous marriages and then had more of their own, including Lucas. Growing tired of the domination of the Irwins, Bruce’s daughter Crystal broke away, and encouraged Lucas to do so as well. Shortly after he accompanied her to a different church, he was called in for a “counseling” session, where he was accused of molesting his nieces and viciously attacked by his own parents and half-sister, among others, only being taken to the hospital once he was already dead.

It’s a horrifying story. To not only suffer a deadly assault in a house of worship, but to have the perpetrators be your own family members, is just mind-bogglingly awful. Knowing where it’s going to end, reading along as the Irwins isolate the members of their church further and further not just from the outside world, but from each other, brings an increasing sense of dread. The behavior being described is truly bizarre, and that’s without even getting into the wild story around the death of Jerry Irwin, which has to be read to be believed. Ashline clearly has done deep research into the stories of the church in general and the Irwin and Leonard families in particular. She clearly cares about what happened to Lucas and wants to expose the circumstances that led to his untimely death.

Unfortunately, the book never quite comes together. Its primary issue is an excess of facts at the expense of any analysis. Ashline asserts in the subtitle that the church became a cult, she references the testimony of an expert in cult formation at the trial that landed the perpetrators in jail, but she never actually lays out how a cult can be identified or applies that framework to the details of the Word of Life situation. She’s a reporter, so the instinct to present facts to the reader without drawing a conclusion for them is understandable, but it undermines the effectiveness of her book. She also struggles to create a real narrative arc for her story, clearly wanting to include as much as what she uncovered as she can in a way that makes it feel bogged down and directionless in places. I appreciate the work that went into this, but I wish it had been better edited and organized, and there had been more analysis. There’s a great true crime book about Lucas Leonard’s death, but this one isn’t it.

A Month In The Life: August 2026

Although of course I know it’s still going to stay summery for a little while yet, September is tomorrow and my brain still thinks that means that it’s fall now. It’s hard to believe that we’re rounding into the last few months of the year, but before we get into that, let’s look back at the month that was.

In Books…

  • Gichigami Hearts: Misaabekong means “the place of the giants”, and that’s what the Ojibwe people who lived there called it in recognition of the large rock formations in the local landscape long before white people showed up and called it Duluth. Gichigami is, of course, the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior. I’d found myself becoming irritated by family histories a few months back, but either this was the exception that proves the rule or Linda LeGarde Grover is simply a better writer than the others. It’s not strictly a family history, though that and memoir are probably the most prominent threads of this slim book, under 150 pages in my edition. There are also a few poems, some traditional stories, a little bit of local history (including a legend about an Ojibwe man who emerged one day from the rocks and attempted, unsuccessfully, to communicate with the white people he found, eventually walking off never to return). I’ve never been to Duluth, my own love for the big lake is based in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and I worried in the beginning that I was going to have a hard time connecting with this book, so deeply rooted in place, because of that, but those fears turned out to be unfounded. LeGarde Grover’s voice drew me in and kept me engaged, even as the book flitted between genres. She touches on issues like the poisonous legacy of residential schools and the devastating effects of alcoholism on Native American families in a way that is deeply powerful for not feeling preachy…she simply talks about how the people in her own family were impacted by them, and even though they aren’t foregrounded in a way that makes it feel like she’s highlighting them for your attention, the message isn’t difficult to suss. The structure of the book, told in short segments/essays, helps it keep moving, but there’s enough common ground running throughout that it doesn’t feel disjointed. I was really impressed by how lovely I found her writing and I am very interested in reading her novels now! This will probably hit hardest for Great Lakes people, but I think anyone could enjoy reading it and I would recommend it.
  • Etna: A dog, still really a puppy, is taken from his home on a farm on the coast in a country where a war has recently started. He is given the name Etna, and the other dog he is traveling with is named Fuji. The dogs are dropped off at an American military camp, where they and many other dogs go through training, learning how to sniff out bombs. Etna is assigned a partner, Jason, who works closely with Fuji and her own partner. The war lasts for several years, and by the end, Jason and Fuji are gone. And so Etna, with nowhere else to go, decides he wants to go home. He sets out on a journey that takes him on trains, into a city, up in the mountains, across a river. He meets new dogs, other animals, and humans who may either hinder or help him. A seasoned veteran, he knows that what was once his home is almost certainly gone, but he goes on anyways. It’s apparently a very Odyssey summer, though not only am I sure that the Nolan movie also coming out a few weeks ago is pure coincidence, this has only a very loose connection with the Odyssey in that it tells the story of a soldier’s winding way home after a long war. Though it does have characters named Jason and Achilles, which feels like a wink to those who know Greek legends. It’s quite a short book, but packs no less of a punch for its brevity. “Told from the perspective of an animal” is a narrative technique that can go gimmicky but by and large I tend to enjoy, and this is a well-done example so it worked for me. I appreciated that Paul Yoon didn’t plunge whole hog into trying to flesh out a fully-realized worldview for animals but let the story stand on its own merits. With a straightforward plot and a sympathetic-but-not-especially-developed protagonist, the book rests on its themes: the arbitrariness of war and who survives it, the destruction it brings that reverberates throughout the natural world, the importance of remaining open to connection, and of course the impossibility of ever going home again. Is any of it particularly new or revelatory? Not really, but in a world where war continues to happen despite all the reasons we all know that it shouldn’t, a story that asks the reader to think about its true costs is as relevant as ever. Etna’s travels were rendered very compellingly, and I would recommend this book!
  • The Book of Salt: A boy, Binh, grows up as the youngest of four sons in Vietnam. His father, devoted to the Catholic Church, is violent and abusive to his wife and children. As he grows into a teenager, his older brother Minh, who works as the sous chef in the home of the Governor General of Indochina in Saigon, springs him from their father’s house by finding Binh a position with him. Things seem to be going well enough, Binh is learning some basic French…and then the new head chef arrives from France. He and Binh begin fooling around, and when the truth is of course eventually revealed, Binh is dismissed not only from his job but his home. With nowhere else to really go, he gets on a ship, and eventually, winds up in Paris. After some initial bumps, he ends up in a position where his still-terrible French is not much of a hindrance…as the cook at the home of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. There he meets a young American man who attends the salons the women host, with no way to know whether this love affair will end any more happily than the last. As a very character-focused reader, I have a high tolerance for books with no plot, but this one was outside the boundaries of even my patience. Very little actually happens, which isn’t a dealbreaker for me usually, but the way this is structured robs it of any sense of momentum. The narrative switches back constantly from Binh’s childhood, his early days in Paris, his days with Stein and Toklas, with little in the way of obvious reason. It made it very difficult for me to get connected with the book or with Binh as a character, who was curiously flat despite having the story told from his perspective. He’s emotionally closed-off and self-destructive, but not in a way that’s rendered as especially dynamic or interesting, just kind of nonsensical. It doesn’t make sense that a man who makes his living as a cook would deliberately cut himself on his hands. That’s a heedless, reckless kind of self destruction that doesn’t match up with the way he’s otherwise portrayed. But I got the sense that Monique Truong was less interested in plot and character and was trying more to draw attention to themes and her prose stylings. To start with the latter, there are some very lovely turns of phrase in this book. The problem is that there are arguably too many, so the flourishes don’t come off as masterstrokes but as the product of a writer who wasn’t interested in killing any of her darlings during editing. When there’s so much imagery, none of it makes the impact that it could. Thematically, I felt like the book was trying to make points about language and understanding, most of all, but also about colonialism, belonging, identity, the way being other can render one both hypervisible and invisible at the same time. But none of it was done particularly well. Binh’s lack of proficiency with French (or even the English spoken by his employers) is constantly referenced, but not only does it not make sense that he wouldn’t have picked up at least a modicum of functional French over the several years he lives in Paris, he’s also depicted as having a deep, sophisticated understanding of what’s being said around him. It doesn’t hang together. On the issue of race, it felt like I was supposed to take something away from the fact that Binh’s lover, Marcus, is himself of mixed race and passing as white. But nothing was actually developed. I was ultimately quite frustrated at the end of reading this book, it felt like there had been little glimpses of a much better one that could have been but it never materialized. If you have a particular fondness for a lush, almost flowery prose style, this might be something you’d enjoy but overall based on my own lack of enjoyment, I can’t recommend it.
  • The Last White Man: Anders is a fairly typical young man. He works at a gym. His relationship with his father is fond but not close, especially after the recent loss of his mother. He’s been hooking up relatively casually with a high school classmate, Oona, who recently left college and came back to her hometown, in part because of her brother’s death by overdose. And then, one day, he wakes up and finds himself transformed. Once white, he no longer is. He doesn’t seem to be himself, just with more melanin. His body and face are fundamentally different to himself and others. He’s not the only one…all across his unnamed country, people are changing in the same way Anders did, apparently at random. In a world where race is a significant component of social identity, this creates tension and unease, and eventually violence. Anders and Oona become nervous to be seen together as an interracial couple. Eventually, just existing places Anders at risk. But as more and more people change, the world around them has to, too…doesn’t it? I wanted to love this book so badly. I thought Mohsin Hamid’s previous book Exit West was a masterpiece, and this feels like it’s playing in similar thematic territory. What if race, like the country one lives in, could change in an instant? What if the people who didn’t want it to be that way panicked, and tried to resist that change with force? What would it mean to be a part of a group that enjoys a greater ease of existence just because of the way they were born, which then finds that their unearned privilege could be placed in jeopardy, and there’s nothing they can do about it? But while Exit West spun a short, powerful story around these issues (also centered on a pair of young lovers), The Last White Man fell flat for me. Neither book is doing anything all that special with character, the couples at the heart of each book are sympathetic but mostly intended as proxies through which the reader can enter the world…though it was interesting to me that while Exit West focused people who were doing the migrating, the less initially privileged group, this time around Hamid tells his story through people who start out white. Though there are few supporting characters here, it did also feel a bit odd that we never got a glimpse into how people who were always of color viewed the transformed white people. Were they pleased to see the new development, feeling some schadenfreude at watching white people struggle to acclimate? Unhappy that it brought additional negative attention to their communities? Both? Something else entirely? It was clear through the omission that he didn’t intend to explore that angle at all, but I still found myself unsatisfied by it remaining outside the narrative. The prose itself also felt less engaging than his previous work that I’ve read. As readers of this blog know, I love a run-on sentence, but it was taken to a point here that was distracting to me. I kept waiting for the story to build up to something more significant, to have something interesting or new to say about racial perception and society, but to me, it never felt like it did. He’s still an author I’m very interested in new work from, I’ll be very excited to see what he does next, but this one was a miss for me and I can’t recommend it to anyone else either.
  • Lakota Woman: Mary Brave Bird lived less than sixty years, but it was quite an interesting life. Born on the Rosebud Lakota reservation in South Dakota, she was raised in her early years mostly by her grandparents as her mother was studying and her father had left. It was a precarious existence from a financial/material comfort perspective, but she was loved and had no less than most of the other people she know, so barely understood that they were poor. Eventually, like so many Native American children, she was taken off to boarding school, where the standard of living was not much higher but she and her classmates were subjected to physical and attempted sexual abuse by the nuns and priests who ran the school. She and a friend published an underground newspaper to expose the staff’s misdeeds, which made her unpopular with them and she was routinely punished, including beatings, for minor infractions of the rules. She left without graduating at 15, getting into drunken shenanigans and engaging in petty crime with other teenagers, drawing the ire of the deeply racist local police, always happy to have an excuse to be violent even to the point of deadliness with Indians. Pregnant at 18, she entered the orbit of young activists in the American Indian Movement after meeting the medicine man Leonard Crow Dog and participated in the occupation of Wounded Knee while in the final stages of her pregnancy, eventually giving birth to her son Pedro there. Crow Dog, over ten years her senior, was drawn to her and repeatedly proposed marriage until Mary accepted. She moved in to his small house on his family’s land, becoming a stepmother to his three children as well as parenting her own son, constantly tending to not only their family but the endless guests who visited the already overstuffed residence. Leonard was prosecuted by the government for his activism, and after his conviction he was moved around constantly, with Mary trailing after in order to be able to visit him. After appeals, he was released, and resumed his position as a spiritual leader in his community with Mary by his side. This felt like an odd sort of memoir, not because Mary’s life wasn’t sufficiently remarkable, but in its style and presentation. She’s very matter of fact in her prose, which creates an impact when she casually relates acts of violence and cruelty (like her sister’s unconsented-to hysterectomy when she went to the hospital to give birth), but also makes for an a narrative without emotional peaks and valleys. Heightening the emotional flatness is her apparent disinclination to really talk about her feelings in the book…it must have been quite frightening to be heavily pregnant during Wounded Knee but she never really gets into it, or for that matter any of her feelings about being young and pregnant. Her devotion to her husband once they marry is clear, she follows him as he’s transferred between prisons and works hard to help secure his release, but his three proposals are not related with any sense of romantic pleasure. I don’t feel inherently entitled to anyone’s innermost thoughts and feelings, but it’s unusual for a memoir to offer so little psychological insight. She seems the most engaged when she talks about religious rituals, like eating peyote and the Lakota sun dance, but though they’re clearly meaningful to her it’s hard to convey that sort of spiritual experience in words. She doesn’t seem particularly interested in trying to convey the American Indian Movement in any way outside her own involvement/experience, I wish I’d learned a little more about how it all worked. It’s a valuable collection of insights from a woman who experienced firsthand Indian boarding schools, reservation life in the Dakotas, the American Indian Movement’s time at Wounded Knee and what it was like to be married to a prominent AIM leader, but as a reading experience it leaves a lot to be desired. If you’re interested in what she has to say, it’s worth reading, but don’t expect anything polished. Otherwise, it’s a miss.
  • Untold Night and Day: The summer in Seoul is punishingly hot. A woman, Ayami, who used to be an actress, works at an odd community theater, where she sells tickets to and introduces audio recordings of plays. The theater is about to close, and Ayami isn’t sure what she’s going to do for work next. She’s been taking German lessons from a woman her boss knows called Yeoni, who asks her to pick up a European poet from the airport and accompany him as his translator as he visits the city. After they close the theater, she and her boss go to dinner in a restaurant that is completely dark. Then they decide to go see Yeoni, coming across a very odd scene in their travels to find her in which a bus drives in circles, around and around. But then again, maybe that’s not true at all. Maybe Ayami is older, a poet herself. Maybe she’s adopted and never meets her real mother. Maybe she’s the daughter of a pharmacist, taken away when her father flees justice after murdering his wife and storing her body in the attic. Maybe she was actually named Yeoni by her birth family and is reunited with them on a television talk show. Maybe she’s in her late 20s. Maybe she’s significantly older. It’s very difficult to provide any sort of plot overview of this book, because an incoherent plot is sort of the point. There’s a jumble of images and motifs: a woman with a pockmarked face, being immersed in total darkness, a poet, etc, and they are constantly being remixed and recycled over the course of the four alternate stories the book presents about Ayami. As a very literal reader, I don’t tend to respond to books that are deliberately exaggerated or overly symbolic, so the surrealist atmosphere of this book was never going to be for me. But I can usually tell what a book is going for even if I don’t personally get on board with it, and that just wasn’t at all the case here. I have no idea what the book was trying to communicate, what story (if any) it was trying to tell. The best thing about it was that it was short. This was an extreme mismatch of book and reader, I just don’t think I was the right audience for whatever it was trying to do, but obviously I can’t recommend it because I did not at all like it!
  • The Hummingbird’s Daughter: Teresa Urrea was not born into auspicious circumstances. Her indigenous mother, Cayetana, called The Hummingbird, was just 13 or 14 when she was knocked up by Tomas Urrea, the philandering owner of the ranch where she and her family lived and worked. When Teresa (or as she’s usually called, Teresita) was still very small, Cayetana dropped the child off with her sister and never came back. The girl, unloved by her aunt, sleeps wherever she can, including sometimes with the pig. Her life changes, though, when she comes to the attention of the ranch’s native healer/medicine woman, Huila, who takes the child under her wing and begins to teach her what she knows. As she grows into a teenager, not only does Teresita become increasingly skilled at her work, her position as one of Tomas’s several illegitimate children becomes known…first to her, and then to everyone else. But even though things start to seem to be looking up (Tomas acknowledges her and brings her into his home, her talents are admired and utilized by the ranch’s laborers, she has warm and close friendships with other young women), trouble is brewing. Tomas’s already unsteady relationship with Porfirio Diaz’s regime in Mexico City becomes even more strained, and then Teresita herself is brutally assaulted by a man and left for dead. She lingers for a few days after being discovered, but her life slips away and her funeral is imminent. And then she wakes up, at first seeming little like herself, taking in almost no sustenance. It’s not long before she comes back to herself, but she’s fundamentally changed. Where she once was a gifted healer, she’s now performing miracles, which she as a faithful Christian believes are worked by God through her hands. She quickly becomes a local legend, dubbed “Santa Teresita”, with people coming to Tomas’s ranch from hundreds of miles away in the hopes of having their pains eased. She speaks to the gathered people about their inherent rights and dignity, making her dangerous to the government and it is only a matter of time before she’s forced to flee. It feels like been a long time since I’ve really sunk my teeth into a long book, and reading this one made me realize how much I’ve missed them. Luis Alberto Urrea tells this story, about members of his own family (Teresa was his great-aunt, I believe) with an epic scope, taking his time to create a richly-realized world and fully develop many of the people within it. I am often critical of books that pad their page counts by indulging in overly flowery writing or side plots that don’t matter, but even some of the sections that felt a bit draggy when I was reading them (like the moving of Tomas’s operations from one ranch to another and the journey of the laborers and livestock to get there) turned out to enhance the scope and depth of the story he’s telling. The character work is fantastic, we read along with years and years of Teresita’s life, Tomas’s life, Huila’s life and I got emotionally invested in all of them even though I found the portrayal of Tomas to be dated (his predation on often very young women in his employ is treated as a sympathetic character flaw, fixed by the love of a good woman young enough to be his daughter, rather than as a disturbing decades-long pattern of sexual assault). I am seldom very interested in magical realism, but it’s harmless enough here, and I appreciated that along with awe about the magic, the reader is asked to consider the political implications of a woman performing miracles and encouraging the underclasses to think of themselves as full people with rights in an authoritarian state. This book is high-quality storytelling, and I’ll be seeking out the sequel along with more of Urrea’s work because I really enjoyed reading it and would recommend it!

In Life…

  • C started pre-K: Nevada doesn’t have state pre-K for the majority of kids, so we’re still at the same place he started in the spring, but now he’s learning things to get him ready to go to real school next year, which is mind-blowing to me. I feel like he was just a little baby but he’s growing so much!
  • I went to Chicago for a show: Bebel Gilberto’s Tanto Tempo was perhaps the most defining album of my years in law school, I listened to it endlessly as I studied, learning the words to the songs phonetically. So when I found out she was doing a small tour for the 25th anniversary of the album, I dragged my friend Crystal to Chicago to go with me, since it’s not a very long train ride from Michigan to get there. It was really cool to get to see the album performed live, and especially to get an extra day with my bestie to toot around a very fun city.

Book Review: Followers

I remember signing up for Facebook. It was the second semester of my freshman year of college. Michigan was on the first or second round of colleges it was released to outside of the Ivy League. We all felt very smug because we got it before Michigan State. I can’t remember if we even had profile pictures, at first. I think it was just your name. Status updates had the prompt “[Name] is…”. It was 2004. I’ve been on Facebook for over 20 years.

There was a time when social media felt innocent. But those days are long gone. We have influencers now. This phenomenon is at the heart of Megan Angelo’s debut novel, Followers. The book follows two separate storylines: in one, set just a few years ago from the present day, Orla is a wannabe writer who moved to New York City to chase her dream…and ended up writing posts for a celebrity gossip blog. Feeling stagnant, she finds herself receptive to a proposal made by her pretty new roommate and aspiring reality star, Floss: to cover her on the blog, raising her profile towards at least the D-list. It pays off when Floss starts dating a former child star, Aston, and Orla becomes a bit character on the reality show that films in their apartment. She’s no closer to her professional dreams, but her association with fame brings a long-held personal dream suddenly within grasp…her high school crush, Danny, wants to reconnect, changing her world in ways she never could have imagined.

In the second storyline, taking place in the 2050s, Marlow lives in a real-life version of The Truman Show: she and the fellow residents of her town, Constellation, are on-screen 23 hours per day and live as government-appointed, network-controlled full-time influencers. After a violent incident in her childhood, Marlow is sponsored by the mood-stabilizing drug Hysteryl, which keeps her numbly content with her life of constant surveillance. But when she and her husband, Ellis, decide to have a baby, she goes off the drug in preparation for pregnancy and finds herself deeply unhappy. Unhappy enough to make a run for it into an outside world she’s never really known, where the consequences of a cataclysmic event called The Spill several decades prior have rendered it very different than we might have thought.

The world is definitely ready for novels that try to reckon with the damage that has been and could be wrought by the rise of the internet and the proliferation of social media, so I’d been excited to read this book. It does some things very well: both Orla and Marlow are rich, interesting characters. Neither are particularly sympathetic, but they feel real in their struggles, especially Orla. But Floss never develops with any similar level of care despite some early promise, and the decisions that Orla makes sometimes feel more like plot contrivances than anything organic. This problem becomes bigger as the stakes are raised later in the narrative. The book as a whole is paced well, I found it compelling enough to keep turning the pages and invested in where the story would go next. Angelo has good prose styling, neglecting neither humor nor pathos.

It’s fairly evident, however, that it’s a debut. The dual timeline structure loses balance every so often, and it was just usually as one part really started to cruise along that it would switch to the other, stopping the momentum of the story. Failing to really dig into developing Floss hinders the book, as she appears throughout both timelines and her decisions often steer the course of events. And most of all, I found myself at the end unsure of exactly what it was that Angelo was trying to say. There’s clearly a message that more privacy, and less screen time, is preferable to the alternative. But that’s pretty wishy-washy, and there’s no real strength behind it. There is very much potential here, so it’s frustrating that it never really comes together. I do look forward to seeing what Angelo does in the future, but can’t recommend this book for more than a plane/beach read.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is super fun, we’re looking back at the books we were reading on this day over the past ten years! This is definitely a time when being very dedicated to logging my reading came in handy, I have records dating back to about 2013, I think. These are all over the map, just like my reading writ large!

2025: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Ah, this one. It read like the first half of a two-part techno-thriller…only it wasn’t very good so as far as I know, the second half never got published. I did not like it then and it has not risen in my estimation since.

2024: Deathless

I enjoyed this take on the Russian fairytale of Kaschei the Deathless quite a bit at the time, and I remember it being engaging, but honestly I don’t think I’ve thought about it once in the two years since I read it.

2023: The King Who Had To Go

This nonfiction recounting of how the abdication of Edward VIII actually happened was interesting and reasonably well-written, I liked it then and still think well of it.

2022: Intimacies

I marked this as being one of my better books of the year, but looking back now I remember most being frustrated by it, it was something I should have really liked on paper that did not deliver quite the way I wanted it to, but I think I was trying to convince myself my brain wasn’t permanently broken after giving birth so probably rated higher than I really should have.

2021: The Walls Around Us

I remember very clearly reading large portions of this on an airplane, where the vibey atmospherics it was going for never really came together over the hum of engines and clatter of the drink cart. I can barely remember its plot or characters.

2020: Ivanhoe

I love to try classics, but I also have read enough of them at this point to not feel weird about not clicking with one…it doesn’t mean you’re dumb or bad at reading, it just means that particular book didn’t work for you! This one did not work for me.

2019: Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams

I really enjoyed this nonfiction exploration of Black Hollywood in the Classic Hollywood era, so much so that I’ve bought two of the author’s other books because I found his way of writing about movies and movie stars very accessible.

2018: The Informant

More nonfiction, this was about an unstable informant in a white-collar crime case and was really trying to lean into the humor of it…but that sort of humor doesn’t really do it for me. Didn’t like it, still don’t think highly of it, not surprised it got a movie treatment.

2017: The Sense of an Ending

I remember the major beats of this story shockingly well considering it’s been nearly a decade since I read it and my memory for plot is not especially strong, a testament to how well-written it is. Still, I appreciated its craft more than loved it (which holds true today as well), so I understand why I didn’t rate it among my top reads for that year.

2016: The Lords of Discipline

I thought this was an excellent book at the time and continue to think so, it’s very much in my character-rich wheelhouse. This is one I very much want to read again one of these days.

A Month In The Life: July 2026

We’re in the full dog days of summer! It has been hot, but fortunately mostly not too smoky (yet). We’re mostly trying to stay cool and wondering which one of our appliances is going to break next!

In Books…

  • James: Jim is a slave in Hannibal, Missouri. He is owned by Miss Watson, who also serves as a guardian to young Huckleberry Finn, a local errant youth. When Jim learns that she intends to sell him, he runs away to a small island in the Mississippi River, intending to return shortly for his family so they can all escape together. Instead, the next morning, he discovers Huck on the island, having faked his own death after his violent, alcoholic father attacked him. Realizing that it will be assumed that he killed Huck and fled, the two head off on the river so that Jim can escape to freedom in the north and regroup. Their path does not go smoothly. They have a series of “adventures”, though perhaps travails would be a more accurate word. Jim finds himself separated from Huck, sold twice over, escaping for his life once again. He’s reunited with Huck and the two return to Hannibal to try to free Jim’s family, but discover that their journey is not yet over. I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, but it was definitely in the second semester of my senior year, which means I was not like, especially attentive to it. I mostly remember not really liking it. I do remember that I found the portrayal of Jim very uncomfortable, even as someone who grew up in an area where the racial politics were not great. The idea of a book that retold the story from his perspective, giving him dignity and agency, was very appealing, and of course this book has won or been shortlisted for many, many prizes. So my expectations were very high, but ultimately this was a book I found more admirable than one I actually connected with. It does a reasonable job with character development, but it’s much more focused on its sometimes-frenetic plot than it is on its characters. Which meant for me that a crucial late-plot revelation didn’t quite land. It didn’t feel like it got the room to develop, or breathe. But even more than plot, this is a book that wants the reader to pay attention to its themes, particularly around the construction of identity. In Percival Everett’s telling, the reason that Jim speaks in stereotyped, offensive dialect is that slaves have developed that method of speech to hide their real voices from whites, to protect themselves by allowing whites to feel superior. There are at least two characters who pass, one knowingly and one unknowingly. Jim at one point joins a company of minstrel singers, where his comparatively light complexion is made up to fit the caricature the audience expects to see. And, of course, when Jim does achieve his freedom at the end (in a different way than he does in Mark Twain’s original), he claims his full name. Given the opportunity to decide what he wants to be called, it’s “James”. We are who others see to some extent, but we are also who we decide to be. So while I was disappointed that I found it hard to get really engaged with, it’s a rich, well-told story that mines new depths of meaning out of a familiar tale. It won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, it’s very good and I would happily recommend it to anyone (especially those who love plot-forward books).
  • The Devoted: Eunha lives every mother’s worst nightmare. Her three year-old son, Minsuk, pulls free from her hand in a crowd in the harbor near where they live in Hong Kong. One second she still sees him, the next he’s gone. While her in-laws insist on calling the police, Eunha makes a much more useful call…to her brother, Solomon, a high-ranking member of the Triads. While he has connections in the underworld that lead to Minsuk’s return, suspicion that those same connections led to the boy’s abduction in the first place drive her husband to formalize their de facto separation and her sister-in-law to remove the boy from his mother’s apartment for protection. She feels she has no choice but to accept these developments, because she’s not just the sister of a gangster, but the daughter of one too, and she knows that the legal system will not be inclined to look at her favorably. Adrift without her son, she comes across a room salon, where men come to drink and entertain themselves in the company of pretty, engaging women. Eunha starts to find community there, becoming friendly with Jing, one of her co-workers, when someone walks in from her childhood and turns this newly established world upside down. Kaito was the nephew of her father’s right-hand man, about the same age as Solomon, and was the only other child they saw on anything resembling a regular basis as the siblings grew up with their grandmother, their mother having suffered a nervous breakdown after being kidnapped herself when Eunha was very small and their father wanting to keep them safely outside the grasp of his foes. He, too, has joined the Triads, and as she’s drawn back into his orbit, Eunha has to decide whether she wants the safe life her father had tried to arrange for her before his own death or if she should throw in her lot with the underworld she’s always been around the edges of. This is a book that sits at a bit of an uneasy genre intersection. There are strong mystery/thriller elements here, but it’s slow-paced and a significant portion of the narrative consists of Eunha’s childhood memories, building her character as well as Solomon’s and Kaito’s. For me, this was very effective, because I really enjoy character-oriented stories and the tension of the plot kept me turning the pages to find out how the story developed. People who really enjoy thrillers, though, will likely feel like it drags. Maybe not, though, because Catherine Cho structures the book to have several mini-mysteries. The initial suspense of what might happen to Minsuk is (thankfully for mothers of small boys) relatively quickly resolved. But then more dominoes fall: there’s a murder, there’s the question of how/if Eunha will get her son back, there are the suitcases that Eunha notices Jing bringing to the salon and leaving without, and then there’s the narrative-long development of what happened between Eunha, Solomon, and Kaito over the course of their childhoods and how it reverberates into their adult lives. The plot does feel a little unbalanced, with the end picking up speed significantly in a way that feels a bit dizzying. The plot is also put together too neatly at points, and some connections are telegraphed too obviously (I guessed a couple twists myself and I am terrible at that sort of thing). I mostly found it engaging and interesting, and I appreciated the character work. For a reader who, like me, likes something a bit more leisurely, this will be an enjoyable summer read and I’d recommend it. For the true thriller heads, though, look elsewhere.
  • The Girls of 17 Swann Street: Anna Roux weighs 88 pounds. Once a ballerina living in Paris, now she’s at 17 Swann Street, an eating disorder recovery group home in Saint Louis, Missouri. Somewhere between a career-derailing injury, her move with her husband Matthias to the United States for a better job for him, not being able to find work she actually likes for herself, and struggling to find community in her new home, a habit of restricting her food intake spiraled into something much darker. As she makes tentative connections with the other women in the group, like longtime resident Emm, shy and sweet Valerie, and high-spirited Julia, Anna is faced with a stark choice: either she wants to live, which means she has to eat, or she can completely surrender to the pain and fear behind her disorder and watch her body become unable to support her continued existence. Anyone who has lived with an eating disorder will immediately clock that Yara Zghaib is writing this novel from a perspective of having lived it herself, and that insider’s perspective goes a long way to keep this book from feeling like an after school special. It is very much an Issue Book, there are definitely some info-drops about anorexia that occasionally feel a little clunky. But it’s rooted in tremendous empathy for those who deal with eating disorders, the deadliest mental illnesses. The plot, to be honest, is a bit on the formulaic side…from the moment it begins and Anna starts meeting the other girls, it’s obvious that someone is going to die, someone else is going to get kicked out. It’s also pretty obvious that Anna herself will make it out alive. Her relationship with Matthias, who comes to visit her daily, is warm and vital, and her memories of happiness with him form a central component of the narrative. But figuring out how and when she will turn the corner provided enough forward momentum for me, at least. I was invested in her as a character and her journey towards reclaiming life. The book has quick, short chapters that keep it going, so despite what is often heavy subject matter it doesn’t feel ponderous or wallow-y. It’s a hard book to affirmatively recommend because of what it’s about, but if you’re inclined towards it I think it’s very much worth the time, I found it touching.
  • Sister of My Heart: Anju and Sudha are cousins, but they feel more like sisters. Born on the same day, their fathers (themselves cousins) having been killed at the same time, they’re raised by both mothers, as well as a widowed aunt, in Anju’s family home. Beautiful Sudha dreams big but mostly follows the rules, while Anju is a bold risk-taker. As a pre-teen, Sudha learns a secret about her family that makes her feel an even greater sense of responsibility towards Anju. So when she falls in love with a man her mother won’t consider for her husband and plans to elope, but learns that the parents of the man Anju has fallen for will put a stop to her upcoming marriage if they catch even a whiff of scandal, she has to decide whether she should follow her heart or sacrifice her own happiness for her cousin’s. Anju and Sudha’s lives take different directions, with one moving to America while the other remains in India, and their closeness waxes and wanes, but there’s too much history between them for their bond to ever truly be severed, even as their lives take unexpected paths. This book felt like it lives pretty squarely in a genre that has come to feel a bit retro: women’s fiction. Not chick lit, chick lit is more lighthearted and comedic, but women’s fiction. It’s not pure melodrama, but definitely leans that way: there are long-suppressed family lies, falling in love with the wrong person, sudden heart disease, a love triangle, controlling in-laws, a desperate quest for a baby, people who are not who they seem. But to pull off a story with the dramatic plot twists and turns that this one takes, I needed to feel more connected with the characters. The novel is told through alternating chapters from either woman’s perspective, which would seem to be a natural way to balance out the character development, but I found Sudha to be more fully realized than Anju. Their bond and the way it shifts over time is rendered convincingly enough, it was what I found most enjoyable about it overall. The portrait the reader gets of Sudha, though, is of a person whose motives hang together and make sense as a way to approach the world, while Anju felt more like an idea of a person, it was hard to imagine what she might have been up to between segments. Something she finds deeply wounding happens about midway through the book, but near the end she realizes she’s forgotten about it in a way that didn’t seem particularly realistic, even considering that something devastating has happened in between. When the really bad thing happens, I felt hard-hearted for not finding it all that affecting, but I just hadn’t been given enough reason to really emotionally invest in her. It ends with what feels like a cliffhanger for a sequel, which was indeed written, but I am not nearly curious enough about what might happen to read it. If you’re in the mood for an emotion-forward story about family and particularly like books set in India, this might appeal to you. It’s far from bad, but I can’t honestly recommend a book that I was never able to get really hooked into.
  • Open Season: The deck is stacked against anyone who isn’t a white man in the United States. If you don’t understand quite how, Ben Crump’s book, published just about a year before the Black Lives Matter movement took off, lays out the case. He examines the ways those lives, most especially those of people of color, are placed in peril: from very straightforward, obvious ways like police brutality to more subtle, insidious ones like educational opportunities and environmental racism. That Crump is a lawyer, specifically a courtroom litigator was very obvious to me, someone who was also a lawyer for a time, in reading this book. It reads, at least for the first half or so (which focuses on the criminal justice system), very much like an opening statement. He makes a lot of bold claims, including the one that makes up the subtitle of this book: that the way people of color are treated in this country is akin to a genocide. He highlights many specific, flagrant examples of injustice to illustrate his points. When it gets into the back half, into the larger systemic factors like education, the school-to-prison pipeline, and environmental pollution in close proximity to communities of color, it becomes more research focused, still providing real-life examples but rooted in empirical data. For me, the back half was much more successful than the front. There’s no denying the power of the true, awful stories, particularly around police misconduct but also stand-your-ground laws, but a few dozen examples from a nation of many millions of people does not make the strongest logical argument. The assertion about genocide seems to be more rhetorical than earnest, and while he has a lot of serious information to share it doesn’t really fully support that claim so I was pleased that it didn’t form a more significant through-line. Despite the power of the moral clarity of his argument, the book isn’t quite as successful as it could be. He sometimes argues both sides of an issue like mandatory minimum sentences, decrying both overly broad judicial discretion as having allowed for conscious and unconscious biases to be weaponized against people of color but also that mandatory minimums make it too difficult for judges to consider the totality of circumstances. Those two options are either end of a continuum, but it seems he thinks both are too flawed for wide-scale implementation without much in the way of ideas about alternatives. He sometimes wants courts to be more small-c conservative on following precedent, but then sometimes wants them to engage in “bold” interpretations of statutory or constitutional language. Many of his broad-scale facets of racism, like lack of educational opportunity, are more directly connected to poverty than to race. Besides a handful of concrete suggestions in the epilogue of the book, it’s a bit unclear what solutions are really being advocated. I was expecting and hoping for something more akin to a legal brief, designed to appeal to my head, but what he clearly intended to write was much more a call to emotion and righteous anger. This would serve as an effective introduction to the major arguments around the way racism manifests for someone already inclined to be sympathetic but isn’t well-informed. It’s too much of a polemic for a fence-sitter and too basic for anyone who already has a fundamental grasp on the issues.
  • A Pale View of Hills: Etsuko is an older Japanese woman living in England, being visited by her younger daughter, Niki, after her older daughter, Keiko, recently committed suicide. While Niki’s father was the British man Etsuko was married to in England, Keiko was a product of Etsuko’s previous life in Japan and had always struggled to adjust to her changed circumstances. Niki’s visit coincides with Etsuko’s remembrance of Sachiko, a woman she once knew when she lived in Nagasaki. Sachiko and her small daughter Mariko entered Etsuko’s life when the latter was pregnant, moving into a cottage close to the apartment building Etsuko resided in with her husband, Jiro. Like everyone else, including Etsuko, Sachiko’s existence was turned upside down by the war, her once-comfortable circumstances having changed drastically. She’s met an American serviceman, Frank, and is determined to get herself and her daughter overseas to new and better opportunities. Despite her stated concern for her child’s future, though, Sachiko is often almost frighteningly indifferent to her. Mariko is frequently left home alone despite being very young, and even when her mother is home, she disappears outside with little apparently concern from Sachiko. As the story of the women’s acquaintance progresses to its conclusion, though, inconsistencies start to arise that call into question Etsuko’s remembrances. Kazuo Ishiguro has come to be one of my very favorite authors, and this was his debut novel. The themes that have preoccupied him in much of his writing (at least the ones that I’ve read), like memory, loss, and the ways people avoid knowing the things that it would undermine their self-concept to understand, are very much present here. So too is a prose style characterized by elegance and restraint. It’s remarkably sophisticated for a debut, but coming from the perspective of having read his later work, it’s also obvious how much room he had to grow from here. He places an important plot/character development literally in the last ten pages of the book, not giving it the room to breathe and be as effective as it might have. There are questions left unanswered, some of which are fine to leave hanging, some of which feel like they could and should have been resolved. Ishiguro’s characters often feel at a remove, but especially so here. I found the way the book dealt with the war to be interesting, especially in light of where it takes place. There are glancing, oblique references to the tragedy that took place in Nagasaki itself, while the aftermath of the war is largely explored through the breakdown of previously-existing social structures, including Etsuko’s father-in-law’s reaction to an article criticizing the way he and other teachers instructed their students, as well as Sachiko’s displacement from her previous life and family. It’s overall a very solid book, made the more gratifying to read by knowing that the promise it hints at would in fact be realized. A must-read for Ishiguro heads, and worth your time for everyone else!
  • The Chosen and the Beautiful: One book that comes up pretty much anytime there’s a discussion of the mythical Great American Novel (and, to be honest, what I would probably argue for if pressed) is The Great Gatsby. It’s 100 years old and still speaks to some of the most salient issues in American life, particularly those related to money. Nghi Vo’s retelling adds race and sexuality to the mix by taking side character Jordan Baker and making her a queer Vietnamese woman, adopted as a very small child into the upper-crust Louisville that includes a young Daisy. But that’s not the only element Vo changes around the narrative. She also incorporates magic into this world, making it a place where souls can literally be sold to the devil, demon liquors give strange power to their drinkers, and Jordan herself possesses the ability to cut paper into shapes which she can bring to life. In this version, Gatsby has bargained away his essence for the wealth and power to woo Daisy, but his love for her does not impede his exploration of life’s other pleasures, including an affair with Nick and a flirtation with Jordan, who are involved with each other as well. It makes for a love rhombus of a sort. The story, while including new material centered around Jordan and her experiences, proceeds down the path we’ve all come to know, leaving Jordan’s life forever changed. It’s a bold move to make your debut novel a retelling of one of America’s most consistently celebrated books, and Nghi Vo manages to in large part pull it off, at least for me. I suspect how much a reader likes this book will be directly related to their appreciation for Vo’s prose style, because it’s very distinctive and quite different than Fitzgerald’s original. It’s very vivid, lots of simile and metaphor, heavy on imagery. While I can appreciate elegant and delicate writing, at heart I have always enjoyed rhetorical flourish, so it worked well for me. Indeed, it’s the writing that elevated the book in my estimation, because I don’t think it was entirely successful on a plot level. While I loved the introduction of outright queerness into the narrative, along with the racial angles introduced in changing Jordan’s ethnicity, the new fantastical/magical realism elements felt like Vo was trying to do a bit too much. Jordan’s paper-cutting powers are underdeveloped, and the introduction of a Gatsby-employed troupe of Vietnamese magicians for his parties who share her skill raised questions that the narrative never even attempts to answer. As Jordan was taken from her home well before the age she would have been explicitly instructed in such a thing, are we meant to believe her talent is inborn and shared by all Vietnamese people? All Asians? Are manifestations of magic segregated by race? Vo doesn’t address these questions, or several others that popped into my head around demons and the selling of souls, which makes most of the magical elements of the story feel like vibe-y set dressing. The vibes are great, the atmosphere Vo creates is glamorously sordid, but I found myself wishing more than once that the magic had just been left out. I think the story is strong enough without it, though I will say that I thought a late-occurring plot revelation didn’t quite land. On the whole, though, it bites off a lot and did manage to chew most of it, mostly on the power of its prose. I had a good time reading it! I would recommend it, but it’s one of those where if you’re not bought into its style within 20 pages or so, it’s going to be a rough read.

In Life…

  • More home repair: In the last six months, we’ve replaced our fridge, our HVAC system, and our sewer drain pipe. And this month we added our dishwasher to the list! Pretty sure the only appliance left from when we bought only five years ago is the oven, so fingers crossed it holds out for a bit longer because we’re kind of tapped out on things that aren’t working right.

Book Review: The Woodcutter

Fairy tales feel timeless. They are often among the first stories we are told as children, filled with vivid characters and plot points that are thrilling but that we know will end in victory for the good guys. We hear them over and over again, see them play out in movies, and often experience their structures again as the basis for other work. Every culture has their own trove of these stories, but there are stock characters, like a trickster, that seem to appear widely around the world.

Kate Danley uses the framework of our familiar fairy tales in The Woodcutter to create one of her own. Her main character is the the titular hero of The Little Red Riding Hood. In Danley’s world, his is a position similar to that of a supernatural policeman, where he mediates between the world of men and the world of the faeries. Usually a balance is able to be maintained, but things are starting to fall apart as the story begins. Fairy tale women, like Cinderella and Red, are turning up dead, and the pixie population, whose dust can be used as a narcotic, is declining. And so the Woodcutter sets off to see what he can do about it.

He finds himself facing off against an evil queen and her consort, who are seeking to depose the rulers of the kingdoms of men and install themselves as the rulers of their world. He is both pursuer and pursued, as they are just as eager to stop him as he is to stop them. He encounters characters and stories both well-known to American audiences (like Jack and the Beanstalk) and those that are less commonly told here (like Baba Yaga and The Girl in the Iron Shoes), and he needs the help of all of them and more if he’s going to be able to save the world and return home to his beloved wife.

This wasn’t especially good, but neither was it egregiously bad. It plunges the reader into its world without doing too much up-front exposition, and when it began with the Woodcutter finding Cinderella’s body I at first thought it was going to take an interesting kind of noir-esque direction in its approach to folklore. That was not to be, however. It felt more like Danley was so excited about revisiting and remixing her favorite childhood stories that she wanted to cram in as many as possible, giving none of them enough room to breathe or gain any sort of depth/resonance. It feels like a Girl Talk album, all cross-cutting samples, but without any of the sense of joy.

With so many fairy tales in play, and relatively little exposition to explain the rules of the world, the book winds up being often difficult to follow. But despite the issues the book has, Danley did good work executing The Woodcutter as a central character. He is brave, smart, strong, deeply devoted to his wife, and easy to root for. His grounded presence keeps the world from splintering apart entirely, much like his role in the world of the book, though I don’t know that I think that the parallel was intentional. It was an easy, relatively quick read, and I think there are people for whom it might work better than it did for me. If you’re someone who loves fairy tales, especially seeing them in new ways, this is worth a try. Otherwise, though, I can’t recommend it.

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Titles That Include The Word Fire

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re choosing a word and picking books that have that word in their title. Since it’s summertime and I live in the West, I’ve picked “fire”, so here are ten books on my to-be-read list with fiery titles!

City on Fire

How to Set a Fire and Why

Girls on Fire

The Fire Next Time

Little Fires Everywhere

Home Fire

River of Fire

The Great Fire

With the Fire on High

Fire & Blood

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