A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Book Review: Zone One

“They were in the same kind of places day after day. Keys for the communal bathrooms down the hall hung on His and Hers hooks in Reception, affixed to broad plastic tongues. Recycled paper stretched expectantly across tables in doctors’ examination rooms like a smear of oatmeal and the magazines in the waiting rooms described an exuberant age now remote and hard to reconcile. It was impossible to find a gossip magazine or newsweekly that had been published beyond a certain date. There was no more gossip and no more news.”

I don’t think I’d survive the zombie apocalypse. I’m not speedy and can be startlingly oblivious, which seems like a bad combination. And the world afterwards seems like it would be…unpleasant. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One follows a man called Mark Spitz as he operates as part of a team of “sweepers”, working to clear out Manhattan for resettlement by humans after a zombie crisis. The humans that survived wandered, trading rumors of fortified camps when they ran into each other, and eventually many of them found their way to one of the military-run settlements. The numbers of dead have seemed to decline, and a first wave of forces has gone through already to clear out the large clusters of zombies that were on the streets. Now the sweepers have been assigned to go inside the buildings and get rid of the stragglers that remain.

Mark’s story runs on two timelines: in one, he looks back on his life of uninspired mediocrity before the “Last Night” and how he’s managed to survive since. In the other, he and two other members of his team (Gary is a triplet, the only one of his brothers to survive, and while Kaitlyn is a Type-A overachiever) do their work to clear the section they’ve been assigned, trading stories and speculating about what the future might hold. But what they’ve been told about the threat posed by the dead being on the decline may not be as true as anyone had hoped, leaving not just Mark and his colleagues but the fragments of civilization at risk.

Colson Whitehead is an enormously talented writer: this is the second of his books that I’ve read and I continue to be impressed with the elegance and quality of his prose. And while I do enjoy authors who don’t feel wedded to one particular genre and try to challenge themselves to write new types of stories, I don’t know that I feel like his writing and “zombie novel” were the best match. Not that all zombie books have to be gory or horrifying (I wouldn’t read very many if they all were), but they’re stories that should be visceral. Zone One, though, is written almost at a remove. The emotional distance between the scenarios that Whitehead is presenting and the way they’re actually written is larger than it should be for the book to give the thrill and punch that feel essential to this kind of novel.

That being said, there’s a lot to like here, especially if you (like me) aren’t really here for gore. Whitehead does very good world-building, creating an entire plausible-feeling, dynamic situation for his characters to move about in. And he does some really solid work with those characters! The story of Mark and a young wife and mother (who has lost both her husband and son) bonding during the aftermath of the events of the Last Night is short adds a lot of dimension to his otherwise Everyman character, and the way he writes now-solo triplet Gary as unable to break his long habit of referring to himself as a unit with his brothers, as “we”, is a detail that stuck in my brain long after I’d finished reading. If you like the idea of a zombie book but have been freaked out by them generally, this is something you might really enjoy. But if you’re looking for something to get your heart rate up a little, look elsewhere.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Set In Places On My Travel Wish List

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week we’re talking about books set in countries we’d love to visit someday, and I’ve decided to exclude places I’ve been before and just focus on places I’d like to go! Hefty caveat here that not all of these books present a particularly appealing portrait of the countries in question, but these are all books I’ve read and enjoyed!

The Thorn Birds (Australia)

The Visitors (Egypt)

The Queen of the Night (France)

The God of Small Things (India)

The Sea (Ireland)

Memoirs of a Geisha (Japan)

Girl with a Pearl Earring (the Netherlands)

The Bear and the Nightingale (Russia)

Cry, the Beloved Country (South Africa)

Pachinko (South Korea)

A Month In The Life: March 2026

I didn’t go anywhere this month, but we did get a visit…my dad came into town to hang out with the little guy! It was really nice to be able to have him come see us and the weather was great. Speaking of which, it’s already starting to heat up around here, we hit the mid-80s last week and it is toooo soon, I don’t want a roasty summer where we feel like we have to be indoors by 10 AM to avoid getting overheated and weather like that comes with real fire danger for us in the high desert, too.

In Books…

  • Just Above My Head: James Baldwin’s final novel tells the stories of two sets of siblings, Hall and Arthur Montana, and Julia and Jimmy Miller, whose fates are closely intertwined. The book begins with Hall, who is in his early 40s and married with two kids, getting a call that his beloved little brother Arthur, a famous gospel singer, has died in London aged only 39. A few years later, Hall and his family are visiting Julia, a longtime friend who was once Hall’s girlfriend, when her little brother Jimmy arrives. This is the first time Hall has seen Jimmy, who was Arthur’s partner both romantically and professionally (as his pianist), since Arthur’s death. Their reminisces about Arthur form the backbone of the book. The Montana and Miller mothers were friendly, drawing the children together in New York City in the late 1940s. Young Julia, then just a preteen, was a child preacher who was a sensation in the African-American community. Her work brought the family fame, and more importantly money, so she is the point around which they all turn. Jimmy loves his sister but resents his afterthought status in the family. Arthur was of course also a performer…the Montana father plays piano and nurtures in Arthur a gift for song, assembling around him a group of other neighborhood boys, Red, Crunch, and Peanut, who become known as the Trumpets of Zion. Hall, oldest of all of them, is fiercely protective of his little brother but is also pulled towards adulthood and an understanding that he will likely soon be drafted into the Korean War. The Trumpets go on tour through the South, and while there is danger there for this group of four northern Black teenagers and their manager, it’s not the same as it will be on a parallel trip many years later. The Trumpets themselves are more innocent of the danger as well, and it is on this trip that Arthur has his first experience and relationship with another guy, sleeping with and falling in love with Crunch. By the time they return to NYC, though, things have gotten very dark in the Miller family after the death of their mother. Teenage Julia takes drastic action to free herself (and ultimately, Jimmy) from their circumstances, and by the time Hall returns from Korea a few years later she’s become a successful model and the two fall passionately in love, bringing their little brothers back together in what ends up being the most lasting legacy of their relationship. Arthur and Crunch have long since broken up, and Jimmy’s own long-burning torch for Arthur is rekindled. While Julia leaves Hall, who marries another woman and is happy in his family life, Jimmy and Arthur are together for 14 years, living mostly in Europe where their race and sexuality are less contentious than they would be in the United States, before Arthur’s death. This is a big book: relatively long, lots of characters, dense prose, and a lot of ideas. For the right reader, it is incredibly rewarding. I am very glad I didn’t try this one even ten years ago, I think that being around the same age as Hall (who is the main storyteller) made it all the more rich and powerful. Hall is not yet old, but his youth is behind him and the way Baldwin crafts the prose has a powerful feeling of both wistful nostalgia and very real loss. As someone who describes my own taste in books as “600 page bummers”, I absolutely loved this one. The characters are rich, deep, and psychologically complex. Their relationships are interesting and change over time. Baldwin’s writing is extraordinary, such care was clearly taken with his word choices, with developing the ideas he introduces. The whole thing is a meditation on love in its many forms (parental, between siblings, between friends, between lovers), the ways it can both free and trap us, the line between devotion and obsession, how much we need it but how it will not save us. It’s about the messy business of being human, of wanting and not getting, of heartbreak and the spark of a new connection, of wanting desperately to protect the ones we love and not being able to, of searching for direction and meaning and sometimes finding them but sometimes not. This is a book I already want to re-read, it was so lush that I know that there were things I missed that will be there to find a second or third time through. This won’t be for everyone though…it doesn’t have a lot in the way of plot mechanics, and if you’re not in the mood for something that will call for a lot of your attention, this would be a challenging one. There are about a million trigger warnings here, it deals with a lot of very heavy subjects. But for me, I’d be shocked if this wasn’t my best book of the year when we get to December.
  • The Cooking Gene: Michael Twitty is many things. He is a cisgender man. He is gay. He is Jewish. He is Black. He is American. He is a cook. And he’s boundlessly curious, especially about his family history in particular and the history of people Black cooking in the South writ large. This book is a chronicle of his exploration of that curiosity. I think a reader’s enjoyment of this book will hinge significantly on how much one appreciates Twitty’s prose and style, which I suppose is the case with a lot of memoir. I did not expect, going in, how much of it exactly was going to be a memoir at all. I figured it would be mostly about food, a little bit about his own story. Turns out his own story, and that of his family, is central to the book. I think I’ve said this before, about another nonfiction book about a family history, but I tend to reach my maximum interest level for them pretty quickly and then find it increasingly grating. While I can appreciate how genetic ancestry information can be an especially fraught subject for Black people whose ancestors arrived here through the slave trade, reading exact breakdowns of Twitty’s results from various ancestry websites is just…not at all engaging. The portions of the book that do focus on the food were much more appealing to me, even if I’m not a foodie by any stretch of the imagination. Twitty clearly did a lot of research and his obvious passion for his subject matter kept my attention, even when some portions got a little repetitive. I feel like this is a book that would have been MUCH better on audio. In print, his tendencies towards digressions were grating to me, making the whole thing feel like it had no structure. I kept wanting to get back to the actual food parts. There were some turns of phrase that really got under my skin as well, like one time when he describes half-siblings (children born to two Black mothers from the same white father) as looking “like fraternal twins”. Fraternal twins are just siblings who gestate at the same time, so what he’s saying is just that they look like full siblings. Half siblings looking like full siblings is not uncommon. It’s a throwaway line but it felt like it exemplified what I found irritating about his prose style. I wish the book had been about 100 pages shorter and focused much more tightly on the actual culinary history, because that was for me by far the best part. But as is, I did not enjoy reading it and wouldn’t recommend it.
  • Purple Hibiscus: Fifteen year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja might seem to have charmed lives. They live in a big house with a housekeeper because their father, Eugene, is a wealthy man. He owns factories and a well-regarded newspaper, is renowned for his generosity, strong Catholic faith, and dedication to using his paper to tell truth to power. Her schoolmates and even her own cousin think she’s a snob because she barely speaks to anyone. That’s because they don’t know that behind the tall walls of their home, their father controls every aspect of their lives. He creates daily schedules that are to be adhered to. He expects that his children will be at the top of their class. He delivers pre-meal graces that are practically homilies. And if anyone disappoints him in even the smallest respect, they face violence. Their mother miscarries after being beaten. The children are beaten, burned, terrorized. She doesn’t talk because she’s so afraid of putting a foot wrong. Everything changes when their father’s sister, their Aunty Ifeoma, somehow persuades Eugene to let her niece and nephew come to visit for a week. Ifeoma, a widow, is a university professor with three children of her own, who she has raised to be bold, curious, and strong. Kambili discovers a Nigeria she’s never known and a way of being she’s never imagined. Neither she or Jaja is able to fit back into their home life in the exact same way they had before, and a showdown with their father becomes inevitable. This was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut novel, and it shows. As compared to her later works that I’ve read, it’s significantly less well-developed. The basic plot beats are very simple: a sheltered, abused teenage girl escapes her environment, learns that the world is very different than she thought it was, starts to develop connections with other people that affirm her basic humanity, and starts to become herself, a self she’d never dreamed she could be before. Even as someone for whom the plot is virtually never the point, I found it sometimes frustratingly cliche. What I didn’t think about until after I read more about the book was its relationship to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and once my attention was dawn to the connection, I appreciated more of how Adichie riffs on those themes: Christianity v traditional Nigerian spiritual beliefs, the way colonialism teaches Africans to hate themselves and aspire to be more like white people, the use of violence by angry fathers to control their children. I think it’s quite successful in that respect! And the clear, strong prose that would become, to me, her trademark is also already in evidence. It’s the kind of debut novel that’s more or less fine but really just makes you excited to read what that author does in the future, and Adichie would more than live up to that promise. This book is well-written, if a bit underbaked, so there’s no reason I wouldn’t recommend it but I’d probably point someone in the direction of Americanah if they wanted to read her work.
  • Kitchen: Mikage Sakurai is only in her early 20s when she finds herself fully without family. Her parents died when she was young, and the grandparents who raised her died first one, and then finally the other. She’s lost, but Yuichi Tanabe, a young man who worked at the flower shop Mikage’s grandmother frequented, comes unexpectedly to her rescue. He invites Mikage to move in to the apartment he shares with his mother, Eriko, a beautiful and glamorous nightclub owner. There are no ulterior motives, just kindness and companionship. To show her appreciation of them, Mikage cooks food for Yuichi and Eriko. Kitchens are where she feels comfortable, food is a way she expresses love. She comes to be quite close to the Tanabes, and learns that Eriko was once Yuichi’s father and transitioned after the death of his wife. Being with Yuichi and Eriko gives Mikage the space to grieve and get ready to head back into the world, where she moves into her own apartment and works as an assistant to a famous chef at a cooking school. But when Yuichi experiences a profound tragedy of his own, Mikage is forced to confront her own relationship to and feelings about Yuichi and figure out how to proceed. This is a very brief book, even for a novella (it seems like most editions, including mine, have a short story called “Moonlight Shadow” bundled with it but it still barely hits 150 pages). But it still manages to pack in a lot of feeling without going for naked emotional manipulation, though it might seem like grief bait based on the plot. The restraint of the language helps, it doesn’t wallow in sadness. There’s an overall sense of determination, an understanding that grief will pass eventually but will hurt very badly right now, that also keeps it from mawkishness. Despite the very real darkness to some of the material, there’s an overall sweetness, an affirmation of the importance of the kindness and connection. It didn’t make a huge impression on me, but I enjoyed reading it and I’d recommend it!
  • A Fine Balance: Okay, I’ve described my own reading taste before as “600 page bummers”, but there’s a difference between that and what this is, which is just pure misery porn. I really do not care for this kind of deliberate, clumsy attempt to heartstring-pull. Terrible things happen to people who don’t deserve them. There’s some good character work but like…to what end? I hated it, and I don’t want to spend time writing anything more about it.
  • The Glass Palace: In the early 1880s, an Indian kid called Rajkumar finds himself in Burma. His whole family has died and he’s only about 10 or 12, but he’s big for his age and scrappy and determined to make it, and somehow he does. In 1885, though, a minor dispute between Burma and Britain escalates very quickly into a brief war. The royal family is deposed. At the news of this development, their palace in Mandalay, called “the glass palace” for a mirrored room within it, is broken into and looted by some of the city’s residents…including Rajkumar. While there, he comes across someone who will change his life. Dolly is a few years younger than him, an orphan taken into service by the royal family, and incredibly beautiful. He sees her again the next day when she and the rest of the retinue are leaving to follow the royal family into exile in India, gives her some food, and promises he will find her again someday. He’s as good as his word. He grows up, becomes successful, and happens to find himself in the coastal town where the royals remain in exile, with Dolly as one of their last remaining servants. They marry, but the world does not stop turning and the events that transpire in India, Burma, and Malaya across the beginning of the 20th century impact them and their loved ones in ways they never would have thought possible. For a book that spends a lot of time with a relatively small cast of characters, it’s honestly surprising how poorly almost all of them are developed. Rajkumar and Dolly are the focus of a good chunk of the first half of the book, and continue to feature heavily throughout it, but I’d be hard-pressed to describe either of them or their motivations outside of a few hackneyed cliches. Major character moments, like the friendship that forms between Dolly and Uma, the wife of the chief provincial official overseeing the Burmese royals in India and persists for the duration of their lives are just kind of hand-waved around in the narrative. What draws them together and keeps them connected for decades afterwards, despite mostly living in separate countries in a time when communication was difficult and slow? Who knows! Certainly not anyone reading this book! It’s no more elegant in its time jumps, particularly the final one, which sees Rajkumar and Dolly’s granddaughter venture to Burma to find out more about her family’s history there. Writer Amitav Ghosh does nothing to get the reader invested in her or her quest. To me, it seemed clear that Ghosh intended the character of Arjun, Uma’s nephew, who is introduced about halfway through the book to be the distillation of the themes he wanted to emphasize in the novel. Arjun joins the British military as an officer after an indolent adolescence, becoming a true believer in the institution, tightly integrated into his Indian unit and uninterested in the perspectives of others who ask questions about oppressed people serving in the military of their oppressors. His journey from that position to the end of the book, when he has not only defected to a group of Indian nationalist military members but become their leader, fanatically enforcing loyalty among those who try to abandon the cause when it is hopelessly lost, takes the book from being about colonialism in a general sense to About Colonialism in a much more specific one. Characters deliver long monologues to each other in a way that real people do not do. It’s not that I disagree with his point, it’s that these portions of the narrative feel less like a story and more like a polemic, the latter of which is much less engaging to me as a reader. I did appreciate learning more about the history of this part of the world, especially from an author with roots there. I don’t believe I’ve ever read historical or even contemporary fiction with any significant portion set in Myanmar, so that was refreshing. But this was just too underwhelming as a story to recommend to anyone.

In Life…

  • C started preschool: My son has only ever been cared for by us and his grandparents, but once he turned 4 I knew it was time to think about getting him into school. He won’t start kindergarten this coming fall, not until the next one, but I want him to go in being ready to go into a classroom full of other kids, prepared to play and learn, and so we can ease into it a little more this way because we’re starting with just two days per week. It feels like such a big step!

Top Ten Tuesday: My Spring 2026 TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week we’re highlighting our spring reading schedule! As usual, I have quite a mix…some suspense, some nonfiction, and a surprising amount of young adult.

Loving: About the Supreme Court case that legalized interracial marriage, I realized I don’t actually know much about it besides what we studied in Constitutional Law.

The Witch: Marie Ndiaye is an author I’ve long been interested in reading so the new English translation of one of her books seems like the perfect time to dive in!

Mexican Gothic: Another writer I’ve been meaning to read for quite a while, and I do enjoy some gothic vibes so I think this will be a good place to start.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: I know Sherman Alexie is problematic, but this book was very lauded and I do still want to read it.

The Woman Warrior: This memoir about growing up as the child of Chinese immigrants apparently weaves in elements of Chinese folklore and I do love folklore.

The Library of Flowers: This seems like the sort of book I will either find really engaging or irritatingly sentimental, so here’s hoping for the former!

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter: I have noticed that my tastes are trending away from young adult books the last few years so this might be good or it might not go well at all. This was a National Book Award finalist so I’m hoping it’s the former!

Everything Everything: See above re young adult books, which is actually inspiring me to go through my list and start eliminating some of the ones I wasn’t especially excited to read to begin with. I do remember this being VERY trendy around the book internet when I first started blogging!

Bird of Paradise: I’m interested to see how this works for me given that I’ve been getting steadily less interested in family history memoirs, so this could be the end of a very weak stretch of books for me.

Girl Woman Other: I remember this tying with Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale sequel to win the Booker Prize and a lot of people being mad because they thought this was clearly the superior book and should have won outright so I have been very excited to read this for a while!

Book Review: Columbine

I was in eighth grade when the Columbine school shooting happened. It was near the end of the school year, but I remember the security measures that followed: you were supposed to carry your belongings into school in a clear bag, and I think we had a couple weeks of bag searches before we entered the building. I remember my mother being nervous, and I was too. If it could happen in a place like Littleton, it seemed like it could happen in my small town just as easily. The idea that school was an inherently safe place was permanently destroyed.

It might be the most infamous, but the Columbine massacre was not the first school shooting, not by a long shot. The reality is that schools in the United States have seen gun violence for essentially as long as we’ve been a country. But this time was different. Dave Cullen’s Columbine is the product of a decade of work and research, rooted in his own experience of being a reporter responding to the scene. He tells the story on two tracks: in one, he examines killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, going back to their childhoods and charting their growing bond as they develop and execute their plans to slaughter their classmates; and in the other, the aftermath of the crime, including the myths that sprung up about what happened that day.

It’s clear from the records Cullen was able to examine and analyze that Eric was a sociopath and the leader, and Dylan suffered from deep depression and followed Eric. They did not fly entirely under the radar before the shooting: about a year beforehand, they were caught breaking into a car and sent to a juvenile diversionary program, which they both successfully passed through. They convinced of-age contacts to help them acquire weapons. They were not popular, but neither were at the bottom of the school’s social hierarchy. They had friends. Eric had dates. They were not a part of any group wearing trenchcoats. They didn’t spend a whole lot of time listening to Marilyn Manson. They didn’t even really plan a shooting: they had built and placed bombs that, if they’d worked, would have killed hundreds. They only planned on using their guns to target those fleeing the explosion.

But the 24-hour news cycle doesn’t wait for the truth, so rumors flew quickly in the aftermath of the shooting: that the perpetrators had been bullied relentlessly, that they were influenced by “Satanic” music, that Cassie Bernall had been shot in the head after responding affirmatively to a question about whether she believed in God. Cullen takes time debunking this rumor in particular, which took off to such an extent that Cassie (who was shot and killed, but never was asked about her faith) was more or less anointed a martyr in Evangelical circles. It was another student who was asked whether she believed in God, and though she said she did, she was not murdered. Cullen also explores those who were left behind to pick up the pieces, including family members of murdered students, the widow of a slain teacher, and the principal who had been devoted to the school and well-liked by the student body.

As someone whose own experience and schooling was shaped by Columbine, I found myself often surprised by the way I’d internalized most of the misinformation that had spread about it. I had no idea that they’d gone in intending to blow things up rather than use their guns. I remember having found out at some point that the Cassie Bernall story wasn’t true as initially presented, but did not know that the student who was asked about her belief didn’t die. Cullen does an excellent job of keeping up momentum with both of his storylines…knowing full well what happens at the end, there’s a sense of dread that builds up as we follow Eric and Dylan, seeing chances where they might have been found out but instead avoided detection. And the reactions of the impacted community members are reported in a way that I found clear-eyed but sensitive: he doesn’t paint Bernall’s parents as malicious or opportunistic, for example, but rather as grieving the loss of a daughter who had seemed to overcome her struggles only to be killed and seizing onto a story they were told that provided them with comfort.

The most frustrating thing about the book is the lack of answers. This isn’t Cullen’s fault, of course. There is no single answer to “why?”. There’s also no single answer to how to prevent future shootings, as the killers procured weapons in ways that circumvented gun laws. This lack of easy understanding, though, makes the book in my opinion even more important to read. It’s a very well-constructed piece of journalistic nonfiction and I found it difficult to put down even as it was hard to read. It’s heavy stuff, but important and worthy of the time and effort it takes to reckon with it.

A Month In The Life: February 2026

Another trip this month, but thankfully much shorter than the one last month! Otherwise, I spent a LOT of time watching the Olympics because I am as previously discussed a giant figure skating nerd. I was reasonably to very happy about three of the four gold medal winners, but I am still salty about the French ice dancers. Anyways!

In Books…

  • When They Call You A Terrorist: Patrisse Khan-Cullors (who seems to have dropped the Khan lately so I’ll just call her Cullors going forward) grew up in a poor, mostly Hispanic area of Los Angeles with two older brothers and one younger sister. Her father, who she later learned was in fact her step-father, worked for decades at the GM plant in Van Nuys before it closed with no real exit planning for its former employees. Her mother worked several minimum wage jobs to keep her family housed and mostly fed, though they still relied on school breakfasts. As a young girl, she watched her older brothers be harassed by police for doing nothing worse than being outside with their friends. Sent to middle school in the neighboring upper-class and mostly white neighborhood of Sherman Oaks based on her academic performance, she wound up needing summer school and was shocked when she realized that the freedom of the campus she’d grown accustomed to was very different in her zoned school, where she had to pass through metal detectors to enter. Her older brother Monte developed mental illness, experiencing both delusions and manic episodes that resulted in a prison sentence, where he suffered maltreatment both physically and psychologically. By the time she reached a social justice magnet program in high school, her life experience had primed her to see the ways in which American society fails the people it has placed at the bottom of its social strata. And indeed she became an organizer, launching the Black Lives Matter movement along with Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin. This book recounts her life and experiences up to and including the beginning stages of BLM, and what is immediately clear is Cullors’s talent as a writer. Her prose is stirring and powerful. It is clear that she has spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the issues she raises. It is interesting reading this book now rather than when it was released n 2018, when I think I may have been less inclined to read it critically. And despite my significant political differences with Cullors, who is far to my own left, I want to preface my criticism by saying that I absolutely agree with her on the most fundamental part of the work she did with BLM: Black lives do matter, and it’s important to say that specifically because of the long history in the United States of Black lives being treated as though they don’t. That being said, I found myself irritated by the way she did not seem to feel like she needed to support her claims with evidence. There are no footnotes here. And while, for example, I very much believe that she felt like there was no support system for her in the wake of a nasty breakup with another woman of color who harassed her because of their race and sexuality, she blithely asserts that there are community-based, non-police supports available for white straight people in her situation and I am just…unaware of what those might be? She doesn’t indicate that she was seeking a domestic violence shelter, the only thing I can think of besides a restraining order that might be out there for other people to access. I also found it a little flabbergasting that she continually presents criminal behavior like breaking and entering a home where someone was present as a crime where “no one was hurt”. Yes technically true but like…that is a serious offense that likely gave someone PTSD! While I agree with her that communal responsibility is something we as a culture should focus on more, personal responsibility seemed to figure very little in her arguments and I just do not find that an especially persuasive position. Despite finding some of her arguments lacking, though, I thought this was a well-crafted memoir that illuminates, for someone like me who has not lived it, what it is to try to exist, and more than just exist, find real joy and community, in a Black, queer, female body. It’s worth a read.
  • Crying in H Mart: Like many teenage girls, Michelle Zauner did not get along with her parents, particularly her mother. Her mom hoped the guitar her daughter had picked up in middle school was just a phase but Michelle started writing and performing her own music. Her mother, Chongmi, a Korean woman her father had met and married while working overseas, wanted a more stable, successful life for her only child. Their sparring over music contributed to Michelle having a breakdown in high school, eventually scraping her way into college by the skin of her teeth. Though she continued to pursue music after she graduated, spending years on the other side of the country and getting some distance helped their relationship start to improve…only for her mother to be suddenly, unexpectedly diagnosed with stage IV cancer. Determined to make up for her teenage waywardness, Michelle dropped everything to go home to help care for her mom. It was an understandably highly fraught time: Chongmi did not respond well to treatment, Michelle and her father struggled to relate to each other and give Chongmi the care she needed, and the presence of Chongmi’s longtime friend Kye to help further complicated the dynamic. More than anything, Michelle wanted to make the delicious Korean food that had been the way her mother most straightforwardly communicated love, but her skills were lacking and Kye had no interest in teaching her. When she died, Michelle was left unmoored, trying to adjust her own understanding of herself in a world without her mother. The songs she wrote to try to process her grief and released under the name Japanese Breakfast launched her into a new level of success as a musician, eventually enabling her to tour through Asia and perform in South Korea, the country she was born in. Grief memoirs are not a genre that I tend to find all that compelling. Perhaps this is a reflection of some sort of hard-heartedness, but outside of the kind of masterful display of craft in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, or a major historical event of some kind, there’s just very little that’s interesting about a person experiencing a profound loss and learning to come to terms with it. They all hit the same beats. I’d heard really good things about this one, though, so I had high hopes which were unfortunately not met. It’s not that Zauner doesn’t have talent as a writer, but it does make sense that this was based on an essay that went viral and was expanded out to make a whole book because there’s almost a kind of flabbiness to its narrative, as if she threw in as much extra material as she could to fill out a minimum page count. It buries what might be clear and true under a bunch of filler. There are a couple of nuggets in here that I found interesting that I wish had gotten more attention and care in terms of shaping a narrative, the first and most intriguing of which was Michelle’s relationship with Kye. The uneasy, tense dynamic between a daughter wanting to make up for her teenage mistakes versus this woman that her mother was close to but she was not, who was able to provide a kind of care to Chongmi that Michelle desperately wanted to provide but wasn’t capable of, who refused to help her learn to do the one thing, make genuine Korean food, that had so often been an expression of love from Chongmi that Michelle longed to reciprocate…that is a unique angle that I didn’t feel like I’d seen before. The other thread that got my attention was her complicated relationship with her father. We learn that she discovered that he was cheating on her mother as a teenager because he was bad at covering his digital tracks, that he’s an alcoholic, that she resented him for leaning on emotionally her during her mother’s treatment, that things between them got contentious after her mother’s death and that he eventually moved to Thailand but I wanted more reflection on how that relationship effected her, or at least more of a concentrated focus, because as is it just kind of bobs in and out of the narrative. Perhaps fans of her music would be more interested in the portions that deal with her career in that field, but as someone who doesn’t know her work those left me very bored and not even inclined to seek it out to hear it. Overall it’s far from terrible but just overstuffed and underdeveloped and I can’t really recommend it.
  • Norwegian Wood: Toru Watanabe is a quiet college student in Tokyo when he reconnects unexpectedly with a girl called Naoko, who had once been a big part of his life. Naoko had been the longtime girlfriend of Toru’s best friend Kizuki, and the three spent a lot of time together in high school before Kizuki committed suicide unexpectedly at just 17 years old. Once Toru and Naoko encounter each other again, they start taking regular walks around the city, and when celebrating her 20th birthday they sleep together. Shortly thereafter, she disappears from his life, seeking treatment for depression in a remote mountain area. Toru feels committed to her, but shortly afterwards another woman enters his life: Midori, a fellow student, who practically bursts at the seams with life and vitality. Toru struggles with his strong feelings about both women as he tries to figure out his path forward and where he fits in in the world. This was one of Haruki Murakami’s first novels, and while he’s become famous for the more dreamlike style in many of his other books, this one, which is much more realistic, was an extremely popular book in his home country of Japan. As someone who’s only read one other of his novels, I found that I preferred the less strictly realistic style to this one, a surprise for me as I don’t tend to find magical realism especially compelling. For me, though, his weaknesses in writing women come into much starker relief when I as a reader am asked to believe in them as literal people. Neither Naoko nor Midori feels like an actual person in the slightest, they are clearly symbolic of an internal-turning/death drive v external-turning/life drive that Toru is meant to choose between, though he writes Toru an end-run around having to make the actual decision. This is definitely a character book rather than a plot one, but because the characters aren’t really engaging it made it hard for me to get invested in the book. I can’t recommend it, it’s fine but did not do much for me as a reader.
  • The Poppy War: When Rin’s foster parents start threatening to sell her off in marriage to an old local official, she knows she needs to find an elsewhere to be. But as a war orphan in a small town in rural Nikara, there’s only one real way out: the Keju, a national exam that governs entrance into the country’s military academy in its capital city of Sinegard. With extraordinary effort, she manages to gain entrance, but finds that getting in was just the first step. She deals with prejudice, makes friends (some) and enemies (more), and struggles to learn everything she needs to learn in order to be accepted by one of the academy’s five instructors to study their art as an apprentice. While she enjoys Strategy, she finds herself drawn to the school’s master of Lore and the study of shamanism he offers. But she doesn’t even get the chance to graduate when Nikara’s great military rival, the island nation of Mugen, invades Nikara with the aim of conquering its land for their people. Dispatched to the front lines, she discovers things about herself within her squadron that she never knew before, and the lessons she’s learned are tested beyond what she could have imagined. I think most new adult (or young adult, which this is not) novels I’ve read that were written in the post-Harry Potter/Hunger Games era suffer from a similar issue, which is that it feels like they take elements of the many books in that and the YA genre that have been popular in the last 20-30 years and try to blend them together in a new and interesting way. This is not a new issue or restricted to this genre: many fantasy novels owe much to Tolkien, domestic thrillers to Flynn, and so on and so forth. The publishing industry wants to make money, so they look for books that have similarities to ones already out there that are selling well. But as a reader it leads to a same-y feeling to a lot of narratives. Here we have the One Special Girl trope, along with exclusive boarding school, the rich-boy rival, secret magic, and more! There were some things I appreciated that were left out that would have made it feel even more cookie-cutter: despite some hints at romance, none develops, Rin’s moral grayness is not her being good but unconventional, she does some truly very bad things. We aren’t treated to endless descriptions of how she’s actually very beautiful even though she’s unsure of herself. Her looks are mentioned in passing at most. But it doesn’t change the feeling that there is a lot of riffing on ideas that have been explored before, except with the twist that this is based on actual history. It’s not just inspired by the Second Sino-Japanese War, it’s very directly taken from that history. Which includes one of the most horrific events I have ever read about, the Rape of Nanking, so this is MUCH darker than is typical for young adult fare, which is definitely what I thought it would be going in. I’ve read a couple reviews from readers well-informed about Chinese history that were frustrated by how much the narrative did crib straight from the historical record but distorted it. Fot my own part, as a reader who is largely not familiar with Chinese history, I was frustrated by how much this tried to do, from a storytelling perspective, and how mixed the execution was. Kuang is biting off a LOT here in her debut novel: what seems like it should be a coming-of-age story, a war narrative with enough backstory for it to make sense, straight-up fantasy elements, genocide, contemplation of the ethics of combat, the ways in which people dehumanize each other. When I say that not all of it works, I mean that none of the individual elements really held up for me at all, everything is middling-to-bad. I wish she’d narrowed her scope and focused on quality of plot elements rather than quantity, because I was left with the sense that there was something here that could have been really good if it had been honed down to what was actually working instead of just tossing everything at the wall to see what might stick. I won’t be continuing the series, and it’s too uneven to recommend to anyone else.
  • Barracoon: One of the very last people who had grown up in Africa and been sold into slavery in the United States and lived to tell the tale was a man named Cudjo Lewis, who was born in what is likely now Benin as Oluale Kossola. He was about 19 when he was captured in a raid conducted by a neighboring tribal leader, who used the slave trade to his advantage to depose local rivals and make money off of it to boot. Kossola was taken to the trading port, where he and just over 100 other men, women, and children were sold and placed on a ship called the Clotilda, which ended up being the last known slave transport into America when it arrived in Mobile, Alabama. He spent five years as a slave, and after the Civil War he and several other survivors of that slave ship, unable to raise the money to return to their homes, bought property and founded their own community which became known as Africatown. He married and had six children, and worked doing manual labor until he was struck by a train and the lawyer he hired to sue the train company for him never actually paid him his settlement. This was not the only sorrow in the back half of his life, he outlived all of his children as well as his wife. When he was in his 80s, he was visited by Zora Neale Hurston, not yet a prominent novelist and working as a collector of folklore. This book is the product of the conversations Hurston had with Kossola. While I think this was an enlightening, informative read, there was no denying that it also didn’t really work for me. Like, I appreciate why Hurston retained Kossola’s dialect in her writing for its authenticity, but it also renders the text quite challenging to read. And while I’m not naive enough to think that she did not shape the narrative in any way, she presents Kossola’s in the book in a manner similar to that in which she received it from him, including occasional backtracks and digressions and very little in the way of questioning from her to get more information about any particular subjects. Again, this makes it a more authentic presentation, but as a reader it made it hard to understand how some events were connected. I did appreciate that she kept details of her own reporting process to a minimum, so many nonfiction writers think that the story of how they got the story is fascinating and it really never is. But while I am glad I read this book, I can’t really recommend it unless you’re deeply interested in a narrative of this kind and are prepared for something that will be challenging to read.
  • My Sister, the Serial Killer: We first meet Korede as she’s helping her younger sister, Ayoola, dispose of a man’s body. The man, Femi, is the third boyfriend that has ended up on the wrong end of Ayoola’s knife. In the first two instances, she believed her sister’s protestations of self-defense, but Femi’s murder hits her differently. Korede, a relatively plain woman, works as a nurse, and when impossibly beautiful Ayoola invites herself to the hospital and walks out having caught the eye of Tade, the doctor on whom Korede has long harbored a crush, she finds herself seriously torn for the first time about what to do about her sister. She confides in the only person she can, a nonresponsive patient in a coma, as she weighs the decision of whether she should continue to enable her little sister or if Ayoola setting her sights on Tade will finally drive her to do something different. This is a strange, quick little read that seems intended to be understood symbolically more than literally. The monstrousness that we as human beings will ignore to bask in the glow of beauty…Ayoola’s ill-fated paramours are not the only ones who fail to take heed of her deadliness, even if warned. She’s a very real threat to Korede, and their relationship is complicated by their sisterhood and Korede’s envy, but even she finds the idea of exiting her sister’s orbit a very difficult one to seriously contemplate. It’s sharp and often stinging, though I struggle to understand how someone might find it truly funny. But although I did appreciate its propulsive pace and social critique, as someone who reads books primarily for character, this was not a particularly great fit for me. What actually motivates Ayoola’s murders? Hard to say! I found Korede’s motivations no less opaque, even by the end of the book. It’s engaging, I bet this one would be a good fit for plot-oriented readers, and I’ll personally be curious to read Oyinkan Braithwaite’s other work because I enjoyed her prose.
  • Sakura: Kaoru, a college student in Tokyo, goes to visit his family home because he learns that his father, absent from the family for several years, is about to come back home as well. There is clearly something amiss when he returns, his dynamics with his mother and sister both seem off, but the family member he can still reconnect with in a familiar, loving way is the family dog, Sakura. The full story of how this once-happy family came to be broken is revealed as Kaoru reminisces about his life, growing up with his siblings and their silly little dog. Things start out with lightness but when tragedy comes it is horrific. As Sakura does what dogs do and gets older, though, can this family survive if the one thing that holds them together isn’t there anymore? I went into this thinking, from the title and cover, that it was going to be mostly about the dog, maybe even centering the dog’s perspective. This is not the case. It also had much more whimsical vibes than I think the actual material merits. There are definitely moments of whimsy! But the places this book goes are quite dark. Tonal inconsistencies were certainly a part of this book not really working for me, but the pacing, too, played a role in that. We open in the present before heading back to the past, which made me curious about what might have happened, but then we take a loooooong time to actually get anywhere. It’s not that the time is completely wasted, there’s some good character work that I did enjoy, but knowing that there would at some point be a shoe drop meant that it felt like it was taking forever to get to that actual shoe drop point. And once that shoe does drop and what happened becomes clear, there’s a rather abrupt shift to a more comedic spirit near the end that felt very jarring. There are elements of this book that I did appreciate, in particular the aforementioned character development, but it was too uneven overall for me to really recommend.

In Life…

  • Company retreat in Las Vegas: This was the third time since I’ve been at my job (for thirteen years now!) that we’ve held our annual retreat in Las Vegas, and while as a 40 year-old Nevadan I don’t tend to get all that excited about Vegas (I am no longer seriously interested in nightclubs and if I wanted to hit a slot machine I need go no further than my local grocery store), it was a really good experience! We had great meetings and conversations about the year ahead and I found a cool little secondhand bookstore to visit!

Book Review: After The Party

Perhaps it’s inevitable that as one gets older, one gets more interested in the World Wars. I remember finding them very boring when we covered them in school, and we all know how much dads tend to enjoy History Channel specials about various and sundry battles and maneuvers. My personal interest has been not so much in the shooty bits, but in the larger cultural trends that produced the conditions that led to war. Nationalist idealologies, in particular, played a large role in a way that is not soothing, given the current state of the world.

It seems like many World War II stories are told from the perspective of “good guys”: people who saw through the xenophobic rhetoric and did their best to resist. That’s not the kind of story that Cressida Connolly’s After The Party tells, though. When Phyllis, her husband Hugh, and their three children return to their native England in the years before World War II, she’s drawn back into the social orbits of her sisters. Both status-conscious Patricia and energetic, bossy Nina have become involved with a political movement with a charismatic leader. Phyllis sends her children to the party-affiliated summer camp Nina is running, and herself falls in line with the support for the party evinced by the people she mixes with. None of them could really be called her friends, per se, except a woman named Sarita who she does become close to. After Sarita’s husband Fergus comes on to Phyllis aggressively at a party, though, something happens that breaks the bond between the women forever.

In the wake of this, Phyllis and Hugh both become more actively involved with the party, which is gradually revealed to be the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley. The reader has known since the beginning of the book that Phyllis eventually spends time in jail, and that turns out to be as a result of the British government’s action, after the war has begun, to imprison party members without trial as a threat to the national security of the country. There are interstitial sections that reflect Phyllis’s reflection on her party membership to a journalist researching female followers of Mosley in the 1970s, where we learn what effect the time she and Hugh spent detained had on their family…and who identified them to the government.

I found Phyllis to be a frustrating character, mostly because of the writing. Connolly seems to be confused about who, exactly, she wants Phyllis to be. She’s often portrayed as susceptible to the influence of others and kind of drifting through her life, barely reacting when she realizes her husband has been unfaithful to her. While she seems to agree with Mosley’s ideas, she doesn’t reflect on them at length and thinks much more about her family than she does politics. On the other hand, she’s also written as a dedicated fascist who refuses to renounce her support for Mosley even when doing so would seem like the most likely way to secure her release from custody, and maintains her beliefs into the 70s. Is she a detached rich lady who doesn’t really care much about anything besides her comfort and security, or a hardcore true believer? Such fluctuation might not have been bothersome if she had a less prominent role in the narrative, but as it’s entirely from her perspective, it was a significant issue. I don’t need my narrators sympathetic (and I didn’t find Phyllis to be so), but I do need them to be written with internal consistency.

It’s still a decent book, but it’s not as good as it could have been because of that characterization issue, which is a shame. I have a fondness for books that feel like the literary version of a prestige British drama movies (and sometimes end up being made into them), and this hits that spot pretty squarely. I liked the way Connolly structured the book, with the brief flash-forwards into the 70s keeping me engaged and curious about how things would play out. Apart from the problems with Phyllis as a character, I found Connolly’s writing generally strong, with elegant prose that well-suited the milieu in which the characters were situated, and the story well-paced. It was reasonably enjoyable, but I’d only really recommend it to readers who enjoy historical fiction about fancy repressed people.

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