A Portable Magic

We’re one month into the year and it’s already been exciting! I read quite a bit this month because I spent quite a few hours on airplanes, so let’s find out what I got up to to kick off 2026!

In Books…

• The Warmth of Other Suns: Beginning around World War I, Black people started to leave the South in large numbers as the industrial cities of the north sought to replace the labor force that was serving overseas. This process, eventually dubbed the Great Migration, continued for decades until about 4 million people had resettled in new places within their own country. Isabel Wilkerson was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist prior to writing this book, and it really shows in the way she puts her narrative together. She picks three people, all coming from different places and choosing different destinations, and uses their stories as lenses through which to illustrate the broader points she also makes about the movement as a whole, sourced from original documentation as well as thousands of interviews she conducted with the people who lived through it. Despite that, the book never felt dense or academic to me…it is very much aiming for a popular audience and is easy to digest. And educational! I learned things about Jim Crow that I’d never even considered, like that Black drivers were forbidden to pass white ones and even parking spaces were segregated. Much like international immigrants, people often chose to go to cities where they had existing connections with family members or friends who had already made the move, and train routes also played an important role in how people left and where they went. Despite enduring belief otherwise, she demonstrates that the participants in the migration were not the source of the social ills for which they were blamed, like low educational achievement or increased dependency on social programs to support large families. She also is very straightforward about the way in which the racism of the North, not institutionalized in legal codes but no less effective for its informality, forced both native and migrant Black people to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Each of the three people Wilkerson highlights is interesting and compelling in their own right, each carrying the legacy of the Southern world they left in a different way. This was an era of American history I knew virtually nothing about, and it’s written in a way that’s rare for history in that it doesn’t feel a little bit like homework. I definitely recommend this book!
• The Best We Could Do: After the birth of her son, Thi Bui feels an increased sense of urgency about learning the stories of her own parents. Like all but her youngest sibling, she was born in Vietnam, though the children came of age in the United States. While the war itself haunts all of them, was the reason they left their homeland, the wounds her parents bear go far beyond the military conflict. This was only the second graphic novel I’ve ever read (both have been memoirs), and like the first was also selected by my book club. I feel like the limitations of the format mean it will always be a less preferred one for me, because I found myself wanting more words, more depth to the writing itself. But the story is deeply compelling, detailing her father’s brutal childhood, her mother’s much softer one, how they came together, and how the Vietnam War disrupted the future they thought they might have. It’s not as straightforward as “Americans bad”, and Bui is not afraid of the moral ambiguity of that time and place, where the best interests of the majority of the Vietnamese people was an open question for larger forces that seemed to have little room for consideration of what might have actually made regular lives easier to lead. And apart from the larger geopolitical machinations around them, the family had their own share of tragedy, including the death of their first child and a later stillbirth. But three living children and another on the way was enough for her parents to make frantic arrangements to leave, finally succeeding and eventually making their way to the United States. But of course, that was not the end of their story, just the beginning of a new chapter. Bui’s childhood as she depicts it makes it clear that it wasn’t the stuff dreams are made of, but what shines through is her tremendous empathy for her parents and how they became the people she experienced them as. Overarching the narrative is a meditation on parenthood, as it is the birth of her own child that inspires her to ask her parents more. They might have made major mistakes, but it is clear that they loved their children and did what they thought was best for them, making countless sacrifices to give them the best opportunities possible, even if that love was not always shown the way that they wanted and needed to feel it. Vietnamese perspectives on the war in their country were not something I was exposed to growing up (honestly the Vietnam War itself wasn’t something I remember being taught with particular rigor in high school apart from its connection to electoral politics), and I appreciated learning more about the history of the country and how the people who actually lived through the conflict thought about it. Even though this is not my preferred format, I think Bui uses it well to engage in some non-linear storytelling and to very literally illustrate what she’s trying to get it, like the way she parallels the way her relatively rural parents must have felt seeing Saigon for the first time with the way she felt when she first moved to New York, a sense of awe and possibility. It’s a powerful, moving work and I would recommend picking it up!
• The Old Fire: Agathe has been long estranged from her sister Vera back in France. She left for the United States as a teenager and built her life there, where she works as a screenwriter. But when her father dies, she goes back to help clean out the house, where she is confronted with the woman her sister has become and her unexamined memories of her childhood. This is the kind of literary fiction that I imagine people are thinking about when they say they don’t really care for literary fiction. Nothing really happens: Agathe goes to her rural hometown, has conversations with her sister and a few other people she remembers from her childhood, thinks about the miscarriage she recently had, and prepares to go back home. I usually don’t mind a book that’s light on plot as long as it turns its attention to character development, but even that is thin. We learn that Agathe was once a fairly serious figure skater, but there’s no real information about why she stopped besides the recounting of an embarrassing social incident. Vera stopped speaking when she was about six, but the questions of why and how she lives her life now are largely left unexplored. There’s a hint that there had been a connection between Agathe and a neighbor boy, now a neighbor man, but this too is left ambiguous. There’s no real conflict here to give the narrative any forward momentum, just questions you assume will be answered at some point (why did Vera stop talking? what is her life like? why did Agathe go to America? did anything ever happen between her and Octave?) that never are. It has the underbaked quality that debut novels can sometimes have, but this is her fourth book. The prose is reasonably solid, but nothing else quite works. I can’t tell if adding some length (it’s only about 200 pages) to allow the plot and characters to develop would have helped, or if there was never any intention of doing that anyways. I was unimpressed enough that I can’t recommend it.
• Such A Fun Age: Emira Tucker is 25 years old and doesn’t quite know what’s next. She’s graduated from college, but doesn’t feel a particularly strong drive towards any kind of work, so she mixes in an occasional transcriptionist gig with a babysitting job three days per week as she promises herself to figure out something before she’s kicked off her parents’ insurance. Her charge is three year-old Briar, who is sweet and stubborn and inquisitive in a way her mother, Alix, finds hard to manage. Late one Friday night, Alix calls Emira with an urgent request. There’s been some minor vandalism at their home and she wants to know if Emira can take Briar out of the house so she and her husband Peter can deal with the cops. With her best friend Zara, she leaves the party she’s at and takes the toddler to the grocery store, where a security guard harasses her for being a black woman with a white child. The incident does not escalate, Emira calls Briar’s father and he confirms that she’s their babysitter, but it changes the dynamic of Emira’s relationship with Alix, an influencer struggling to negotiate her move from New York to Philly, her transition to motherhood, and writing the book based on her blog she’s gotten a contract to create. In love with the idea of herself as a woman with a close relationship with her younger, cool, Black babysitter, she tries desperately to cultivate a friendship that Emira is not interested in. And would be even less interested in if she knew that her new boyfriend Kelley was the high school ex Alix never really got over. Tension builds as Emira tries to figure out who to be while other people try to push her towards their own vision of her future. I had an idea in my head of what sort of book this was probably going to be going into it, and I was pleased to discover that I was wrong. I thought the grocery store incident was going to take up a much larger place in the narrative, but while it certainly resonates throughout the book, it’s much less about that and more about softer, more subtle racism. The way white women look to women of color to be a part of raising their children, the way white culture looks to Black culture for authenticity and coolness, the way white people will look for an audience to see them being “an ally” to under-represented groups, the way white people are sometimes unable to resist the urge to think they know better than people of color what they really want. Reid does good character work: Emira doesn’t have a strong sense of direction but she’s also not an aimless cliche of a 20something, and I appreciated the way the extent of Alix’s toxicity was slowly revealed throughout the course of the narrative. There would have been much less natural tension if we were introduced to her as the person she’s revealed to be as it moves forward. I was genuinely invested in how things would turn out, especially once Alix discovers the identity of Emira’s boyfriend, which isn’t always the case when a character makes me cringe the way Alix does. It helps that her experiences with Alix are not the only part of Emira’s story, her relationships with her friends are also central and important. A lesser book would let Emira be almost symbolic, a focus of other people’s projections, but Reid makes sure that she is a person in her own right. I also found Reid’s prose engaging and insightful, she’s smart and funny. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it!
• The Fifth Season: On another planet there’s a continent called The Stillness in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, because it’s a highly seismologically active place. Every so often, that activity leads to what is referred to as a Fifth Season, when an earthquake or volcanic eruption creates society-destroying chaos. Over time, civilizations have risen and collapsed, with some Fifth Seasons relatively short-lived and some that kill off all but a few isolated bands who restart the world. There are a group of people in this world called orogenes, born with the ability to connect to the earth’s energy in ways both helpful (stilling earthquakes before they even happen) and destructive (triggering those same quakes, or even just striking out against threats). Those without their powers hate and fear them, and have channeled that fear into the creation of a training center called the Fulcrum where orogenes can be controlled, taught to use their skills for the good of the greater society. This book tells the story of three women in that world: Damaya, a young girl whose family has discovered that she is an orogene and have rejected her, sending her away to the Fulcrum, where she struggles to connect with her peers even as she excels in her training, Syenite, a young adult working her way up the heirarchy in the Fulcrum, who is sent on a mission with Alabaster, one of the center’s most accomplished products, and Essun, a middle-aged woman whose personal world is destroyed on the same day as the wider world: her husband has discovered that she and their children are orogenes and has killed their son, while fleeing with their daughter. At the same time, an orogene has triggered a massive earthquake that sets off a Fifth Season, making Essun’s quest to find her daughter ever-more fraught with peril. I don’t tend to gravitate towards sci-fi/fantasy that spends a lot of time on world building: I can’t “see” scenes play out inside my head when I’m reading so the pleasures of that sort of thing are largely lost on me. But N.K. Jemison balances her intricate world-building with the kind of strong character development that many of these sorts of stories lack, giving me reason to care about all of the details. Each of the women’s stories is compelling, exploring what it means to be “other” and how to interact with an outside world that both needs and resents you. It also explores the power of story itself: the folklore that has been passed down through the years about how to survive a Fifth Season and how people respond to it, the framing of orogenes as inherently dangerous through tales told to children, and how easy it can be to make up a story for yourself in ways that paper over uncomfortable realities. In a bit of a stylistic flourish that she completely earns with her talent, Essun’s chapters are narrated in the second person, something that can be tricky to pull off but works here. Another thing Jemison does that feels refreshing in this genre is incorporate diversity in a way that feels completely natural: The Stillness is home to people of various ethnic backgrounds and has its own racial hierarchies, and people are not always just cisgender and heterosexual. While I was always engaged with it when reading it, the book is a bit on the intellectual side and it was the sort of thing that I didn’t find myself compulsively driven to pick up. That being said, though, this was a very good book and I intend to continue with this series and recommend it!
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe: Besides being two Mexican-American teenage boys in El Paso in the 1980s, Aristotle and Dante wouldn’t seem to have much of anything in common. Dante is the beloved only child of intellectuals, including a professor father. Aristotle has three much older siblings, twin sisters and a brother, who has been in prison for most of Ari’s life and who his parents do not speak of. Ari’s father is a veteran, scarred from his time in Vietnam, and neither parent is especially openly affectionate. Ari himself is a loner, respected and a little bit feared for his ability to hold his own in a fight. The two meet at the local pool when Dante offers to teach Ari to swim, and soon becomes Ari’s only close friend. They don’t always understand each other, but they become very close…so close, in fact, that when Dante walks into the road to rescue an injured bird, Ari throws himself into the path of an oncoming car to push him out of the way, ending up with several broken bones and a long healing process while Dante’s family moves to Chicago for a year. Dante writes Ari constantly, including revealing his own attraction to boys, but the more taciturn Ari responds only sometimes. After Dante gets back, though, their friendship becomes increasingly complicated by the feelings they can and cannot express. As a 40 year-old lady, I am long past the point when young adult books were written for someone like me. But despite being YA and written in a very breezy, quick-reading style, there’s a lot of substance here to explore: what it means to be Mexican-American, the impact of a family member in prison, war trauma, teenage depression, sexuality, homophobia, disability, class. Neither Dante nor Ari fits neatly into cliches, both are vivid and mostly realistic (to the extent one believes teenage boys are capable of significant introspection). There’s a sweetness and innocence to their love story that’s very charming. The book is written entirely from Ari’s point of view, in short chapters that make for fast forward progress, and the story Saenz tells is compelling enough to keep those pages moving forward. But this is another one of those books where I was perfectly happy to not think about it when the book was closed, it didn’t worm its way under my skin in a way that made me want to keep picking it up whenever I could. I enjoyed quite a lot about it and would recommend it, but if you’re someone who primarily reads books targeted at adults, this isn’t a can’t-miss YA.
• Kindred: Dana is a Black woman in her mid-20s living in California when she’s suddenly pulled through time. One moment she’s in the apartment she’s moving into with her white husband Kevin, the next she’s in a completely unfamiliar time and place and a red-haired child is about to drown in a river. She saves him, scooping him up and giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but when she’s confronted by his confused and angry parents she’s transported back home as quickly and inexplicably as she left. She barely has time to begin trying to understand what’s happened to her, much less address her terrified husband, when it suddenly happens again. This time the boy is older, but again her quick thinking saves him from what could have been a deadly situation. Their conversation reveals that she’s in Maryland, a slave state, prior to the Civil War, and that this boy, Rufus, will eventually father a child with another youngster she meets soon after, a free Black girl named Alice, and that child will be Dana’s own direct ancestor. Though she’s gone longer this time, she reappears in her own world only a few minutes after she left. Dana and Kevin quickly begin to figure out “the rules” of whatever is happening to Dana…she gets only a few seconds of warning, and anything (or anyone) she’s touching will go along with her. Just a small fraction of the time she experiences in the past will pass in the present. But how can she really live in either world knowing that the other may be only a heartbeat away? How can she tolerate or even just survive the slave-holding past in the increasingly lengthy stays she’s forced to make? How can she live with herself when she learns the price of her family line’s existence? Some people call this book science fiction, but I think those people are wrong: there’s not any science on display here. The mechanics of the time travel are never of significant interest to the narrative. That’s not what Octavia Butler is trying to do here. What she does is plunge the reader into Dana’s story with about as much preparation as Dana has for it, which is to say essentially none. One minute she is in the present, the next she’s in the past. How? Doesn’t matter. As someone who tends to focus on characters over plot, it made it a little bit of a hard one to connect with at the beginning…if I don’t know who she is, why should I care about what’s happening to her? But there’s something about the way that the story takes off and demands that the reader follow that works because of Butler’s skill in telling it. It can be all too easy to think about periods of profound injustice in the past and imagine ourselves as one of the brave ones if we’d been there, feeding information to resistance fighters or protesting an autocratic regime. What Dana’s narrative does is disprove that comforting fiction, because in reading it one realizes why most people weren’t that brave…it could get you killed. Dana is far from meek but when she’s presented with a reality in which her full humanity is not recognized either formally or informally, she does what she needs to do to survive. Which means quite often biting her tongue, keeping her head down, and allowing terrible things to happen because she wants to live. We do get some character development, but that’s not really the point of this book. The point is the ideas, and the writing supports them. A hard read in many ways and chock full of triggers but very much recommended.
• The Black Calhouns: If someone brings up the lack of representation for Black actors in Old Hollywood, someone else will virtually always bring up Lena Horne. While Horne was indeed the first Black actress signed to a “star contract” by MGM, a contract that forbade the studio from forcing her into maid/housekeeper roles, she did not have the career you might imagine. In a world where southern states would refuse to allow a movie that showed white people and black people interacting casually as equals to be screened and studios were willing to make those cuts so they could still make money on the movie, Lena was instead assigned roles where her storyline was inessential to the narrative so her scenes could be easily excised. Her fame, and her money, really come from her career as a lounge singer. But Lena (and her daughter Gail Lumet Buckley, who wrote this book) did not emerge into the world from nowhere. They were and are the products of the Calhoun family of Georgia. Moses Calhoun, Lena’s great-grandfather, was a slave to the white Calhouns, but he experienced something most slaves did not: education. He was literate and good with numbers, which meant that when he was freed after the Civil War he was in a better position than many to prosper. He owned a grocery store, and eventually a restaurant and boarding house, which enabled his small family to rise to the middle class. One of his two daughters, Cora, married a teacher and newspaperman called Edwin Horne, and they left the South for New York City and had four children of their own. One of their sons, Teddy, married an actress called Edna, and before splitting up they produced one child, a daughter called Lena, who they named after Cora’s sister. Buckley examines the histories of her family line, including tracing that of the original Lena, who W.E.B. DuBois had once nurtured a crush on and whose descendants remained in the South. In the back half of the book, after she is born, the book takes on some elements of memoir about growing up as the child of a celebrity, though it maintains the more formal prose styling found throughout. This was an interesting book to read in relation to other works I’ve read about this time period and these people: Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams and its examination of Black Old Hollywood, The Original Black Elite about how upward progress stalled for many Black people as Republican politicians largely abandoned them to chase segregationist voters, and of course The Warmth of Other Suns about the Great Migration and the challenges faced by Black Americans as they left the South. The Horne family’s story brings together many of those threads, and Buckley is a capable narrator. I was worried this might be on the dense side, but she keeps the writing lively, although ultimately it’s not an especially engaging book. It suffered the most for me in its scope and balance by including the Southern side of the family, and while I understand the interest in telling that story to include the full breadth of familial experience, it’s clear that her records are best for the people most closely connected to her: her mother Lena and Lena’s grandmother Cora. She touches on the other side of the family infrequently enough that I had usually forgotten who was who when the narrative switches back to them and kind of glossed through those sections (one of the downsides of reading on Kindle is that it’s not very easy to do things like flip back to a family tree). Buckley does well at finding the most interesting parts of the stories of her forebearers (her background in journalism is obvious), but while her enthusiasm for their lives is clear, it’s just hard to get all that connected with someone else’s family history. Reasonably interesting and generally well-written, it’s just too inessential to really proactively recommend though if you’re inclined towards something like this, it’s worth your time.
• Good People: When the Sharaf family arrives in the United States from Afghanistan, having fled their home country during the Russian invasion, they have virtually nothing, just two parents and a small boy in a nearly empty apartment in northern Virginia. When the local Afghan community becomes aware of them, though, they band together to bring them furnishings and food. The family grows, adding first a girl and then after a long gap, another boy and girl, even as they struggle to find financial security. But when father Rahmat makes a series of canny business moves, the Sharafs move upwards and fast, buying a mansion in an exclusive DC-area enclave and spoiling the children that they have big dreams for. Eldest son Omer dismays his parents by eschewing college to enter the business world, making the pressure on his teenage sister Zorah all the more intense. Formerly a star student, Zorah starts to rebel. Her grades start to slip, she confesses to her parents that she wants to pursue a career as a makeup artist rather than the lawyer they want her to be (a confession that is received poorly), and most shockingly to her parents and their conservative Muslim community, she starts dating a boy. When her relationship is discovered, there’s a significant rift within the family, but several months later things seem to be back to normal when they all go together on a trip to Niagara Falls. On the way home, though, there’s a terrible accident. Driving late at night in bad weather around a tricky turn, Zorah is killed when her car plunges into a canal. But as details emerge about that rift in the family and how severe it was, it starts to seem like maybe it wasn’t an accident at all. Could this tight-knit family, the seeming embodiment of the American Dream, really have the kind of darkness within it that could mean that Zorah was murdered for the shame she brought on them? Patmeena Sabit tells her story entirely through outside voices: various family friends and former friends, neighbors, Zorah’s peers, journalists, and the lawyer that the family hires as they become the focus of a police investigation, among others. Structured as a series of interview segments, each interviewee has their own perspective, their own relationship with the Sharafs. It’s a narrative device that can be tricky to pull off, making it all the more impressive that Sabit does so with such elan as a debut novelist. Her own lived experience growing up as a member of the Afghan expat community in NoVa doubtlessly helped her craft voices that feel so real, but getting that out into a book and making the story so compelling for a reader without that kind of background is no mean feat. Being a debut, it has some issues that crop up…in particular, the pacing feels a little off, with the first half of the book sometimes a bit draggy. But once it takes off, it’s incredibly compelling and hard to put down. The short chapters/interview segments help give it a propulsive momentum, and there’s enough ambiguity around what might have happened that the narrative tension stays high. I found it very engaging, very much recommend it, and am very excited to read what Sabit writes next!

In Life…

• I went to England for the European Figure Skating Championships: My bestie and I decided that our skate trip for this season would be Europeans after some lackluster scheduling for the North American Grand Prixes, so we headed to England for the last major event for the skaters on that continent before the Olympic Games! We spent four days in Sheffield, where the event was being held and where I’d never been before, before heading to London for a few days of sightseeing. We do eventually want to go to every major skating event and this seemed like a relatively easy way to check Europeans off the list. It was super fun, I missed my family like crazy and am very glad to be home.