A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Summer 2026 TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about our seasonal to-be-read lists, and once again my summer reading is extremely non-beach-read-y. We’ve got prize-winners, retellings, and bummers but fiction and non!

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: This book, and Amy Chua herself, are both controversial, but it’s pretty short and I’m always curious about books about parenting that take off in pop culture so I’m curious to see what I think of it.

James: I am finally finally getting to the Huck Finn retelling that everyone loves and won all the prizes. I did not care for the source material when I was in high school so I wonder what I’ll think:

The Devoted: Sometimes I like to pick advance review copies that seem a little out of my comfort zone, and this book about an organized crime family seems like it will have suspense elements that I don’t always go for but is focused on a strong sibling bond, which I tend to enjoy.

The Girls at 17 Swann Street: I had an eating disorder in high school, and I had a cousin who struggled with one for a long time before beating it, so I expect this book about a home for young women dealing with anorexia to hit close to home.

Sister of My Heart: This is about cousins rather than sisters, I gather, but I always have a soft spot for stories about bonds between women.

Open Season: Ah yes, my light summer reading about systemic racism and its often-lethal consequences.

A Pale View of Hills: I love Kazuo Ishiguro and am really interested in starting to get more into his back catalog.

The Chosen and the Beautiful: I do actually very much like The Great Gatsby, and think it could be quite interesting to read a take on it retold from a character re-written to be Asian and queer.

Etna: A post-war return to home story…but it’s told from the perspective of a dog. I’m really excited about this advance review copy!

Gichigami Hearts: I am a sucker for anything about the Great Lakes and always interested in Ojibwe history so I’m looking forward to this!

Book Review: The Sisters of Henry VIII

Popular culture has long been fascinated by King Henry VIII of England and his wives. And I’m counting myself there, too! There are multiple biographies of these women, and even more fictionalized versions of their stories. But his wives were not the only women to define the king’s life. His mother and grandmother were both powerful sources of influence. And while we might all remember that he had a brother, since marrying his brother’s widow kicked off his notorious matrimonial career, he also had sisters.

Maria Perry’s The Sisters of Henry VIII is about exactly what the title says: the lives of Henry’s two sisters. Henry VII and his wife, Elizabeth of York, had four children who survived to adulthood: Arthur was the oldest, the heir. Then there was Margaret, then Henry, then Mary. Arthur was intended for the throne, Henry for the church…which obviously changed when Arthur died of consumption shortly after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. While royal boys could be given substantive roles, though, there was only one thing royal girls were destined to be: brides. Both Margaret and Mary would be queens: the former of Scotland, and the latter of France. But that is where the similarities in their stories ends.

Mary’s story is more frontloaded with drama: she was wed to King Louis VII of France at 18, who was 34 years her senior and was delighted to have a very young wife. But being already advanced in age when he wed Mary, he did not have long to live and died only a few months after their wedding. As their parents had also since died, Mary’s future was now in the hands of her brother Henry, and she had extracted from him a promise that she would be able to marry a man of her choosing once Louis passed. Despite the fact that he apparently thought there was enough of a risk she would chose to marry his close friend, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, that he warned him again going through with a wedding beforehand, Henry sent Brandon to collect Mary from France. They wed only a few months after Louis’s death, creating not only quite a rage in Henry, but a precarious situation if she had fallen pregnant, as it would not have been clear which husband had fathered a child. After this initial kerfuffle, though, Mary and Charles had a long marriage and she was eventually accepted back into her brother’s good graces. It was through descent from Mary that Lady Jane Grey and her family made a claim to the throne when her cousin, Edward VI, died.

Margaret, on the other hand, really lived through some stuff. She was married to James IV of Scotland in an effort to bring his kingdom into the orbit of England. They had one child (James V, who would go on to father Mary, Queen of Scots, who would go on to mother James VI/James I of England) who survived infancy in their five years of marriage before he died in battle with England. As the regent for her young son, she found herself (and her child) caught in power battles between Scotland’s clans, and then went ahead and made it worse by marrying the Earl of Angus. He openly cheated on her, using her money to support himself, his side piece, and their child, which she understandably objected to. She was finally able to get a divorce (after having a child, Margaret Douglas, who would mother Henry, Lord Darnley, who would father James VI with Mary Queen of Scots), but then married another man who also cheated on her and took her money. She was eventually mostly reconciled with her son and third husband before her own death.

These women, especially Margaret, lived very interesting lives, with multiple marriages and plenty of scandals. Which makes it a real pity that Perry’s book is so incredibly dry and honestly pretty boring. On a certain level, I get it. It’s published by an academic press, and not really meant to be a history for a “popular” (rather than professional) audience. But I don’t think that necessarily means you have to drain all the sense of drama and intrigue out of your narrative, especially when you have this kind of material to work with! Margaret fired cannons at her estranged second husband when he tried to mess with her plans for holding power in Scotland! This is juicy stuff, and I wish there had been some liveliness in the prose to match it.

In fact, Margaret’s life was so full that I found myself resenting it a little bit when Perry would return attention to Mary, who really settled down when she got back to England with Brandon. It seemed like she felt she had to make an attempt to at least somewhat balance attention to each of the women, though Scotland’s complicated politics made me want more context for Margaret as well as there just being more material there. Throughout the book, with both women, I found myself often confused about members of the nobility being referred to, as Perry used both surnames and titles (Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk being both Brandon and Suffolk) interchangeably to refer to the same person and since virtually every major male figure in these women’s lives were members of the nobility and had at least two names that could be used, it made it hard to follow at times. If you’re a Tudor completist, this is worth reading to get more information about the lives of Henry’s sisters. But I wouldn’t recommend it for someone not in the mood for an academically-oriented history text.

A Month In The Life: May 2026

With June right around the corner, we’re in proper summer now. Also right around the corner: primary elections! As a person working in politics, election cycles are really foundational to my job, so I’ll be curious to see how some of the more meaningful races for the state play out as November creeps ever closer. But that’s not what you come here for, so without further ado:

In Books…

  • Bird of Paradise: Raquel Cepeda did not have an easy life. The daughter of a Dominican couple living in New York City whose marriage imploded when she was a little girl, she lived first with her mother Rocio, but after Rocio just barely manages to escape from an abusive relationship, she’s sent back to the island to live with her grandparents for a while. This is the place she seems to have been happiest. A few years later, she’s sent back to NYC and her father Eduardo, who wants her to fit into a whiter mold than his fellow Latinos and play tennis and the piano. Despite the middle-class outward-facing appearance, she sleeps on the sofa in his apartment for lack of other room for her and when her father is dissatisfied with her, which is often, he beats her. Her Finnish stepmother Alice refuses to step in. Rocio, deep into a series of marriages and relationships that will see her mother five of Raquel’s half-siblings, isn’t any help. It’s up to Raquel to figure out how to keep her head above water, which she manages to do in part due to her high school boyfriend Angel’s open-hearted and generous mother, who keeps Raquel fed and loved. Always drawn to hip-hop, she manages to work her way into becoming a writer (and eventually editor-in-chief) of Russell Simons’s magazine, despite having dropped out of college. When she becomes a parent, she becomes more curious about her family’s origins and travels the world to discover her roots after DNA testing reveals more about their roots from as far away as northern Africa. This book feels much more like two stories uneasily stitched together than it does a coherent narrative. Though I did not especially enjoy either half, the memoir angle it takes at first is stronger. Terrible-childhood memoirs don’t really do much for me besides make me feel tremendously sad that children have to grow up with parents who either can’t or won’t treat them with love and care. But at least there’s a story here, albeit one that’s difficult to read. It’s also often frustrating, because she seems determined to share as little as possible about her inner life as she possibly can while writing a memoir. Not that I need someone to rip their own heart apart for a stranger’s reading experience, but if you’re not interested in investigating your own internality…why are you writing a memoir? Even her connection to music feels glossed over, leaving me with only the vague impression that she felt strongly about rap music, but not really getting deeply into how it effected her emotionally. The second half is even weaker, reading as a glorified advertorial for a particular DNA testing service, which she doesn’t just mention by name, she explains its product offerings in detail. It seems very clear that she was directed to use the term “ancestral DNA” because that’s how she constantly, clunkily refers to it. Indeed, there’s a coupon for your very own test kit from the company in the back material of the book. I did feel like I learned some things I didn’t know before about the DR’s relationship with Haiti, so it’s not that I didn’t get anything at all out of this book, but I didn’t enjoy reading it and can’t recommend it.
  • Girl, Woman, Other: Twelve people born as women live in the United Kingdom. They are mostly women of color. Many of them are queer. Each is the focus of a section of this novel. Their lives overlap in various ways, with the closest thing to a central plot element being the debut of a play written by Amma, the first woman the reader meets. She’s Black, she’s a lesbian, she spent most of her life in radical underground theater before earning the opportunity to put on a new work at the National Theatre about African warrior women. The book is divided into four sections, each of which tells the story of a mother and a daughter and then one other woman somehow connected to them. It won’t be for everyone, but as a character-oriented reader, this book was extremely for me. I loved getting deep into the lives of all of the characters, especially as they overlapped and we learned how other people think about the ones I’d read the perspective of previously. The character work is rich and detailed and incredibly rewarding if you enjoy that sort of thing. Obviously, there’s a lot here about the relationships between mothers and daughters, the complicated stew of love and obligation and sacrifice and betrayal that makes up that bond. There’s also a lot about friendship, about immigration, about growing up as the child of immigrants, about marriage, about race, about feminism, about gender, about sexuality. Many but not all of the characters feel strongly about politics and their politics are reflected in their stories. I will say that one of the things that keeps me from going full rave about the book is the way it’s written. Bernardine Evaristo writes in almost exclusively fragmented sentences throughout, and while it does give the book a lot more zip than one might think given that it’s about 450 pages, by the closing sections I was starting to get a little weary of it. I also think some sections were significantly stronger than others, though none was “bad”. Overall, I thought this was a great book and I understand why it won the Booker! If you like a lot of plot or find departures from typical prose styling irritating, this won’t be for you. Anyone else I’d heartily recommend it to!
  • Silver Sparrow: Dana and Chaurisse are two girls growing up in Atlanta who have a lot in common. They both have a father who is a chauffeur. Both of their mothers, who are married, work. They’re both smart and ambitious, attending magnet schools. Both get a summer job at the same theme park. Both have terrible boyfriends that sleep with them but will not claim them. But only Dana knows the thing that binds them closer than anything else: they’re (half) sisters. That chauffeur father is the same man, James Witherspoon, who married Dana’s mother despite already being married to Chaurisse’s. Dana’s life, and that of her mother, are shadow versions of those of James’s “real” wife and daughter. Dana learns very early that she’s not allowed to talk about her family and how it really works. She’s only allowed to go to the science magnet school she’s earned entry into after Chaurisse elects to go elsewhere. She’s not allowed to work that summer job, for fear that she might come into contact with Chaurisse. As a young girl, she and her mother occasionally indulge the urge to spy on their doppelgangers. But as she grows up, spying isn’t enough anymore. She strikes up an illicit friendship with Chaurisse, a plain girl drawn to Dana’s good looks and air of specialness. She wants that special something to rub off on her, too. As Dana crosses more and more lines, the girls end up in the car to a party together when there’s an accident, and the scaffolding of lies and deceit that’s been holding up for years threatens to come crashing down and bring everything each family holds dear down with it. I’d read Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage several years ago now and really enjoyed it, so I was not especially that she used a similar storytelling technique in this earlier book, starting us out with one character’s perspective (in this case, Dana’s), before changing it out for another set of eyes (Chaurisse’s). It’s not that it doesn’t entirely work here, but it isn’t nearly as successful. Switching to Chaurisse’s viewpoint makes her and her mother more fully human than Dana has any ability to see them as. The problem is more that she’s not an especially interesting character to spend time with. She’s awkward and a bit naive, and I was far more curious about what was going on inside of Dana’s head during the portion of the book narrated by Chaurisse. I did appreciate the coda at the end that brings us back to Dana, but it left as many questions as it provided answers. Which was the main thing holding the book back from breaking through for me…there were many moments that felt like they deserved exploration that didn’t get developed. There’s a moment when someone close to James who knows both his families offers to wed Dana’s mother, who turns the question over to Dana to decide, and once the decision is made it’s just never revisited again despite being something that could be life-changing and that you have to imagine would linger in Dana’s mind. There were so many chances to go deeper with these characters, or maybe even add an additional perspective, but it skims along the surface a little too much. Jones’s lively, appealing prose makes that possible, it’s engaging even as it shies away from leaning into what could have been richer and more rewarding. Perhaps if I didn’t have the bar set quite so high from reading An American Marriage, I might have been more forgiving of these sorts of flaws. I can understand why people found this book very promising, it definitely is. But it’s a little too underdeveloped to have really worked for me, and also for me to affirmatively recommend.
  • Strangers From A Different Shore: If you asked the average white person in the United States about immigration, they would almost certainly think of two kinds of immigrants…either their own ancestors coming over from the Old Country (stories reinforced by not only family tales, but history textbooks and quite a number of movies) or people coming up from South and Central America (reinforced by breathless coverage on Fox News). But of course, there is an entire other group of immigrants who often get overlooked in popular culture: people from Asia. Ronald Takaki’s book is an attempt to fill that gap, recounting Asian immigration from its early stages (mostly Cantonese-speaking Chinese people, almost entirely single men who intended to go back home after making their fortunes through either gold prospecting or manual labor jobs paying wages far above those that could be hoped for in China) through the wave of southeast Asians displaced by military conflict in their home countries. The first two-thirds or so of the book recount the experiences of the first several waves of Asian people who came to the United States, from those very early Chinese people, then Japanese people, then Koreans, then Indians, then Filipinos. They were driven by both by poor economic outlooks in their homelands as well as American business leaders who sought to disrupt efforts at labor organizing by previous groups. Hawai’i, which Takaki takes a detour to examine, was a special case, with an existing non-white population already well-integrated into even the top levels of social life and the plantation labor system encouraging more permanent, stable employment and living situations that allowed for families to be brought over together (though there were plenty of downsides to that system as well, of course). The parallels with European immigration are there, of course: in both cases, immigrants were often restricted to the hardest and most menial jobs, with limited options for housing and low wages driving them to overcrowded and poorly maintained buildings and neighborhoods. But unlike Caucasian immigrants, the physical differences of Asians meant that they and their children were forever, instantly marked as “other”. There was no way to say, change a surname and watch your accent-less children assimilate. Their race also prevented Asians from becoming citizens, a privilege allowed only for white people, and California’s restrictions on non-citizen ownership of land meant that this discrimination just compounded. Many Asians had experience and expertise in farming, but even if they were able to come up with the funds to buy their own land, it was extremely difficult to do so legally. The latter portion of the book deals with World War 2, the associated unraveling of the most blatant forms of discrimination (in part to counter Japanese propaganda about the very real racism to be found in America!), followed by very brief examinations of the groups of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian immigrants who fled the American-driven conflicts in their countries not to seek new opportunities but to avoid death. A final chapter touches on the 1992 riots in LA and affirmative action controversies centered around Asians. This is a very comprehensive overview, fitting in an odd little niche where it doesn’t feel truly “academic”, it’s pretty straightforward and more interested in the presentation of facts than deep analysis, but neither does it really feel like it’s written for a popular audience, it’s much too dense and often quite repetitive. It’s not especially engagingly written either, there is no gift for lively prose on display here. I do feel like I learned quite a bit, and from that perspective I’m glad that I read it, but I didn’t enjoy the experience of reading it and would not recommend it to anyone besides someone looking for the very specific thing is offers.

 

In Life…

  • Summer is almost here: We’re having some fairly typical northern Nevada late spring weather, ricocheting from the upper 80s to the upper 40s and back again. I do not love the super hot months so I am keeping my fingers crossed that it stays more rather than less reasonable outside, but I suspect I am on the losing end of that battle. What I am extra keeping my fingers crossed for is that our extremely dry winter does not turn into a catastrophic fire season.

Book Review: The Line of Beauty

“Nick was always a favourite with mothers, he was known to be a nice young man, and he liked the unthreatening company of older people. He liked to be charming, and hardly noticed when he drifted excitedly into insincerity. But he also knew the state of suspense, the faked insouciance, of bringing friends home, the playful vigilance with which certain subjects had to be headed off even before they had arisen; you took only a distracted, irrelevant part in the conversation because you were thirty seconds, a minute, ten minutes ahead of it, detecting those magnetic embarrassments towards which it would always twitch and bend.”

Unpopular opinion here: I don’t get the deal with 80s music. Too synth-y, I think. But what a decade to think about in terms of its impact on our culture even all these years later. The partying! The drugs! The neon and spandex! The Gordon Gekko of it all! And then, underneath the flash, all the dark stuff: the rise of AIDS, the failure of trickle-down economics, the existential threat of nuclear war. On the whole, I’m glad I was born in the middle of that decade and grew up through the 90s and early 2000s. There were plenty of issues, but things were generally a little calmer overall.

It wasn’t just in America in the 1980s that conservatism had a moment: we had Reagan, and the United Kingdom had Margaret Thatcher. The Thatcher era is explored in Alan Hollingsworth’s The Line of Beauty through the eyes of Nick Guest, who has just graduated from Oxford and is halfheartedly pursuing post-graduate work on Henry James while he lives with the family of his classmate Toby Fedden. Nick, who is both middle-class and gay, is infatuated not just with Toby but with his whole life: the exclusive London neighborhood where he lives, his rich mother, his rising-star politician father, the blue-blooded social circles he runs in. Toby’s sister Catherine has a history of self-harm, so Nick stays with her in their home while the rest of the family takes their traditional summer trip to France, and there he has his first brief love affair with a man named Leo, who he meets through the personal ads.

A few years later, Nick’s studies are all but abandoned and he’s still living with the Feddens. He’s in a new relationship, with his one-time Oxford classmate Wani, whose family is from Lebanon. They have to keep things quiet, because while everyone knows Nick is gay, Wadi is deeply closeted. He’s also fabulously wealthy, and he and Nick start a magazine, Ogee (named after the shape), to give them an excuse to travel together. It’s peak 1980s and the couple is living it up: they’re far from exclusive and do quite a lot of cocaine. Nick even dances with Margaret Thatcher while high out of his mind. But being set when it is, the specter of AIDS becomes all too real. And a discovery Nick makes about the Fedden marriage makes his place in their world suddenly tenuous.

For a book that runs 500 pages, it’s paced well and moves surprisingly quickly. It’s helped by the fact that it’s organized into three sections with a couple of significant time jumps, which lets it focus on the good stuff. And there’s a lot of good stuff here: Hollingsworth’s story is beautifully written, thematically rich, and entertaining. There’s so much here about deception, hiding behind the surfaces of things. British society (as I, an American, understand it) is often inclined towards an appearance of calm even during real turmoil, but this is next level: Nick hides his middle-class origins through association with the Feddens, both Leo and Wani hide their sexuality from their conservative immigrant parents, one of the Fedden parents is hiding a secret (or two). And all of it is being hidden from greater world by that most powerful illusion: money.

The power of money, and the way it allows those who hold it to retreat away from consequences, is one point at which this book feels like it pays homage to The Great Gatsby. Another is having its young man with a middle-class point of view as a character named Nick. This Nick, like Gatsby‘s, is a bit of an elusive character, serving as much as an entry point into a gilded world for the reader as a clearly defined person in his own right. Beauty‘s Nick is more complicit, more dazzled by wealth and eager to truly belong among the rich. His disillusionment and expulsion is uglier, and more final. Even without the parallels to Gatsby (one of my personal all-time favorites), this is a fascinating look at both the beginning of the AIDS crisis and the excesses of the Thatcher era. There’s some sexy bits, but honestly not too many and not gratuitously racy…older teens are likely mature enough for it if they wanted to pick it up. It’s a really well-constructed book that I found enjoyable to read, and I’d definitely recommend it!

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Floral Titles On My TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, since April showers bring May flowers, I’m picking out some books with floral names from my TBR to highlight! I haven’t read any of them yet but am definitely looking forward to them!

A Court of Thorns and Roses

Killers of the Flower Moon

Tulipomania

The Language of Flowers

Hotel Iris

The Flower Girls

17 Carnations

The Blood of Flowers

The Lotus Eaters

In the Palace of Flowers

A Month In The Life: April 2026

Thankfully, this month featured the last time I’m scheduled to be apart from the family until November, when I’ll go to Skate America. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy having a little space and time to myself every so often, but I really do miss my husband and kiddo when I’m away. Turns out I’m a sap!

In Books…

  • Loving: I had expected this to be more about the actual background of Loving v. Virginia, which it was not really trying to be in a direct sense. Instead, Sheryll Cashin reviews the history of inter-racial romantic relationships for about the first 40% of the book, spends about 20% in the middle talking about the Lovings and the situation that brought them to the Supreme Court, and the back 40% speaks to the increasing frequency of close relationships (platonic but deep friendships, love, sex, parenting) between people of different racial backgrounds and how these bonds have the power to shift public opinion towards greater progress towards integration. I found the initial portion of the book to be the most compelling, tracing the way interracial couplings have been socially and legally received since the days of Pocahontas and John Rolfe in Jamestown. At first, social concern was directed at the difference in religious practice between spouses, and even in the early days of slavery as Africans began to be imported into the country, there was still much greater potential for social connection and movement for interracial couples. It was only as fortunes began to depend on slaves as a permanent underclass, as powerful landowners realized that the natural affinity between whites and blacks living in poverty could overwhelm their concentration of wealth, that the rules changed. Cashin spends the most time with anti-miscegenation laws targeted at whites and blacks, which extended further northwards than you would think, but also touches on their history in the West aimed primarily at Asians, the racial background of most of that region’s large imported workforce. We get a relatively quick sketch of the Lovings themselves and virtually nothing about the long legal process of taking their case to the Court. I hadn’t realized that Richard Loving lived less than 10 years after they won their victory, dying in a car accident. The back half of the book is the weakest. While Cashin presents quite a bit of research regarding the positive effects of relationships from simple casual exposure to people of other racial backgrounds to much more devoted relationships like marriage and adoption, in today’s political climate the sunny predictions of a growing ease and tolerance as more and more people form connections with those unlike them ring agonizingly naive. This is quite a short book before endnotes, less than 200 pages, but it’s not the most engaging prose so it took me longer than expected to read. It’s fine if you’re looking for information about the history of interracial marriage, but otherwise very skippable.
  • The Witch: Pierrot, Lucie, and their twin daughters Maud and Lise live what appears to be an extremely normal life in a small town in France. He works selling timeshares, she’s a homemaker, and the girls are being raised to appreciate the finer things in life, though both of their parents grew up much less well-off. But lurking under the surface is unhappiness: the marriage is loveless, the girls are turning into snobs…and Lucie is a witch. She’s not a very good one, and unlike her own, more powerful mother, she can see only small glimpses into the past and present, not the future. When Maud and Lise turn 12, though, Lucie initiates them into the world of magic, and watches them grow far beyond her abilities very very quickly. As their power and strength expand, the fragile bonds holding together their parents’ marriage start to crumble. A customer who has left his wife and family gives Pierrot the idea to do the same for himself, and soon he’s gone and has taken a large sum of money Lucie was given by her father. This becomes a problem when Lucie’s father needs it back, but she decides to try to use it as leverage to achieve her dream of reuniting her father and her mother as a couple. This does not work out the way she had intended. It’s hard to describe the plot of this book, because there really isn’t a lot of plot. Nor are there really characters. There are themes, and prose styling, and vibes. Ndiaye creates a world I was left with a lot of questions about. Besides the very obvious allegory of witchcraft with menstruation/puberty (one is initiated at about age 12, women shed blood when using magic, men seem to find it vaguely gross and refuse to speak of it, it gives the power of transformation and escape), it was unclear to me how literally I was meant to take witchcraft in this world. Are Lucie and her families the only witches, or are there others out there? None are even mentioned. When Lucie’s father is physically changed after his coerced re-connection with her mother, is that meant to be believed a literal, permanent change? Or is his new form meant to comment on his previous behavior? I don’t think I’m meant to ask these questions, I don’t think the book is meant to be read literally, but I am a very literal reader. This made for a bit of a mismatch between me and the novel…or rather, novella, as it’s quite short. The prose, in translation from the original French, is beautiful and insightful about the human condition, but that was the high point for me. I just don’t tend to care for allegorical stories, so if you’re like me on that front, I can’t recommend this.
  • Mexican Gothic: Noemí Taboada, like Emma Woodhouse, is handsome, clever, and rich. But this isn’t an Austen-esque story, it’s a Brontë-esque one…albeit in 1950s Mexico City rather than windswept English moors. Noemí’s cousin Catalina, who recently married a white guy and moved to his family’s home in a dying mining town in the mountains, has sent a worrying letter to her father. Concerned that Catalina is ailing and may need psychiatric help, Noemí is sent to investigate. Despite her high spirits, she struggles to make much headway when she arrives at High Place, where the Doyle family lives together in genteel, isolated decay. There are precious few operational electric lights, and there’s mold on the walls and in the books in the library. Catalina’s husband Virgil is handsome and talks smoothly, but the whole household revolves around the very aged and openly eugenicist Doyle patriarch, Howard, and his comfort. Which requires quiet at all times, there isn’t even really conversation over dinner, much less merriment or music. Noemí is told that the family’s (white) doctor has diagnosed Catalina with tuberculosis, and though she’s certainly unwell the symptoms don’t quite seem to fit. Noemí struggles to secure a second opinion from a local doctor, but she’s barely able to see her cousin as is, constantly shoo-ed away so that the other girl can “rest”. The only person who is regularly kind to her is Virgil’s shy, mousy cousin Francis, who encourages her repeatedly to leave. She won’t heed his warning until, after she starts to be plagued by vivid, frightening dreams and finds herself sleepwalking around the house, it’s too late, and she discovers that the rot in the Doyle family runs much, much deeper than she ever imagined. This novel doesn’t fit neatly into a single genre, with elements of horror, suspense, and, of course, the gothic. There’s a lot of evocative imagery here: a cemetery whose paths are cloaked in swirls of mist, sharp ravines, moldering books, beautiful silver implements left to tarnish. And that’s not including the supernatural elements, which are key to the story, so if you’re looking for a book planted solidly in reality, this may not be for you. The lushness of the scene-setting is a particularly strong element here, High Place is as vividly etched as Manderley or Thornfield Hall. I wish the characters had been as strongly painted. Noemí is an engaging enough heroine, spunky and quick-witted, but it’s hard to understand her actions. She protests very little her restricted time with Catalina, and ignores the increasingly unsettling atmosphere around her until well past when common sense would have demanded her exit from the premises. Characters acting in ways that the plot demands rather than what their development would otherwise suggest is nothing new, but the plot, and more specifically its pacing, is also an issue. It drags in the first half and feels overstuffed in the second, though this is also true of many other gothic novels. The thematic elements dealing with colonialism are painted with a very broad brush. All of that sounds quite critical, but this is one of those cases where I did like the book and couldn’t help but think about ways it could have been better. Despite the pacing issues, it’s an engaging read, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s prose is sharp and witty. This is a good book that could have been great, but it’s still a good book and I’d recommend it!
  • The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: Arnold Spirit, Jr, called just “Junior” on the Spokane Indian reservation where he grows up, is already an outsider. Born with hydrocephalus, the surgery he had to fix it caused damage that gave him a lisp and a stutter, but his brain otherwise works more than fine…outside of the usual mishaps typical to the brains of teenage boys. He’s small and skinny and terrible at fighting, but that’s okay because his best (and only) friend is Rowdy, who will happily beat up anyone he can for virtually any reason. At the beginning of high school, Junior is genuinely excited to learn new things, but when the names in his algebra textbook reveals that it was once his own mother’s book, that it’s been that long since the reservation school was able to afford new books, he snaps. One of his teachers recommends he attend the local public high school outside the reservation, in a very white town called Reardan…over 20 miles away. Despite the strong social pressure to be like the other members of the tribe and stay on the rez, Junior wants to go, and his parents support him. Despite the difficulty (if his parents lack the money for gas or to fix the car, he either needs to hitchhike or walk), he goes, and finds himself in a whole new world. He’s the only Indian kid and finds himself the target of racial bullying, but he also finds unexpected friendships. He even manages to wind up the sort-of boyfriend of one of the popular girls. A talented basketball player, he makes the varsity team, setting up two of the book’s central scenes: Reardan’s two games, home and away, against the reservation high school, at which the simmering tensions around Junior’s decision to transfer become openly hostile. That hostility extends to his relationship with Rowdy, who has all but disowned him. As a tragedy in Junior’s family unfolds, his relationship to his community continues to evolve as he tries to understand what his future might hold. I’m not going to get into the allegations against Sherman Alexie here except to say that I bought this book well before those came to light. I have complicated and evolving feelings about consuming work made by people who I know to have done things I find reprehensible. That aside, I understand the fuss about this book now that I’ve read it. I’ve had a hard time connecting with young adult books recently, which makes sense because I am fully 40 and the themes these sort of books often focus on are less relevant to my life than they once were. But this book’s energy practically pushes right off the page, with Ellen Forney’s lively, funny illustrations (Junior is a budding cartoonist, the drawings are incorporated into the text) and Alexie’s semi-autobiographical voice of experience, wit, and verve combining to create a compelling, engaging quick read. There’s a lot of dark, sad stuff here: a beloved sick dog is put down at home for lack of money to take him to the vet very early on, there are multiple human deaths, a teenager is bullied and roughed up by men in their 30s, the ruinous effects of alcohol play out in several contexts, but this isn’t a book that wallows in misery. There’s an irreverence to it, a refusal to drown in sorrow. And there are bright lights. Junior’s parents, for all their flaws (his father is an alcoholic), are very supportive of their son to the extent they can be. His decision to take action to leave the reservation inspires someone else to take similar action. There is humor, there is devastation, there’s everything in between. There are issues, of course. Characters and plot elements are not uniformly well-developed. But all around, it’s a vibrant, interesting book that will speak especially, I think, to young teen boys who don’t quite know who they are quite yet. I’d definitely recommend it.
  • The Woman Warrior: Maxine Hong (later Kingston) is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, growing up in California. Her parents, particularly her mother, raise her with stories, the telling of which they refer to as talking story. Some stories are folklore (many prominently feature ghosts, a category that includes essentially every white person), some are based in real history but have taken on mythic proportions (like the story of Fa Mu Lan), some are essentially real with some fantastical elements (like her mother’s story of living in a dorm with other female students studying to be doctors). Talking story is different than lying, different than delusions. It’s the invocation of a ancient tradition of oral tale-telling. For Maxine, growing up is a struggle to balance the American culture that surrounds her with the sense of filial responsibility that her upbringing has inculcated in her. This is the sort of book that I found myself wishing I’d read in college, because I felt like there was much more going on in terms of language, culture, and writing style than I was really able to fully comprehend. It has aspects of memoir, but does not comport to the usual structure of the form. There’s no attempt to tell stories chronologically or even in a way that has superficially obvious connections. It is often not obvious at the beginning of a story how true it is, if it’s even “true” in a literal sense at all (a large portion of the first section of the book is an imagined version of what might have happened to an aunt that died in China). This made it a difficult book for me personally to enjoy. I was constantly trying to figure out when/where I was, never mind if what I was reading was meant to be taken as something resembling reality or not. It was interesting in that it was unlike anything else I’d ever read before, but it wasn’t really an enjoyable reading experience so I can’t really recommend it either.
  • I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter: Olga Reyes is a dutiful daughter in her Mexican-American immigrant family. She’s helpful and obedient. She doesn’t challenge her parents, who are undocumented. She doesn’t push for a life bigger than the ones her parents want for her inside the relatively small Mexican community in Chicago, even in her early 20s. But Olga Reyes dies, hit by a car as she crossed the road, leaving behind her devastated parents and a little sister, Julia. Julia is nothing like Olga. Julia is prickly, defiant, determined to get out of not only her neighborhood but her city. Smart and ambitious, she dreams of becoming a writer in New York. This forms the throughline of the novel’s tension, as Julia tries to figure out how to escape and her parents, devastated by the loss of their other child, struggle to keep her contained. Just a few months away from her 16th birthday as the book begins, Julia is trying to figure herself out the way that all teenagers do, and when she discovers that Olga might not have been exactly who she seemed to be on the surface, figure out who her sister was too. This is very much a young adult book, and I mean that in a less-than-complimentary way. It’s all surface level, everything is underdeveloped and underexplored. Which is unfortunate, because this could have been much richer. Julia’s anger is certainly explicable, but it’s her most defining trait and reading along with the perspective of someone who’s angry all the time is just tiresome. I wanted more about her relationship with Olga than just resentment, there’s no complexity to what could have been a nuanced relationship. Her dynamics with her overbearing mother and withdrawn father feel rooted in stereotype. There’s some potentially interesting material when her best friend Lorena starts hanging out with another classmate, but even that doesn’t really go anywhere. The plot elements seem to happen because they’re what the author wants to put in place, not because they’re rooted in either well-defined character motivations or necessarily real-world sense. Of course in a YA book the cute, well-off white guy Julia meets cute in a bookstore is genuinely interested in her as well, but the mother we’ve just been repeatedly told is incredibly strict constantly buys her daughter’s excuses to leave the house and she’s able to spend hours talking to a strange boy on the phone when she’s at home. There are many other plausibility-straining developments. In different hands, this could have been something poignant, there are moments that should have been able to rendered with tenderness and sensitivity that might have buoyed some of the weaker stuff. But as is, I did not enjoy anything about reading it and can’t recommend it.
  • Everything Everything: Madeline might be an adult at 18, but her life is tightly constrained. She goes to school online, the only people she sees in person regularly are her mother and Carla, her nurse, and she never ever goes outside. That’s because Madeline has severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), probably best known as “bubble boy disease”. Without a functional immune system, a basic cold could rampage through her body and kill her. She’s made a sort of peace with her existence: she reads and watches movies, she plays word games with her mother, she dreams of being an architect. But things change when a new family moves in next door, and the teenage son, Olly, is very cute. She’s curious about him, he’s curious about the glimpses he catches of her through the window, they manage to exchange contact information by holding up signs. And soon they’re talking on instant messenger late into the night almost every night. This turns into Carla sneaking Olly in (only after he goes through the disinfection procedure required to be in her company) while Maddy’s doctor mother is at work to visit. Which turns into feelings, which turns into stolen kisses. Maddy can no longer be content with her little pristine world, takes big risks, and learns devastating things about herself and her life. Reading more YA than usual this month has made me think about different kinds of YA. There are some that are written with a teenage audience in mind but are broadly appealing and well-constructed enough to engage adults. There are some that are written in ways that capitalize on teenagers generally being less sophisticated readers than adults and feel like they cut corners around character development, prose styling, and plot believability. And then there’s a lot of stuff in between. I’d place this book in the in-between. It was easy to get caught up in, the way Nicola Yoon structures it (it’s written in short chapters, incorporating IM chats, book blog posts from Maddy, notes, etc) makes it very quick and entertaining to read. The plot developments, even the ending twist, are not difficult to see coming and there are definitely elements that do not withstand even mild scrutiny. Whether or not one will enjoy reading it depends on how bought in one becomes in the relationship between Maddy and Olly. It’s all about capturing the heady intensity of teenage first love, with the melodramatic stakes made even higher by Maddy’s condition. I wasn’t all in, but found the overall reading experience appealing enough that I was willing to let the book sweep most of my quibbles to the side while I was reading it. This is not Serious Stuff (despite the subject matter), it’s a teenage romantic drama, and if you go into it expecting no more than that, it’s satisfactory. If you want something with real depth and heft, though, this will almost certainly disappoint.
  • The Library of Flowers: For centuries, the women of the Hua family have been perfumers. The firstborn daughter in each family has a special gift, the ability to infuse their perfume with a power, like improving the mood of the people who smell it or creating calm. The wealthiest families of China are willing to pay a very high price for these scents. But for every fifth first daughter, the power is the same: the perfume will bring the wearer their true love. That is, every fifth daughter until Luling “Lucy” Hua. When she was 20, her first attempt at making her magical perfume did not result in a happy customer walking down the aisle, and that crushing disappointment (combined with her longtime-best-friend-turned-love-interest Rafe not responding positively when she makes a move on him) sends her fleeing across Canada from her native Vancouver, as the family has relocated there. At 32, she’s wound up in Toronto, where she rents half a store from a vintage shop owner called Ana. She still makes perfumes, but thousands of miles away she doesn’t have to face her mother’s pressure to figure how what went wrong and fix it. They can just be regular perfume. But of course, family ties are never cut that neatly. The death of her grandmother, and her inheritance of the logbook of Hua perfumers, sends her back into her family’s orbit…and at the same time, the long-estranged Rafe pops up much closer than she ever would have anticipated. It’s now or never for Lucy to decide who she wants to be. I’m not gonna lie, I thought this was going to be super cheesy and romance-forward. I do enjoy some fluff every now and again, but this surprised me in being much more a story about a woman coming into her own than a romance. That angle is there, of course, but it’s not the focus of the narrative. It’s much more about the complicated dance between mothers and daughters, and the way that children and parents alike can get so locked into their narratives about each other that it’s hard to see outside them. It’s also about male resentment of successful women, even when they benefit from that success. There are some excerpts from the life stories of other Hua women over time that echo these same themes. But at its heart, it’s about Lucy deciding whether to keep running away from her problems or face them head on. Though she’s in her early 30s, she’s been unsettled enough that she’s never had to do that work, and she doesn’t do it perfectly. She spends a lot of time creating narratives about other people in her head and interpreting them through that lens. Which makes her occasionally frustrating (and the book winds up feeling pretty repetitive at points), because we see her do it again and again, but I appreciated that it felt like a real person trying to learn and grow instead of something easy and saccharine. I wish there had either been more historical perspectives or they had been omitted entirely, it was infrequent enough that it took me out of the story when it did happen. There are a couple other plot threads that felt like they could have been trimmed out without losing much. But overall I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed this book! If you’re looking for something that centers a romance, this might not be what you quite wanted. But if you’re interested in a story about a person figuring out how to be her better self, regressions and all, this is a very solid read and I’d recommend it!

In Life…

  • Quick trip to Michigan: One of my longest-time friends got married in the middle of the month, and even before our current geopolitical disaster it was expensive to fly the whole family out, so I went alone for a quick trip to the mitten to be a bridesmaid! It was great to be back in my natural habitat and spend the time with the bride and my other friends who were there, and it was even greater to get home to my little family!

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.

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