A Portable Magic

When you read this, I’ll be on an airplane for my family’s annual trip to Michigan! It’s been a good month, thankfully kicked off by a break in the summer heat…you never realize how good it is to be able to open up the door for some fresh air until it’s wayyyy too hot to even think about doing that. As a certified Fall Lover, I am here for the changing leaves!

In Books…

• The Coldest Winter Ever: Teenage Winter Santiaga has almost never wanted anything she couldn’t have. The daughter of Ricky Santiaga, who’s been the big boss of the Brooklyn drug scene for years, she’s been spoiled ever since she was born with material things: jewelry, clothes, handbags, anything that can be bought. Watching her mother, who had her at only 14, she’s learned what she needs to be to live a life where the finer things are hers for the taking: beautiful, street-smart, proud. The only thing she can’t seem to have is Midnight, one of her father’s most trusted associates, who is unmoved by her repeated attempts to throw herself at him. She’s upset when her father decides that the family will leave their longtime home in the projects to move to a mansion on Long Island, which takes her away from the clique of friends who compete for her favor in the hopes of being able to pick up any scraps of her largesse that might fall from her hands. But the move is beginning of the end of the world as she knows it: first, her mother is shot in the face on a trip back to Brooklyn with her father, and then before she can have the plastic surgery that would restore her looks, Ricky is arrested for his crimes. The house, the cars, the clothes, everything is seized. Her three younger sisters are taken by the state, her mother descends rapidly into addiction, and despite her best attempts to hustle her way through being on her own with rapidly dwindling resources, she’s found by the state and put into transitional housing. She starts her own small-scale criminal enterprise there, using her sense of style to convince the other girls she lives with that they need the kinds of clothes she has, taking advantage of the shoplifting skills of her longtime friend Simone, now pregnant, to earn money by selling stolen merchandise. When Simone is caught, though, Winter is happy to drop her like a hot potato. She winds up in the home of Sister Souljah (yes, the author of the book), where she ignores every attempt to break through her materialistic shell and tries to figure out how to secure advantages from her new connection. Eventually, she reconnects with an old flame who may have played a role in her father’s downfall, and tries to turn the situation to her own advantage but power dynamics are ever shifting and her future may be in more danger than ever before. If I’d read this even ten years ago, I likely would have been so blinded by my anger at Winter and her choices that I would not have appreciated what Souljah was doing here. That Winter is so infuriating is a testament to her skill at characterization. Presented with opportunity after opportunity to change her trajectory, Winter steadfastly refuses. Why? Because she’s still a child, far too convinced that she’s actually a capable adult, prioritizing the things she’s learned her whole life to prioritize. Faced with imminent destitution, she constantly spends money on clothes, purses, or other luxury items, because she’s internalized that presenting the right appearance will lead her back towards security. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating to read along with, but having a mid-life perspective to look at how young she is, how difficult it would actually be for her make huge changes in her underlying value system, makes it at least explicable. Outside of the brilliance of the character study, though, the surrounding narrative was hit-or-miss for me. The author self-insert especially fell flat, though I certainly understand the urge to include a place for her own philosophy about how her community could make positive improvements in a story about a young woman whose has grown up hearing all the wrong messages about what’s important. Though she makes an effort to not portray herself as perfect (she’s hesitant to enter an AIDS section of a women’s prison, for example, and struggles to make romantic connections that ight compromise her ideals), it’s not hard to understand why Winter dismisses her as preachy. The narrative feels like it gets bogged down in that section, and I felt myself waiting for its inevitable end to see how Winter’s journey would continue. Given the emphasis placed on Winter’s connection with Midnight early in the book, I’d expected them to continue to interact, but his eventual re-emergence took place far later than I’d anticipated and felt underdeveloped. It’s a book with very strong character development and a thoughtfully-constructed, vivid voice, but there are definite flaws there. I’d recommend it, but I’m not sure how eager I am to dive into her other work.
• Moon of the Crusted Snow: When the power goes out on the Anishnaabe reserve in northern Ontario where Evan Whitesky lives with his longtime partner Nicole and their two kids, Maiingan and Nangohns, it doesn’t feel like that big of a deal at first. Consistent electricity is a relatively recent introduction to the reserve, and there are diesel generators to tide things over. But when the power doesn’t come back within a day or two, there start to be some rumbles of worry. Phone lines, too, are down, and at a distance from Gibson, the nearest city, no one knows what’s going on. Tribal leadership tries to maintain calm, but their anxieties, too, are growing. It’s late autumn, and as the snow starts to fall, the community feels even more isolated than usual. While many residents hunt and gather to supplement their diets, just as many rely totally on the supermarket and its regular deliveries of food from the south. Alarm spikes when two young men, who had been going to school in Gibson, arrive back at the reserve on snowmobiles, recounting their narrow escape from a city that had fallen into chaos after the power disappeared. Shortly thereafter, another snowmobile arrives…this time driven by a very large white man, Justin Scott, toting a small arsenal of weapons but promising to help with the hunting the tribe will need more than ever to keep food on plates as they take stock of their relatively small cache of emergency supplies. Reluctantly, they agree to take him in, but he starts working to undermine the chief and council almost from the very start. Scott and his bravado attract a contingent of the community, growing to include another handful of white people who are taken in after Scott shoots their leader. As the long, cold winter goes on, the reserve is increasingly divided and in their new reality, taking the wrong path could lead to total destruction. This is an interesting spin on the well-worn structure of the post-apocalyptic novel. Setting the book far away from major population centers means that the social breakdown that so often forms the initial hook is absent. It lets the story develop at a slower pace, leaving the reader just as confused about what might be happening as Evan and his neighbors. Even the story brought back by the college students doesn’t shed much light on the situation. Was it “just” a massive power failure? What else might be happening out there? But those sort of questions are largely extraneous to the tale Waubgeshig Rice is looking to tell. Though the tribe writ large lives only a quasi-traditional lifestyle, they’re still in a much better position to survive than the largely white society around them. Once again, we see white people in the Americas arriving on the doorstep of the First Nations, asking for help. The echoes of history are a major theme here, with Scott obviously representational of colonialism: he arrives bearing quite a lot of firearms as well as alcohol, he actively works to subvert the native leadership structure, he cultivates a group of disaffected tribal members to sow discord, he steals. The obviousness, though, is indicative of what didn’t quite come together for me about this book. I was surprised, after I finished reading it, to discover that it was not Rice’s first novel, because its flaws largely feel like those of a debut. He doesn’t seem to have the confidence that he can lay out dots for his reader to connect, he not only does all the connecting but underlines his work. At one point early in the narrative, Evan and Nicole are having some drinks and playing cards with friends, and their ambivalence about drinking after the havoc alcohol has created in indigenous communities is an interesting note, but he goes on to spell out what might be behind the sadness that drives many of their neighbors into destructive patterns around booze: the loss of their ancestral homelands, the horrific legacy of boarding schools, etc. Maybe it’s that I’ve read a lot of Native American/First Nations stories this year, but this felt like it could have been implicit rather than explicit. Similarly, Evan and Nicole’s two children both have Anishinaabe names, in contrast to their parents and even grandparents. Rather than letting this detail make an unspoken point about the life that Evan and Nicole have chosen for themselves, in the back half of the book Rice specifically draws attention to it. There are also some elements that feel underdeveloped: Evan’s siblings and parents seem initially like they’ll be major players but recede quickly into the background. I feel like the tensions between the more and less traditional members of the tribe could have been explored more as well. It’s a bummer because despite this sort of clumsiness, I generally liked the book. I was invested in the Whitesky family and the survival of the community, the way that indigenous practices and values could change how events might progress in this sort of story. Rice does a great job creating a sense of place, the distance and isolation the tribe already experiences being heightened by the thick, ever-building snow, the starkness of the landscape. I’m curious enough to want to read the sequel, but I was lukewarm enough about this one itself to have a hard time affirmatively recommending it. 
• Indian Horse: Saul Indian Horse is the youngest of three children in an Ojibway family in Canada. The first, the only girl, was taken away to residential boarding school and never seen again. The second, Benjamin, was also taken but returned a few years later…with tuberculosis onboard. The parents, along with a grandmother, take Benjamin and Saul far away, to a small ancestral island, in the hopes of keeping themselves together. But the TB is too advanced, and when his parents take his brother’s body away for Christian burial, it’s the last time Saul sees them. When the snow starts to fall, his grandmother decides to set out for her brother’s house to regroup and figure out what’s next. She ends up sacrificing her life for him, freezing to death while holding him to keep him warm. All of that, and he’s found by the government and taking to boarding school at St. Jerome’s anyways. It’s a horrific experience: children are psychologically, physically, and sexually abused by the nuns and priests who run the school. They receive almost nothing in the way of education or nutrition. But one day, when he’s eight years old, a new father arrives, and brings with him hockey. Saul is at first intrigued, then obsessed. Too small to join the team initially, he’s given the task of clearing the rink for the players and begins to teach himself to skate and shoot in secret. Soon, he’s too good to be denied a spot on the team. He’s recruited for a low-level local team, but it’s there that he gets his first taste of the racism that the game can engender. Despite his talent and the team’s increased success rate, the white parents of the other kids are mad he’s taking playing time away from their sons. So he goes back to school, but not for long…he’s soon recruited for a reserve (reservation) squad that means he’ll leave the institution, live with a local native family, go to regular school. Initially skeptical of him, the team ultimately embraces him and his incredible skill. But it’s a double-edged sword, because white teams take notice and want to play against Saul’s team and that racism hasn’t gone anywhere. When a scout for the Maple Leafs’s minor league team offers him a tryout, it would seem like a dream come true but Saul is reluctant to leave the life that had become comfortable and familiar to him. When he’s convinced to go, the culture shock and loss of his support structure breaks the dam that had held back his anger at the anti-indigenous sentiment that continues to crop up. Once a fast finesse player, he becomes a brawler, and he’s benched. His attempt to go back home again fails, his rage burns too hot and his former teammates find him off-putting. He descends into alcoholism, drifting here and there, but he can’t outrun the secret he’s been holding back from himself and once it resurfaces, he has to decide what he’s going to do with himself for the rest of his life. This book should have a trigger warning for basically everything and even my own fondness for a bummer seemed like it was going to be tested. But surprisingly, it’s less unrelenting a downer than it might seem at first. There are moments of hope and light disbursed throughout: Saul’s discovery of his gift for the game, the joy he finds on the ice, his acceptance into his host family and hockey team when he leaves St. Jerome’s, a man who tries to help Saul dry out when he’s lost in an alcoholic spiral for no reason other than kindness, the counselor at the rehab he eventually enters that doesn’t give up on him. That being said, it’s still extremely heavy and often very upsetting. Richard Wagamese could have written Saul as drowning in self-pity, the life he leads would certainly deserve it. But even in his lowest moments, there’s a clear-eyed quality to his inner world. He’s not mad about the lost opportunity of success and wealth that his experience playing professional hockey resulted in, he’s mad about being robbed of the way he was able to lose himself in the game, the way it took him outside his own head. That Saul doesn’t wallow in his agony means the book doesn’t either, making it a much more compelling reading experience than the kind of misery porn it could have become. And it ends on an optimistic note, with old bonds being cautiously reformed and a possible opportunity to play a role in guiding the next generation, making his hardships not purely in vain. I thought Wagamese did a wonderful job balancing an at-times harrowing depiction of the tragedies wrought by the residential school system against a tentative hope that healing is possible and that generational cycles can be broken, without ever letting the tone become cloying or hackneyed. I ended up really loving this and definitely want to read more from him in the future, but with the incredible darkness of much of the subject matter it’s hard to recommend (if you think you can stomach it, though, it’s well-worth your time).
• Family Life: Eight year-old Ajay Mishra is excited to move to the United States from India when his father sends for him, his mother, and his brother to join him once he’s gotten established in a government job. But Ajay finds the experience more difficult than he’d imagined…he struggles at school, he struggles to make friends. Not so for his older brother Birju. After only about a year in America, Birju starts studying for the entrance exam to an exclusive New York City high school, and he’s accepted. He starts dating a pretty girl in their neighborhood. But over the summer, when the brothers are visiting their aunt in Virginia, everything changes in a minute. Three minutes, actually. That’s how long Birju is underwater after he hits his head after diving into a pool. He survives, but he’s severely brain damaged. Gone is his bright future, gone are his family’s hopes for their new life in their new country. Instead, there’s litigation and fighting with insurance companies as Birju moves from the hospital to a nursing home, and once the family realizes they can’t afford a nursing home that will provide the care they want for him, into the house, where his mother cares for him with help from nurse aids. She devotes herself entirely to her son, entertaining every hope for a cure, even from obvious crackpots. Their father slides down the slippery slope into alcoholism, drinking first sometimes, then often, then constantly. And Ajay? He’s mostly left to his own devices. Seeking the attention he’s not getting at home, he concocts increasingly outlandish stories to draw the sympathy of his classmates, who turn against him when they realize what he’s saying isn’t true. He tries to replicate his brother’s path of academic success, bringing home the best grades in his class, but it earns him only minimal praise. As the years go on, things continue to get darker and Ajay has to decide what comes next for him and whether he can or should look for his own path or remain bound to his family. This is a very different kind of book about the Indian experience in the United States than what one might expect. Instead of professional parents in high-earning jobs smothering their children with both pressure to achieve and close bonds, the Mishra family experiences significant economic stress, with one government job expected to provide for four people, including one with complex medical needs. His parents, lost in their own sorrow over Birju’s situation, don’t spend nearly enough mental energy on Ajay to push him. Ajay’s response to his profound loneliness is often unsympathetic, but it feels deeply realistic as what a child experiencing trauma might actually do, which makes sense because this book is based heavily on Akhil Sharma’s own life story. He’s clearly spent a lot of time in self-reflection (indeed, he’s said it took him over a decade to write this book), because the most rewarding aspect of this novel was the psychological portrait it paints of its protagonist. It never felt like a stereotyped “acting out”, Ajay does not have a breakdown and tearfully plead with his parents to engage with him the way a Message Movie might depict, it’s just a clear-eyed, unapologetic portrayal of maladaptive behavior on everyone’s part. But that’s also the downside..it’s hard to want to get too engaged with a book this bleak. There’s not a lot of hope here, or even much in the way of dark humor to break up the sadness. There’s also not much plot structure, which makes it feel like a slog, and the pacing is uneven. Sharma is not without a talent for prose, there are some stunningly evocative phrases in this novel, but overall it was too depressing to really recommend.
• Fifteen Dogs: Apollo and Hermes make a bet one day: if other animals had human intelligence, would they be as miserable as humans? To find out, they grant it to a group of fifteen dogs in a veterinary clinic in Toronto and wait to see what happens. The answer is, of course, complicated. Some dogs die quickly. Some dogs live long lives. Some glory in their newfound facility for complex thought, while others resent the loss of their previous, more instinctual state of being. After most of them escape the clinic, some go on to find new homes while others become long-term strays. But they are all forever changed. Early on in this book, as the dogs that leave the clinic find shelter in a local park and start to form a little society, I thought this might end up being something I found interesting as a thought experiment but didn’t really connect to. But Andre Alexis admirably balances the thinky elements of this novel (maybe more a novella as not even 200 pages) with a more rounded look at some of the dogs and their relationships: Atticus, who works to be an effective leader of the “dogs-should-stay-dogs” group, Benjy, a wily schemer always looking for the best possible angle for himself, Majnoun, who develops an intense bond with his new owners, and Prince, who not only embraces his new situation but wants to take it to its fullest extent, playing with language and composing poetry. It felt a little bit like reading the original versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey, with the Greek gods and their jealousies and quarrels playing an active role in the drama, working to protect their favorites and hinder the ones they like less. It’s lively and engaging to read, and given the previously mentioned page length, a fast read to boot. But there’s a lot to chew on here despite its brevity: social structures, language, loyalty, justice, fate. A very good book, and one I’d highly recommend.
• Ply: It’s been a few generations since the world as we know it ceased to be, since consistent power became a luxury reserved for the wealthiest (a setup the power company works vigorously to protect). It’s been about one generation since the Suppression, where people like our unnamed heroine’s father, who owned a bookstore, disappeared in a crackdown on the kind of dissidents that used that space to organize. Regular people like her and her mother are usually able to barter for enough power, stored in batteries, for the very basics: charging for an e-bike, charging for a personal device that has photos on it. Her mother is skilled with her hands, teaches her daughter how to tinker with both mechanical parts as well as materials like wood. The mother’s talent is sufficient to keep her and her only child in food and clothes…until cancer comes for her and, wanting to provide for her daughter’s future, she takes her to live with one of her best clients. The girl lives there for a while, and then a new place, and then a new place after that, and by the time she’s a young woman she’s living on her own, making her living by “pinching”, drawing down small amounts of power from electrical lines to charge batteries that she works with a broker, Anton, to exchange for the currency or goods that she needs. She’s created a new battery that can hold significantly more power, and that creates interest from three entities: two crime lords, who want this new design for themselves in the hopes of being able to put the other out of business, and a mysterious figure who turns out to have a lot of ideas about how to improve what “the pincher”, as she’s referred to in the text, has already created in the hopes of putting that power to use for experiments in physics. These experiments implicate the very nature of space and time, and deciding whether and how to engage with them will forever change the trajectory of the pincher’s life. Having previously read and loved Hernan Diaz’s Trust, I was prepared for another novel that started slowly and was vaguely disorienting until it all come together in the book’s final portion. And this did seem to be following that pattern! About halfway through, theoretical physics started to be foregrounded in the narrative, and I was hopeful that my struggle to follow would be rewarded…but despite what seemed like it had potential to be a rally at the end, I was left feeling disappointed. I’m generally lukewarm on unnamed protagonists, it just almost never feels like it adds anything to a story for me, and here was no exception. Everyone else in the novel is named, which made the pincher’s lack of one feel gimmicky. It’s something I likely would have been willing to overlook if the story had done more for me, but the book lost me there too. The opening half of the book jumps around in time to tell the pincher’s story and build out her world, and despite some characters that seemed like they were going to be more important and went nowhere in a way I found perplexing, I was generally engaged with where it was going. It’s when the physics started in the back half that the issues started piling up for me. The explanations went above my head, and while I’m sure never having taken physics is why, this is a book marketed towards a non-specialist audience and I’m no dumber than average so I suspect many others will also find themselves confused. It also robs the book of forward momentum, slowing the narrative tension and making it feel like it’s getting bogged down. There’s growing non-romantic connections between characters that are done well enough on their own but don’t make up for the dragging pace. An episode that should have been very high-stakes and exciting is glossed over in a way that undercuts the energy it might have brought. The closing is mostly fairly strong, but for me, failed to deliver the true gut punch that would have been necessary for this book to rise higher in my estimation. I don’t tend to feel a strong affinity for the issues of identity and purpose and what it means on a fundamental level to be a person that the book seems to be interested in playing with, so maybe if those themes spoke to me as a reader more I would have been more satisfied with the journey it took me on. As is, though, I found it too bloated for even the strong prose to push it much above average and I can’t really recommend it.
• Funny Boy: Arjie has been different from his brother and his boy cousins for as long as he can remember. On the days he spends with his large Tamil extended family in Sri Lanka as a little boy, he does not go outside and play sports…instead, he stays with his sister and other girl cousins, playing a game they call bride-bride, with Arjie in the starring role complete with glittering sari and make-up. He loves those days, until another girl cousin, returned from abroad with her family, becomes jealous. She brings it to the attention of the parents, including Arjie’s father. Like many men in cultures with rigidly enforced gender roles, he doesn’t want his son to be “funny” and tries to force Arjie away from dress-up and into physical activity…but while he succeeds in destroying the once-cherished game, he’s powerless to change who Arjie is. He’s also powerless to stop the ever-present and increasing tensions between Sri Lanka’s Sinhala majority population and its Tamil minority, preferring to stick his head in the sand for as long as possible. Arjie’s own trajectory, though, constantly exposes him to it: when his aunt recruits him to join her as a cast member in a play and forms a romantic connection with a Sinhalese neighbor that she’s pressured to break off, when his mother has an affair with a childhood friend when she’s taken Arjie out of town to recuperate from an illness and her lover’s work as a journalist reporting on the conflict puts him in danger, when his father’s own childhood friend’s son comes to work for the family without being entirely honest about his connections to the Tamil Tigers, and even as he ages into a high school with a mixed Sinhalese/Tamil student body. It’s at school that the difference between him and the other boys finally becomes clear to him, but can his first romance take off even as the Sri Lankan civil war threatens to begin in earnest? Shyam Selvadurai tells this coming-of-age story as a series of vignettes, proceeding chronologically but peering at only a short period of time in each section. To a certain extent, it works: we get a very close-up view of particular events, diving deeply into dynamics both familial and societal. But there’s a certain amount of cohesion lost in this type of structure…Arjie and his parents are foregrounded, but even his brother and sister, much less the side characters, are only sporadically present at best. It’s frustrating to explore particular relationships (Arjie and his mean cousin, Arjie and his aunt, Arjie’s mother and her sister) only to have those be largely if not entirely dropped from the narrative going forward. The title of the book had led me to expect that its focus was going to be on Arjie’s relationship with his sexuality, and while that’s certainly a significant part of it, it’s actually more focused on the conflict in Sri Lanka. A lot of books that try to illustrate a historical moment through showing its impact on a particular person/family/group of friends (something I love when it’s executed well!) end up with a lot of clunky exposition, so I appreciated how skillfully Selvadurai managed to weave in this sort of information organically, with few passages that felt like blatant info-dumps. It helps that he draws Arjie as a protagonist more passive than most…he’s a quiet boy whose ability to go along to get along means that adults in his life often use him as cover to get away with things they might not otherwise be able to, putting him in the position to listen to a lot of conversations he often understands fully only in retrospect. I understand why the story ended where it did, in his early teenage years, but it was a little disappointing to stop following his trajectory when he’d just started to come into his own…which is testament to the power of the characterization here, I was definitely invested in what would become of him. It’s a good book that was close to being very good, but definitely worth a read in any case!
• Persepolis: Marjane Satrapi was born in the last years of Pahlavi control of Iran to parents that were already dissidents. While they protested against the regime, their hopes of revolution were more Leninist than religious. So when the revolution happened, their early hopes dissolved into continued concerns, heightened as their friends and associates were imprisoned and killed for being communists. Even as just a young girl, Marjane was steeped in the intellectual life of her family, reading comic books about dialectical materialism that displaced her early dreams of becoming an Islamic prophet. Marjane was torn between her desire to fit in with her classmates and her love and idealization of her own family and their values, and the Iran-Iraq war continued to complicate their situation. As her outspokenness (and the ongoing conflict) began to threaten her safety more directly, her parents made the impossible choice to send her abroad to continue her schooling in the hope that she would be able to grow and thrive away from her home. As a comic artist, I understand why a graphic novel was the medium in which Satrapi felt the most at ease telling her story. And it’s an incredibly interesting one! Her parents seem like fascinating people, and their daughter is no less compelling. The Islamic Revolution is one of the most consequential world events of the last 75 years, and getting an inside view of what it was like to grow up in that incredibly heady time, the constantly shifting understanding of what the rules were at any given moment, is valuable in and of itself. Satrapi’s art style is striking in its black-and-white starkness. But even so, I didn’t think the medium allowed for the kind of development of the main figures I found myself wanting. The family, including Marjane herself, feel more like rough outlines than actual people, which made it harder than it should have been to get really emotionally involved with their plight the way I almost certainly would have with a primarily-text rather than primarily-visual book…it’s not that I didn’t care about them at all, of course, but that I didn’t have a rich enough picture of their inner lives or even the dynamics of their relationships to get connected to them the way I tend to need to really get engaged with a book. That being said, I don’t know whether it would have improved the other main issue I had, which is the episodic structure of the narrative. It was hard to tell how much was meant to be passing in any given transition…some seemed to be no more than a matter of days, others were jumps of years, which contributed to a feeling of distance from the events being depicted. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, it got both a sequel and a film adaptation and I understand why in both cases, but it ultimately just didn’t click for me in the way I’d hoped and I would hesitate to affirmatively recommend it.
• The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford: Richard Milford had been notorious in Newville, a small, all-Black town outside of Tulsa, since he was a little boy. Orphaned in a fire, he and his sister Mae went to live with his wealthy uncle, resented by most of the town for living on the best land and wielding as much power as he could acquire. The uncle’s housekeeper, Alberta, was the closest thing he had to a mother for most of his life, but even she couldn’t control him. Being allegedly struck by lightning during his teenage years did nothing to improve his behavior. His uncle died, and as Richard took his place, bringing in money by moonshining and kicking back to the local sheriff, he decided he wanted to grow a family of his own. He came back from out of town with a first wife, Lally, and over several years three other young women began to reside in his house, and many children were born. The first time the town got a proper look at all the Milfords is when Richard died and the women and children came out from their home for the funeral. But he was far from an old man when he passed, so…what happened to him? The reader finds out through alternating chapters, each highlighting the perspective of a woman in his life and their relationship to him, interspersed by the voices of the townspeople at large. This is a very brief book, less than 200 pages, which works both to its benefit and to its detriment. It feels very tight and punchy to read, and Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s background as a short-story writer shows with her skill for evocative language without excess verbosity. She’s clearly used to cutting her work back to its most essential ideas, which makes this feel engaging and quick-moving but not sparse. Each of the women feels different from the others, their characters clear and distinct, and there’s a Greek-chorus-type feel to the chapters written from the perspective of the other residents of Newville as a whole. In the earliest chapters, we get their views of the women whose own narration we’ve just read, highlighting the differences in how those women feel about themselves from how they are perceived by others…something I wished had been maintained more, though the other women have had less direct contact with the outside so it makes logical sense. But the voices of the town at large turn towards the tales, tall or otherwise, that circulate about Richard himself, and this was one of my frustrations with the book. He’s written as odd-looking and temperamental, and even given his financial security it’s not always easy to understand what drew the women in Richard’s life to him and kept them there outside of desperation and lack of other options. He’s depicted as sexually active since his youth, with no trouble attracting girls, but he never seems all that compelling. I wanted to get a sense of some sort of magnetism or charm, but it never really came through for me. The book’s length also means that there are narrative threads that seemed like they might lead in promising directions but were never fleshed out. Richard’s sister Mae was sent away as a child by their uncle for a “nervous condition”, returning to her brother’s home after the uncle dies, and herself passes shortly before the story begins. What was going on with her as a child? How did she feel about her brother? How did she die? None of these questions are answered, it’s mostly relevant to the narrative that her passing has further destabilized Richard. There’s a childhood friendship with the son of a pastor that suddenly ends in their teenage years, the two men becoming estranged, but the rupture is never fully explained. And there are the women themselves! Two are better-developed than the rest, but I would have loved a second perspective chapter from each of them to round them out more, even just a short one. While like I said previously, I did respond to the feel of the book and understand how the abbreviated length contributed to that feeling, I felt like another 50 pages would have rendered it still far from flabby while letting it breathe a bit more. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it and it was a promising debut from an already-well-regarded short story author, so I look forward to reading what she writes next and would recommend this one!

In Life…

• Scheduling all the appointments: As a working mom, it can be easy to let my own needs fall down the priority list, but this month I scheduled my first-ever mammogram as well as my annual physical, my annual well woman visit, and my annual mole check. If you’re reading this and you’ve been putting off getting those appointments on the calendar, take this as a gentle reminder to just go ahead and do it.