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Book Review: The Forgotten Sister

“And so began the last meal I would eat at Netherfield for over six years, for I did not dine there again until the arrival of Mr. Bingley. I look back on it now as a sort of unholy Last Supper, for there were thirteen of us seated around that table and a lot of wine was drunk—at least by Nonna—and it all ended in tears.”

I wasn’t an English major. As a Person Who Loves To Read, I thought about it, and likely would have minored in it if there had been a minor offered, but I thought it made more sense as a pre-law student to major in Political Science. Which I was doing until I totally fell in love with Psychology during my junior year and changed it…that poli sci turned into my minor (which has come in handy!) and I took an entire slate of psych classes my senior year and loved it. What all this boils down to is that I didn’t read many of “the classics” until later in my 20s.

Maybe if I’d read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a teenager, I would have done what it feels like everyone else did and fallen in love with the character of Lizzie Bennet. But I read it closer to 30, and P&P remains, while a quality book, not my favorite Austen novel. Instead of being a sassy, bookish role model, I thought Lizzie was…kind of an asshole. Jennifer Paynter’s The Forgotten Sister, which re-tells the story of P&P through the eyes of middle sibling Mary, agrees with me on that front.

Mary isn’t much more than comic relief in Austen’s original. But here she’s given a full life of her own. Adrift between two pairs of closely bonded sisters (the only one she really cares for is Jane), with parents whose relationship has deteriorated, Mary is a lonely, awkward creature. After a nervous breakdown, she spends quite a bit of her childhood away from the family home, enabling her to observe them with a more distant eye when she returns. And while her sisters are entangled in their own dramatic courtships, she quietly develops a connection with a man called Peter, who is warm and kind…and far below her in social class. She has to push back against her own natural social clumsiness, as well as the objections she knows her parents would have to the match, if she is to secure the marriage she knows will bring her happiness.

Austen’s stories are timeless classics, which is why they make such tempting material for retellings and sequels. But her skill as a writer is such that it’s hard to pull off effectively, as comparison to the original is unlikely to be flattering to the author of the more recent take. Maybe if Pride and Prejudice was a work that I was more strongly attached to, I would have thought less of this book. While Paynter certainly doesn’t display the level of elegance and wit that are Austen’s trademarks, though, I found this a highly enjoyable read. I doubt it would be as engaging without having read P&P first, but if you have read it, this fills in on and expands the storyline there in ways that feel organic, giving additional color and texture to familiar scenes.

But where this book really does its best work is with character. I love the way Paynter portrayed Mary as a sympathetically flawed person who is as often as not her own worst enemy. Though I’m sure the chances of a successful romance between someone of Mary’s station and someone of Peter’s would have been vanishingly slim, Paynter builds the two of them and their connection in a way that makes you root for them. So too, are Mary’s friendships outside of her family convincingly rendered. Is it, like Austen, great literature? Well, no. It drags in points, there are a few too many characters, and I’m sure Lizzie devotees would be annoyed at the less-flattering look at her. But if you like P&P and would like to read more stories about those characters and their world, this is very much worth your time to pick up and I would recommend it!

Book 326: Polite Society

“As Dimple waited for Fahim, she doubted Ania’s wisdom for the first time. There was no convincing reason why Fahim would be attracted to a woman like her, obviously provincial, still at times cloddish, when he had the pick of those sophisticated gazelles at media parties. Ania had kept insisting that she could see the signs. but Dimple was worried about the dangers of being wrong. It had taken her months of discipline and training to calm the anxieties that assailed her—worries about her position as some kind of interloper—and now her equilibrium was again wrecked. Ania was too fearless and her friendship too effortless, spilling from her without consequence, leaving a trail of easy generosity and advice. For Dimple that same friendship offered elation and play, but also apprehension and uncertainty, a fear that it would all collapse and crumble to dust.”

Dates read: July 9-12, 2019

Rating: 7/10

A few years before I started this blog, I started making a concerted effort to read the much-bemoaned classics. I wasn’t an English major (Psychology for me!), so apart from the standard high school mandatories like Gatsby and Mockingbird, I had read actually quite few of them. And what a surprise it was! While some of them deserve their boring reputations, many others have survived the test of time because they’re wonderful reading experiences. Turns out I love Jane Austen! Who knew?

When she wrote Emma, Austen famously described her as a heroine that she didn’t think people would really like. A smart, pretty, rich girl isn’t exactly the most sympathetic of heroines. Clueless proved that Emma could hold up well to adaptation, so when I read that Mahesh Rao had decided to transplant the book to modern-day India in Polite Society, I was curious. Instead of Emma Woodhouse, we have Ania Khurana, beloved daughter of wealthy businessman Dileep. Ania is bored with her socialite life in the most elite circles of Delhi, and when she successfully sets up her spinster aunt Renu, she decides her next project will be her new friend Dimple, who works in PR. Dimple grew up in the country, and though she met a nice guy, Ankit, when she first moved to the city, finds it hard to resist when Ania tries to steer her towards up-and-coming reporter Fahim.

While many aspects of the original are here, Rao puts his own, darker spin on some of the side characters: both the Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax types have very different storylines than Austen gave them, and Dileep is drawn dangerously into the thrall of a faith healer type called Mr. Nayak. The broad strokes of the story play out more or less as expected, though: Fahim does not fall for Dimple and marries impulsively shortly thereafter, Ania grows closer to her longtime family friend Dev (standing in for Mr. Knightly) even as she develops a flirtation with the Frank substitute, Dimple and Ankit come back to each other eventually. But while Austen wraps things up neatly and happily, it’s much more unsettled at the end of Polite Society.

Taking a beloved story and adapting it is a tricky thing to do…too close to the original, and it barely seems worth the effort, but too far away and you risk enraging fans. I think Rao struck a good balance, adding plot twists that gave the story new complexity. I especially liked the addition of perspectives besides that of Ania, which had the effect of giving Dimple, Dileep, and even Fahim so much more richness and interest. I appreciated the generally edgier tone and the way it undercut a story that has a lot of romantic wish fulfillment and froth built into it. The story the book tells is compelling, and I think would work even without having read Emma (though the understanding that the heroine is supposed to be kind of annoying is definitely helpful to come in with).

While I enjoyed a lot of what this book did, it was not entirely successful. Rao’s prose lacks the wit and verve that really mark Austen as a master of her craft, and is less charming as a result of the inevitable comparison. And while many of the side stories were a welcome addition, it felt like there were too many to give them all time to really develop. The generally lightweight tone of the book (even in the heavier way Rao rendered it) would be compromised by the addition of too many extra pages, but I think another 50 or so would have given it all a little more room to breathe. Overall, though, I found this book very good and would recommend it both to those who already love Emma and those who haven’t experienced it yet!

One year ago, I was reading: The Death of Vivek Oji

Two years ago, I was reading: A Perfect Explanation

Three years ago, I was reading: The Coming Plague

Four years ago, I was reading: Love Medicine

Five years ago, I was reading: The Man Without A Face

Six years ago, I was reading: Zodiac

Book 324: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o’clock in the morning.” 

Dates read: June 27-July 5, 2019

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Sometimes I feel like living in the era of technology has robbed the world of its magic. Anyone with an internet connection can have access to what once were locals-only “secret” places. A rational explanation for something odd is almost always just a google away. You can have access to scads of information about almost anyone you meet in minutes. There’s so little room left for actual mystery.

I remember reading somewhere that Haruki Murakami’s books are among the most-stolen from bookstores. I’m not sure why that is, but there’s no denying that the Japanese author has very devoted fans. Reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was my first experience with him, and left me both sort of getting it and sort of not. It’s a hard story to describe: there’s a guy, Toru Okada, who lives outside of Tokyo with his wife, Kumiko, and their cat (which they’ve named Noboru Wataya, after her disliked brother) has gone missing. Toru has recently left his longtime job in a lawyer’s office, but is unemployed while he tries to figure out what’s next. Kumiko wants him to find the cat, and his searches for it lead him to strike up an acquaintance with a strange teenage girl, May, who lives down the block. That’s when the phone calls start.

First, there’s a woman who says she knows who he is and starts talking dirty to him. But then there’s a psychic, a woman named Malta Kano, who explains that Kumiko has reached out to her to help with locating the cat. Kumiko and her family believe in things like psychics, having previously arranged for Kumiko and Toru to spend time with an old man called Mr. Honda, allegedly for spiritual consultations…but all that actually happens is that he repeatedly tells them about his experiences as a soldier in Manchuria during World War II. Toru meets with Malta Kano, and her sister, Cresta, but before long Kumiko herself disappears. She sends Toru a letter explaining that she’s left him for a coworker with whom she’s been having an affair, but he doesn’t believe this and decides to try to find her, which brings him into contact with even more strange people, including a mother and son who he calls Nutmeg and Cinnamon. And appearing throughout is the sound of a bird, that sounds like something mechanical being wound.

This is a weird book, and I’m not sure I entirely understand it. It’s one of those that you finish and almost want to flip right back to the beginning and start again, to see if it makes any more sense the second time through. I think there will be a second time through, though certainly not now. And there will definitely be more Murakami. If I had to chose a single word to describe it, it would be “dream-like”. The way Murakami uses language and builds the world of the book create a feeling of constant loose connection, almost a structured free association, in which the concept that would tie everything together is just tantalizingly out of reach. It works well, and I found myself turning the pages and getting drawn further and further into it, though I suspected (correctly) that not everything was going to be tied up in a neat bow by the end.

Honestly, though, once I finished it, though I felt like I liked it, I have had a hard time articulating exactly why. It was obtuse, the female characters were largely underdeveloped (though I did love May), and it felt like some storylines were just dropped like hot potatoes. But despite its flaws, it’s strangely compelling. There’s something magical and mysterious about the world as Murakami creates it, and it did get me thinking about some of the deeper themes that were explored, like our obligations to each other as people and the nature of power in relationships. It’s intellectually engaging despite the kind of haziness about it. If you’re ready for something non-traditional, I would recommend this book.

One year ago, I was reading: Tooth and Claw

Two years ago, I was reading: Year of Wonders

Three years ago, I was reading: Delirium

Four years ago, I was reading: Boy, Snow, Bird

Five years ago, I was reading: Mrs. Dalloway

Six years ago, I was reading: Spinster

Book 311: The Lowland

“The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator. Each year began with an unmarked diary. A version of a clock, printed and bound. She never recorded her impressions in them. Instead she used them to write rough drafts of compositions, or work out sums. Even when she was a child, each page of a diary she had yet to turn, containing events yet to be experienced, filled her with anxiety instead of promise. Like walking up a staircase in darkness. What proof was there that another December would come?”

Dates read: April 20-26, 2019

Rating: 8/10

I tend to believe Tolstoy when it comes to that stuff about unhappy families. Except that I think that there are so few truly happy families that we can safely exclude them from the data set. Pretty much every family has its own special kind of unhappiness. All of our parents screwed us up in their own ways. And their parents screwed them up, and we’ll screw our own children up. The only thing to be done is to do your best to keep the damage minimal.

In Jhumpa Lahari’s The Lowland, brothers Subhash and Udayan are so close that they’re often confused for twins despite being a few years apart. They have a more or less happy childhood, building radios and playing in the marshy lowlands near their family’s Calcutta home. As they start to grow up, they start to grow apart. Udayan becomes political, part of the Naxalite movement being repressed by the authorities. Subhash, on the other hand, turns towards school, eventually leaving India to study marine biology in Rhode Island. Separated by thousands of miles, the brothers do still write letters to each other, and Subhash is surprised to find out in one of them that his brother has gotten married. In defiance of expectations for his parents to chose a bride, Udayan has married a college student, Gauri, for love. Not too long afterwards, though, Udayan is killed.

When Subhash returns home for his brother’s funeral, he finds an untenable situation: Gauri is pregnant, and his parents are planning to take the child to raise and kick her out after the birth. There’s only one way out that he can see: he’ll marry her, bring her back to the United States, and they’ll raise the child as a family. With nowhere else to go, Gauri agrees. But this doesn’t mean that everything’s suddenly okay. Gauri gives birth to a daughter, Bela, and Subhash devotes himself to being a father. Gauri, though, is still traumatized by the death of her husband and the second marriage she had no real choice but to go through with. As Bela grows up, the family’s tensions stretch to the breaking point.

This book is epic in scope, tracking Subhash through nearly his entire life and other characters, like Gauri and Bela, through much of theirs. Lahiri does her usual beautiful character work here…Udayan doesn’t get a lot of narrative time until a flashback near the end, which leaves him feeling slightly unrealized, but the rest are developed in a way that feels achingly real. Gauri makes a decision that leaves her probably the least sympathetic of them, but the way Lahiri builds up to it, and what happens after, make it understandable. I also appreciated Bela’s arc, the way that it seemed like she would grow up to become one sort of person because of the environment she was raised in, and then other events leading her to become a very different sort of person instead. All three of the major players were fascinating and I wanted to spend more time with them.

This is definitely one for people who prefer character over plot. Little actually “happens” besides a family coming together and coming apart. There’s a more dramatic bit at the end, the part that goes back to the events leading up to Udayan’s death, but I almost wished it hadn’t been there or it had been told in its proper place in the chronology. I tend to think that Lahiri’s writing is elegant almost to the point of being restrained, and having this part at the end feels out-of-character. That emotional remove, though, is what kept me from enjoying this novel more. It’s a sophisticated work, but it deals with big emotions, and it felt like Lahiri was more devoted to keeping that style over letting the book really breathe, letting those feelings really build and explode. As it was, I admired it but didn’t really connect with it. Still, it’s a very well-written novel and one that I would definitely recommend to others.

One year ago, I was reading: Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls

Two years ago, I was reading: After The Party

Three years ago, I was reading: The Possibilities

Four years ago, I was reading: In The Woods

Five years ago, I was reading: The Girls

Six years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

Book 294: The Buried Giant

“She began to make her way towards the cairn, and something about the way she did so, her shoulders hunched against the wind, caused a fragment of recollection to stir on the edges of Axl’s mind. The emotion it provoked, even before he could hold it down, surprised and shocked him, for mingled with the overwhelming desire to go to her now and shelter her, were distinct shadows of anger and bitterness. She had talked of a long night spent alone, tormented by his absence, but could it be he too had known such a night, or several, of similar anguish? Then, as Beatrice stopped before the cairn and bowed her head to the stones as if in apology, he felt both memory and anger growing firmer, and a fear made him turn away from her.”

Dates read: February 5-10, 2019

Rating: 5/10

When I was in middle school, I was on the swim team. I wasn’t very fast, but I enjoyed being on the team and going to meets. So when I went to high school, I joined the team at that level. It was a whole different game: our local pool was closed for renovations most of the year, so getting to practices (an hour before school and two hours after) took a long time and I was perfectly miserable. I told my mom I wanted to quit. She insisted that I stay on the team, and I swore that if she didn’t let me drop it, I would never seriously swim again. She thought I was bluffing. I wasn’t. That was over 20 years ago and I haven’t swum a lap since.

I don’t especially regret this, I do still work out regularly and the way that chlorine dried out my hair and skin is something I don’t miss at all. But more than a disinclination to swim for exercise, what keeps me away from the pool is remembering how angry I was when I had to keep swimming for months after I no longer wanted to. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, remembering is a struggle for the residents of an immediately post-Arthurian era Britain. Axl and Beatrice are an older couple, Britons, who have been relegated to a restricted existence in the warren-like community they live in, but they don’t know quite why. They’re sure that they would get better treatment with their son, who lives in a neighboring community, so they take the highly unusual step of leaving to go to him.Their journey takes an unexpected turn almost immediately. At their first stop, a Saxon village where Beatrice often goes to trade, there’s a commotion. A young man named Edwin has been abducted by ogres, and though he’s rescued by traveling warrior Wistan, the villagers are suspicious of a bite he’s sustained during his captivity. Wistan and Edwin flee, taking Axl and Beatrice with them. They encounter, among others, an elderly Sir Gawain. Both of the fighting men claim to be on a quest to kill the dragon Querig, whose breath turns out to be the reason for the mist of forgetfulness that lays over the land…which could have surprisingly significant consequences if it were to go away.

Ishiguro loves a slow-paced, dreamy sort of narrative that reveals its secrets slowly, but there’s an unfocused quality to this book that undermines the effectiveness of that approach. The story threads: Axl and Beatrice’s marriage and journey towards their son, the Arthurian past, the simmering tensions between the Britons and the Saxons, and a quest to slay a literal dragon…they’re not interwoven as tightly and neatly as they need to be to make the whole thing work. The characters have the level of complexity typical of myth and legend, which is to say that they’re all quite shallow, more symbolic than realistic. I found it difficult to get emotionally invested in them, despite the fact that Axl and Beatrice’s love seems like it should be what roots the story in genuine feeling.

Although the story itself doesn’t quite come off, Ishiguro does do solid work on hitting deep themes. The power of remembering (or alternately, of forgetting) on human relationships, both on the personal level, as between Axl and Beatrice, or the group level, as between the Saxons and Britons, is powerfully rendered. The prose is lovely and elegant. I get what Ishiguro was going for here, but the reality is that it just didn’t really work. The idea of a fantasy-set novel from an author I love for his ability to evoke strong emotions turned out better than the actual execution. Unless you’re really just determined to read everything Ishiguro has written, or you’re really looking for a book that’s all theme and not much else, I’d skip this one.

One year ago, I was reading: Cat’s Eye
Two years ago, I was reading: How To Be Good
Three years ago, I was reading: The Romanov Empress
Four years ago, I was reading: Me Talk Pretty One Day
Five years ago, I was reading: The White Queen

Book 288: Astonish Me

“The motions. She has been trained to believe that the motions are enough. Each motion is to be perfected, repeated endlessly and without variation, strung in a sequence with other motions like words in a sentence, numbers in a code.”

Dates read: January 10-14, 2019

Rating: 8/10

If it’s possible to fail out of ballet, I did as a child. First of all, I’ve been pigeon-toed my whole life, so a proper turnout was something beyond my capabilities. But mostly, I am just completely without grace. Despite my 5’2″ frame, my dad nicknamed me “Gabezilla” at one point because I walk so heavily that I sound vaguely dinosaurian. My sister, on the other hand, had talent for lithe and lovely movements and did ballet until she graduated high school. I was always jealous, both of her elegance of movement and toe shoes.

Despite my own lack of capabilities, I’ve always enjoyed books and movies about ballet. Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me centers around the story of Joan, a young dancer in the corps of a New York company in the 80s when we first meet her. After a steamy romance with a Russian defector, Arslan, left her heartbroken, she reconnected with Jacob, the boy who worshipped her in high school. Now she’s pregnant, ready to leave dance and move on. Joan and Jacob marry and move to California with their son, Harry, where he works in educational research and she tries to fit in with the other stay-at-home-mommies, but eventually opens a dance studio.

The story moves back and forth in time to reveal Joan and Jacob’s high school friendship, her move to Paris with a ballet company in her early 20s, her role in Arslan’s defection, her friend Elaine and her entanglement with the company’s artistic director, and then later, after ballet, Joan’s brief but unhappy friendship with a neighborhood couple with a daughter the same age as her son, the tension in Joan’s marriage, where both parties are aware that she “settled” for him but it remains to be seen how happy that settlement was. Joan’s role as a ballet teacher, her ambivalence about her son’s interest in and obvious talent for dance, and Harry’s own eventual growth into a man round out the narrative.

This book was an excellent example of why I always give an author two chances. Even if I really don’t care for one book, if another one by the same author catches my eye, I’ll give it a shot: not every book is for every person, after all, and sometimes a book just doesn’t work for a reader because of reasons outside the quality of the work. I did not enjoy Maggie Shipstead’s previous novel, Seating Arrangements, which mocked the well-off and grasping of Martha’s Vineyard through dramatics over a wedding. But this one was wonderful! I found myself enraptured in Shipstead’s tale, in the characters, in the various ways she looked at the relationships of artisans to their art. I’m not always big into non-linear narratives when it feels artificial, but the use of both this device and multiple perspectives really worked for the story she was telling.

The bits of this that didn’t come together for me mostly happened near the end and while they kept the book from great rather than just good, they didn’t derail the whole thing. I was too invested in the characters: Elaine, Jacon, Harry, his friend Chloe, and especially Joan. Joan was sometimes infuriating, sometimes enviable, sometimes mysterious, but always interesting. Her quest for fulfillment and happiness really resonated with me. If you’re generally into books in which ballet/dance features prominently, you’ll find a lot to like here. But even if what you’re looking for is more along the lines of character-driven family drama, this is very satisfying. Highly recommended!

One year ago, I was reading: A Dirty Job

Two years ago, I was reading: The Coming Plague

Three years ago, I was reading: The Girl With All The Gifts

Four years ago, I was reading: The Man Without A Face

Five years ago, I was reading: The Name Of The Rose

Book 251: The Pleasing Hour

“They had forgotten me, and I felt snug and warm in my blanket of incomprehension. I had always wanted to go to France to learn the language, but instead I’d come and lost my own. Finally I was free of the need to explain anything to anyone.”

Dates read: July 24-27, 2018

Rating: 5/10

It can be difficult to see your own family objectively. Many families have a level of dysfunction that seems normal from the inside, but if you were to see someone else’s family doing the same thing would seem maladaptive. That doesn’t necessarily mean the people in that family are unhappy, though. No one’s family is perfect, and if it’s not one weird pattern of behavior, it’s another. Finding a balance where personality quirks are able to be negotiated and worked out with each other is the important thing.

The Trivot family, living on a houseboat in Paris, looks happy from the outside in Lily King’s debut novel The Pleasing Hour. A beautiful mother, Nicole, a successful father, Marc, and three fundamentally good children: lovely teenage Odile, high-spirited Lola, and serious Guillame. Every year, there’s a new jeune fille who works as an au pair, helping with the kids and around the house, and this year, it’s 19 year-old American Rosie. Usually, the young women in her position are studying at the Sorbonne, perfecting already skilled French, enjoying a social life untethered to the “real world” they’ll return to at the end of the year. But Rosie is different. She’s clumsy with the language, not attending school, and spends most of her off-duty time in her small bedroom. What drove her to France was not an appetite for adventure, but escape from a situation she couldn’t face.

Not long before she arrived, Rosie had a child, and gave him up to the older sister who basically raised her. She’s still working through that experience when she comes into the Trivot household, where the glossy surface conceals plenty of problems underneath: haughty Nicole and sheepish Marc are disconnected, and the kids each have their own struggles. Rosie becomes more integrated into their lives, finding some sense of security, before a trip to Spain unsettles everything.

One of the major themes of the book, and one that really resonated with me, is language: the power of fluency and the way it can both bring people together when it’s shared and isolate them when it’s not. Rosie arrives speaking poor French, setting her apart from the family, and even as her proficiency increases to the point where she feels comfortable speaking it in most situations and to everyone else in the household, she fears Nicole’s ability to make her feel wrong. Nicole herself tries to bury the Provencal accent that marks her as a non-native Parisian. And the way Rosie sees herself and is seen by the Trivots shifts when they go to Spain and she has the most command of Spanish. Anyone who’s ever tried to learn a language, or gone someplace where they didn’t speak the primary one well, knows how isolating it can be when you don’t understand it, how frustrating it can be to sort-of understand, but be unable to clearly make yourself understood, the thrill of being able to communicate.

While I found that particular thematic element of the book compelling, as a whole I’ll admit it was just okay for me. It is a debut, and though it’s the promising kind (King’s prose is strong, and she shows flashes of brilliance of characterization), it doesn’t seem quite sure of what exactly it’s trying to say or do as a whole. We get in-depth looks at the family’s children, and go back in time to learn about Nicole’s parents and childhood, but get no insight into her as an adult or into Marc at all. The plot meanders, and important threads of narrative, like Rosie’s emotional processing of her pregnancy and surrender of her child, didn’t feel like they went anywhere. It’s not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not particularly good either. If what you’ve read makes you interested, you won’t be wasting your time in picking up the book, but you won’t really be missing out on anything if you don’t.

One year ago, I was reading: Empire Falls

Two years ago, I was reading: The Luminaries

Three years ago, I was reading: Duel with the Devil

Four years ago, I was reading: Neon Green

Book 250: The Romanov Empress

“For the moment I obliged, reasoning that the ongoing burden of the war, the shock of Alexei’s illness, and Alexandra’s distress were an impossible combination. Let time ease the brunt of it. Once it did, I’d try again. I’d not cease until Nicky accepted that in this modern age, our autocracy was already doomed. No tsar could rule as his ancestors had. If he didn’t concede, they would force him to it.”

Dates read: July 20-24, 2018

Rating: 6/10

My husband and I are both fortunate in the in-laws department. His parents like me, my parents like him. While I very well remember the feeling of discomfort when it comes to “meeting the parents” for the first time (with the exception of my college boyfriend, this always went well for me but was still nerve-wracking), now that that part of my life is over, I find myself wondering what it must be like to be on the other side of it. To know that your offspring is bringing home someone they really like and want you to like, and you hope you like them but also want them to like you. It must be a tricky situation if you get a bad vibe off the new person…do you discourage and get called a meddler? Passively accept that your adult child can do whatever they want and let it go? Figuring out how to play it must be a very thin tightrope to walk.

Of all the decisions that Maria Feodorovna, Empress of all the Russias, made in her long life, one of the most fateful what was to do about her oldest son, the tsarevich Nicholas, and his devotion to a minor German princess called Alix. She failed to dissuade him from her, and Nicholas and Alexandra, of course, were deposed and ultimately executed along with their five children. But while it might be the fate of her eldest and her grandchildren that the world mostly remembers her for, Maria had a long and interesting life of her own, and C.W. Gortner explores that life in his historical fiction novel The Romanov Empress. We first meet her when she’s the teenage Princess Dagmar of Denmark and follow her through the beginning of her years in exile after the fall of the royal family.

That gives us roughly 50 years to cover, and there was a lot that happened in those years. Dagmar initially falls for and is betrothed to tsarevich Nicholas, and is enthusiastically preparing for her new life in Russia when Nicholas has a horse-riding accident and dies, but before he does he begs Dagmar and his younger brother Sasha to wed. They do, despite initial coolness on both of their parts, and the marriage is ultimately a happy and successful one. But this was a time of increasing instability in Europe, and after multiple attempts on her father-in-law’s life, Tsar Alexander II is assassinated and Sasha becomes Tsar Alexander III. Sasha’s reign is challenged by the same forces that ended his father’s, but Maria stays mostly out of politics and turns her attention to charity, court life, and raising her children, and is particularly close to her eldest, Nicholas, whose mildness irritates his father. Neither Sasha or Maria want him to wed Alix, but when it becomes apparent that Sasha’s kidney condition will take him sooner rather than later, they reluctantly consent so Nicholas can be married before he assumes the throne. Sasha’s death makes him Tsar Nicholas II and his bride Tsarina Alexandra, and Maria tries to guide her son and his wife through continued social turbulence, but Alexandra will have none of it and turns to an obscure mystic called Rasputin for guidance after it becomes apparent that her youngest child and only son, Alexei, suffers from hemophilia. We all know how it goes from there.

Though I’ve read/heard about Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children (particular Anastasia), I’ll admit my familiarity with any other Russian rulers besides Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great is non-existent. So even though “the grandmother” is always present in Anastasia stories, I literally had no idea who she was, and this book was a solid introduction to her. She lived in an era of such turbulence that she’s a great lens through which to take a look at how Europe completely changed within one generation. The downside of that, from a novelistic perspective, is that since there is so much actual action to pack in, once you add in the interpersonal Romanov drama on top of the greater social shifts, that Maria ends up being kind of a passive, reactive character. Which isn’t such a bad thing in and of itself, but when the writing is constantly telling us about Maria’s high spirits and sense of mischief and all we see is a woman who’s mostly pretty conventional and constantly placed in a position to be reactive rather than proactive, it creates a mismatch.

That being said, though, Maria does feel like a real person. Gortner indulges in some insta-love in her initial engagement to Nicholas, but I appreciate the way he built her relationship with Sasha over time, as a couple who barely knew each other when they married and grew their connection gradually. I also enjoyed the frenemy dynamic between Maria and her sister-in-law Miechen, whose actual roguish energy made Maria seem even more well-behaved and dutiful in comparison. With the time span this covers, and all the events it needs to touch, it almost feels more like a highlight reel than a portrait of a person, and comes off a little cluttered. I think some of the material could have been trimmed down a little, which would give it all a bit more room to breathe instead of feeling like we’re hopping from major life event to major life event. It just never really takes off, and while it’s a solid read, it’s nothing more than that. It did serve to introduce me to several figures I’m hunting down actual biographies for, so there’s that at least. If you’re interested in Russia and the Romanovs, this is decent and worth reading. If that time and place doesn’t hold any interest for you already, though, this is skippable.

One year ago, I was reading: My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Two years ago, I was reading: The Silence of the Girls

Three years ago, I was reading: Valley of the Dolls

Four years ago, I was reading: Smoke

Book 249: Olive Kitteridge


“As a matter of fact, there is no reason, if Dr. Sue is going to live near Olive, that Olive can’t occasionally take a little of this, a little of that—just to keep the self-doubt alive. Give herself a little burst. Because Christopher doesn’t need to be living with a woman who thinks she knows everything. Nobody knows everything—they shouldn’t think they do.” 

Dates read: July 17-20, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Pulitzer Prize

It’s easy to think that we really know the people in our social circle. We see them being regularly rude and snappy, we write them off as jerks. They’re always kind and thoughtful when we see them, we assume that they’re a good person. But it’s hard, if not impossible, to actually completely know anyone else. The lovely human we know in the work place might go home and be cruel to their family. The person we see being prickly could spend hours volunteering in their community. Unless we’ve seen someone in every possible context, there’s always an aspect of them that could be missing from who we think we know.

The thirteen short stories that make up Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge all feature the main character at least once. Sometimes she’s the center of it. Sometimes she’s a passing reference between two other people who live in her small Maine town. It moves roughly chronologically, beginning when Olive and her husband Henry are already older and headed toward retirement (though the first story, about Henry, is mostly a flashback), and their son Christopher is an adult. Olive negotiates her relationships with her family and her community at large as they all change, slowly but inexorably…or, often just as aggravatingly for her, don’t change much at all.

Though many of the lives we encounter look at least moderately happy on the surface, there’s often profound sadness lurking underneath. This is not new territory, suburban dysfunction and familial drama, and while there’s nothing special plot-wise it’s Strout’s skill as a writer that makes this book shine. Each story is a whole unto itself but subtly builds to create a full picture of Olive, her strengths and her flaws. She can be infuriating, as when she deals with the fear from finding herself the victim of a crime by berating her husband, and she can be deeply relatable and sympathetic, like when she overhears her new daughter-in-law mocking the dress she made herself for their wedding. She is stubborn and proud and controlling and rendered with profound emotional truth. Strout never has to explicitly ascribe these qualities to Olive, because she understands the power of showing rather than telling, which she does in spare-yet-lovely prose.

As in any short story collection, some entries are stronger than others. I loved the first one, “Pharmacy” about Olive’s husband’s long-ago infatuation with a shy technician at his pharmacy, and two where Olive is only a background mention, “Winter Concert” and “Ship in a Bottle”. Some others, like “Tulips” and “The Piano Player”, failed to move me. But one of the upsides to reading short stories is that even if you don’t care for a particular story, it’ll be over soon! I’ll be honest, I was not looking forward to reading this book, because it felt like I was in a rut of books that were interconnected vignettes without strong central plots and I wanted to read something with more structure. Happily, though, it’s good enough that I found myself very much enjoying it and I’d highly recommend it even if you’re skeptical of short stories!

One year ago, I was reading: Tower

Two years ago, I was reading: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Three years ago, I was reading: Boys and Girls Together

Four years ago, I was reading: Life Itself

Book 244: The Feast of Love

“You think that what I’ve just told you is an anecdote. But really it isn’t. It’s my whole life. It’s the only story I have.”

Dates read: June 22-25, 2018

Rating: 5/10

What is it, exactly, that makes up “chemistry”? I’m sure many of us have sat through a date with a perfectly nice, reasonably attractive human being who just could not possibly be less interesting in a let’s-fall-in-love kind of way. On the other hand, there’s the stranger we were in the elevator chatting with for five minutes that lingers in our mind for weeks afterward. You can ignore it, but if it’s there, you can’t force it.

The sparks and romantic connections between various couples in Ann Arbor are the connecting thread in Charles Baxter’s A Feast of Love. Most of them are connected through Bradley, a middle-aged man who owns a coffee shop in the mall but pursues his love of painting at home. Bradley’s marriages, both of which end in divorce, are brought in, as are his young employees Chloe and Oscar, who are crazy about each other. His neighbors, a long-married couple struggling with how to deal with their drug-addicted son, are also players in the drama. The story is framed by the conceit that a friend of Bradley’s, a professor and writer (meant to be Baxter himself), is interviewing all of the players one-by-one over a period of time.

There’s not much in the way of a plot, per se. Each little story has its own rising and falling action…Bradley’s first wife, who leaves him when she falls head over heels for another woman, is a bit player, but his second wife, who marries him mostly to spite the lover who refuses to leave his wife for her, has a larger role in the narrative. Chloe and Oscar’s story, which appears steadily throughout the book and sees the couple dealing with his unbalanced father and a larger, more unexpected problem, provides probably the most straightforward structure in the whole thing. Also constantly recurring is the title, first as the name of Bradley’s best painting, which then inspires the author-within-the-book to title his work in progress after it.

When this book is on, it has moments of real brilliance. The story I mentioned above, in which Bradley’s first wife meets, falls for, and eventually divorces Bradley in pursuit of the other woman, feels alive with poignancy. A story Bradley relates about having to kidnap his own dog from his sister sparkles with dark humor. And it’s more specific to me personally, but as an Ann Arborite in exile, I love reading about the city. Allmendinger Park, post-game traffic, the mall…all of these are deeply familiar to me and make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to see on the page. The experience of seeing places that are meaningful to me depicted in print is something I didn’t even know could be as powerful as I found it.

Now for the critical part. I feel like I’ve read several of these interconnected-vignette style books lately and perhaps I’m just tiring of that presentation, but all of them suffer from a lack of traditional plot and tension. This feels more like a piece of writing than a book, if that makes sense. It feels stylized and over-written, and part of the issue is that the character work is spotty. Bradley’s clearly meant to have a particular personality but it never really feels honest or consistent, and the way Chloe is written was extremely off-putting to me. She’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl before that was a thing, insisting on a quirky pronunciation of her name and using some of the most cringey language to describe sex I’ve ever read. Anyone who writes a girl under 20 as using the phrase “lovemaking” to describe sex unironically has never really listened to a young woman talk about it, and that is far from the worst example. In the end, I just never really got invested in it. There’s some very capable storytelling here, in parts, but it’s not well-realized enough throughout to get an affirmative recommendation for me unless you’re determined to read about Ann Arbor.

One year ago, I was reading: Money Rock

Two years ago, I was reading: Shantaram

Three years ago, I was reading: Notes on a Scandal

Four years ago, I was reading: Masha Regina

Book 238: Boy, Snow, Bird

“I looked into his eyes. He couldn’t return the gaze steadily, kept focusing on my left eye, then on my right. I could guess what he was thinking: that there were two of me, that was the explanation, that was why I was acting like this. I had applied this rationale to the rat-catcher the first time he punched me. First you try to find a reason, try to understand what you’ve done wrong so you can be sure not to do it anymore. After that you look for signs of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, the good and the bad in a person sifted into separate compartments by some weird accident. Then, gradually, you realize that there isn’t a reason, and it isn’t two people you’re dealing with, just one. The same one every time.” 

Dates read: June 1-5, 2018

Rating: 7/10

I’ve always thought that being a step-parent would be a complicated situation to deal with. There are the complicated feelings people have about their exes getting into new relationships, and then on top of that there are the feelings of territoriality about one’s children. If one tries to form a close bond with the kids, there are accusations of trying to “replace” the parent. But if one doesn’t take an active interest in the kids, then you get the mean/bad step-parent label. It’s a very fine line to walk, and it takes work and love by everyone involved to balance it out.

The wicked stepmother is one of the most fundamental tropes of the fairy tale genre, probably most famously exemplified in the stories of Cinderella and Snow White. It is the latter that is subtly retold in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird. Boy Novak grows up in New York City with a mercurial, abusive father that she calls only “the rat-catcher”, and as soon as she can figure out how, runs away as far as the bus line will take her…which turns out to be small-town Massachusetts. Having left behind her childhood sweetheart, she finds herself drawn to Arturo Whitman, a metal smith and widower with a lovely little daughter named Snow. They marry, and things look promising for a while: Boy finds her stepdaughter charming and delightful and soon falls pregnant herself. But when she gives birth, it changes everything. Her own daughter, Bird, is unmistakably of mixed race, revealing that the Whitman family are actually light-skinned African-Americans passing as white.

Arturo’s mysterious sister appears, having been sent away as a child when she turned out dark and threatened the family’s secret, and offers to take Bird. But Boy doesn’t want to part from her own child. Instead, she finds herself increasingly haunted by the adoration lavished on fair-complected Snow by everyone, including the Whitman family, compared to the treatment Bird receives…so Snow is sent away instead. As Bird grows up, she and her sister begin a correspondence, and a piece of Boy’s past, long since left behind, draws nearer with revelations which could threaten the life she’s built for herself.

I’d previously read Oyeyemi’s short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and very much enjoyed the way she played with themes, the multiple levels she was operating on at the same time, her richly evocative language. I found many of the same qualities in this novel, and thought Oyeyemi’s take on the pervasive issue of race in America was interesting, as she’s a black woman but not American. I appreciated the way she subverted expectations by building to what you think is going to be the moment where Boy turns against her stepdaughter by having her inflict the emotional cruelty of exile rather than the usual depiction of verbal and physical abuse. Oyeyemi is a skilled storyteller, and ably walks the line between a story that’s interesting and pleasurable to read without sacrificing richer layers of meaning that push you to think. But that ending was…woah.

I’ll usually drop some minor spoilers in my reviews if it’s critical to my reaction to the book, but even though the ending of this one had a huge impact on my response to it as a whole, I don’t feel like it’s appropriate to reveal it. But I also can’t avoid talking about it, because it honestly made me think less of the book as a whole because of the way it played out. Oyeyemi places a huge, game-changing detail about a character in the last 5-10 pages of the book, barely giving the others time to react to it. The elicited reaction by the other characters doesn’t feel quite earned, but the way that this reveal is made, and the details surrounding it are what really bothered me. In particular, I thought it played into some problematic stereotypes about a marginalized community (though I doubt that was the intention). Either way it was a major plot development and placing it where she did in the book was not effective. I thought I’d be able to recommend this book enthusiastically, but while I do still think it’s a good book and worth reading, I’m not quite as sure about it as I might have been.

One year ago, I was reading: The Coming Plague (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Sloppy Firsts

Three years ago, I was reading: Spoiled

Four years ago, I was reading: Zodiac

Book 235: Landline

“Sometimes she lost her place when she was arguing with Neal. The argument would shift into something else—into somewhere more dangerous—and Georgie wouldn’t even realize it. Sometimes Neal would end the conversation or abandon it while she was still making her point, and she’d just go on arguing long after he had checked out.”

Dates read: May 21-23, 2018

Rating: 6/10

My husband and I didn’t meet until our late 20s. While obviously that’s worked out, sometimes I’m a little jealous of people who meet the person they end up with early on in life. Knowing someone in that way you only really can when you watch them grow up and come into themselves is special. On the other hand, though, the 20s can be such a turbulent decade that the person we are near the end of it is very different than the person that began it. And for me, that’s a good thing. I honestly don’t know that my husband and I would have found each other especially interesting if we’d met in college.

Growing together really lies at the heart of what makes a long-term relationship work. In Rainbow Rowell’s Landline, Georgie and Neal meet while working at their campus humor magazine in college, marry when they’re 23, and by the time they’re in their late 30s, they have what looks like on the outside to be a cozy little setup. Georgie writes for a cheesy sitcom, and Neal is a stay-at-home dad to their two little girls. But Georgie and her long-time writing partner, Seth, have dreamed of their own show for ages and they finally get the chance to pitch it to someone who could make it happen. In order to give it their best shot, though, Georgie will need to miss the annual family trip to Nebraska to spend Christmas with Neal’s parents. Her decision to do so, combined with her husband’s growing dissatisfaction, puts her marriage in jeopardy.

Desperate to get ahold of her husband and with a dying cellphone, she drags out an old landline phone to connect with him. Georgie slowly comes to realize, though, that while the voice on the other end of the line is her husband, it’s not him now. It’s him on Christmas break their senior year in college, when he broke up with her but then suddenly showed up on her doorstep with a ring. As she remembers the early days of their love story, and the versions of themselves they used to be, she finds herself thinking about how things have changed over the years and re-evaluating what it actually is that she wants and needs from her life.

Rainbow Rowell is a writer who is constantly recommended on the internet for her sweet, compelling love stories. This one will strike a chord for many women who work and feel stuck between their home/family life and their career. Although Georgie’s probably the more relatable character simply because the story’s told from her perspective, I really appreciated that both she and Neal are painted in shades of grey. She’s not demonized for wanting to be successful in her chosen field, but neither is he for feeling neglected and put-upon. The characters Rowell builds feel real, and so do the situations she puts them in. And, crucial in a book about being on the phone, she’s got a great knack for dialogue.

Now on to the less good. Landline was Rowell’s first adult novel (most of her work falls into YA), and I’d heard it was not one of her stronger efforts. I’m glad I had that warning ahead of time, because while I thought there were a lot of flaws here I wasn’t crushingly disappointed. In order to really buy into the book, you have to be emotionally invested in Georgie and Neal’s love story, and I just wasn’t. I didn’t understand what brought them together in the first place, much less what kept them together. And the tone of the whole thing just felt wonky. On the one hand, Rowell clearly wanted to write something light-hearted and charming, with quirky side characters all over the place to keep the mood up (her mom breeds pugs AND has a much younger husband! And her younger daughter insists on being called Noomi instead of Naomi AND talks like a cat!). But on the other, she’s trying to write something heartfelt about the challenges of making sure you and your spouse/partner are growing together and not apart, and the stresses of trying to keep your family happy and achieve your professional goals. That’s a much more serious book, and in trying to toe the line between them it fails more often than it succeeds. But I liked the quality of her writing, and while I ultimately wasn’t wow-ed by this book, I’m definitely interested in reading her YA.

One year ago, I was reading: Midnight’s Children (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Sky Is Yours

Three years ago, I was reading: The Panopticon

Four years ago, I was reading: Shylock Is My Name

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