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

In Books…

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

In Life…

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