Tomorrow is 2025! There will be a whole big year-in-review post tomorrow, but today is the month-in-review one. We are through the bulk of the holidays and it is so terrifyingly close to being my busy season! But for now, we’re still enjoying being a cozy little family together. I hope you are with people you love too!

In Books…

• Future Home of the Living God: Cedar Hawk Songmaker, the adopted Native daughter of an upper middle-class white couple in the Twin Cities, is about four months pregnant when she decides to seek out her birth parents on the reservation to learn more about her medical history. It’s the near future, and it hasn’t snowed in years, not even in Minnesota. But even more alarmingly, something has recently gone awry with evolution. It seems to be going backwards. Children are being born that aren’t quite homo sapiens. Crops are failing. Ancient animals are appearing in the suburbs. No one understands why or how. The government is increasingly unstable as panic builds over whether the human race will survive at all, and women/their wombs are suddenly a subject of intense interest. On one of her last trips outside the home, Cedar watches a very pregnant woman be abducted off the street by police in broad daylight, torn from her husband and child. She is desperate to avoid that outcome, to be able to meet her own child, however they are to turn out, as a free woman. But the further along she gets, the greater the risk that she will be discovered. The book is written as Cedar’s diary, a series of entries written to her unborn child to document her experience bringing them into the world. This is a storytelling device that worked pretty effectively for me. Erdrich leaves a lot of details about the world vague, but it makes a certain amount of sense in context, as Cedar is isolated and outside sources of information become both less accessible and less reliable as civil society collapses. But even so, one of the things that kept me from getting more wholeheartedly into the narrative was the implausibility of some of the changes in the world. Over a series of just weeks, Cedar goes from being able to withdraw thousands of dollars from her bank account (luckily just ahead of a larger bank run) to a virtual prisoner in her home, terrified to so much as open the door to her home on a street newly renamed after a Bible verse. I found myself wishing the book started earlier on in Cedar’s pregnancy so it could flesh things out a little more and have an easier timeline. Indeed, a longer narrative could have solved many of my issues with the book. There’s a LOT going on thematically. There are echoes of A Handmaid’s Tale and its story of declining birthrates and subsequent control and commodification of female fertility, as well as of Children of Men and its speculation about how a world without (in this case, recognizably human) children would function. Cedar is a Catholic convert who publishes her own magazine about faith and is particularly intrigued by Kateri, the first Native American saint, bringing religion and the role of Christianity (with its central miraculous birth) and more specifically Catholicism (with its adherence to more restrictive gender roles) into the mix. There is adoption, and of course race. There is the nature of love (romantic, parental, familial), and its boundaries. There is the mystery of what’s happening to the world and why. But the novel itself doesn’t even run to 300 pages, which makes a lot of it feel underdeveloped. As always with Erdrich, the prose is elegant, with the last line ringing in my head long after I closed the book. It was good, I appreciated reading it, but it never grabbed me the way I’d hoped it would. Recommended for Erdrich enthusiasts and lovers of dystopias/post-apocalyptic stories, but otherwise not an essential read.
• Verity: Lowen Ashleigh is a professional writer on the verge of financial collapse when she’s presented with an unusual offer that could solve her problem. Best-selling suspense author Verity Crawford has been in a serious accident and is unable to complete her enormously popular book series, and Lowen is asked to come in as a co-author on the final three books for an enormous sum of money. When she agrees, she travels from where she lives in New York City to the upstate home where Verity resides with her husband Jeremy and young son Crew. Crew is the only one of the couple’s three children who is still alive, their twin girls having died in separate accidents shortly after each other. Lowen quickly learns that Verity isn’t just injured, she’s in a persistent vegetative state and won’t be able to provide any guidance at all about what she intended to do with the as-yet-to-be-written books. While combing through her office for any notes or outlines, Lowen comes across Verity’s unpublished autobiography and starts to read in the hope it will help her get into the other woman’s head. But it turns out Verity’s head is a very dark place to be, as the manuscript relates increasingly unhinged information about the writer and her family. And strange things are happening around the house, making Lowen wonder what, exactly, has happened and is happening with the Crawfords. Colleen Hoover is an enormously popular author, so I decided to try out her work, and this seemed like the most interesting thing of the bunch. But y’all…this is bad. Clearly the point here is the plot so let’s start with that, eh? The set-up here is that Lowen is a writer with some low-to-moderate level of success writing suspense novels who has just depleted all of her savings because she’s spent the last year taking care of her mother as she died from cancer. Despite the fact that Lowen is relatively obscure, we’re meant to believe that not only did she have an income level that allowed her to rent a studio apartment in NYC alone, but that would support her moving to a one-bedroom apartment and not working for an entire year. She has no apparent side gig. She does not have family money. She apparently makes this kind of money through advances alone? This is just not remotely reflective of my understanding of the economic reality of writers! The entire premise falls apart under even light scrutiny! The characters come with their own set of problems. Neither Lowen or Jeremy has any real personality. Neither of them gives any indications of experiencing any trauma about their recent devastating personal losses. We’re told early on that Lowen has a history of sleepwalking, that she’s injured herself doing it before, so it seems rife with possibility to figure into either her character development or the plot in some way but besides one isolated incident in which she ends up somewhere she shouldn’t that has no further ramifications, it’s a total dead end. My issues with Verity’s character would require major spoilers to get into so I’ll just leave it to say that she’s also poorly developed. The prose is dull and utilitarian, there are no interesting turns of phrase or any subtlety. I felt like the entire thing was insulting to my intelligence and not even engaging. What a waste of time.
• Diary of a Void: I haven’t read anything for book club recently because the past few months have been books with male authors, but this one was December’s pick and it’s by a lady! Ms. Shibata (we never do learn her first name) is a Japanese woman who works in middle management at the office of a company that manufactures cardboard tubes. Well, actually, she’s the only woman in her section of the office. Which is why, it seems, the menial tasks of office management tend to fall into her lap: in addition to doing her actual job, she’s expected to answer the phone, serve coffee, clean up afterwards, empty the trash can. Even as more junior men come into the office, these tasks still fall to her. Her resentment grows until one day, impulsively, she announces that she can’t deal with the aftermath of the coffee because she’s pregnant and it’s triggering her morning sickness. She finds herself suddenly liberated from much of the workplace unpleasantness she previously experienced: not only is she not expected to do the admin work anymore, she’s also exempted from much of the overtime she’d been putting in. She’s suddenly able to do her grocery shopping at a normal time, meet people for drinks, go to the gym. She experiments with various ways to fake a changing body. And about halfway through her “pregnancy”, she joins a maternal aerobics class. As her due date approaches, her situation becomes increasingly fraught. What will become of her? This is an odd little book. It follows along with Shibata’s situation in weekly increments, some longer and some quite brief, tallying up towards the 40 week marker of a full-term gestation. It’s clear from the beginning that the pregnancy isn’t real, but the deeper into it she gets, the stranger turns things take. The tone of the prose throughout is matter-of-fact, not remotely inclined towards anything resembling a flight of fancy, making the contrast with the surreality of the events being recorded more stark. There comes a point quite late where events transpire that make it clear that our narrator is not reliable, which makes you wonder where exactly that unreliability started. The tension of wanting to know how the situation can possibly be resolved drives its momentum throughout, but it changes from being interested in whether she will get caught to something else. I found the question about when and to what extent Shibata was deceptive to be the most compelling aspect of the book. There are also themes around the ways women are expected to take on additional “caretaking” duties in the workplace, like taking notes and light cleaning, which may have some additional cultural resonance in Japan but are plenty applicable in the US too, as well as disconnection and loneliness. Shibata’s closest friends are both married and out of the workforce, and it becomes clear when she meets up with them with her newfound free time that they don’t actually have very much at all in common anymore. The bond she forms with the women in her mommy aerobics class encourages her to keep up and deepen her deception. But of course, it can’t last, can it? I found it reasonably engaging but it didn’t make a significant impression on me. It’s fine, it’s not a waste of time to read or anything, But it’s not really compelling enough for an affirmative recommendation.
• Red Fortress: The Kremlin is instantly recognizable, with its towers and the iconic domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral standing in as a visual shorthand for Russia itself in just about every newscast about the country anyone in the US has ever seen. It is in fact the ways in which the Kremlin implies status, legitimacy, and authority that Catherine Merridale explores in this book. She starts all the way at the beginning, much farther back than many Westerners know anything about, with the founding of Kievan Rus, the establishment of the grand principality of Vladimir, and the emergence of the principality of Moscow/Muscovy as a major city that attracted the attention of the Golden Horde. It is in this distant past that the Kremlin sprang up, back then just a kremlin (which is Russian for a fortress within a city). Various leaders built structures (primarily churches) within the walls of the Kremlin to commemorate their deeds and burnish their own credentials, as a surprising number of them had tenuous-at-best claims to what became the tsardom of Russia under Ivan the Terrible. Merridale does not repeat the rumor that circulates around the building of St. Basil’s, that Ivan had their eyes put out so they could never again build anything like it, which probably means that it is not supported by the historic record as quite a few of his other misdeeds are recorded. She traces the bloody conflicts that arose after that tsar’s son died, ending the Rurikid dynasty, and the eventual resolution of those conflicts when the Romanov dynasty began. The imperial history becomes lighter after the reign of Peter the Great, who of course moved the capital to his namesake city of Saint Petersburg, but the Kremlin still served as a useful backdrop for important state ceremonies, including the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsaritsa Alexandra. While the main events of the Russian Revolution happened in Saint Petersburg, Lenin was canny enough to know that to seize and hold the Kremlin would lend credibility to his fledgling revolution and moved his government and personal residence to the fortress. But he also was determined to make a hard break with the old regime and ordered the demolitions of several historically important buildings. Many of the imperial occupants of the Kremlin did the same thing in their own time, each wanting to leave their own mark for posterity. Another recurring theme throughout the history of the Kremlin and Moscow generally is just how often it all burned down, with the last major fire having taken place as Napoleon partially blew up the city behind him in his retreat. It is staggering to think of how much significant history happened in this one relatively small area, and it’s one of the places I most long to see with my own eyes (particularly St. Basil’s), but it’s hard to imagine a future where such a trip would be possible to make safe. This book feels like it lives in that place between being written for a popular audience (it’s far too detailed) but isn’t quite fully academic either. The writing isn’t especially lively, but it’s not turgid or drowning in jargon and minutiae. It’s best for people in a similar position to me, who already know they enjoy reading Russian history and want to learn more about this incredibly interesting place.

In Life…

• C’s third Christmas: He was basically a potato his first holiday season, but last year he was more into it and this year he has fully embraced Christmas, constantly singing carols to us with his own toddler version of the lyrics and demanding tours of the neighborhood to see all the decorations. He was incredibly spoiled by everyone who loves him and we are so lucky to have our little guy surrounded by so many people who want him to have the best Christmas possible.