As you read this, I am likely getting ready to head to the airport with the family! We started out the month with a big work event for my husband and closed it out with some travel, making September one of our busier months recently.

In Books…

• The Majesty of the Law: I’ve mentioned before that Sandra Day O’Connor was my childhood idol. I’d been disappointed by how lackluster I found her memoir, so I was a little nervous to read her book about the Supreme Court and the legal system. If she couldn’t make her own childhood interesting, a drier subject could be painful. Thankfully, much like her opinions, a more technical subject matter works for her less dynamic style. In this book, she’s not really trying to tell a story as much as she’s trying to provide an overview of the underpinnings of our legal and political systems, focusing of course on the role of the Supreme Court. This she does capably, advocating for the importance of the independent judiciary in a way that made me glad she didn’t live to be aware of the way her beloved institution has been undermined lately. I found her brief looks at some of the Court’s more notable jurists to be well-done if somewhat underdeveloped. I had to smile a bit to myself at her defense of deference to state lawmakers, like the former State Senate Majority Leader she was. While this worked for me, as a former lawyer who now works in politics, I wonder what the intended audience for it was…it’s too casual to be intended for an academic reader, but not really engaging enough for a truly lay audience. If you’re a political or legal enthusiast, this is a solid read, but otherwise it probably won’t work very well.
• Moloka’i: Native Hawaiian Rachel Kalama, the youngest of four children, is only about seven when her beloved Uncle Pono develops a rash that’s soon revealed to be leprosy. Not too much later, she starts to develop a similar rash. Her parents try to hide what’s happening from what is then the Kingdom of Hawaii’s health officers, but it’s no use and Rachel is taken away from her home to Kalaupapa, the leper colony on Moloka’i. She’s one of the lucky ones, because her uncle is there as well, and her adoring merchant seaman father comes to visit regularly. That doesn’t mean she feels lucky, though. She’s heartbroken to be parted from her siblings, heartbroken again when her request to live with her uncle and his girlfriend, Haleola, who had originally moved to the colony to take care of her husband and caught the disease herself before he died, is refused and she’s forced to live with the other children in a facility run by the island’s nuns. What happens to Rachel on Moloka’i is nothing more or less than just…a life. She makes friends with other kids with leprosy. She develops bonds of affection with some of the nuns. She grows up, fortunate to have a slower-acting trajectory of the disease, wanting the same things everyone wants: love, meaningful work, learning, fun. Some people die. Newly-diagnosed people arrive. And history rolls on, seeing Hawai’i’s monarchy deposed, the land becoming a United States territory before becoming a state. Both World Wars happen while Rachel lives on the island. And the war against the leprosy microbe itself trudges on. This is the kind of thing I’m inclined to like: a lifetime-spanning historical novel about a time and place I’m unfamiliar with, telling me a story and letting me learn about something new at the same time. And I liked it okay! I wish I’d liked it more. The prose quality is fine, neither especially great nor distractingly bad, though I found it hard to understand why only certain words are consistently rendered in Hawaiian, a technique I tend to find irritating. Obviously many of these characters would speak to each other in Hawaiian, but if you’re writing for an English-language audience (and are yourself not a Hawaiian person, which Alan Brennert is not), it feels self-consciously shoehorned in. The plot is reasonably engaging, if you’re inclined to enjoy books that present the lives of characters who may live during remarkable times but are not themselves remarkable in any way, or even closely connected to anyone remarkable. It’s mostly characterization that kept this book from really reaching its potential. For a work that almost exclusively follows Rachel, I didn’t feel like I had much of a sense of who she was beyond some basics: high-spirited but not reckless, good-hearted, smart. Rachel’s actions are described but her inner life remains in many ways a mystery. For me, a person who loves reading books that really dive into characters, this was frustrating. There are occasional small portions of the book that follow other figures in Rachel’s life, and it’s not that these insights into other people were unwelcome, but I wish it had either devoted more time to these portions or excised them completely. Ultimately, I would recommend this just for the introduction to the history, but keep expectations low.
• Creation Lake: Sadie Smith is an American girl in France. She meets Lucien in a bar as if by chance, and the two quickly become a couple so devoted that they refer to each other as husband and wife even though they haven’t actually married. Lucien, a budding filmmaker, is the son of a wealthy and well-connected family, and suggests that while he’s off making a movie that Sadie go to his family’s home in the country’s rural area, where she can help his boyhood friend Pascal on some translation work. Pascal is the leader of Le Moulin, a farming collective opposing a plan by large agribusiness to change water rights in the area, and the group has a manifesto they want to see translated into English. Seems reasonable enough. But the thing is, her name isn’t Sadie. We don’t ever find out what it really is, but Sadie was the cover name she chose to infiltrate Le Moulin at the request of shadowy, nebulous bosses. She loathes Lucien but he was a natural connection to the group for her to exploit. It’s not her first such mission. She started out as legitimate undercover agent, but after her work failed to secure a conviction in a domestic case, she was let go with skills it seemed a waste to just give up, so she moved into the private sector. Her work begins long before she ever met Pascal. She’s also hacked into the email of the group’s advisor, Bruno Lacombe, a former radical who gave up activism after the death of one of his children and writes long, philosophical emails to Le Moulin expounding of his theories of human evolution, European history, caves. It’s long, often boring work to develop connections with the group, but a change in plans from her employers leaves her needing to take some risky actions that jeopardize the delicate balance of trust and threaten to lead her to places she doesn’t want to go. This is one of those books that make me glad I don’t abandon books. It’s a slow start, with a lot of time devoted to Bruno’s emails about Neanderthals and Homo sapiens and how and why each had the outcome that it did, and also establishing how Sadie got herself set up in Lucien’s home. Very little actually happens, and I found myself wondering if anything ever would. It’s not until about 150 pages in that Sadie even meets up with Pascal for the first time, and while that does start to escalate tension, it still sometimes feels agonizingly slow. I’m not usually someone who needs the plot to be super engaging, but even for this more literary sort of spy story, I did feel like the pacing was detrimental to my enjoyment of the book. More’s the pity, because I did enjoy Rachel Kushner’s prose. She’s a very clever writer. She gives the reader just enough of Sadie’s character to keep her intriguing rather than merely an outline where a person should be. Sadie’s not as developed as I tend to prefer, but she’s as developed as she needs to be for the narrative to work. Her observations are sharp, sometimes cruelly funny, sometimes just cruel. The side characters are vivid and interesting. Most of the slow burn of the plot does pay off in the end, it’s a very satisfying conclusion. But even as I closed the book I had questions about why some plot elements didn’t really go anywhere, if certain developments were fully earned, some things that felt like plot holes. Overall quite an enjoyable read, but this is definitely more heavy on the literary and less heavy on the thriller, so if you’re looking for something more purely in the latter category this likely won’t be one that appeals to you. But if you’re willing to sit with a story that doles itself out slowly, there’s a lot to like here.
• Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: For all the popularity of track, swimming, hockey, and skiing, we all know the real glamour events of the Olympics are the gymnastics and the figure skating. And we all know that the ones we actually make a point of watching in both cases are the women’s events, watching beautiful, slim girls toss themselves into the air to perform dazzling feats of artistry and athleticism with sparkles and a smile. But what actually goes on behind the scenes to create these moments when a lovely young woman bows her head to receive a gold medal around her neck and becomes a global celebrity? Not that any of us need a reminder in this post Larry Nassar world, but the answer is often horrific. But this book was written thirty years ago, in 1995, so at the time what it revealed was genuinely shocking. Joan Ryan examines every aspect of the culture of gymnastics (and besides some relatively cursory looks at figure skating, the focus here really is on gymnastics), including the lower-hanging, more obvious fruit like the culture of pushing through injuries and sidelining athlete safety and weight control/eating disorders, to looking at the ways the parents often find themselves pursuing their own dreams for their daughters that they convince themselves are their daughter’s dreams and how the politics of governing bodies, their preference for docile and demure girls that will allow themselves to be molded in an image that is designed for the ease and convenience of that governing body rather than healthy for the athletes themselves, play into decisions that have tremendous, often detrimental impact. It’s hard to believe that I could be especially naive after years of watching figure skating, but I was honestly a little bit shocked at how much of the Bela Karolyi abuse was laid out here, with the depriving gymnasts of food and playing the girls against each other and the disregard for safety all right out in the open. He and his wife Martha, who is portrayed in this book as on the same page as her husband, continued to be top-level, in-demand coaches for decades afterwards, only really losing their grasp on power in the wake of the Nassar scandal. Then again, as Ryan lays out in the book, parents (and sometimes the gymnasts themselves) will often work very hard to not see something that might derail Olympic goals. It does seem, at least for gymnastics, that there have been real, meaningful changes since this book was published. No longer are the most notable gymnasts in the world teeny-tiny teenagers. Simone Biles, Rebecca Andrade, and many more are slight but visibly strong, competing well into their 20s. But I have no doubt that there is still plenty of darkness behind the scenes in both gymnastics and skating (definitely in skating). This is an old book, but the information in there is still very relevant and it’s an interesting, often infuriating read.
• The Wilderness: As the Beatles said, we get by with a little help from our friends. In The Wilderness, four Black women come together to form a friend group, some of those friendships beginning in childhood and others coming together as they become young adults and then less young adults. Desiree has a history of family loss that has left her relatively financially secure but emotionally unmoored and without a strong sense of direction. Nakia is the daughter of upper middle class professionals that don’t understand her drive towards the tumultuous restaurant business but support her anyways. January has been with her staid, dull boyfriend Morris since she was in high school and feels increasingly trapped inside the relationship, especially after she leaves her finance job to pursue the graphic design that she really enjoys. And Monique was once a librarian at a small liberal-arts college, whose writing about her experience on a school commission that whitewashed history on her blog opens up new avenues for her. There’s not much in the way of “plot” here: the women live their lives, growing closer and then more distant and then closer again in various configurations as they grow. They try out relationships, some of them settling into long-term ones. They all want to be successful but have different ideas of what that means and pursue it in separate ways. They make mistakes. They help each other. Eventually, tragedy strikes, creating reverberations that spill out widely, affecting many lives. As someone whose own friendships have been deep and enduring and meaningful, I have always been a sucker for a female friendship novel, and rarely have I come across one done so well as this one. Flournoy creates rich, fully-developed characters, who grow and change in believable ways over time, no less inclined to trip over their flaws for being aware of them. The relationships between the women are rendered thoughtfully, with the changes in their closeness to each other rooted in thoughtful character choices. I felt like I knew these women by the end, understood what drew them to each other as well as how they got on each other’s nerves. Besides her top-tier character work, Flournoy’s prose is also incredible: smart, insightful, witty. It takes such skill to render this sort of story compelling, to make the reader understand that the moment-to-moment stakes may seem relatively low, but taken in sum they’re actually quite high: nothing more or less than the trajectory of their lives. I could not get enough of it, I was constantly thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it. That being said, there were a couple little quibbles. Of the core four, Monique is the least developed and I wanted more about her to match the depth of the other three. And also, Flournoy uses a nonlinear structure, skipping back and forth through time, which is a narrative device I tend to find irritating. But honestly this is so good these little nitpicks couldn’t begin to derail my enjoyment of the book. I cannot recommend it highly enough, an amazing novel.
• The Poisoned City: As Mark Twain once said, whiskey is for drinking but water is for fighting over. That makes sense in an arid state like Nevada, where I live now. But my home state of Michigan? Where the Great Lakes are? Water, water everywhere, and all of it fresh. That’s one of the things that makes the Flint water crisis so unbelievable. But it’s far from the only thing that beggars belief. Anna Clark traces the history of Flint, the ways its roots as a major industrial city of the Midwest set the stage for what happened to it in the 2010s. She examines its founding all the way to the glory days and from there to its current state of decline, focusing in particular on the role of the auto industry, the collective organizing supported by its unions and churches, and the way the ugly history of redlining built the city up with concentrated wealth among elite whites dispersing outside of city lines once official housing discrimination began to fall by the wayside. The battle for fair housing was ugly and tough-fought and ultimately in some ways phyrric, as it spurred the kind of white flight to the suburbs that would be repeated in many a major city. Down the line, this alone would contribute to the crisis, as the water system infrastructure of the city was outsize for its actual demand in later years and water sitting stagnant in pipes had more time to absorb the lead that would poison Flint residents. But what happened is far too complex for a single narrative. What happened was racism, as it took a white face becoming prominent among those questioning what was going on with the water for concerns to be taken seriously. What happened was other local governments needing the buy-in from Flint to stand up a new water system and greasing the right palms. What happened was the system of emergency managers in Michigan and the way the power they held was taken from locally elected governing entities, allowing unelected state officials to wield power over the destiny of people they were not in community with and who did not trust them. What happened was a state hit hard by the recession and without a lot of excess resources being all too happy to look the other way about issues that might have a fiscal impact to the state, abusing loopholes in regulatory procedures for their own benefit. But what happened was also human bravery: a bureaucrat leaking an early draft of a report that let Flint residents know they weren’t crazy, that there were incredibly high levels of lead being recorded in the water, A doctor who tracked the elevated blood lead levels of the children in her care and spoke out about it. Community organizers who deployed testing kits throughout the city, along with collection instructions, and followed up to make sure they got samples back. It’s a complicated, multifaceted narrative, but Clark weaves the threads skillfully, making the whole more than the sum of its parts. A solid, interesting read, but I don’t know that it’s the kind of book that would draw in readers now already engaged with the subject area, there are few smoking guns or gotchas.
• Tiny Imperfections: Josie Bordelon graduated from the exclusive Fairchild Country Day School in San Francisco as a top athlete and a top student, earning a merit scholarship to NYU in what was a dream come true. Josie, whose mother had dropped her off from New Orleans to go live with her Aunt Viv when she was only four, never really felt like she fit in in the Bay. The number of places where a tall, thin, gorgeous Black girl fits in is a short list, but in New York City, where she’s scouted for a modeling career, is on it. Soon she’s neglecting her coursework to jet all over the world to walk runways, eventually dropping out entirely. Shortly after she does, however, an impulsive fling with a handsome guy winds up in a pregnancy, and Josie gives birth to a little girl she names Etta nine months later. The modeling opportunities dry up, and soon she’s back on Aunt Viv’s doorstep, a four year-old girl of her own in tow. Viv takes her back in, as does Fairchild, offering her a job as an admissions assistant. A dozen or so years later, Josie is the head of admissions at the school, staring down the barrel of her upcoming 40th birthday as well as Etta’s senior year. She blows off the steam from dealing with the overbearing parents of prospective incoming kindergartners in her weekly happy hour with her best friend Lola, who runs admissions at another private school and wants nothing more than to get Josie back out on the dating scene. As a new application season kicks off, there’s a lot of drama in store for the year ahead. I feel kind of bad for how much I did not like this book, because it is so far from trying to do the kinds of things that I respond to that it’s hard to tell whether it’s doing what it IS going for well or not. No one in this book is more than a concept and all of the tension points between them would be easily solvable if they would stop being so dumb. One of the primary plot points is Etta’s trajectory for her future. Josie seems completely taken aback that her daughter, a dedicated and talented ballerina, wants to focus on dance. Josie’s desire to protect Etta from the mistakes she herself made is natural, but she seems to have at no point prior to the events of the book ever discussed with her daughter what she might like to do with her life. That such a conversation needs to happen is patently obvious, but Josie and Etta quarrel for hundreds of pages before it does. Josie’s relationship with Aunt Viv, which could have formed a central warm bond for the book, is also underdeveloped. I wanted conversations that highlighted the richness and depth of their relationship, but got little more than surface-level chatter. Lola is a Sassy Best Friend, Josie’s admissions colleague Roan is every gay stereotype under the sun, Josie’s distant boss is a textbook Woman Who Hates Other Women. The book’s humor is not the type I respond to, lots of satire about over-the-top parents. There’s an ongoing plot point in which Josie types up the responses she really wants to send before deleting them that I was sure was going to result in an inadvertent irreverent email being sent, but it never was. There’s a romantic subplot here, but I found the mechanics around it vaguely distasteful and it’s not sold very well, to be honest. I kept hoping for the book to break free from its tropes and become something better but it never really seemed to want to. Alas. I found so little to enjoy in it that I can’t recommend it.

In Life…

• The annual Michigan trip: Like I said above, we’re on our way to the airport to head back home now, but it’s been a fun week back in the mitten! We had stunning weather, the first day was a bit rainy but the rest of it has been lovely, maybe even a bit too warm. We visited the zoo, local parks, the cider mill, the nature center. It was lovely to get the time with family and friends but I am also very ready to sleep in my own bed tonight.