Harmony - Carolyn Parkhurst

One of the reading challenge categories that was posing a problem for me this year was "A book by a local author."  I live in Washington, DC.  I knew that there could be no shortage of local authors with great books available.  However, when I Googled, the ones that came up, the Big Names, were ones that I either wasn't interested in (David Baldacci, Tom Clancy) or I'd already read their works (Laura Hillenbrand).  Thankfully, I eventually found an article by DC Refined, "5 D.C. authors you should know (and their latest books)".  While a bunch of the authors and books listed there caught my interest, one in particular stuck out: Harmony by Caroyln Parkhurst, because she has her MA from American University, which is my school!  Also, the premise seemed very interesting.

Told from multiple perspectives, Harmony is the story of a family (the Hammonds) who seek help for their brilliant but troublesome daughter, Tilly, who has a non-specific disorder along the autism spectrum.  In the search for help, they fall in with Scott Bean, who gets them to come to a camp, Harmony, in New Hampshire that is, for all intents and purposes, cut off from the outside world.  They will live and work at the camp, grow their own food, avoid pesticides and stimulation from screens, and anything that's needed from outside, Scott will get while the rest of them stay at the camp.  A few other families are also present, for similar reasons.  But while Harmony initially seems like it might be exactly what the family needs, might it perhaps be a little more sinister?

Camp Harmony treads along the thin line--is it a cult or isn't it?  At some times, it seems like it is, and at other times it seems like it isn't.  Scott Bean is a masterful manipulator.  He gets the families to feel like they are accomplishing something, and every time something unnerving happens, he backs off, reassures them...and then continues on with his own plans.  There's a menace here, but not one that that's obvious,or even always present.  It leads to a strange balancing act in the mind, which I'm sure is exactly what Parkhurst intended--is this okay, or is it not?  Some of it is, and some of it isn't, and some of it is questionably...and it all adds up to a big, big problem that will shatter the Hammond family's existence.

The writing style here was interesting.  There are three perspectives: Alexandra, the mother; Tilly, the older sister; and Iris, the younger sister.  Alexandra's parts are written in second-person, which I typically dislike, but in this case I think it really worked.  It made her struggle more empathetic, made it easier to see where her difficulties were coming from.  Iris has a more traditional first-person perspective, relating the "present" events; she is our main narrator, telling us the story as it unfolds, whereas Alexandra's parts are more of a "how we got here" set up.  And then there's Tilly.  Tilly's narrative is neither here nor there, first person nor third person, just a sort of weird, floating imagining that happens at an ambiguous place and time, and yet perfectly suited to Tilly's character.

This was a book that intrigued me, but that I was unsure I would actually like.  And while the pacing is somewhat slow, the building unease in the background propels the story forward to its climax.  I do wish there had been a bit more closure here--we are definitely left with the question of, "What happened to the Hammonds, anyway?"  I mean, will the daughters be giving TED Talks about growing up in a cult when they get older?  Or will everything be all right?  These are the things I'm left wondering--and while I would have liked more closure, I gather that the wondering was rather the point.

Anyway, I'm very glad that I picked this title for my "local author" reading challenge category.  It wasn't something I would probably have picked up on my own, but I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to reading other books by these local authors.

4 stars out of 5.

Baking Cakes in Kigali - Gaile Parkin

Baking Cakes in Kigali has been on my to-read list for a while, and as I have a friend who recently traveled to Rwanda and was in Kigali for New Years', the book popped back to the front of my mind and it seemed like a good time to read it!

Set in Kigali in 2000, the story is a slow, character-driven one about a neighborhood that centers around a single apartment complex and particularly one woman who lives there, Angel.  Angel is a native Tanzanian who lives in Kigali with her husband, who is doing consulting work for a technical institute, and their five grandchildren, who they care for in the wake of the deaths of both of their children.  Angel interacts with other people who live in the complex as well as others they are connected to, and others still who come to order cakes from her.  Her cake making business is the heart of the book, bringing her into the lives of many other people and revealing their secrets to her, as she promises confidentiality as part of being a "professional somebody."  There characters include Odile, a nurse who survived the Rwandan genocide; Jenna, the wife of a CIA agent who she doesn't know is a CIA agent, and who is also cheating on her; Sophie and Catherine, a pair of American volunteers helping with the reconstruction of Rwanda in the wake of the genocide; Vincenzo, Amina, and Safiya, a Muslim family Angel is close to; and Leocadie, a young woman who runs a small shop down the street.

This is a book that touches on a multitude of tough subjects while still remaining a wholesome story.  There are so many tough subjects--AIDS, genocide, suicide, rape, genital mutilation, kidnap and child soldiers, to name just a few--that I kept expecting disaster to pop up around every corner, but it (thankfully) never did.  Really, the story touches on those things, but it's about Angel acting as a sort of mother to the entire neighborhood, handing out wisdom over cake and milky cardamom tea.  Love, loss, and schemes are all poured out and over, and Angel, despite having had difficult times of her own, remains a calm force throughout, and even leverages her insight for others to help herself come to terms with the death of her daughter.

I liked the writing here.  At some times I did find it a bit stiff and formal--however, I had to keep in mind that, while this book was written in English, most of the dialogue is actually delivered in Swahili that Parkin represents as English on the page.  Some other reviews indicate that Angel's version of Kigali seems a bit too bright and sunny for taking place after the genocide--however, the genocide occurred in 1994, and the book takes place in 2000.  There are ongoing trials and attempts at reconciliation--two of the characters that Angel meets have come from South Africa, where they worked on the truth and reconciliation process following the breakdown of apartheid, in order to assist--but six years can change a heck of a lot.  And I think Parkin did a good job showing that, while some people seem happy and functional, they can still be deeply scarred and haunted below the surface.  And it's also important to remember that, while the genocide was clearly a huge part of recent Rwandan history, it's not all that Rwanda is--and that, I think, is what Parkin was really aiming for, and I think she accomplished it.

The structure of the book revolves a series of events, all things which people would order a cake for, which allows Angel to really become involved.  Again, this is a character driven book, which means that there's not a strong central plot and the story instead revolves slowly around the people on the page rather than a driving event or crisis.  The structure works well for this type of narrative, but it's definitely not something that everyone enjoys.  Considering this was a first novel, I think it was done extremely well; characters can be hard to balance without plot points driving them along, but Parkin did so with aplomb, and this was overall a joy to read.

4 stars out of 5.

A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea - Dina Nayeri

This book has been on my to-read list for ages, and I'm not entirely sure why I added it.  It probably had something to do with the cover; I love a good silhouette cover and a lyrical title.  It might have also had something to do with the description--Iranian girl (and eventually young woman) uses her love for America to escape.  But honestly, I can't remember on that part now.

The story follows Saba, who loses her mother and her sister on the same day in the years following the Iranian revolution.  She's convinced they flew off to America, leaving Saba and her father behind.  Others insist that her mother is gone and her sister is dead, but Saba's belief that they are alive is so all-encompassing that she had me half-convinced that she was right--and there really was no telling what happened to her mother... Wrapped up in her beliefs, Saba embraces forbidden American culture through books, movies, and TV shows, and tells stories of her sister Mahtab's new life in America.  As Saba grows up and goes through love and marriage and abuse and heartbreak on many fronts, she dreams of making it to America herself, even refusing to go to college in Iran because she is saving herself for an American education.

This was somewhat of a slow book, and it took me a while to get through it even though it wasn't that long in pages.  The plot is entirely Saba's longing to escape and everything that gets in her way.  While there are definitely bad parts of her story--something that her husband does to preserve his honor and her inheritance, the laws that mean she won't get the inheritance anyway even though she has a marriage contract to preserve it, the way her friend is beaten for being "immodest" but really for being beautiful and saying "no," and various other cultural aspects that come in the wake of the revolution--are certainly reprehensible.  But there's a certain idolization of American culture that didn't seem healthy, either.  And when Saba finally does escape, we're led to believe that her life, with few exceptions, really is as hunky-dory as she had imagined it to be.  The book finishes up just after 9/11, and while Saba admits that it will make it harder for her to visit her family still in Iran or for them to visit her in America, that's really the only consequence of her life, as she's spent so long making herself American from afar that she's not really Iranian anymore.  This was a weird dynamic to me, and one that I don't feel great about looking back; it just rubs me the wrong way for some reason.  It felt like Saba was willing to just write off all of the good things--and there certainly were good things, she listed them numerous times--in exchange for books and TV and music, which seemed very shallow of her, just like one of the old woman of her town was always accusing her of being.

I wanted to like Saba as a character, but I just couldn't quite bring myself to do it.  Really, none of the characters here were very likable--I felt like they were all very self-absorbed and greedy.  The exception was probably Ponneh, but then she jumped too far into a resistance and dragged her friends into danger with her when they didn't want anything to do with it, so I kind of lost my sympathy there as well.  I think Nayeri did a wonderful job with the setting of the book, but the actual characters left a lot to be desired for me, and the slow pacing didn't help either.

2 stars out of 5.

Swear on This Life - Renee Carlino

Swear on This Life was the Deliberate Reader book club pick for December 2017, which made Thanksgiving weekend a perfect time to read it.  The book has pretty stellar reviews on Goodreads and a promising premise, so I can see why it was selected.  The story follows Emiline, who discovers that her childhood best friend and first love wrote a book about their experiences, and her supposed life after them, from her perspective, and it is a huge bestseller.  Emiline, who hasn't heard from Jase in more than twelve years, is furious, because he's profiting off her pain and suffering and he's not even getting it right.  But what to do?

So, this had the potential to be good.  But it really wasn't.  The problem is not the plot, or really the characters, but the writing itself.  The entire book, which is composed both of first-person snippets from Emi and of excerpts from the book Jase wrote, All the Roads Between, is flat and lifeless.  It's all telling and no showing.  "I couldn't believe he lied."  "I was so mad."  And so on.  There's a great lack of emotion here, which is somewhat astounding for a story that should have been absolutely bursting with it.  Emi and Jase's story is a hard one to read...except it's not, because there's no feeling embedded in all of the terrible things they went through.  Instead, this book reads like a dry recitation of the facts, instead of a tale that pulls heartstrings and evokes tears and rage and passion.

The nesting of the stories in a sort of Russian doll fashion was interesting, but it wasn't enough to carry a book that lacked any dimension.  I could understand Emi's pain and anger and longing, but it wasn't conveyed very well and I had to do a lot of pulling on my own emotions in order to make it all "click," something that a well-written book should do for me.  And while I think both Emi and Jase were promising characters and could have shone with a little more polish, the supporting characters were all pretty bland and flat, lacking any and all sense of dimension.  I absolutely could not believe that this was a book about a bestselling book because it was so poorly done.  And you know what?  Carlino is aware of this.  You know how we can tell that?  Because at one point Emi points out that Jase's book isn't well written and is just being lauded because it's a story about two kids in bad circumstances.  And that's exactly what the book as a whole is!  Are people really okay with that, or are the majority of readers seriously not catching on?

Overall, bland, not worth the hype, and dear lord I actually spent Thanksgiving weekend reading this.

2 stars out of 5.

Good Morning, Midnight - Lily Brooks-Dalton

Wow, what a lovely book!  With both a cover and a plot evocative of the equally-lovely Station Eleven from a few years ago, Good Morning, Midnight looks at a few individuals left alive, for various reasons, after the mysterious end of human civilization in the rest of the world.  In fact, the writing styles and feel are so similar that it's easy to imagine that this book takes place in the same world as Station Eleven, just in different physical locations on it.

There are two halves to this book that are told in alternating chapters.  First, astronomer Augie has been left alone--or almost alone--at an observatory in the Arctic Circle after he refused to evacuate with the rest of the staff.  He planned to live out his last days in solitude, until he discovers a young girl, maybe nine or ten years old, named Iris and who appears to have been forgotten during the evacuation.  Augie and Iris try to make a life in the observatory in the silence that the rest of the world has left behind.  Meanwhile, Sully is a communications specialist aboard the Aether, a ship completing the first manned mission to Jupiter and its moons and which is now on its way back to Earth--but they know something is wrong, because Earth has gone silent.  Told over the course of a year, the book is very much a tale of people searching for purpose when the lives that they have known are suddenly, completely, and irrevocably changed.

There are no zombies to fight here, no nuclear hazard zones, no diseases to outrun.  The apocalypse, whatever it was, happened and then was done.  We don't know what caused it.  We just know that something happened, and now the world is silent.  Augie appears to be the last man on Earth, though it's hard to imagine he actually is; certainly other isolated spots would have survived, like maybe in the Antarctic research stations, out in Siberia, high in the mountains--something.  Maybe Augie is just the last man on earth who knows how to use a ham radio.  The writing is simple and beautiful, relying on two extraordinary settings to showcase a story of survival and belonging.  There's some funny business going on in the background that I started to suss out fairly early, but I wasn't quite on track with exactly what it was until close the end, which was nice.  There is a very ambiguous ending--it clears up one part, which is the part that I'd been poking about, but what ultimately happens to some of the characters is left up to the reader to decide, something that I think probably has to be done in a book of this nature and with this particular plot.

It's not a long book, but it was an absolute joy to read.  The characters have depth and dimension and are so perfectly suited for their roles; the settings are evoked with beautiful prose; and the whole thing has such a lovely feel to it that I didn't want it to end.  Is some of the science squishy?  Yes, very.  But this isn't meant to be the next of kin to Andy Weir's The Martian.  It has an entirely different focus and purpose, and with that in mind is set at some point in the future where science has advanced somewhat, making a trip to Jupiter possible in a year and having Voyager I go offline, along with its successors including the fictional Voyager III.  It's not supposed to be a "hard" science book though it definitely falls into the sci-fi genre.  With that in mind, I think it can be forgiven for its squishy science, because the rest of the book more than makes up for that.

I absolutely loved this, and after a string of books recently that were only "okay," it was a pleasure to read.

5 stars out of 5.

American Fire - Monica Hesse

Book of the Month has absolutely been killing it with selections recently; I have loved all of my main selections for the past few months, and it's been great to see more nonfiction that isn't in the style of a memoir.  Killers of the Flower Moon was stunning and terrible, and American Fire is sad and evocative and atmospheric.

This is a nonfiction book, accounting a string of arsons that took place on Virginia's Eastern Shore.  Between November and April 1, sixty-seven buildings in Accomack County burned.  (Well, it was more than that, but the sixty-seven were the related ones.)  As readers, we know pretty much from the beginning who is behind the arsons; Hesse puts it all out there right in the beginning, even on the jacket description.  But of course the people of Accomack don't know, and watching them try to figure out who is burning down their county is fascinating, as is watching the building and decaying relationship between the aronists and how it eventually all unravels in court.

Hesse's book definitely falls into the category of literary nonfiction; it reads like a story, alternating between a chapter or two about the fire departments, police, etc. trying to figure out the arsons, and a chapter about the arsonists themselves.  Hesse uses words to, stroke by stroke, paint the picture of Accomack County, accessed at the north by a road that passes by a gas station sporting a sign, "The South Starts Here."  It's a county that has largely been left behind by the rest of the United States; once the richest rural county in the US, it's now one of the poorest.  Its main employers are Tyson and Purdue.  The fire departments are entirely volunteer, so dispatchers need to call four in order to make sure enough people show up to fight each fire.  And there's no municipal water supply, so the fire departments have to bring their own water with them, and if they run out, their only chances to reload are sometimes ponds.  It's a completely different place from the urban settings that most of the country inhabits, a place that almost felt like it could have been the setting of a Sookie Stackhouse novel if they took place on the Eastern Shore instead of in Lousiana.

It's not a long book, and the narrative style is so readable that I absolutely devoured it in just a couple of hours.  But it shows wonderfully how no single factor in Accomack County or in the arsonists' lives caused the arsons.  Being poor and depressed doesn't make you set fires, and if you do set fires, it doesn't mean that you'll get away with it...but the societal fabric of Accomack County contributed immensely to it.  And, as Hesse points out, it could have happened elsewhere, too.  Such a fascinating look into this county, the arsons, the investigation, all of it.  Highly recommended.

5 stars out of 5.

Eight Hundred Grapes - Laura Dave

Ah, another foray into the world of audiobooks.  My audiobook selections tend to revolve mainly around what the library has available for download at the exact moment I'm looking; Eight Hundred Grapes fit that description when I finished Dark Places and was looking for something else to listen to while walking to/from work and doing my running.  The book had caught my eye before, from Book of the Month and then on a few lists of good books from 2016, so I decided it was worth a shot.  The results?

Pretty good!  The narrator here is good for the book's main character, Georgia, who narrates the story in first-person.  Georgia flees to her family's vineyard in Sonoma County, California, seeking refuge after seeing her fiance out on the street with another woman and a child she never knew about while she was at the final fitting for her wedding dress.  Upon her arrival, she discovers her mother has another man in the house, her father is sleeping in the winemaker's cottage, the family vineyard has been sold to a Big Bad Corporation, and one of her brothers might just be in love with the other's wife.  Yikes.  So the story is Georgia attempting to navigate all of this family drama, all the while trying to decide whether or not she should forgive her fiance for keeping his daughter a secret and marry him anyway.

This is a story of family drama, clearly, which I really enjoy.  I liked how Georgia's first-person chapters were interspersed with other chapters set in the past that focused more on her parents.  Those third-person chapters helped to flesh out how they ended up where they were in a good, characterizing fashion, rather than her mother and father just info-dumping everything on Georgia in her chapters.  Though, now that I think of it, I wonder if there was a bit of omniscience from Georgia here, her picking up on things from those third-person chapters that she's never actually told in the first-person ones... Hm. 

Georgia is a likeable character, and the supporting characters were likable, too--even the transgressing Ben.  The narrator's voice sounds a little silly when she tries to do the dialogue for the men in the book, but until my dream of having every audiobook read by a full cast is realized, I guess that's something I'm just stuck with.  But story-wise, the things that I didn't like here were two-fold.  First, not enough Jacob.  For how the book ends, I think there needed to be more Jacob.  Second, that epilogue!  This, even though it's still about Georgia, abruptly switches from first-person to third-person, and it comes across as really cheesy and just...ugh.  Did not like.  I think that the book easily could have ended with the last chapter from Georgia's perspective and been just fine.  Maybe even better.  Just like how the movie Lincoln would have been better if it had ended with that shot of him going down the stairs to leave for Ford's Theater instead of going through the entire assassination sequence, because hey, we all know how it ends, right?

This was a shorter book, but it had a great sense of atmosphere, good pacing, and good characters. The narrator mostly suited it, and overall I found it a very enjoyable reading/listening experience.

4 stars out of 5.

Rich and Pretty - Rumaan Alam

Rich and Pretty is one of the backlog of Book of the Month books that I had on my back list and finally got around to reading.  It has a pretty dismal rating, a 2.77 on Goodreads as of the time of this writing, and honestly, I think it's pretty well deserved.  Goodreads considers 2 stars an "okay" book and 3 stars a book you "liked," so the majority of people who've read and rated this on Goodreads didn't really enjoy it that much.  And it's a pretty bland book, so that sounds about right.

The story is about two women, Sarah and Lauren, as they move into new phases of their lives.  They've been friends since age eleven, and now in their early thirties Sarah works at a charity shop and is getting married, and Lauren is trying to get a promotion from her job as assistant editor.  They don't see each other much anymore, but when they do they easily fall back into the patterns of their earlier friendship.  But at various points, the differences between them are painfully obvious, such as how Sarah is ready to marry after only having like four boyfriends; Lauren isn't looking for anything serious, and it grates on her nerves when Sarah frowns upon her casual sex.  The title refers explicitly to Sarah and Lauren; Sarah has always been the rich one, while Lauren has always been the pretty one.

The writing is just okay.  While it's a male author writing female main characters, it's not terrible, and terrible is something that I've gotten used to when reading books such as this.  However, Sarah and Lauren are apparently always focusing on their "tits," which is not something I've ever encountered in an actual, living, breathing woman--a fascination with breasts is something I've also come to expect of male authors writing female characters, and that's not any different here.  Sigh.  Sarah, Lauren, and their supporting characters are also just bland.  They're not interesting in any way.  While each of them could have been fascinating, they're all flat and one-dimensional.  Additionally, there's something about the way that Alam writes that just makes me a little nauseous, almost like being seasick; this is something that I also encountered while reading The God of Small Things, and it's not a very pleasant experience.  The sentences can be rambling and hard to follow and sometimes have strange constructions, and just have this "wavy" feeling that was...ugh.  It makes me feel sick just thinking about it.

So, was it a good book?  Not really.  With flat characters and no real plot to speak of, it just didn't intrigue.  I do like character-driven books, and the characters don't even have to be nice or good--but they do have to be interesting.  None of the people here were that, which is unfortunate, and makes it a flop as a character-driven book.

1.5 stars out of 5.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is a book that I first encountered in the pages of another, Anna and the French Kiss (where Anna and her classmates read it as part of their literature class' study of works in translation), which made it a perfect candidate for my 2017 reading challenge, which has a category for a book mentioned in another book.  Even better, I already had a copy that I'd picked up a used book store in New Jersey out of some form of Anna-related nostalgia.

The basic story here is two young men, still in their teenage years, who are exiled from their city homes and parents in Chengdu, China, to be re-educated in the country, in a town on a mountain called the Phoenix of the Sky.  While there, they encounter two subjects of note: the Little Seamstress, the daughter of the mountain's renowned tailor who the protagonist's friend Luo immediately falls in love with and dreams of educating; and a secret stash of Western literature in Chinese translation owned by a fellow subject of re-education, which become an instant intrigue to our protagonists.

This is a short book and the story itself is rather simple, and a bit nostalgic.  I don't know much about Dai Sijie--my edition is even devoid of the typical "about the author" section--but a quick glance through the Wikipedia article about him shows that a lot of this book was taken from his own life experience.  It definitely shows.  Sijie himself was sent for re-education, something he did voluntarily since he could have been excused from it (according to Wiki) which might explain the nostalgic tone that permeates the book.  Despite the grueling labor that the protagonists engage in, the narrator seems to overall enjoy his time on the Phoenix mountain, controlling time through the little rooster clock the two brought with them, working in the fields, traveling to the main town in the area to see films in order to relate them to the village--really, everything except the coal mines.  And of course, the connection with the Little Seamstress brings light into the whole place, as well.

The end of the book was rather unexpected to me, as well.  While Luo's relationship with the Seamstress (who never gets a name--really?) immediately raised my eyebrow and my suspicions, I still didn't expect Dai to go down that road, though it definitely added a somber note to what was overall a lighthearted book.  And I appreciated the way that he took the Seamstress' development.  While Luo had always been in the city and simply saw the books as a way of reconnecting, and the Seamstress as a sort of pet project and not a person in and of herself, the Seamstress saw the books as a way of escape and an indication of what might lay beyond the mountain.  While I was a bit surprised by the ending, it was a pleasant sort of surprise, because I thought that it fit.

One thing that I didn't like was the three little chapters about two-thirds of the way through the book.  While most of the book is from the point of view of one narrator (who I don't believe was ever named), there are three chapters that abruptly switch viewpoints to "the miller," Luo, and the Little Seamstress.  They interrupt the flow of the story and aren't strictly necessary; I feel like the information here was either conveyed elsewhere, could have been inferred, or could have been worked in within the main narrative without disrupting the flow or giving the narrator more knowledge than he should have rightly possessed.  While there was some lovely description and probably some symbolism that went over my head in these chapters (the key chain? the snake? I'm sure these were symbolic but I don't know quite what of) they just didn't fit the flow of the story as a whole, and I was left rather wondering at their purpose as I proceeded on to the end.

Overall, I liked this, more than I thought I would considering that I had misconceptions about what the story was about when I started--I definitely just made up some story in my head, there's no sense as to where I got this alternative plot from--but those chapters just didn't make sense to me.

4 stars out of 5.

Hannah Coulter - Wendell Berry

Hannah Coulter is possibly one of the most boring books I've read in a while, which is unfortunate because it doesn't bode well for the discussion on Facebook for the Deliberate Reader digital book club, which is what I read this for.

The premise is simple.  Hannah Coulter is an old woman looking back over her life in Port William, Kentucky, including her time as a girl during the Great Depression and her young womanhood during World War II, as well as her later married life.  But here's the thing: Hannah Coulter's life is boring.  She farms.  She has children.  She talks about the characters of these children, and of some of the people connected to her and her family in various ways.  But that's pretty much it.  There's not a plot, just a lot of "late in life" musing about what being a farmer and a mother has meant to her.  But honestly, I didn't feel like there was anything here that I haven't gotten out of countless other books, and those books had more to offer than this one did.

I guess it's well-written enough for literary fiction, but there's nothing intriguing that really kept me wanting to read.  I only finished it because it was a book club book and some perverse desire I have to finish every book I start even when I don't really like it.  It's just a "meh" book and doesn't drive me to pick up anything else of Berry's...like, ever.  There's not a conflict, not even a character-driven one, and while many reviewers seem to be praising how introspective it was, and how it highlights small-town life, but quite frankly I think that idolizing the small-town farming life has just as many dangers in it as idolizing big-city life.  I've lived both, and Berry makes small towns seem far more idyllic than it really is, even if he and I grew up in different times.  As the "story," such as it is, goes on, Hannah turns her attention more to other people than herself, which eliminates some of the promise the book held early on, when she talked about her own thoughts and her own struggles.  Instead, she spends much of the later part of the book just talking about others and what they did and how they did it and so on.

Apparently, this is actually part of a series of interconnected books about this fictitious town and the same people...but I struggle to see how reading them all could have appeal when so much of it seems to have been just laid out here.

Ah, well.  At least it was short.

2 stars out of 5.

Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain

I originally had Bourdain's book No Reservations slated for my reading challenge this year, but absolutely nowhere had it available.  So I picked another book for that category and got this one from the library instead.  It's probably better that way, since this was Bourdain's first book and laid the groundwork for a lot of his career, which is of course what I've been watching on Netflix.

This is the updated edition, which has a bit of a foreword and an afterword that serves as a kind of "where are they now" catch-up section, and a PS section that has discussion, an interview, etc.  I didn't care about the PS stuff but the added foreword and afterword were a nice touch.

Here's the thing.  Having watched collections of "No Reservations" (the show, not the book) and "The Layover" on Netflix, I could totally hear Bourdain's voice.  He lays out what he sees as the fundamentals of the restaurant world and the path of his own career.  But then he goes back later on and turns it all on its head, showing that not all cooking crews are the sort that he experienced and seems to seek out.  He doesn't really go into how his life of booze and drugs affected his career at various points, but he also doesn't hide that away, and finally mentions that he hit a point where he knew if he didn't stop, he probably wasn't going to.

And here's the other thing... Bourdain is an ass.  Anyone who's seen him on any of his shows can tell that pretty easily.  But he's so up front about it, without really making himself seem better than others, and I found that I could move past it pretty easily.  There are, of course, moments, when I step back and go, "Wow, Anthony, you're an asshole."  But for the most part, I felt like I could step away from that terribly abrasive part of his personality and still enjoy his writing and his tales of "the culinary underbelly," as the book refers to it.  Bourdain seems to prefer what he calls "pirate crews" which are basically a bunch of former (and sometimes current) criminals and drug addicts and overall people who are just as unsavory as he can be.  But at the same time, as I mentioned before, he brings up kitchens that run as smoothly as a well-oiled clock or a well-choreographed and rehearsed dance.  While he greatly speaks from his own experience, he doesn't pretend that his way is the only way, and I can respect that.

Overall, I found this book a very enjoyable read.  Though I can't say that I look up to him as a person or would ever want to work with him.  But that doesn't meant his stories aren't good or shocking or that this book wasn't good (though sometimes shocking) because it was.

4 stars out of 5.

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Atonement has been on my to-read list for a while, but I finally got around to it because I fit it into both my normal reading challenge and my romance reading challenge for 2016.  For my regular reading challenge, it fit the category of "A book set during wartime."  For the romance challenge, I slotted it in for "A literary romance."

Atonement is a weird sort of book.  It has a meta storyline, fitting the events of the book into their own book story.  The plot follows two sisters of the wealthy Tallis family, Cecilia and Briony, and the son of the family's charwoman, Robbie.  One day in 1935, there's a house party at the Tallis home for Cecilia and Briony's visiting brother and his friend.  Briony, an aspiring author and possibly playwright, sees a confrontation between Cecilia and Robbie, who both attended the same school and have spent the past few years in a sort of dance around each other, drawn to each other but unable to put a pin in their feelings.  Briony, ten years younger than Cecilia and Robbie and not within hearing distance, thinks Robbie is coercing Cecilia into some perverse act that involves taking her clothes off and getting into a fountain.  Later, when Robbie puts his feelings to paper in an apology to Cecilia, he gives Briony the note to deliver and she reads it--but Robbie has actually given her a draft that includes some passionate but rather vulgar phrasing, and it helps to cement in Briony's mind that Robbie is a dangerous deviant.  All of this sets off a chain of events that ends with Robbie being falsely accused of rape and imprisoned, and then joining the infantry just before the start of World War II to lessen his prison sentence.  All the while, he and Cecilia maintain a relationship via letters, and Cecilia severs her relationship with her family due to how easily they turned on Robbie.

The romance in here is definitely a secondary story, with the main story revolving around the devastation the rape allegations wreak on Robbie's life and, to a lesser degree, Cecilia's, and how Briony comes to the realization that she was wrong as she grows older and tries to atone for her actions, even though there's no way she can completely right the wrong she committed.  This is an interesting concept, and once the book moved into the second and third parts, it moved quickly and was pretty enjoyable.  However, the first part, which takes up the first half of the book, is very slow, and it almost had me quitting reading a couple of times.  The problem is that, despite the part taking place over only a day, it just drags.  Pretty much every scene has to be rehashed from at least two different viewpoints, and while I understand that the perspectives were necessary to introduce both the truth of the events and how Briony interprets them, but I can't help but wonder if there would have been a more streamlined way to do this that wouldn't have resulted in the beginning of the book being so incredibly slow and clunky.

Later in the book, Briony receives a rejection letter from a literary magazine to who she'd submitted a piece of writing based on the pivotal events of the book.  The letter contains a bunch of advice for Briony about the weak points of her work--and I couldn't help but feel like those weak points were still evident in the book itself, which is ultimately supposed to be Briony's final draft of the events, one that she's worked over again and again for decades.  But I found the same weaknesses and tedium in it that were pointed out in this fictional rejection letter, and it just highlighted to me that the beginning of the book was...not that good.

Overall, I can see why people like this--it's very meta, and the later parts of the book are enjoyable.  But the slow beginning and rehashing of any and every event in the first half of the book really impacted my enjoyment of it.

3 stars out of 5.

Exit West - Moshin Hamid

"...when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind."

Exit West was my March Book of the Month selection.  Promising the story of two lovers forced into an early intimacy by a civil war sweeping their city and their attempts to escape, it seemed particularly fitting for current political situations around the globe.

The protagonists are Saeed and Nadia, two young adults (in their twenties, presumably) living in a city somewhere in the Middle East.  At first I thought it was supposed to be a city (though not necessarily a real one) in Syria, but the further I read the more I became convinced that the actual locale wasn't supposed to matter, because this was a city that could have been any city in that region, and that was the point.  Their city is increasingly torn apart by a civil war, and they are beset with bombs and loss of electricity and checkpoints, and eventually even the loss of Saeed's mother.  Ultimately, the two decide that they have no choice but to leave.

This is where the book gains a magical realism element.  It's actually evident earlier in the book, but it doesn't become apparent as to what's really going on until Saeed and Nadia decide they have to flee.  See, there are doors in this book.  Doors that don't take you where they're supposed to go--like out to your front yard or into your closet--but instead to different places altogether.  The chapters of the book are all studded with little stories about other people in other parts of the world who are stumbling across and using the doors, but that they're actually being transported across vast amounts of distance instantaneously isn't entirely evident until Saeed and Nadia flee through a door, ending up in the Greek islands.

This is the story of people on the move and of the rise and fall of a relationship.  Saeed and Nadia are initially taken with each other, and spend so much time in contact with each other, both physically and virtually.  But as they flee chaos time and time again, their relationship begins to sour and grate and they begin to drift apart, and each "exit west" takes them not only farther from their homes, but farther from each other, even though they don't separate until the very end.  It's a poignant story not only of how people come together and drift apart and stay together sometimes even when they shouldn't, but also of how nativism and xenophobia turns people against each other and presents a harsh face to people who are only looking for better lives.  This clearly isn't our world as it is exactly now, but it's almost our world, and sometimes the difference is only a black door apart.

The premise here is wonderful, and there are some poignant lines as well, such as the one I started this review with.  The ideas here are breathtaking and wonderful.  But I'm not sure the writing style is one that I really liked.  Well, yes, I am sure.  I didn't really like it.  There's very little dialogue and the book is mostly a straight relation of what characters did and where they went and what they felt; much tell and little show.  There are some wonderful passages sprinkled throughout, but overall Hamid covers as a vast amount of time and turmoil in very few pages--231 pages, actually, with large print and line spacing.  It means that there's not a lot of words to convey what needs to be said here, and while parity can be a blessing, I think a little less brevity here could have been a good thing.

Overall, though, this is an important book for our time, and I think it's one that many, many people could benefit from reading.  It offers a perspective that is, to so many of us, lacking, and a view, if people really understood, could help better the world.

4 stars out of 5.

Girls in the Moon - Janet McNally

First off, can we take a moment to step back and appreciate the brilliance of this cover design?  The New York skyline with Luna and Phoebe's silhouettes, emblazoned against a moon that is also a microphone--whoever did this cover design is a pro.  (Clearly, because I assume they did get paid for it, but you know what I mean.)

Girls in the Moon was my Book of the Month selection for January.  I also picked up Lucky You by Erika Carter (which isn't due out until March) but GITM was my primary choice.  I wasn't actually thrilled by the description, but it seemed to fall into the realm of mildly interesting, so I went for it.  Boy, am I glad that I did.

This is a positively lovely book.  I think that's really the best word for it.  Lovely.  The story is that of Phoebe Ferris, who's finishing out her summer vacation between her junior and senior years of high school by visiting her older sister, Luna, who lives in New York when she's not touring with her new band, Luna and the Moons.  Also to be considered is that Phoebe and Luna's parents are Meg and Kieran Ferris, two of the members of a band that was big in the 90s called Shelter.  Kieran hasn't been in Phoebe or Luna's lives for the past three years, but Phoebe knows he's also in New York, so she plans to see him while she's there, too...and maybe learn something about her parents' rock star past, which she can't remember and which her mother refuses to really speak of, going so far as to pretend she's not Meg Ferris whenever anyone asks.  Oh, and she wants to see Archer, the bassist in Luna's band who Phoebe has been texting since they first met earlier in the year, and who is probably the only person who knows about Phoebe's budding poetic, lyrical talent.

Phoebe is a character with whom it is easy to empathize.  Her summer has pretty much been a disaster for two reasons.  First, she and her best friend got into a fight over a boy.  (Ah, high school.)  Well, not really a fight, but something that has certainly put a damper on things, especially because said friend lives directly across the street.  And then there's Meg herself, who is pressuring Phoebe to talk Luna into staying in college instead of going on tour with the Moons.  She's a little introverted and seems to think in song lyrics sometimes, jotting them down in text messages when they come to mind.  And while she doesn't crave fame and fortune, she wants to know more about her family and where she comes from, something that her mother has been reluctant to discuss and her father hasn't been present to.  She wants to make her own way but isn't sure how to do so, unlike Luna, who always seems to know exactly what to do and when to do it.

None of the characters here seemed superfluous and the setting of New York was perfect here.  I've only been to New York once, and I hated it for the short time I was there, but this made me want to go back and see it in a different light.  Luna's life in New York isn't perfect and Phoebe's aware of it, but she savors her time there nonetheless, and seems to really live.  Then there's the beauty of McNally's writing itself.  It's not overwrought and is actually pretty simplistic, but she has a way of just making things very clear and picturesque at the same time.  I didn't feel like there were any big plot holes here, and the secondary story going on--Meg's story, going back in time from the present to essentially when Shelter first started, in leaps and bounds, just a few pages at a time--lent another dimension to Phoebe and Luna's story in the present.  And the lyrics spattered throughout the book, single lines as they are, seem exactly like lyrics to the sort of songs I would have loved to listen to when I was Phoebe's age, and probably even still today.

Overall, this was an absolutely beautiful read, and a wonderful first Book of the Month for 2017.  It has a sort of nostalgia and optimism that's perfectly suited for these rather grim times, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

4.5 stars out of 5.

Pull Me Under - Kelly Luce

Pull Me Under was my Book of the Month selection for December.  I wasn't really thrilled with any of the selections, but I wanted to get two other books, and you can't skip the month and still do that, so I went with Pull Me Under.  The story here is about Rio, originally Chizuru, who is half American and half Japanese, and spent the first half of her life there--though eight years of that time was spent in a juvenile detention facility after she stabbed and killed a classmate with a letter opener.  After she was released from the center, she moved to the United States, changed her name to Rio, and essentially erased her entire past.  Now married and with an eleven-year-old daughter, Rio Silvestri is completely disconnected from the life she once led...

...until she gets a letter that her father, a Japanese National Treasure and renowned violinist, has died.  Rio decides to return to Japan to attend the funeral despite the fact that she and her father haven't spoken in at least eighteen years.  She leaves her husband and daughter behind in the US, not wanting them to realize who she was in her past life, and jets off for the funeral.  Once in Japan, she runs into Danny, one of her former teachers, and basically invites herself along into Danny's life and onto a pilgrimage to eighty-eight temples that Danny has sent herself to doing.  Meanwhile she continues to avoid telling her husband what's really going on, despite his obvious frustration and knowledge that something is going on.

We know from the beginning that Rio killed someone, and that she doesn't really feel like a murderer.  There's a sense of disconnect from the actual murder and its aftermath and what her life has become.  That said, I still didn't like Rio.  She has this real sense of righteousness about her and is, again, a very selfish character.  I understand her fear that her husband might not want anything to do with her if he knows about her path--that I get.  But when she returns to Japan and forces herself into Danny's life, when Danny clearly does not want her there, and then inviting other people along, too...that was incredibly inconsiderate and very selfish of her.  She holds no consideration for other people and how they might feel regarding her father, and instead seems to feel that she should be the center of this trip even though she and her father have been completely out of touch for more than half her life.

There was some lovely writing here, and I feel like Luce got a real sense of Japan for someone like myself who hasn't ever been there.  I don't think Luce is a bad writer, not at all, and I liked how the story was constructed, all of the supporting characters, and how unique everything was.  I just didn't like Rio as a character or a person, finding her far too selfish for my tastes--refusing to be there for her daughter because her daughter was "testing" her, feeling indignation that her husband is upset that she was hiding her past for their entire marriage, etc.--and that really dragged down the book as a whole for me.

3 stars out of 5.

The Shipping News - Annie Proulx

The Shipping News was a pick for my reading challenge for 2016, for the category of "A National Book Award winner."  I thought it was going to be a real slog for some reason; it wasn't, but at the same time it left me baffled as to what makes a book a bestseller and award winner and what doesn't.

The main character here is Quoyle, whose family hails from Newfoundland but who was born and raised in New York.  Following the end of a terrible marriage, Quoyle takes his two young daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, back to Newfoundland along with his aunt, who is a professional upholsterer.  The town they end up in Newfoundland seems like a terrible place, which was one of the baffling parts of the book.  Objectively, it's horrible: car crashes and sexual abuse abound, and the food is, by all accounts, horrible as well.  The cliffs are charming despite the bodies found at the bottom of them; the house on the rock is charming despite the menace of the moaning cables and house's own background.  But somehow Proulx makes the place, food and all, seem charming.  But this was a baffling book overall, so that probably suits it just fine.

What's so strange about the book is that it can't seem to decide what it wants to be.  A narrative of a family recovering from loss and finding a new way?  Maybe; that's what it tends towards most of the time.  But there are also paranormal and supernatural elements, and elements of mystery and horror, that are never fully explored and are just kind of floating around the background.  And in the end, there's a startling lack of resolution.  The story just sort of...ends.  Now, there wasn't a real running "plot" to wrap up, but some of the elements are left hanging in a strange way.  For example, what on earth is up with Bunny and her apparent premonitions?  And what happened to her fear of the white dog, that just vanished?  And where did the house go?

Overall, I thought this was an interesting book, with some beautiful writing at times and a wonderful sense of atmosphere.  But I'm not sure what propelled it into actual award territory.  It's very confusing to me.  I've read so many books that are absolutely stunning that can't shoulder their way into the awards, and yet ones that have a few compelling elements but are overall just okay somehow end up being bestsellers and lauded from all angles.  If someone can explain this to me, please do.  In the meantime, I'd be up to reading something else from Proulx, but I don't think she's someone who I will search out as being on an auto-buy list, or whose back catalog I'll ravage.

3.5 stars out of 5.