New Century Reading

A Children's Bible

Well, this is a heckuva wild ride. I'm not sure what I expected, exactly, except it sounded intriguing. I wasn't expecting a page-turner that I pretty much inhaled. 

A Children's Bible is a novel, but also a parable or fable of sorts. Told by teenage Eve, it's the story of several well-to-do families who have decided to rent a seaside mansion for the summer. The kids and teens have had it with their parents, who are spending the holiday largely getting drunk. So the young ones have formed their own alliances and created their own diversions, many of which are dependent on ignoring the adults.

Then a hurricane comes, a hurricane to end all hurricanes. The adults are not remotely equipped, physically or emotionally, to deal with it: "For it was under the influence, when parents got sloppy, that they shed their protective shells. Without which they were slugs. They left a trail of slime."

The kids, exasperated, pack their things and leave, planning to go to one of their homes inland. But once they leave the vacation mansion, they discover that as bad as things were in the mansion, it's much worse outside. They end up at a hobby farm where one of them has worked and settle into what is an almost idyllic life. Until, suddenly, it's not anymore.

"Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending.

"Historians said there'd been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices."

And that's all I can say without spoilers. I found this a gripping read, and more than a little relevant to the things that are happening right now--pandemic, protests and riots, climate change. Millet's writing style is spare and straightforward. She's an expert at lulling the reader into complacency, then upending things with one short sentence. I don't believe I've read any of her other books, but this one shook me and echoed in my head for a while after I read it.

Hamnet

I've said before that I don't read a lot of historical fiction because it often seems that the authors feel compelled to put every last piece of research they did into the book, whether the reader needs it or not. Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy is a shining example of an author avoiding that. Now it turns out that Maggie O'Farrell also deftly avoids research overdose in her new novel, Hamnet. 

In this book, O'Farrell fictionalizes the life of William Shakespeare and his wife Anne (here called Agnes, which was apparently often used interchangeably for Anne back then), and their three children: Oldest daughter Susanna and twins Judith and Hamnet (the latter also being used interchangeably with Hamlet). This is not a spoiler--it's on the first page--Hamnet does not survive to adulthood, and four years after his death, his father produced the play Hamlet to audiences for the first time. O'Farrell is taking a stab at explaining how his young son's death brought him to Hamlet. Is she right? We have no idea. Much of Shakespeare's life, and the lives of his family members, are shrouded in history. This seems as likely an interpretation as any.

And the writing. Lordy, there is some gorgeous writing in this book, lots of gorgeous writing: "Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns."

The characters too, Shakespeare himself (who is never named in the text, interestingly) and his enigmatic wife: "She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be."

Out of a paucity of actual biographical information, O'Farrell created a rich, moving portrait of a marriage, of family, of grief and mourning. This one will stay with me for quite a while, I can tell already.

 

Amy and Isabelle

I first read Amy and Isabelle years ago and loved it, as I've pretty much loved everything I've read by Elizabeth Strout. (I also once had the pleasure of taking a weekend workshop with her at the University of Iowa, where I learned a ton.) It occurred to me recently to revisit her books in publication order, as I'm doing with Virginia Woolf, but I wondered if this book would hold up well, coming as the earliest part of her career and before winning the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge. 

Lucky me. It holds up incredibly well. And also provides glimpses into that prize-winning book yet to come. While this is a traditional novel format as opposed to the novel-in-stories about Olive and focuses largely on the titular characters, there are brief scenes of the secondary characters that tell us so much about these other lives. The town of Shirley Falls is drawn so vividly, as is the weather in the beastly summer during which most of the book takes place.

The characters are where Strout really shines. Everyone, no matter how minor, is drawn with care. Amy and Isabelle are daughter and mother, respectively, living in this small town decades ago. Isabelle is highly repressed and withdrawn, focused entirely on providing for her daughter and raising her daughter safely to adulthood. Amy is entering the teenage years and becoming increasingly resentful of her limited life. The simmering resentment erupts with a clash between mother and daughter that opens the door to family secrets being exposed and relationships forever changed.

At times I ached for Amy and Isabelle, in that hard place of a rocky mother-daughter relationship, all the misunderstandings and misinterpretations that characterize so much of human communication. A wonderful book from a writer who was just beginning a stellar career.

Orlando

I'm still on track with my project to read all of Virginia Woolf's novels in order of publication. Several years ago, I read four of her books with a group online, the four books that are largely considered to be her masterpieces: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves. Loved then (and still love now) Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. The Waves I remember as being difficult, but beautiful. Orlando, however, was an entirely WTF experience for me. I was utterly flummoxed. What the hell was this book even about? A person who starts male, lives for several hundred years during which he turns into a female and never grows older than 36? What now?

The group that read together at that time seemed largely split between those who loved it and those who felt like I did. Those who loved it also seemed to have some knowledge of Virginia Woolf's life and times, which those of us who didn't love it did not have. After that read-along finished, I tackled Hermione Lee's doorstep bio of Woolf, and then I tackled all five volumes of her diaries. Learned a lot, enjoyed learning, and felt it was time well spent.

But I still felt apprehensive when I approached rereading Orlando for this year-long project. Was it going to leave me as WTF as the first time?

Nope. Loved it. Loooooooooved it. Changed my Goodreads rating from 2 to 5 stars. 

The biggest thing I missed the first time around was the humor. I viewed Woolf as a Very Serious Writer, Whom I Should Approach With Utter Seriousness, Including a Furrowed Brow and Pursed Lips. Her diaries in particular taught me that she had a wicked sense of humor, and that knowledge alone was a breakthrough to reading Orlando. She has scathingly funny commentary on so many things--women's and men's roles in life, the role of gender, gender fluidity, the meaning of life, the literati, the Victorian era, servants, you name it, she's got something to say about it. At times, it's clear she's a product of her generation; the n-word comes in, and there are some rather colonial attitudes about other countries.

But mostly, there's beautiful, thought-provoking prose that's among the best of hers I've read. My recommendation if you're interested in this masterpiece: You don't need to do all the background work I did. Some time online learning about Woolf's life and times would get enough for you (or get a good annotated copy--I have a beautiful edition that unfortunately lacks annotation, and I plan to correct that and read it again with good notes) to understand what she's talking about. Particularly if you learn about her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, and Vita's lifelong passion of restoring Sissinghurst. 

Such a joy to revisit a book that confounded me and discover what others have loved about it. There's no one book that everyone will love, of course, but glad that I could come to love this one.

The Stone Sky

I loved the first volume of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, The Fifth Season. I loved the second volume, The Obelisk Gate. And now I'm happy to say I loved the final volume, The Stone Sky. 

In the first two volumes, Jemisin created a world filled with fascinating, flawed characters who are struggling to survive after an apocalyptic event that has shattered much of their world and left factions even more at odds than ever before. A uniting thread was the story of Essun, whose husband (in the first book, and right away, so not a spoiler) has killed their young son and taken away their young daughter. Essun wants her daughter back, and has spent much of the previous books both trying to stay alive herself and trying to find her daughter.

Jemisin came into this volume with a lot of threads to tie up, and she does it in an exemplary way, making everything feel plausible, but not making everything happily ever after. It was a deeply satisfying conclusion.

And it's unfortunately an all-too-relevant series of books to read in these troubled days, as Jemisin is not only world-building, but commenting on our own world, its systemic racism, the long-term effects of that, and how difficult it is to change it and find a way to move forward. How deftly she weaves the societal commentary into the action and world-building is amazing. 

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James is one of those writers that constitutes a gap in my reading history, so when a friend clued me in to a summer of online read-alongs that included this famous horror story, I took it as the sign that it clearly was. It's as much a story of psychological horror as it is supernatural, told in that grand old Victorian/gothic way.

The book opens with a gathering of people, and one person says he has a story to scare all of them. Naturally, they're all up for it. So he begins reading them a manuscript in his keeping, narrated by an unnamed governess. The governess has been hired to work with two young children at a remote mansion. At first (of course) everything is hunky-dory. She loves the children, they're perfect, the mansion's housekeeper is a delightful woman, the mansion is beautiful.

But the governess sees something amiss after a bit. Namely, she sees an unknown man in an upper window as she's out walking. When she sees him again outside the window of a room she's in, she tells the housekeeper about him. Turns out he's a former employee, and one not known for being a good employee. Not long after that, the governess sees a woman who she believes to be the previous governess--who is dead.

Is she seeing ghosts? Are the ghosts there to harm the children? Or is the governess hallucinating?

That's a question that--spoiler alert--James doesn't fully answer. That ends up being part of the book's attraction. It's a product of its time, a very talky book with most action occurring through dialogue rather than actual action (although there is some). And James is well known for his convoluted sentences, littered with commas. At times, that bogged the book down. Overall, though, the tension between the "ghosts!" and "hallucinations!" kept me going, right through to the ambiguous ending.

The book owes a bit to the Bronte sisters, I think. The structure of having a seemingly innocuous person telling the tale comes from Wuthering Heights, while the governess with the supernatural tale is straight out of Jane Eyre. A quick Google told me he had indeed read their work. I'm glad I finally read it, and now wonder about some of his other novels.

The Obelisk Gate

Recently I wrote about how much I loved the first volume of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, The Fifth Season. Now I can tell you that I love the second volume as much, if not more, as the first. 

Trilogies can be tricky. The first volume sets everything up, the final volume wraps things up in one form or another. The middle can sometimes be a slog. But Jemisin avoids that slog with some heart-pounding plot twists, as well as a new point of view. 

This volume, like the first, has a lot to say about racial inequality and racism, systemic and incidental. But it's woven so tightly into the story that it doesn't feel like it slows the story's progress in any way. 

There's not much I can say about the plot without going into spoilers, but let's just say I had a hard time putting the book down, and I'm launching straight into the final volume. Part of Jemisin's strength in a writer resides in the characters she creates, who are complex, difficult, and wholly believable. She's also fantastic at creating visual scenes. I've read that these books have been optioned for a TV series, and I could truly see this being the next Game of Thrones. It deserves to be on a screen just for the eye candy that her worldbuilding has created. 

The Mercies

Kirin Millwood Hargrave's novel The Mercies is a ripping good read. Set in a tiny village on an Arctic Norwegian island in 1617, the book opens with an unexpected, dreadful storm that wipes out nearly all the village's men, who were out fishing. The women of the town have no choice but to try and recover, even while dealing with their grief at losing husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons. Maren is one of the women; she lost her father, brother, and fiance, and now must work to keep her mother and pregnant sister-in-law fed and healthy. 

The town's pastor perished as well, and soon a new one comes to replace him. He is shocked to find that some of the women have taken it upon themselves to go out fishing--man's work! No matter if there are no men to do it. Soon a Scottish man, Absalom, and his Norwegian wife, Ursa, arrive to oversee the religious life in the town. Almost immediately, the village begins to crack into factions. There are some villagers who believe in the old Lapp ways of runes and wind-weaving. But to Absalom, this is witchcraft. And there's only one thing to be done with witches--including Maren's sister-in-law, who refuses to go to church.

Grief, religion versus old ways of belief, village hierarchy, witch trials--all this and more. But at the heart of the story is the growing relationship between Ursa and Maren, both isolated and lonely. Ursa was essentially sold into the marriage by her father and is desperately homesick for her old life in the metropolis of Bergen. Maren is isolated between her grieving mother and sister-in-law, especially as those two end up on opposite sides of the religious schism. 

Author Hargrave is one of those excellent historical fiction writers who trusts her readers enough to say, "Hey, this is on this remote Arctic Norwegian island in 1617, let's go" and understand that most readers will understand that things look different than they would in 2020. She brings in enough period detail to set the scene, but she uses it to flesh out the characters rather than stopping the action to boringly describe things. She has a fine grasp of women's relationships and how they can turn on each other. The one thing that I could quibble about was the character of Absalom; Hargrave seemed to try to make him complex and contradictory, but at times, it didn't quite fly. But that didn't matter to me as much as the rest of the characters, who were compelling. 

The Fifth Season

Wow, what a great read The Fifth Season is. And lucky for me, it's the first book of a trilogy, so I have more to look forward to.

The Fifth Season takes place in a fictional land called the Stillness. There, a type of people called orogenes have very specific skills: They can essentially become part of the earth and literally move mountains or stop earthquakes. But while these skills are valuable, orogenes in general are not respected by those without the skills.

We see how this lack of respect plays out through the eyes of three women: Essun, whose son has just been killed as the book begins; Syenite, an orogene who is paired with another high-level orogene in hopes of producing offspring that will also be high-level; and Damaya, whose parents have just realized she's an orogene and have given her away to an orogene master. Along the way, they travel across various parts of the Stillness, which has recently witnessed a devastation known as the Fifth Season, a time of great destruction and turmoil that can cause a reset in humanity. 

It's a tough book to summarize. But author N.K. Jemisin is a master world builder. She doesn't drag the plot down while creating this world, just gives enough to orient the reader and then returns to developing her characters and moving the plot along. She also provides social commentary extremely relevant to today's world, and she does it with a deft hand; the book never slows down or feels preachy. 

There's a plot twist towards the end that I saw coming, but I was so engrossed in the story that I didn't mind. Now I just have to wait impatiently for the next book to arrive in my mailbox, so I can dive back into this world and see what's coming next.

A Month in the Country

This is an odd little novel, in which not a whole lot actually happens, and yet it's a deeply satisfying read. It's short--135 pages--but I found myself slowing down, not wanting to go too fast. It's the story of Tom Birkin, a man physically and emotionally wounded by his service for Britain in WWI and a miserable marriage. Tom has an unusual calling: He can uncover long painted-over murals. The small town of Oxgodby has summoned him to uncover one in its church, at the direction of a wealthy woman who has died, but left money in her will for this activity. 

The head of the church is far from excited by this work, but he has no choice but to have Tom do it and pay for it. So Tom spends a summer in this painstaking, slow activity, and in the process gets to know the townspeople. He's a curiosity to them as much as they are to him. Slowly Tom works himself out of the numbed misery he's been in from the war and his marriage and begins to find possibilities he didn't know existed.

Which is not to say this is a treacly, feel-good book, but more a bittersweet, wistful one. Author J.L. Carr's writing is beautiful and evocative, and capable of producing surprises. This one had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while, and I'm glad I took it down and read it.