New Century Reading

The Wall

I've said before that I'm a bit of a hard sell on dystopia or post-apocalyptic books. This one falls into the category of books that worked for me in those categories.

The book was originally published in German in 1968, but it feels timeless. The unnamed narrator has gone to visit friends in an Alpine hunting lodge in spring. Her friends decide to go into the local village for a drink one night, and she stays behind. When she wakes the next morning, she's alone. Alarmed, she tries to walk into the village to find them, and walks into a wall. Literally. A clear wall that has arisen overnight, blocking her from the rest of the world, and the rest of the world from her.

It soon becomes apparent that having stayed in the hunting lodge saved her life. From behind the wall, she can see a nearby farm, and realizes the old farmer couple are dead (they're outdoors). Behind the wall, it's our narrator, a dog, and a cat. It's up to her to try and survive, even as she slowly realizes no one is coming for her. There are no planes, no radio connection, nothing. 

This is a book without much of a plot. Mostly it's the narrator trying to come to terms with what has happened and figuring out how to survive, even though that means doing things like killing deer for meat when she's extremely fond of animals and doesn't want to harm them. She has a few basic skills and acceptable physical strength to get her through the most primitive tasks, but she's not superhuman. But she is human, and her emotions and how she copes with them and overcomes them to focus on the arduous task of staying alive--even if she's not sure why she should stay alive--make up a large part of the book. 

Part of my problem with dystopia comes with books like Station Eleven, in which people hang out around the Great Lakes and yet never seem to worry about preparing for winter. The Wall doesn't have that problem. Surviving each season, finding food and figuring out some ways to preserve it when possible, caring for the dog and cat--there are all real and persistent problems. 

But the book is also about the human condition, as cliched as that sounds. It's one I'll return to.

My Sister, the Serial Killer

Hoo boy, this book. Korede has a sister, Ayoola, who has the unfortunate habit of doing away with boyfriends that annoy her or she tires of. Korede, a nurse who is all too aware that her sister got all the looks and charm in the family, is the one who keeps Ayoola from being discovered, a task both embittering and binding. But is blood--the blood of vanquished beaus--really stronger than water? 

This is a quick read, darkly funny, with some salient points about family and what we do to protect them. There were also unfortunately some plot twists that I saw coming a mile away. That brought my enjoyment down a tad, but not enough to keep me from finishing the book, or being happy that I did. But I wouldn't feel like rereading it to see what I missed in the story's layering, because I didn't miss anything. That said, the ending itself was a stunner, and in a good way. So: Quick, darkly funny, somewhat predictable, yet still a fun read. 

The Year We Left Home

This is a mixed bag of a book. It's a novel in stories, focusing on an Iowa family starting in 1973 and carrying them forward 30 years. It's about topics big and small: the farm crisis of the late 20th century, the fallout from the Vietnam War, the rapid changes technology brought to the world and to the economy for the former; a close look at family relationships, the mundane and the tragic that befall them for the latter. 

It's primarily about siblings Ryan, Blake, Anita, and Torrie, and their cousin Chip. Ryan is a bit of a drifter, a very passive person who lets life happen to him through things major and minor. Anita has the aspirations of many small-town Midwest girls of her time: Get married, have kids, keep the perfect home. Torrie is the youngest, a bit of a brat who unexpectedly finds a different direction. Blake gets the least attention as the son who stays in town (as opposed to Ryan, who drifts away) and becomes a builder and remodeler. Chip is a damaged Vietnam vet who keeps in touch with Ryan, and their paths cross in not always believable ways. Throughout the decades, they separate, come together, note each other's changes and choices, as the outside world has effects not entirely welcome.

In the end, the reason I found this a mixed bag is that while I found Anita's and (especially) Torrie's storylines compelling and interesting, Ryan and Chip, not so much. Ryan's passivity becomes dull after a while. Anita may be annoying at times, but at least she's trying to do something, not just let things happen to her. There's not enough of Blake to care, and Chip seems like a bit of a deus ex machina, dropping in to move things along for Ryan. 

It's a shame, really, because the parts I liked, I liked a lot. Thompson is a strong writer, and there were many sections I highlighted or marked with heartfelt exclamation points. But the book would just have been so much stronger if she'd focused on the women. Or found a way to make the men more compelling. 

A House in Norway

Oof. This is a short, thought-provoking, disturbing little novel out of Norway. Alma is a divorced textile artist with grown children who has made a comfortable, if not wealthy, life for herself. She lives in a seaside cottage in Norway that she can afford because she rents out an attached apartment. She considers herself a feminist, a social liberal, but in reality, she's not much connected to the world around her; her artistic process when creating her artworks is comprehensive, time-consuming, and involves pretty much shutting the rest of the world out. 

When a young Polish family applies to move into the apartment, she accepts them without much concern and doesn't even push them to make the supposedly required deposit. They seem like ideal tenants; the dad even does some renovation work in the apartment, which Alma accepts as in lieu of the deposit. 

All seems especially well when Alma receives a prestigious--and profitable--commission from a national organization. But all is not well with the Polish tenants, and gradually Alma is both drawn into and repelled by learning more about them. The little she learns sets off a set of chain reactions in her emotionally, in which she begins to make assumptions. Really big assumptions.

This book is so unsettling because it's taking place in the head of a person who is complacent about her political beliefs, but has never really had them challenged. And it's perhaps a different view than journalists have taken in the past few years. Instead of looking at one large disenfranchised group of people who hate another group of people, here we're looking at one person who believes she doesn't hate, but when confronted with one small example of another group, begins to have misgivings and starts to wonder about that group as a whole. Which I suspect happens more than we know, unfortunately. 

The book is told through long blocks of text, with run-on sentences that can slow the reading, but I don't mean that in a bad way. It fits the main character and really brings us into her head, even though it's in third person. Alma is in a state of not being terribly self-aware, yet slowly--painfully--becoming self-aware, in bits and spurts. During her research for the large commission, she uncovers a story from decades ago about a woman who was unfairly locked up in a psychiatric hospital, largely because she was an ungrateful wife who ran away from her dour husband, and it draws her to an unpleasant conclusion about herself:

"Having recently read about the narrowness of women's choices a century or two ago, it had occurred to [Alma] that had she lived back then, there was a strong possibility that she too would have been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, since she too struggled with norms and following the dictates of the day. Then she checked herself and blushed at the courage she had just attributed to herself. The chance were much greater, indeed close to one hundred percent, that she would have submitted to poor conditions rather than run away from anything. She would have accepted her restricted sphere and limited opportunities, or worse, believed them to be the most natural thing in the world. Hindsight and retrospective bravery were so easy."

Alma is highly flawed, unreliable, at times unlikable, but it's hard not to see aspects of her in many people, including myself. She's someone whose basic life assumptions haven't been tested much. That pertains to a lot of people today. And that's what makes this a worthwhile read and, I suspect (and will eventually find out), a worthwhile re-read.

Ordinary Grace

Earlier this past fall, I read my first William Kent Krueger novel, Desolation Mountain, which I liked quite a lot. Doing some reading about him, I found that he's got a very popular series featuring Cork O'Connor, but his novel Ordinary Grace, which won an Edgar Award, is a stand-alone book which has gotten a lot of acclaim. I'm not always up for committing to a series, so I decided to read the stand-alone next.

Boy howdy, I loved it. It's not perfect, but the imperfections were things I could let go. Perhaps the biggest imperfection was Krueger's attempt to include a Native American character that basically served only to break up stereotypes. That's a worthy goal, certainly, but when I sit back and look at the story as a whole, removing that subplot changes nothing in the book. I appreciate Krueger wanting to do that, but I wish he'd either done more with it, or done away with it.

The book is told by a man named Frank who looks back at his youth from 40 years in the future. He spent some years in a fictional Minnesota town bearing more than a small resemblance to New Ulm, where his father was assigned as a Methodist pastor. Specifically, Frank is looking back to the summer of 1961, which was a summer that would forever affect his family's lives going forward, starting with the unexpected death of a child on railroad tracks, and going forward to a teenage girl disappearing under mysterious circumstances.

I figured out about halfway through what the mystery was and who was guilty, and normally, that would annoy me. But I was so invested in Frank, who's an endearing and exasperating young man, and his younger brother, Jake. Their parents struggle with some problems of their own; when they got married, Frank's father was on track to become a hotshot lawyer, but ended up in WWII. When he returned, he had changed dramatically and decided to become a minister. This was not what Frank's mother thought she'd signed up for, and her resentment is still simmering years later.

Bottom line: The characters here are more important than the mystery, which is my favorite kind of mystery. Krueger nails small-town life in 1960s Minnesota, and he nails the difficulties of growing up at any time, or trying to grapple with tragedy and religion in all its forms. It's a lovely book, and I'm so glad I read it.

Louisiana's Way Home

Recently I read and loved Kate DiCamillo's Raymie Nightingale, and especially loved the character of Louisiana Elefante. Well, DiCamillo obligingly wrote a book just about her that takes place after Raymie Nightingale. 

In Louisiana's Way Home, Louisiana's granny wakes her up in the middle of the night (in 1977) and says the day of reckoning has arrived, and they must leave their home in Florida immediately. This is not particularly unusual behavior for her granny, and off they go. But it becomes clear that Granny does not plan to return, and that's a big change. 

Louisiana is a little girl with a lot of hunger, physical and emotional, and Granny is pushing her luck just a bit too hard this time. When they land in the town of Richford, GA by accident after Granny desperately needs some dental care, it looks like they'll have to stay put a while. That's a hardship to Louisiana, who is humiliated by the highly suspicious (and not entirely incorrectly so) owner of the motel they stay at. But soon she meets a young boy who has a crow for a friend--a friend who can get her more food to eat.

And things then go even further downhill. Louisiana, who is telling the story, makes it clear from the get-go that this story has a good amount of sadness in it. I've talked before about DiCamillo's willingness to write about hard stuff for kids, and she hasn't backed off on that here. There are times when I choked up--something that rarely happens when I read.

There was an interesting review of this book on Goodreads that talks about how often DiCamillo's children are living without a safety net, which is something adults find difficult to read about. But the reviewer (sorry, just went back to look for it and couldn't find it) notes that in DiCamillo's work, these children are often living in a real-world version of a fairy tale. What child in a fairy tale has a safety net? 

It's a slight spoiler to say that the book doesn't end badly. But Louisiana goes through some hard things and learns some hard truths before she gets there.

I loved it. It made me weepy and wishing Louisiana was sitting at my kitchen table so I could make her a big pan of tuna noodle hot dish followed by chocolate cake with ice cream. DiCamillo is a blessing.

Convenience Store Woman

Oh, man, this is a sneaky little book. Keiko is someone who has always had trouble fitting in, from a very young age. She's extremely literal and practical; when a playground fight breaks out at her school and someone calls for someone to stop it, she calmly picks up a shovel and bashes the head of one of the fighters. Mission accomplished, fight over. And yet the school and her parents don't seem to think that was a good idea on her part. Imagine that.

At age 18, Keiko is wandering aimlessly, trying to figure out how to fit in so as not to make others uncomfortable. Her sister is a great help, teaching her phrases and responses that will seem acceptable to most people. But when Keiko discovers a new convenience store about to open and is hired for a job there, it seems she has found her place. The store offers routine, set expectations, even a series of phrases to be used with customers every day. Keiko has found a place she belongs, a place she can excel.

And for the next 18 years, she does excel. But then society starts noticing that there's a 36-year-old woman who not only isn't married with children, but isn't dating anyone, and apparently never has. Well, that's not a good situation, right? So poor Keiko finds herself under scrutiny, with people disparaging her job and her singleton status. 

But Keiko comes up with a plan.

And that's all I'll say about that. 

This is a cheeky book, subverting expectations, and making some very pointed commentary on societal expectations. I've seen people comment that they think Keiko is on the spectrum. I'm not in a position to judge, and I'm hesitant to make that statement, especially given some of Keiko's extreme solutions to life's problems. I will say that she is a singular person who's aware that she's different and has developed methods of trying to--maybe not fit in, even if that's how she describes it, but escape notice while keeping her routines and her life in the order she prefers. And who are we to say her way is wrong?

In her own way, Keiko is self-aware, and she's also got more understanding of other people than she realizes:

"They were harsh words, but he uttered them so quietly I somehow didn't get the feeling he was all that angry. From where I stood, there were two types of prejudiced people--those who had a deep-rooted urge for prejudice and those who unthinkingly repeated a barrage of slurs they'd heard somewhere. [He] appeared to be the latter."

And: "The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of."

At the very least, I'll be more aware of my interactions with convenience store women--and men--in the future.

 

Laurentian Divide

When I posted about the first book in Sarah Stonich's Northern Trilogy, Vacationland, I noted that it was flawed, but I liked enough of it to read the next book. So I did; Laurentian Divide is the second book. And like the first, I found it flawed, but likable. Mostly.

We're back to Hatchet Inlet, the fictional setting of Vacationland, and many of the same characters are here. The story is centered, somewhat, on widower Alpo and his fiance, Sissy, and Alpo's adult son Pete. But like the first book, there are many other characters, a few too many. The story told between these three is plenty to fill a book. 

The story opens promisingly at the town diner where Hatchet Inlet's residents are getting worried: the eccentric Rauri Parr, who is the last resident allowed to live in the adjacent Reserve (think Minnesota's Boundary Waters), has not appeared in town since the ice went out on the lake. The residents worry: What happened? Is Rauri dead? He lives in a very remote place, difficult to get to, should someone check on him? (Side note: Rauri appears to be a tip of the hat to Dorothy Molter, the last resident of the Boundary Waters.)

Great opening, but then the book immediately goes into backstory, something that happens over and over--and over and over--again. It was so frequent that I found myself pulled out of the story, sitting back and thinking, Did I need to read this scene, did I need this knowledge, just now, just here? And the answer the majority of the time was: No. I did not need that info. Worse, the backstory had the effect of diminishing the tension in several key scenes. If all this backstory was so important, I think the book would have been better with a chronological structure.

It's a shame, because the parts of the story told in the present time were really good, really interesting, and I loved many of the characters. But between the backstory and the too-quickly and too-neatly-tied-up ending, I ended up disappointed.

Yes, I'll read the third book, because I want to see how this all plays out, and the parts that are good are really enjoyable. But I'll come at it with a bit of concern.

Eternal Life

Rachel began life over 2,000 years ago, and is still around, thanks to a vow she took to give God her death in exchange for saving the life of her young son, who was very ill. At the time, it seemed like a great idea, but in reality not so much; the son eventually grew up and died anyway, while Rachel can't die. Ever. Even when she tries to die, she awakens as a younger version of the self she tried to kill.

She's not entirely alone. Her son's father, Elazar, took the same vow. It's tricky, because Elazar may be the son's father, but he wasn't Rachel's husband. He's obsessed with Rachel and stalks her throughout the centuries as they both marry again and again, have more children, see times changes, move to different continents, and yet always, always see their families age and die.

This is such a great premise, and author Dara Horn starts well. The book travels back and forth in time, and Horn doesn't bog down in historical details, even though she's clearly done the research. But even though it started promisingly and hooked me right in, by the end (and it's not long, only 233 pages), it didn't feel fully developed. Rachel is a bit one-dimensional; there are scenes between Rachel and Elazar that began to feel repetitive; and even though Horn went back and forth in time, I think she really wanted to write an entire book about the First Jewish-Roman War, and ended up conflicted between doing that and exploring the themes of immortality and why that's a positive or a negative. She probably could have done two separate books, one more focused on the immortality aspect which would have helped flesh Rachel out more thoroughly. Still, an interesting topic, and hopefully someone else could pick it up and run with it.

Raymie Nightingale

Raymie is a little girl in 1975 who is highly motivated. Her father has just left her mother for a dental hygienist. Raymie is sure that if she can just win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire contest, then her picture will be in the paper, her father will see it, and realize the error of his ways. But to do that, she needs to learn how to twirl a baton. So she signs up for lessons with a local woman who, in her day, was quite the baton twirler. 

At the first lesson, she meets Louisiana Elefante, who also is desperate to win the contest for her own reasons, and Beverly, who has no interest in winning; in fact, her stated goal is to sabotage the whole event.

Obviously it's the start of a beautiful friendship.

Well, in Kate DiCamillo's deft hands, it is indeed just that. DiCamillo is a wonderful children's writer, and it's been too long since I've read anything by her. I was inspired to get this from the library after seeing that she has a recently released sequel starring Louisiana Elefante (who is incredibly endearing), and I had forgotten how wonderful DiCamillo is as a writer. Sure, this is quirky, but it's also deeply believable.

I've seen some discussion lately about whether or not children's books should be sad, or address hard issues. To which I say: Why wouldn't they? I mean, I'm all for The Wonky Donkey (which I bought after seeing the video and giggling myself silly). But for every kid who has a grandmother who reads them The Wonky Donkey, there's a kid whose father left with a dental hygienist, or whose mother hits them, or whose grandmother cares for them and they're not exactly getting enough to eat. Pretending those things don't exist doesn't help the kids who are in those situations, nor does it help the fortunate kids who aren't becoming empathetic and caring. 

So DiCamillo does a tremendous service by presenting these kids and their less-than-perfect situations, and making them personable and giving them things to care about that are on the surface less stressful. It's accessible for young readers and doesn't give graphic scenes of child abuse, etc., but presents all these ideas very matter-of-factly. And along the way, we have three young girls, all very different, who learn as much as they can handle about the realities of life--including the idea that sometimes, the thing you think you want isn't really what you want, and that unexpected grace can show up from odd sources sometimes.

I'm totally ready to read the sequel. I loved these girls and ached for them, and yet felt like DiCamillo is equipping them to rise above their circumstances and become thoughtful, smart, resourceful adults.