Review: 'Notes on Your Sudden DIsappearanace'

©2020 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance
By Alison Espach
Fiction
Henry Holt & Co.

Sally is in awe of her older sister, Kathy, in Alison Espach’s Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance. When you're in grade school, three years can make a big difference in how much your older sister knows. When you're in middle school and your sister is in high school, those three years make an even bigger difference.

The girls share a bedroom, where their names are spelled out in glow-in-the-dark stars. They also share a fascination with the star basketball player of their small Connecticut town, Billy, who is a year older than Kathy. Every tiny, fleeting encounter with him is treasured and dissected by the sisters. Billy appears to be an all-American prototype. But one day, he gets into a dare contest and jumps off the roof of the elementary school. He breaks a leg and becomes a hero to all the kids. It's also a sign that perhaps Billy is more complicated than he appears to be.

For years, the girls talk about Billy every night. Their infatuation never wanes.

Billy, whose father owns the local gardening store, works at the town pool's concession stand. The setpiece has the girls spending a day lounging by the pool, going over to the stand, watching what Billy does and how the other girls go over to the stand to flirt, the moms in a group by themselves talking about who knows what, Kathy acting like a true blue teenage girl who wants a boy's attention but doesn't want him to know it, and Sally trying to do her summer reading while keeping track of everything that's going on, and wishing she was older. This section is filled with what it is like to be all of those characters at those stages in their lives.

It's also a strong portrait of family dynamics, something that is a constant throughout the story with the two sisters and their parents, and their parents' wishes of what could have been. Their father, for instance, fusses over the big maple trees in the back yard whenever a storm is forecast. Those trees will play a central role.

Sally, frustrated at being 13, climbs the high dive ladder but instead of diving, falls off. Billy rescues her. Her mother is so grateful that she invites him to dinner. Kathy is mortified but it leads to their going out.

Kathy becomes Billy's girlfriend. She shares everything that happens with Sally. But Sally is not as forthcoming to her sister, especially when a chance remark she made once in elementary school is picked up again by some boys. She is attacked on the bus one day going home from middle school. Sally's encounters with Billy are limited to them silently waiting in the kitchen mornings while Kathy dithers about what to wear to school. The day he wants to know what she's writing in notes for schoolwork floors her.

One morning, the unthinkable happens. In all the years that follow, two of the three try to carry on with their damaged lives and heartbroken souls. They deal with friends who are not really friends. They deal with stricken parents who lash out. They blame themselves but never each other. And they talk to each other. And talk to each other. And talk to each other. They go to college. They go out with people. They break up with them. They go years without speaking but never forget the other.

What is remarkable about Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is that there is a tragedy anchoring the story. Everything that happens afterward is because of that tragedy. But this is not a morose book. It is heartfelt and looks for ways in which people carry on, for how they manage to get through their days and nights without the relentless crush of grief. There are piercing moments of joy that feel all the more earned because of what happened.

And, oh how to talk about the end without spoilers of any kind. Let's just say it is an ending I adored, and that the last sentence is one of the best I've ever read. With all the madness going on, it was a respite to live in Kathy and Sally's world for a day.

Review: 'Violets'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Violets
By Kyung-Sook Shin
Literary Fiction
The Feminist Press at CUNY

In a world of lost and missed connections, a story such as Violets seems particularly fitting. 

The novel, by Kyung-Sook Shin, chronicles the life of a young Korean woman born into loneliness. When Oh San was born, her mother suffered postpartum depression and her father left. She is raised by her mother and paternal grandmother, who constantly fight. She has only one friend, another schoolgirl with only one parent. But one day they become too close and the girl refuses to have anything to do with San again.

In the 1990s, San is a young woman on her own in Seoul looking for work. She tried hairdressing, such as her mother did, but hated it. She's been taking word-processing classes and would love to do that work at a publishing house, but loses out on a job because she has no experience. A flower shop has a hand-written note for a woman took look after the flowers in its window. She sees it, but backs away, then returns a few days later.

Oh San fills her days and sometimes her nights at the flower shop. The owner does not speak and would rather be on his flower farm. His niece is the one who runs the shop. Lee Sue-ae and Oh San are the same age and have both been through trauma in their childhood. Sue-ae rebelled but has returned to the flower farm and shop, and has come into her own. She is more confident and assertive, and becomes San's roommate. She brings light and stability into San's life.

Two men who come into the shop also come into San's life. One is a businessman who often buys flowers from the shop for company business. Choi is big, bold, polite but interested in San, and he terrifies her with these traits. 

The other is a flower photographer who comes in on assignment to take picture of violets. The unnamed man hates the assignment, hates the flower and is not quiet about it. But he is taken by the appearance of San among the flowers with her head down and takes several photos of her amidst the blossoms. It's not an important event to San but suddenly, without warning, the idea of the photographer as a man overtakes her. She is beyond drawn to him. The idea of him becomes her entire existence.

Everything that happens in this short novel, every character that comes into San's life, every idea, shows different ways in which people may have good intentions but cannot always be counted on to be that way. Violets is a searing look at ways in which women with open hearts can have them broken. Violets also is an open-hearted look at how women seek ways to pick themselves back up. As one character asks about herself:

Was I always this fragile a woman?

And as is said of one character:

She pretends to be strong and cold but she is actually sensitive and vulnerable.

Kyung-Sook Shin, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, has crafted a story that gives women a chance to reflect on ways in which they have let their best selves shine, even when the characters here do not, and those who would care about them the chance to see them for who they are.

Review: 'Circus of Wonders'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Circus of Wonders
By Elizabeth Macneal
Historical Fiction
Atria

A country girl, covered in birthmarks that make her an object of scorn and curiosity, is sold by her destitute drunk of a father to a traveling circus owner in post-Crimean War Britain. Just as Nell grows into her true self as the mechanical wings she performs with unfurl, so the story of all the characters in Circus of Wonders unfurls. It's a novel of yearning, sorrow and wonder.

Elizabeth's Macneal's second novel opens with Nell, a girl on the cusp of womanhood, entranced by the colorful handbills being put up around the village by a bear of a man. The man, Toby, is the brother of the circus owner, Jasper Jupiter. Jasper sees himself as the natural successor of P.T. Barnum and is determined to not fail as the master showman did. Nell draws the townsfolk's attention and flees to the sea, where she feels free in the water. Her ability to ride the waves and dance in the sea precedes her aerial performing in the circus. Toby sees her dive into the water and fears for her safety. He is caught flat-footed staring at her when she surfaces. The entire scene sets the stage for what becomes of these characters, from Toby introducing Nell to his brother's circus to Nell's way to be the queen of her world.

Circus of Wonders has overtones of the story and film "Freaks" in the way it takes us into the world of people who live being stared at by others. The comradery draws Nell in. So does the honesty:

"Where else can we be celebrated for who we are?"

"For how we look, not who we are."

Nell soon realizes that she can control the way people see her. When she flies during the show, she is the one in control. The crowds adore her. It is a power that helps her believe in a genuine chance of a life not spent alone, or as someone doomed to be the unwed aunt to the future children of her beloved brother and his betrothed.

Just as Nell once thought she and her brother were inseparable, so did Toby and Jasper. Jasper is the older and has always been the leader. Their father gave Jasper a microscope, while Toby received a photography machine. The microscope plays into Jasper's sense of being in charge, while the camera reinforces Toby's fading into the background while life goes on in front of him. Toby joins his brother on the Crimean battlefields. That's where Jasper and a new friend, Dash, turn into rowdy war criminals, killing with bloodlust and looting with glee. Toby is charged with creating pro-war propaganda, and sets up photographs that make the war look, well, civilized. 

It was astonishing, he added, what a difference modern machines made. They could offer an exact impression of how things were and have it delivered to thousands of drawing rooms within a fortnight. 

Or an exact impression of what was created to look like how things were. Something we are grappling with today in this era of misinformation and social media.

Jasper's ambition is the force that drives what happens in the narrative. He is part Icarus and part Dr. Frankenstein. He likens himself to both driven, doomed figures. Other characters' awareness about themselves and what matters to them do not stop him; sometimes, they are the impetus to his bad choices.

Circus of Wonders is filled with illusions -- the illusions of how war is portrayed, of how circus acts are created, of how people see each other. The illusions work together to reveal some poignant truths about how important it is to see oneself clearly, and to know when it matters to have a dream. Whether it comes true or not.

Review: 'The Sentence'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Sentence
By Louise Erdrich
Literary Fiction
Harper

Whether it's the past not letting go of us, or us not letting go of the past, many souls walk with ghosts swirling around them. They may be metaphorical ghosts bringing about tragedies that reverberate around the world, or they may be spirits haunting a bookstore. Both types figure in Louise Erdrich's The Sentence.

Tookie lives what may seem like a quiet, even mundane, life. But it's one she never expected to have after being sentenced to 60 years in prison. She agreed to go get the body of the lover of her crush from his wife, and transported it, plus more, across state lines. Yes, it is as wild as it sounds and Tookie's acceptance of that was a clear sign this is a character to watch and wonder over. She is released after serving more than 10 years and talks her way into working at Louise Erdrich's real-life bookstore. 

While in prison, Tookie became a reader. One of those people who live and breathe books, who will race through a book and then go back to the first page to savor every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every page.

One day, she sees the tribal cop who arrested her. Pollux always has been the one for her, and they are married. It's a good life, no matter how quiet it looks on the outside. Tookie treasures it, but is not surprised that there will be upheaval.

The upheaval arrives when one of Tookie's best customers, an annoying white woman who is one of those Indian wannabes, dies. Although Flora has died, she isn't gone. She's haunting the bookstore. At first, it's benign, even though it unnerves Tookie. But as with all stories, things change and build.

This is November 2019, one of the few remaining months before the world changes. Money is tight at the bookstore, the owner is headed out on tour (for this book) and people are starting to hear rumors about a mystery virus.

As Tookie and her family -- including her stepdaughter Hetta and her new baby, who were visiting but are now stuck together uneasily -- hunker down, the malevolent spirit that took over the White House casts a spell over their lives as surely as Flora has taken over the bookstore. Other bookstore employees are now hearing her. And nearly all of Indigenous women who work there have ghost stories of their own, even if they do not believe in them.

There is another harmful spirit that haunts Minneapolis, and its evil is unleashed when Derek Chauvin murders George Floyd. Even with the pandemic gathering force, many in Tookie's world take part in the marches and in trying to protect and clean up their city. During these events, of course Covid attacks a beloved character.

It is difficult to reach a resolution to ongoing events, although Erdrich does an admirable job of getting Tookie and her family through the initial phases. The Flora storyline is another facet to the idea of spirits, and approaches it from the aspect of how sometimes people are not randomly chosen by outside forces. For things to happen for a reason is a powerful human desire, and one of the joys of a well-crafted narrative is discovering how the why can connect to the what.

Throughout, there are two very strong storylines that make The Sentence another powerful Erdrich novel. Tookie and Pollux are two parts of a whole. Their personalities, their love, their essences, result in a lovely story.

If I stepped off a cliff in that heart of his, he'd catch me.

Dear Reader, I was captivated.

That this is a novel for all Dear Readers is evident in Tookie's love of story. The authors she handsells to customers make for a booklist both broad and deep. Erdrich even includes Tookie's top books in an afterword that is a delight to savor. Seeing beloved authors' names throughout the book also is a delight, including the few appearances Erdrich makes as a character in her own novel. 

One of the best is a customer Tookie names "Dissatisfaction" because the older Black man has read so much and is so choosy that it is difficult to satisfy his reading habit. Giving him a copy of James McBride's Deacon King Kong is a great scene.

It's also delightful to see how often Tookie and others gush over Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

Books are a lifeline to so many in this novel. The right one can be a special solace if, like Tookie, the reader realizes that even for those who do not believe in spirits, the past still exists in the present.

Review: 'Intimacies'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Intimacies
By Katie Kitamura
Literary Fiction
Riverhead Books

The connections we make with other people are based to some extent on what we know about them, which is guided in part by what they show us. The levels of complexity and ambiguity in what we see, if what we see is what is really being shown, and what we make of it can add up to a long-lasting connection or a severed one.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura chronicles these connections for a court interpreter in The Hague. The unnamed narrator is drifting after her father dies, her mother moves back to Singapore and New York no longer feels like home. At The Hague, she slowly makes a friendship, has congenial thoughts about her colleagues and meets a man. At an arts event, early in their relationship, a man who knows him tells her Adriaan is married and tries to both come between the new couple and claim her. It doesn't work, but the interplay between the three of them is fiercely emotional and yet quietly calm and civilized at the same time.

That tone, and the delicate balance between the surface of civility and the underlying deep emotions, is a hallmark of this short, highly admired novel (it made President Obama's list of favorite books as well as listed for the National Book Award).

Our narrator's work as an interpreter, and her understanding of that role, underpin the interplay between all the characters, especially as she tries to interpret what people are showing her and telling her. In her work, "there were great chasms between words, between two or sometimes more languages, that could open up without warning."

It's not just words; it's also actions that can be observed but perhaps not clearly or from the wrong angle, as when our interpreter sees three men slowing making their way down the street in an odd fashion. She realizes two of them are picking up cigarette butts dropped all over the streets of what appears at first to be a clean city, while the third follows them vacuuming up the small bits of trash. 

The author shows how what we interpret what we see in other aspects of life. The interpreter's friend introduces her to another friend. This new woman is the sister of a man who was viciously mugged near the first friend's apartment. This man, and what the interpreter sees him doing, are open to more than one meaning, until the truth settles in.

The interpreter also is assigned to the trial of a would-be dictator who is responsible for the murders of many people in his country. Of course the dictator's demeanor is never that of an evil monster, and that ambiguity about what people are capable of while appearing as something else is striking. Complicating the interpreter's work is the new lead defense attorney, who is the man that attacked her lover and tried to put the moves on her at the arts event. His actions are at times bizarre, and there is little ambiguity about his character. 

The attorney is a bit like the man in a real painting that is described in some detail as the interpreter views it during another art show. Judith Leyster's "Man Offering Money to a Young Woman" is a dual painting from the mid-1600s, painted by a woman in her 20s. The man is hovering over a woman working on a hand-sewing project. His look can be seen as either arduous, according to the author, or conceited. The woman looks fearful. The money in his hand isn't apparent at first, but it's there. He's treating her like an object of commerce. The other title of the painting is "The Proposition".

The painting operated around a schism, it represented two irreconciable positions: the man, who believed the scene to be one of ardor and seduction, and the woman, who had been plunged into a state of fear and humiliation.

More than one man in Intimacies uses women as objects of desire, of acquisition, as beings not even important enough to assassinate. Not all the women are sincere in what they are pursuing, and why, either. This is depicted more as an observation of the breadth and depth of human nature, rather than a judgment that some people are mostly good and some are mostly not. It's also an observation on our world, as seen while riding on a bus past The Hague's secure jail:

But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in -- this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.

When the trial comes to an end after months, the interpreter notes that reporters who covered the opening and stayed away until the end will use pieces to form a narrative:

They had mere fragments of the narrative, and yet they would assemble those fragments into a story like any other story, a story with the appearance of unity.

This is exactly what the interpreter is doing as she observes the people she interacts with. It is dispassionately written, much as the author notes an interpreter or translator works, in that the person doing this work is trying to stay removed while accurately conveying what is being communicated.

Making conclusions early in the novel before revelations don't pay off. This is especially true of the ending. It was an unexpected ending and one that was joyous to behold. "Only connect" indeed.

Review: Tessa Hadley's 'Free Love'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Free Love
By Tessa Hadley
Literary Fiction
Harper

A beautiful evening, a beautiful woman preparing herself for a beautiful dinner in a beautiful English suburb in 1967 -- Tessa Hadley sets the stage for a novel that shows how everything brittle cracked and everyone had a chance to become their own true selves during the revolution that swept through this seemingly perfect world.

In the novel, Free Love, the woman, Phyllis Fischer, is a 40-year-old Mrs. Dalloway with a husband and two children. Everything is just so; she has worked hard to make it that way because that is what she is supposed to do. The scene is set as an idyll:

Life flowed into the room from beyond the window in its drowsy suburban evening stream: the steady relieving splash of a hose in a herbaceous border, confiding clack of shears, distant thwack of balls from the tennis club, broken sharp cries of children playing, fragrance of cut grass and roasting meat, jiggling of ice in the first weekend gin and tonics.

Even "her dress for this evening waited like a friend". 

Phyllis takes pride in what she has accomplished, but it is obvious there is something missing: 

In all that stillness one pulse was racing: hers. Her life was passing, passing.

Dinner will not be a dinner party, even though she has taken great care with the food and her costume. The son of old friends is coming. Phyllis is certain Nicky Peters will be as much a bore tonight as he was when they met once in his boyhood.

Meanwhile, Nicky doesn't want to attend a stodgy dinner with stodgy friends of his stodgy parents. He is getting sloshed at a pub instead, wondering if he can escape the entire evening. He shows up an hour late, obviously more than one pint in, and is most inconsiderate and rude. Phyllis's husband, Roger, who works in the Foreign Office, brushes aside Nicky's obvious attempts to be a rude boor. Their teenage daughter, Colette, is at an awkward stage and is as contemptuous of Nicky as Nicky is of all of them. Their young son, Hugh, is glad to not have to attend because of his age; he would rather not share his mother's company at all anyway.

But before the story threatens to undo itself with trivial domestic drama, Hadley throws serious ideas into their dinner conversation. For example, Nicky tried to do some writing while in Iran and Afghanistan, but realized that "I didn't know what those people were thinking. So there was only me on every page, thinking about them: that was fairly sickening."

Nicky also is quick to stand up for not being a member of the Greatest Generation (even if it wasn't called that yet):

-- I suppose you think, Nicky went on, -- that we'll never be heroes, because we'll never be tested in the way you were. But we don't want to be. At least I don't. I'm happy to come clean: I'd fail every test you want to put to me. And I don't care. I'm a coward and I glory in it. A world built by cowards would be a better place. We could all sleep in peace and read our books.

It's about this time that I begin to wonder if a bookcase is going to fall on Nicky, like Leonard Bast.

Before an argument can break out at the table, a neighbor phones and demands that Phyllis go out in the dark, to another neighbor's yard, to rescue a child's sandal thrown into a pond. It is during this errand that Phyllis and Nicky suddenly kiss.

And everything changes in every character's world.

Hadley gloriously conveys what it is like to be in the throes of passion, to wonder if one will be able to breathe properly if one cannot be with the beloved. But woven throughout even this aspect of the story are the various strands of cultural and political explorations. Wondering if one is a Marxist or a traditionalist or nothing at all is as tied to the Britain throwing off the constraints of post-war gloom as experimenting with pot or sex.

There are characters who change and grow, who become their best selves with acquired wisdom and depth. There are characters who realize they should let someone go, and characters who realize they never should have let someone go. Some of these characters are the same character. There are characters who harden their hearts and a reader's heart can ache for them.

Later in the novel, a shoe drops in the plot about connections. At first it seems an odd choice by the author. Then the other shoe drops, and the plot takes on the overtones of an Oscar Wilde play. A reader does not have to be concerned about disbelief remaining suspended to remain invested in how the characters react to the plot points. The characters remain who they are, and that results in a rewarding reading experience. It's been some time since I was book drunk with falling into a novel, but that is what happened with Free Love.

Review: 'Unplugged' by Gordon Korman

 ©2020 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Unplugged
By Gordon Korman
MG Adventure Fiction
Balzer + Bray

Jett Baranov, the only son of a Silicon Valley genius whose companies are like Google, Apple and Microsoft combined, is en route to Oasis, a wellness resort in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. He's not going willingly. He's going because he's caused one uproar too many. Accompanied by an employee of his father, Jett is determined to get back home or cause even more trouble. Or both.

Giving up all his devices and deprived of tech upon his arrival only makes him more determined, especially when faced when an all-veggie diet.

Gordon Korman's latest middle grade adventure, Unplugged, is not only Jett's story. There are other young teens at the resort, their families, his companion and those who run the resort. Magnus created Oasis. His number two is Ivory, a tall, tough-looking woman who specializes in hypnosis counseling sessions.

Magnus can do no wrong in Grace Atwater's book. She and her mother have been coming to Oasis for years, leaving her dad and dog at home while they meditate, zip line and paddle in the lake. Everything about Jett is wrong to Grace, and she wants him to leave as much as he does. Tyrell Karrigan is allergic to everything and hapless about just about everything. Brooklynne Feldman comes and goes to camp activities as she pleases. Grace and Tyrell aren't even sure who her parents are, but Brooklynne has been coming to Oasis longer than they have.

When Jett finds a baby reptile in the hot springs pool, the kids band together to take care of little Needles. They end up bonding together in a story that doesn't force them into becoming friends. Their bond serves them well when Jett's trips to town to get meat for Needles lead to a surprising discovery.

The discovery leads to a wild action adventure-style climax, but one that middle grade readers will enjoy. Korman, an accomplished author of dozens of novels, does a great job providing adventure and characters to care about. Unplugged is a fun and engaging novel.

Unplugged will be published on Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2021.