Sunday, December 11, 2022

Review: 'Bliss Montage'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Bliss Montage
By Ling Ma
Literary Fiction
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Who are we, really? Are we destined to bear the dreams and sins of our families, of our home countries, of our newly adopted homelands? Are we worthy of happiness? What is a facade and what is reality?

These themes are essential to the stories in Ling Ma's new story collection, Bliss Montage. They are sometimes fantastical, sometimes grounded so thoroughly in family that the narrators feel trapped or weighed down. In all of them, the female narrator seeks a way to do more than endure. 

The opening story, Los Angeles, gives the reader a sense of what to expect throughout the collection. A woman, married to a wealthy man, spends her days with 100 ex-boyfriends who live in a wing of their huge home. They go for drives, for shopping, for being out and about aimlessly. When her husband returns home from work, they fly up north for a fancy dinner, then return home, often after their young children have fallen asleep. The husband only speaks in dollar signs.

Two of the wife's ex-boyfriends are opposites, and the ones that mean the most to her. Adam abused her, Aaron loved her. "The wound, then the salve. Maybe you don't always know that you're wounded until you receive the salve." It's an idea that surfaces in different ways in the various stories. What do we deserve? When certain events happen, as they seem to inevitably do, how do we respond? Is there a way to outfox destiny?

The story ends with an attempt to catch up to the past, to capture it. In the following story, Oranges, that is what happens. Coming to grips with having been abused is treated in a realistic, searching fashion as far as the tone of the narrator's journey in catching up to her past. In the end, one character is trapped within themselves while the other goes forward.

The story G, the name of drug that makes its user disappear and able to wander freely, is about working to be oneself while anchored by a childhood friend, anchored to their Chinese-Amerian neighborhood where they were firmly anchored by their mothers. It is a tour de force in how the past can define a person, and how a person can feel unseen.

Do you now how easily the world yields to you when you move through it in an invisibility cocoon? No one looks at you, no one assess you.

That would be a dream come true for the narrator and her childhood friend. The idea is tied to the way the narrator, Bea (which can literally be Be in this story), became herself as her friend Bonnie spent hours of their childhood finding out what Bea thinks and feels. "It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someeone's gaze."

The transformations to come in the story are completed rooted in identity and being seen.

Another take on these ideas is presented in Returning, in which a young Chinese-Amerian wife goes back with her husband to his mid-European country for a traditional festival that is meant to be life-changing. Her husband talks in his college classes about fiction and identity:

Fiction can be a space for the alternate self ... It often serves as a fantasy space for our other selves.

While his book is a successful novel called Homecoming, the narrator's old college friend has published a graphic novel called Arrival Fallacy, a science fiction tale in which explorers return decades after they have been forgotten. The two stories merge in the trip back to the husband's homeland. The narrator's own novel, Two Weeks, is more about stasis after a missed connection and a plan falls apart. It's not surprising to wonder how that, too, is connected to this story in which it is presented.

There is a similar feeling in Office Hours, in which a college student becomes a professor and inherits her old professor's office. There is a passageway to a different world there, much like Narnia. As she begins to explore this other world, and delivers lectures about the journey in The Wizard of Oz, there is an undercurrent of what kind of life she really wanted to live. As her professor once said:

It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.

That is a core concept to the fantasy elements and situations in the stories of Bliss Montage. What is real, what should be real, what do we really want? The yearning is explicitly present in the final story, Tomorrow. Another Chinese-American woman is in stasis again with a job, an ex-boyfriend and a baby coming. A baby with an arm already out of the womb. But whether it's because the baby is already itching to get out into the world or not at home in his first home is unsure, just as so many protagonists in these stories are unsure of where they want to belong.

The penultimate story, Peking Duck, is a meditation on the power of mothers to play a role in their children's lives well past the time they grow up. Although it is tied to the immigrant story of the narrator's family, it is not limited. Like all the stories here, this tale involves making stories one's own story, even if they first were heard from others. The connections are strong as chains, sometimes lighter than feathrers and even occasionally softer than silk.

Review: 'The Book of Goose'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Book of Goose
By Yiyun Li
Literary Fiction
Picador

A young woman who grew up in poverty in post-WWII France marries an American and quietly raises chickens and geese in the States. She recently receives word that her childhood best friend has died in childbirth, the same as her friend's older sister. Although the woman, Agnes, is not yet middle aged, her account is as someone whose life has already been lived.

This story of mine expired when I heard of Fabienne's death.

That's because Agnes and her friend, Fabienne, once pulled off what could be seen as a remarkable act of creativity or a stunt with malicious overtones that got away from them. Fabienne was the stronger personality. She was always poking and prodding people. She would do things to people and animals to see their reactions. When not tending to her father's livestock and her motherless brothers, she ran wild. She was not loved, except by Agnes.

After the postmaster's wife dies, the poetry-loving man is on his own. Fabienne decides to poke and prod, so she and Agnes visit him every evening. Eventually, they show him the stories that Fabienne has dictated to Agnes, who writes down the tales of dead children. Devaux, when he reads the stories each night, calls them macabre, puerile, morbid, unbalanced, and waits with greed for each new one. 

He knows they are Fabienne's stories, and the two of them frequently spar. When she declares the stories are done, he dictates some editing changes that Agnes copies out in her handwriting. Devaux finds a publisher for them, and Agnes is whisked to Paris as a child prodigy author. Fabienne insists she go, alone, and later to England, again alone.

The rest of the story involves deceptions, betrayals and the fervent wish of Agnes to return home, to the days when she and Fabienne wandered around the countryside. But, of course, we know that even if that happens, it will never be the same again.

Agnes knows that for a time, she was considered a minor myth. And she knows that no one would believe her now. But she says that isn't important:

But is it a myth's jonb to make you believe in it? A myth says, Take me or leave me. You can shrug, you can laugh at its face, but you cannot do anything about it.

That mindset is embedded in everything Agnes tells the reader. She insists that a notable life and a dull life are the same, because both are lives that are being lived. 

"Any experience is experience, any life a life."

And yet, and yet. If that is so, why was she so determined to go back to Fabienne and to try to reclaim the past? Agnes is determined that she can only be herself when she is with Fabienne and that the two of them make a whole person. To Agnes, they wanted each other's experiences and to feel as the other felt, to go beyond themselves. For someone who states that "any life a life" Agnes protests a bit too much when the story reaches its climax. As she acknowledges:

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

The Book of Goose is not a story about contentment. Or love. It is a complex philosophical treatise about myth and reality, friendship and solititude, truth and deception, in the guise of a narrative. Of course this is an unflinching work. Because this is an author who could write a novel about a woman contemplating the suicide of a daughter (Must I Go) that she put aside when her son committed suicide. She wrote an imagined dialogue between her son and herself in Where Reasons End. This is a book to ponder over with its implications of how people consider themselves and others, and the places in which we exist.

Review: 'The Many Daughters of Afong Moy'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
By Jamie Ford
Historical Fiction
Atria Books

That feeling you can't escape destiny? Or that the person you've just met is someone you immediately feel you already know? Or wondering why people in your family feel the same way about things?

Those ideas are explored in Jamie Ford's new novel, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy.

Ford was inspired by his child's taste in music so closely mirroring his own, and wondering what happened to a Chinese woman who was put on American music hall stages as a curiosity in the 1830s to 1850s, only to disappear from history. She was known mainly as the Chinese Lady, but also was identified as Julia Foo-chee ching-chang-king, Miss Ching-Chang-foo, Miss Keo-O-Kwang King, and Afong Moy.

The family connections he explores through the lens of epigenetic inheritance. At a most basic level, we're talking family traits here. Or the way that some identical twins share so many things in common, even some who have been raised apart from each other.

But Ford and some researchers take it deeper, that there may be a connection between family members in which patterns are repeated from generation to generation because of the way individuals react to situations and feel about certain things. This includes intergenerational trauma, in which later generations learn ways to cope from their elders, ways that may not be healthy. There also is the concept of later generations feeling the burden or pain that their elders went through.

I know many of my relatives and I share similar taste in music, food and entertainment. But sometimes I wonder if there's more when it comes to things like a younger relative not getting over a first love, just like my great-grandfather (who made sure his wife knew she wasn't the one; what a rotten thing to do). Or knowing how to get somewhere in a large city when I'd never been there before (or studied the kind of map that would show me where to go).

What if, well not exactly the same two souls, but two souls who recognized each other, kept meeting but also were kept apart, generation to generation?

The women in this novel are the descendants of Afong Moy. The reader learns her tragic story, as well as what happens to succeeding generations of female descendants. The first daughter encountered is Faye, a nurse during WWII who feels an instant connection to a wounded pilot who crashlands his fighter plane and collapses in her arms. Later, she finds a photograph of her when younger, with the words "Find Me" written on the back. It's a photograph she never had taken.

No way was I not going to find out the mystery of that photograph.

Ford goes back and forth in time, dropping a trail of breadcrumbs through the lives of Moy's daughters. They include a programming genius whose work makes a female-based dating app a spectacular success, a poet in near-future Seattle who suffers from depression and a partner with an overbearing mother, a girl with a crush on one of her female teachers at the famed Summerhill school, a young girl sent back to China after a plague outbreak in San Francisco, and Afong Moy herself. Any single one of them would have been the strong lead in a historical novel.

But Ford combines both the historical stories with the metaphysical and emotional searches of each character. It's not just the meeting, and losing, of each one's true companion. It's also the way each character, in her own fashion, strives to devise a life for herself within the restrictions of her time and place. And the way none of them give up, despite the yearning, despite the loss, despite the traumas, no matter how injured they are.

Without spoiling the ending, let's just say Ford knows what to do with the narratives he has created. The Many Daughters of Afong Moy is a most satisfying book to read.

Review: 'Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney
By Adam Braver
Literary Fiction
University of New Orleans Press

When the Beatles' Abbey Road album was released in 1969, a giant billboard with the iconic album cover of the Fab Four crossing the street was put up on Sunset Boulevard. Paul McCartney's head was cut off and never found. 

Wondering why that might have happened is a starting point, but not the only point, to Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney. The novel by Adam Braver has an ensemble cast, all touched in some form by the missing billboard head, to bring to vivid life what an intense time the late 1960s were. There is a young couple who drive by the billboard and wonder, like Leonard Cohen, about the cracks that let the light in a chaotic world. There is a college student confronted by the FBI because a neighbor overheard her and her university friends talking about the billboard head but he thought they meant Gov. Ronald Reagan. There is a photographer in East Germany whose sister is working to get him and his work out. There is a young man whose girlfriend talks him into the performance art of dancing down Sunset Boulevard with only his head showing. There is another young couple who hide in a friend's bedroom after they are assaulted in a drug deal. There is a young woman who insists she is in the background of one of the six photographs taken the day the album cover was shot. And there is a young boy who carries the dream of someday finding Paul McCartney's head.

Some of the characters interact with each other. Some of them bump into each other years later, even if they don't know that they share a moment in cultural history. Some of them find closure, some find a way to carry on, some remain mourned for decades. Mistakes also are carried by souls for years.

Whatever bad things happened to each one of us, as they did, we accepted them as penance for that time in our lives when we might have been so much more courageous.

Braver's construction of writing the novel in suites keeps each story on track and the characters individually memorable. Most seek connection with the greater beauty of life, whether they seek a purpose to their days or not.

Those were the years when all I craved was connection, when you have the sense that any person that you might meet could be the one to change your life.

The author also brings back into focus just how intense that time was.

This was a tough time in our country and the world. We had seen a president shot in the street in broad daylight. We watched soldiers and the Vietnamese die on the nightly news. Police officers in Chicago had beat a young man holding an American flag. Black man targeted by cops and then jailed for defending themselves. For us, grasping at rationales had become a way of life.

It's easy to see parallels to today, when put in those terms. 

And because of those parallels, Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney brings to mind how individuals, whether they drift through life or are determined to follow a certain path, are affected by what is going on around them. 

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Shrines of Gaiety
By Kate Atkinson
Historical Fiction
Anchor

The apex of the Roaring Twenties during which nightclubs flourished and competed with each other for the patronage of the aristocracy, the underworld and those visiting the big city for thrills, girls leaving their provincial lives, a family that depends on each other but doesn't much like each other, a morose copper and the queen of night life released from six months in gaol all feature in Kate Atkinson's latest novel.

Shrines of Gaiety is a twisty tale that has the best features of both her Jackson Brodie novels and her historical works, especially Life After Life and A God in Ruins. This one begins with Nellie Corker leaving Holloway after being sentenced for violating liquor laws. The mother of six and owner of London's most popular nightclubs is greeted by her family, a throng of fans, the press and at least one policeman. With the copper is Gwendolen Kelling, a librarian from York who has come to London in search of two girls who ran away from home, but who really seeks to more fully live. She's going to spy on the Corker empire while searching for the girls.

Nellie's children includea WWI sharpshooter, the mysterious Niven; practical Edith, her mother's heir apparent dealing with an unexpected problem; two sisters who would rival the flightiest Bennet sisters; inept Ramsay who doesn't know who or what he likes; and the youngest, nearly feral Kitty. All play a role in what happens to their family empire after Mum is freed, especially with at least two factions trying to bring her down.

And, because this novel is written by someone who is a master of combining narrative threads of various characters, the relationships they form with Gwendolen and others is fascinating.

The others include that copper who was with her when Nellie Corker came out of Holloway. Detective Chief Inspector Frobisher has been assigned to Bow Street to clean house. He also has his eye on the Corkers. And spends a lot of time working because he doesn't know what to do for his depressed French wife, who is trapped in a world of her own pain.

The girls Gwendolen is looking for have stories of their own that convey what life could be like for girls who wanted more than settling for second best in York. Freda is ignored by her mother and thinks she may have a chance to become a famous dancer, performing in the spotlight every night. She convinces her hapless friend Florence to run away to London with her. Their stories show the dangers of shooting for the stars. 

But the heart and soul of this novel is Gwendolen. The former war nurse who became a librarian is an intrepid heroine who shines, even when she's not sure of where her heart is leading her. She represents what once was seen as the best of sturdy English sensibilities. As a portrait of was considered to be the genuine character of a nation, she anchors the serious commentary that in turn anchors the rompish aspect of the narrative. Both she and the novel are delights.




Review: 'The Deceptions'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Deceptions
By Jill Bialosky
Literary Fiction
Counterpoint

Some novels call out to certain readers to find them, so that those readers can be immersed in the feelings and ideas that make up the reason for the story. Such a novel for me is The Deceptions by Jill Bialosky.

The novel begins with notice of an upcoming book that promises to shed light on the relationship between two contemporary poets. The book, by a young woman academic, is entitled Vindication. Echoes of Mary Wollstonecraft are perfecty appropriate. For this is a story about a woman, about creativity, about communing with words and the poet's challenge to use words to make sense of ideas, emotions and events.

The novel then switches to the narration of a nameless woman, a middle-aged teacher whose latest book of poetry will soon be published. She isn't sure whether to look forward to or dread a promised review in The New York Times, especially if a certain misogynist writes the review. She is a person who is wrapped up in words, and has been for most of her life. She teaches classics to boys on the verge of manhood in a private Manhattan academy. Her husband is a research doctor. Their only surviving child, a son, is a college freshman in a small town.

As the story opens, she is anxious and her husband is angry. He focuses on television sports and they do next to nothing together. Of course it's been ages since they were intimate. How much of this is due to her anxiety about her book? About both of their concerns for their son? What about his work, which he doesn't like to talk about? And what about the Visiting Poet who was in residence at her school last year? What role does he play in her regrets?

To help steady herself, our poet spends as much time as possible in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a place she has frequented for much of her life, and she finds both peace and quests there. During her visits, the reader gets to see the works of art that are her focal points of concentration, and to ruminate on how the attributes of both the artwork and the diety portrayed propel her search for answers to what is causing her internal crises. These interior monologues, and a few conversations with museum personnel and visitors, are outstanding ways to work through the ideas that anchor Greek, Roman and Egyptian classical literature and dieties, and the way these ideas structure our culture today.

The classical references are especially apt because her upcoming book is a series of poems inspired by the myth of Leda and the Swan. That there is more than one way to view the story and Leda is woven into the monologues at the museum and the very fabric of the narrative. It's not an easy subject, but it is one that is tackled with heart and mind.

To compare and contrast our poet's family life, she has a longtime neighbor whose situation at times mirrors her own. Both couples had twins, a boy and a girl. Our poet's daughter died after one day. The other couple's daughter is like a foster daughter to her in their shared love of literature and the written word. Whereas it's not clear what happened between her and the Visiting Poet, her neighbor has fallen for her yoga instructor and knows she is now living her best life.

Before the novel ends, the reader finds out the mystery of the Visiting Poet, what kind of a book review is published in the Times and what our poet plans next. Because of the journeys she has undertaken at the Met, there is a solid foundation to her determination to be her own true self and to not be confined by the way a male-dominated society views the world.

Throughout The Deceptions, the author is willing to confront nuance, more than one way of looking at something and the lies people tell themselves, as well as others. As is noted while contemplating one statue of Heracles, pathos is an important aspect of this novel. Emotions are both acknowledged and projected.

The Deceptions is an engrossing, engaging novel. The reader does not have to be able to relate to every aspect of our poet's situation to connect with her thoughts and feelings. It is a novel that can stay with the reader for a very long time.


Review: 'White Horse'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

White Horse
By Erika Wurth
Horror
Flatiron Books

The late horror writer Peter Straub once told me, in an online interview, that he decided to write in that genre because of the freedom is gave him to write about all kinds of things. One short story of his in particular, about a boy who was bullied, showed me how true his statement was.

Among the indigeneous authors now writing in the horror genre, doing the same thing, is Erika Wurth. Her novel, White Horse, is ostensibly about what happens when a bracelet with power is brought to the protagonist. But this story is about a lot more, and it is a story told well.

Kari James has reached equilibrium in her once rowdy, rebellious life. She's still no pushover, but she has cleaned up her act and works long hours at two waitress jobs. Time off includes hanging out at the White Horse, a rundown Denver tavern that has a long history of catering to both urban and tribal Indians, reading horror novels and petting the saloon's cats while sipping beer or whisky. She's still recovering from the long ago deaths of her best friend and her mother.

That equilibrium is disrupted when her cousin Debby, who has a history of pestering Kari into not destroying herself, brings her a bracelet that belonged to Kari's mother. Her mother disappeared when she was two days old, and Kari has spent the last 30-some years angry at her. That her father suffered an accident that destroyed his brain in mourning her doesn't help. The moment Kari touches the bracelet, she sees ghosts from her past. First it's Jaime, her best friend who OD'd when they were partying hard, then her mother. Her mother's ghost is accompanied by the specter of evil following close behind.

Wurth is wonderful at describing what Kari and Jaime were like in their wild days, growing up in Idaho Springs, wishing for more, whatever that might be, and why Kari will always love heavy metal rock.

We'd hitched one Saturday night, ready for adventures of the kind that could not be had in a small town that sat at the bottom of a mountain, the trees swaying above our trailers, our dingy houses, our wild, furious hearts.

As the story progresses, Wurth uses the tropes of horror to tell the story of a young Indian woman who disappeared just when it looked like she had everything to live for -- a husband she loved, a new baby, a political cause. And this fits so well. The real-life monsters who abuse women, who kill them, who are frightened of them having a voice, are no less menacing than a grim paranormal creature of death. And because this is a horror novel, just as in magic realism, they are intertwined.

White Horse reaches its full narrative power as it becomes a story of individual indigeneous women and men who form alliances, who forge communities, who recognize their connections to each other as family.

Erika Wurth joins the company of such powerful storytellers as Stephen Graham Jones, Rebecca Roanhorse and Cheri Demiline, and authors who sometimes use the tropes of horror/magic realism such as the great Louise Erdrich, Richard Wagamese, Morgan Talty and Cynthia Letitch Smith.

They acknowledge the spiritual in life as well as the physical and emotional. They take full adantage of the folklore roots of horror storytelling to explore psychological aspects of the indigenious experience. They create characters to care about and insights into their experiences. This is storytelling to treasure.

Review: 'The Marriage Portrait'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Marriage Portrait
By Maggie O'Farrell
Literary Fiction
Knopf


She had
A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Browning's "My Last Duchess" was the first poem I studied in college that caught my attention and imagination. The story it tells of a young woman who seemed kind and interested in the world, who was not appreciated by a world-weary aristocrat, who died and who was not mourned, whose portrait was a curio among many for her widower, floored me.

How could anyone be that callous? How could anyone not appreciate kindness and beauty? How could "a nine-hundred-years-old name" be worth more than those qualities? Is the male ego that fragile? Is is an aristocracy thing?

These questions came back to mind while reading Maggie O'Farrell's latest historical novel. The Marriage Portrait imagines the life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici d'Este. The middle daughter of Cosimo and Eleanora de' Medici was married to Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, at the age of 13. This happened after her elder sister, also promised to Alfonso, died before the wedding could take place. Lucrezia died at the age of 16.

She is believed to be the subject of Browning's poem about a dead young wife's marriage portrait. The actual painting of her that inspired Browning, which was on display near his Italian home, although it was apparently painted some time after the marriage, makes one wonder what she was thinking. O'Farrell has some ideas.

In the novel, Lucrezia is unlike her sedate siblings. She is not only the opposite of sedate, she also is curious and desires to know things, to see things, to understand things. As a child, she crept down to the family's courtyard during the night when a tiger her father had commissioned to be part of his private zoo arrived. Mesmerized by the fierce, caged beast, she later gets to visit the caged animals with her older brothers and sisters. As the odd one out, Lucrezia is skilled at fading into the background, and does so to go to the tiger's cage. To stroke its magnificent fur. She is discovered doing so and is dragged away. Later, the tiger is killed when the doors to its cage and those of the two lions already in the zoo are opened. 

That part of the story is factual. But like deeds surrounding her eventual husband, whether her father had something to do with what took place is worthy of speculation. 

To anchor Lucrezia's fictional character to the real portrait, and subsequent fame through Browning's poem, O'Farrell's protagonist is a talented painter. Brushstrokes, use of color, the fascination of creating underpaintings no one but the artist will see are all fascinating and satisfying to the Lucrezia of the novel. The way that O'Farrell describes how these aspects of creating art giving meaning to her character's inner life show another interpretation to the complaints of the widower in the poem, who is peeved at not being on some mythical pedestal. Instead, the novel's Lucrezia is lost inside her art.

The truth is, though, that she is still caught in the microcosm of her painting: that is the only place she wishes to be. All other sights, all ther worlds, will be dissatisfying to her until she finishes it, until the painting is complete and will release her back to where she belongs. Here, in this salon, waiting for her husband to appear, an embroidery hoop in her hands.

Added into the mix are Alfonso's troubles with his Protestant mother, who has angered the Pope, and his desperation for a child. (The real Alfonso married twice more after Lucrezia's death but had no children.) If Lucrezia feels a bond with a different man, that could well be the last straw for an aristocrat accustomed to getting his way.

It is easy to see that a would-be empire builder, in an age when Henry VIII would be doing the same, only in public, would think murdering a wife could solve some of his problems and perhaps soothe his ego.

How much any of this is true is not the purpose of the story. It is the wondering about what drives people, what inspires or motivates them, what controls them, that makes The Marriage Portrait a fascinating look at how people with so many advantages can fail at life on such a grand scale.




Review: 'Haven'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Haven
By Emma Donoghe
Literary Fiction
Little, Brown and Company

Three monks leave a comfortable monastery a thousand years ago to begin their own community. Two were chosen by the third, who dreamed of perfection in worship and contemplation in the wilderness, away from the evils of humanity. They find Skelling Michael and begin the work of making their prior's dream a reality.

In Emma Donoghe's Haven, Artt has traveled the known world and is now visiting an Irish monastery. The food is plentiful, the abbott has a comfortable family life, the monks are hard-working. But he is not content. He eats little and holds himself aloof. As a famous and mysterious figure, he is fascinating to young Trian. The growing lad, given to the monks when he was 13, is a pure soul who loves playing music with one of the older monks. Cormac came late to the religious life, after surviving both battle wounds and the death of his family to the plague. He is content to live out his days with his brothers.

But in his dream of a new brotherhood, Artt sees Trian and Cormac as his followers. Although he resists the title of abbott, it's clear he considers himself the leader because he is the one who was given the dream. While Cormac and Trian want to take care of the basics, such as food and shelter, Artt wants to make a cross of stone and an altar. Because they trust his extreme views as faith, they obey.

As the conflicts between reality (eating, shelter) and divine (worship, copying manuscripts) take root, Donoghe also delves into the practical. She chronicles just how Cormac and Trian solve problems of survival with the little at hand. This fascinating narrative of how people created what they needed to get by in pre-industrial times grounds the overlying parable of how one determined man tries to make his vision real.

And that's what Haven is, a parable that delves into the differences between faith and religious doctrine, between perception and reality, between being in charge and being a leader. As the author gives the reader looks at their situation from each character's perspective, it is clear that all three are sincere in wanting to serve God. But they all three approach this sincere wish differently, because of who they are.

Trian loves being one with nature. The idea of being like a bird, able to exist in air, on water and on land, appeals to him. Having grown up in a fishing family, he is adept at scaling the rocks of Skellig and swimming.

... he finds himself wondering what it would be like to be equally at home on land, in water, and in air. To be powered by the breeze, wheeling and soaring, free from the weight that keeps other creatures shackled to the earth.

Cormac is a builder, a gardener and a healer. He accepts people for who they are.

After recounting a story in which time passed by while a holy man listened to an angel's song, Cormac shows a love of humanity:

It strikes Cormac now what a sad story this is. To be soothed with music and given a heavenly reward, but in exchange you've lost a century and a half in a blink, and all your friends are dead and buried ... If he'd been Mochaoi, he'd have preferred to sweat over every beam of that church than to dream away his whole life in an afternoon. Once childhood is over, don't the years pass too fast already, rollling over a man as fast as waves?

Neither one of them are prone to judge.

Artt is all about judgment. The scores of birds on the island drive him crazy. Cormac's stories drive him crazy. The two monks' wishes to create music, shelter, heat and food sources, to not be adept copiers of manuscripts, drive him crazy. It soon becomes clear that all of humanity and nature drive him crazy. Artt appears to wish, above all, to be pure spirit in worship. His desire leads, of course, to acts of hubris.  Does he have a death wish for him and the two men he called to join him in this quest? As he tells one of the monks:

Why dread sickness and death at all, when we should rather trust God to do with us what he will?

Artt's ego is definitely involved:

Artt finds himself wondering if perhaps tales will be told about him. Is it arrogance to think it?

The way he punishes himself also is ego-driven. No wonder when one of the others falls ill, his brother prays:

Don't dare die on me, our first season. Don't leave me here alone with a saint.

The real Skellig Michael has been home to monks for centuries. It's probably better known now as a key location in the last three Star Wars movies. The setting serves the story well, whether Donoghe's initial aim was to explore how and why monks first settled on that beautiful, harsh, remote isle, or whether she set out to explore the differences between love of humanity and love of God. Regardless of the inspiration, Haven is a calm and forceful look at the nexus of faith and love.

Monday, October 10, 2022

Review: 'Marigold and Rose: A Fiction'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Marigold and Rose: A Fiction
By Louise Glück
Literary Fiction
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

What is it like to become aware, to start to understand that there are things to see, to hear, to feel, to know?

Those ideas are explored in Nobel Prize-winning Louise Glück's Marigold and Rose: A Fiction

The Marigold and Rose in the title are twin baby girls. One is thoughtful and already shows she was born to be a writer. The other is beloved by all and draws people to her without even trying. They consider themselves half of a whole person, while always recognizing their differences. That they are different does not mean they are in conflict, and that is a lovely idea to see.

The slim volume begins with Marigold, the writer-in-residence, poring over an alphabet book of animals. It may seem like she is reading, at first, but Glück shows what the real situation is by revealing:

Of course she wasn't reading; neither of the twins could read; they were babies. But we have interior lives, Rose thought.

And oh how lively those interior lives are!

Besides the differences in themselves, they study Mother and Father in detail and love them for the different beings they are. And, just as they seem themselves as both a unit and as individuals, so they see their parents. It's a facile way of describing family dynamics that is more complex than first appearances seemingly reveal.

Marigold is a character who it would be fascinating to revisit throughout her life. Books are her great love, because she has already discovered one astounding truth about them:

Books did not judge you, Marigold thought, because they were full of animals. She knew from the dog animals did not judge you.

As someone who loves books because they don't let you down the way people can, and as a lifelong dog lover, oh how this resonates.

During the course of their first year, the babies disover and muse over the outdoors, incuding bunnies and flowers, Mother's feelings about a house compared to an apartment and going back to work, stairs and learning how to drink from a cup.

As throughout the work, the evening of their first birthday, when the party is over and night has fallen, is both descriptive and philosophical. Glück's poetical prowess shines in her writing and, because of the power of poetry, each word counts.




Friday, August 19, 2022

Review: 'My Government Means to Kill Me'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

My Government Means to Kill Me
By Rasheed Newson
Literary Fiction
Flatiron

A young man leaves his affluent Indianapolis home in the 1980s, lands in New York City and seeks well, not fame and fortune, but some of the lustier glories of the big city. And since he is a young Black gay man with unresolved sorrow in his heart, a flamboyant attitude and a quick mind, he can only be Trey Singleton in Rasheed Newson's My Government Means to Kill Me.

Trey is a teenager when his life in the Big Apple begins. He knows he stands out. Sometimes, he embraces it and sometimes, he acknowledges that it is not half of who he is.  From his first job as a bicycle messenger, Trey knows he doesn't fit in. He also knows he is going to have to take it if he plans to stay. There is an acknowledgement and honesty to Trey that is immediately endearing. 

Although he knows that "the average person was never going to bestow pity or mercy on me", he also quickly learns that "We are not so narrowly defined as society would have us believe."

Trey soon discovers Mt. Morris, a bathhouse that has not been closed down because of its mostly Black clientele. There, he cruises for quick sex and becomes friends with Bayard Rustin. This Rustin feels and sounds like the little I know of the real Rustin, whether he would ever have been in such a setting or not. Like all the real people mentioned in the novel, each chapter, or lesson, has a footnote when they are introduced that is factual. (Excuse me for a moment. Footnotes! Oh joy! Rapture! My nerdy little heart was delighted.)

Rustin is one of several characters who serve as anchors while Trey bounces around discovering the ups and downs of life in the big city. Rustin serves as both advisor and Greek chorus, telling Trey and the reader of how far things had come even back in the 1980s.

When Trey and his roommate can't pay rent, Trey plows through the old-fashioned kind of research, when one dug through paper documents in dusty basements. He then finagles his way into a rent strike against the landlord who is, of course, Fred Trump. The portrayal of that despot is both a clue into why his son turned out the way he did and a portend of things to come. It is brilliantly written, as are other setpieces with prominent conservatives of the era.

As Trey becomes more involved in his New York life, he is drawn toward activism. The rent strike is the tipping point. In this and all the outer things that happen to Trey, his observations about himself apply not just to the action at hand, but to him. To wit:

If we never meet our despicable adversaries, we'd never be forced to find out how brave, resilient, and cunning we can be.

This bit of wisdom applies to the trauma Trey carries from his childhood, when something happened that he was at least in part responsible for and which is the main reason he left home. In between episodes that portray 1980s New York City and the explosion of the AIDS crisis, Trey deals with his past. It will affect his future. And it will involve confronting demons, both those in his head and those in his family. But one of Trey's great strengths is his self-awareness and knowledge:

We could blame it all on our families, but then we'd never find the keys to unlock our cells.

This self-awareness and knowledge also leads to one of those big "oof" reading moments when the air can leave the reader's innards and tears may come to one's eyes:

What flesh-and-blood man was ever going to immediately recognize the inner beauty and value in me, then make the effort to machete his way through the thorny thickets of insecurities and defense mechanisms surrounding my heart?

As Trey becomes involved with ACT UP, the reason for the book's title comes to the fore. It is a brutal realization that this is how dire things were. And a reminder that we're not that far from seeing how dire things are close to being again:

The point is to let your bruised and bloodied bodies serve as evidence that the government means to kill you, if you so much as protest its bigoted policies.

The novel is not all doom and gloom though. Through all the ups and downs in Trey's life and those of his friends, there is a cheekiness, an earnestness and an honesty to the story that thoroughly anchors it. My Government Means to Kill Me is not only a brilliant historical novel of those times, it is a bold statement of how someone who could have been an outcast doesn't settle for being left out. 




Monday, August 8, 2022

Review: 'Night of the Living Rez'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Night of the Living Rez
By Morgan Talty
Literary Fiction Short Stories
Tin House

A young boy, living on the Penobscot reservation with his older sister and mother, gets older but doesn't seem to grow up in a beautifully written set of connected stories. Morgan Talty's Night of the Living Rez centers on David, or Dee, at different ages in a non-linear arrangement. Talty takes advantage of that narrative construction choice to show how, regardless of what is going on in our young narrator's life, there are some constants that affect everything about his life and the lives of his family and friends.

These constants are mostly not positive, which makes the positive parts stand out all the brighter. The stories also show how strongly connected the positive and not-positive are. In "The Blessing Tobacco", a young David visits his grandmother at her house. She is starting to suffer from Alzheimer's and thinks David is her long-dead brother, Robbie. 

Grammy keeps passing him cigarettes at the kitchen table. He hasn't smoked and is pretty sure he'd get in trouble if he did, but his mother told him to just go along with Grammy if she wasn't herself. So he smokes them and she keeps passing more to him, getting more insistent that he smoke them. So of course he's soon sick. Turns out Grammy was punishing Robbie for taking something that happened years before David was even born.

His mostly quiet mother and his usually distressed sister nurse him and he is sent back to fill his grandmother's wood box. The slight guilting, the quiet back-and-forth conversation that sends him back and the ensuing chat with his grandmother are realistically and quietly portrayed. It is real life. As they sit back down at the kitchen table, Grammy is herself and tells David a joke he finds so funny that he has her repeat it.

When Grammy has a bad spell later, the arguing that David's mother and sister had been doing is dropped as they unite in taking care of of their elder. She again mistakes David for her dead brother. Later, David dreams that he knew Robbie and has memories of them hunting or fishing together. The way the end of the story is written is indicative of why this book can take hold of one's heart and head:

"... and after all that we walked away through mud or snow until I stopped walking but he kept on going and going and going out there in quiet strides through a dark-pined forest until he was gone."

Gone in more ways than one.

David spends a lot of time with his friends. Whether they're playing an elaborate game of sticks and stones, or smoking, drinking and even doing drugs, the boys are together or looking for each other. They are just as apt to steal from each other as they are to give each other things. It's fascinating that they don't hold grudges and fall right back into hanging out together. David even spends significant time living at their houses when he and his mother cannot abide each other.

His father is mostly out of the picture. David's parents divorced when he was quite young and his dad moved away. He isn't a good provider and doesn't come to visit his kids, but when something goes wrong someone usually reaches out to call him and make him part of what's happening. And one of the other family members shuts him out. Again, the pattern is repeated.

The other major character is Frick, his mother's boyfriend who first appears in his role as a medicine man when Paige has a crisis. His role within the family has a most definitive trajectory:

He was a medicine man who had been forgetting to pray in the mornings and at night, forgetting to feed the spirits once a month.

For the most part, the fights and quarrels and bickering and hurtful things separate the characters. But then something comes up and, for the most part, they are there for each other. Throughout everything that happens to each family member in Night of the Living Rez, that love underneath the trauma holds:

Mom had driven fast. Real fast, and she watched me most of the time during the drive, as if I had been her road the whole way to our new home.









Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Review: 'Olga Dies Dreaming'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Olga Dies Dreaming
By Xochitl Gonzalez
Literary Fiction
Flatiron Books

Olga is a successful high-end wedding planner, daughter of Puerto Rican activists, and sister of a media star congressman. What's most important to her right now? Some dodgy paperwork to present her cousin with expensive, heirloom-worthy linen napkins at her upcoming wedding.

So, is Olga Dies Dreaming, the new novel by Xochitl Gonzalez, a frothy tale about a woman and her familia? Let's just say it has a lot to say about family dynamics.

Olga and her brother, Prieto, were left by their mother, now a fugitive activist fighting for Puerto Rican independence. Their father, a Vietnam vet, died of AIDS as a broken-hearted junkie who loved music and his children, but who loved the needle more.

Their grandmother raised them with unconditional love. Both are accomplished, successful adults who are close to each other. Of course they are both hiding pain. And as the story deepens, the reader learns about the what and why of their pain. And how it affects what happens in the rest of the novel.

Olga has shut her heart up. She has an ongoing relationship with the rich owner of a chain of hardware stores, but she isn't in love with him. Olga had one other serious boyfriend as a young girl. Reggie is now a wildly rich music mogul with diverse investments and a renewed interest in his own Puerto Rican heritage. And now there is a new man who has appeared. Matteo is his own true self, even when it comes to admitting his flaws and fears.

Prieto is divorced and has a young teenage daughter. He's been hiding his homosexuality from even himself, but that's no longer an option. He is afraid of how his family will react, even more than the voters or the media.

Both sister and brother have received letters from their mother over the years, although she's never visited or even called them. She exhorts them to remember who they are and to not sell out. Nothing they do is ever good enough, because they are not as committed to her cause as she is. 

By the time the personal, professional, racial and cultural aspects of their story propel each other to some potentially disastrous decisions, it is difficult to not be worried for both Olga and Prieto. It's easy to see how badly things can do. So easy to see that it would be understandable if one decided to put the book down and, say, listen to music for a spell.

But it is so worthwhile to return to the novel. To find out what happens. And so see what happens when even people who love each other acknowledge that they haven't been brave enough to be completely honest in the past, but they're trying now. 

At one point, Olga wonders about someone who collects so many certain objects that the word hoarding is apt. What pain caused that hole in the heart that the objects are an attempt to fill it back up? What Olga doesn't know at the time is that she, too, has a hole in her heart. Every main character in the novel does. And the ways in which they seek to fill those holes show both how loving and how wounded, how willing to heal and how wounding, people can be.

Olga Dies Dreaming is a fascinating look at how the personal is part of the larger story -- of a family, of a culture, or a heritage that all can serve as foundational and supportive for someone to become their best true self.

Review: 'Fire Season'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Fire Season
By Leyna Krow
Literary Fiction
Viking

Before Washington Territory was granted statehood, a fire swept through downtown Spokane Falls. The cause was never determined and the town was rebuilt larger and more grandiose than before. One way of looking at why the town burned underlies the story in Leyna Krow's Fire Season

The story of the fire is not the subject of the novel, however. But it does serve to illuminate the story of a woman of a certain kind, as Roslyn is dubbed by her father. The fire also sheds light on how damaged men would control such women, and what happens when they try.

On the eve of the Great Fire of 1889, Barton Heyward runs the only bank in town. He's certain no one likes him, no one respects him and he just got the worst haircut of his young life. Not even his favorite prostitute, Roslyn, likes him more than she likes the drink. So perhaps he'll just kill himself. He chickens out, the town burns the next day and he comes up with a way to enrich himself. If he can't be loved he can find another way to make himself feel better. Writing fake bank notes and charging hidden interest fees makes him feel clever.

That includes keeping Roslyn at his house under the pretense people think she set the fire. People don't actually think this, but Barton isn't just deluding Roslyn. He's deluding himself, convincing himself that she is his great love, that she loves him and that they will go away together to begin a beautiful life. As Roslyn begins to clear her head from its alcohol-fueled fugue, she begins to think for herself.

Soon, another young man arrives in Spokane Falls. He is even less impressed with the people he meets than Barton. Quake Auchenbaucher was sent for because of his reputation for solving fire investigations as a federal government inspector. That's not who he really is, but Quake is ready to once again size up a situation, tell people what they want and make a tidy profit.

Barton seems a ready-made patsy for Quake's scheme. And the sooner Quake can get out of Spokane Falls, the happier he will be. The local police are a drunken gang, the town is full of stupid people and the only thing people seem excited over is the fare of a local waffle shop.

What Quake doesn't know is that Roslyn will come into his life, too.

And what both men don't initially know is that Roslyn, well, she can do certain things. Because she is a woman of a certain kind. Hints about what she can do appear during interludes between the sagas of the two men. Hints about women who can fly, who can intuit, who can have visions and who can levitate beyond their bodies.

As more is revealed about Roslyn and how she ended up in a Spokane hotel, more is shown about the ways in which women have to make the most of whatever gifts they have. And ways in which they can be punished for having those gifts. But Fire Season also shows that for a certain kind of woman who perseveres, grace is possible.

Fire Season does a superb job of portraying the aftermath of the Great Fire. It gives a feel for what Spokane Falls and other Western towns were like, in addition to their people. These portraits serve the greater story very well. 

Although there are serious themes displayed, there also is whimsy in this novel.





Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Review: 'Face" by Jaspreet Singh

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Face: A Novel of the Anthropocene
By Jaspreet Singh
Literary Fiction 
Touchwood Editions

Mysteries within mysteries, whether scientific, academic or personal, are puzzled over in Jaspreet Singh's novel Face. As the mysteries are revealed, the ways in which they connect demonstrate just how complicated even the simplest-seeming thing can be.

Lila studied geology at university, but left India and became a science journalist. She enrolls in a fiction writing workshop and is paired with a woman in a face-studying exercise. They don't yet know each other's names, but they will get to know each other. And one of them will be dead in 51 days. 

The exercise is not comfortable to Lila, but she continues. And she imagines feeling responsible for this other person, who is named Lucia. Before they have a chance to talk when the exercise ends, a man appears in the classroom door to pick Lucia up. Lila is certain she has seen him before. But how and where is one of the mysteries to be unraveled in the novel.

When Lucia introduces her husband to Lila, she recognizes him as a former classmate of hers. But that cannot be. He died.

Lila's university days are recounted -- the group she studied with, her best friend, the boy her best friend fell in love with, and what happened during a field expedition that went very wrong.

Early on, Lila writes that she enrolled in the workshop because she wanted to "enter a character's consciousness". As the story progresses, the reader learns that Lila is revealing more of her secrets while considering the other mysteries in the story. 

The novella Lila is writing for the workshop attempts to connect two stories that she says do not belong together on the same page, although they are connected in real life. Singh connects those two stories together and brings in far more other stories and ideas. 

Face also has the reader consider such ideas as how caste and colonialism pervade academia and scientific research, and how scientific research founded upon lies works its way into generations of further research. 

Not everything is revealed in the novel. But that's part of the plan. When Lila's writing instructor tells the class that "we are the stories we tell", she notes:

We are also the stories we choose not to tell. In fact, we are more the stories we don't tell, cannot tell, or will never be able to tell.

Throughout the telling of the various stories in Face, the choices about what is revealed, what is not revealed, and when things become known propel the narrative. It's a remarkable exercise in how personal stories can affect the greater natural world, and how that natural world is a part of every person.

The subtitle to Face is A Novel of the Anthropocene, signaling that this is a story of the current geological age. It certainly is a novel about the effect of people on the natural world and on each other.


Monday, June 27, 2022

Review: 'The Angel of Rome'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Angel of Rome
By Jess Walter
Literary Fiction Short Stories
Harper

Any new work from Jess Walter is a cause for celebration. When it's a new collection of short stories, such as The Angel of Rome, every story is reason to celebrate. (I don't know about you, but right now, any cause to celebrate is necessary.)

Mr. Voice may seem to have an odd title at first. The name refers to the stepfather of the narrator, the daughter of a single mother who draws men like flies. Tanya's mother marries an older, not-handsome man who is known as the Voice of Spokane. Things about the marriage embarrass Tanya, but her stepfather, Claude, is kind. And so is his son, an older teen who Tanya develops a crush on. Over the years, the things that happen to the family reflect the times from the 1970s to the present. Although it seems Tanya is telling the story of her life, there are major events that take place which she refers to only in passing. Because the story title is important. This is a portrait of her stepfather, Mr. Voice. And it's a spot-on portrait of the town for which Claude is Mr. Voice. This is a portrait of Spokane that resonates deeply for someone who was born and raised there.

Fran's Friend Has Cancer has a lot going on, and it's conveyed in a sly manner. An older couple are sitting at a New York City restaurant, perusing a large menu for a pre-Broadway matinee show meal. He's peevish, she's peckish. She's headed to Oregon to see her son, although it's ostensibly because her husband's cousin is caring for a friend with cancer. He doesn't want her to be gone long because although his cancer has been in remission, he has a fear of dying alone. And, besides, he's certain his stepson doesn't like him. While they quibble over this, and whether his cousin is a lesbian and whether she's plain and whether the waiter will ever come back, the husband notices a young man nearby writing in a journal. The way he stops and starts writing catches the husband's eye. And for good reason. But what is actually going on may be meta, it may be sheer Twilight Zone, it may also be a clever way to reinforce the idea that the way time passes changes with one's age.

Magnificent Desolation features a 50-year-old seventh grade science teacher who has been coasting on inertia for years. He was born on the day of the moon landing and idolizes Buzz Aldrin, who famously popped a moon landing denier. Aldrin also said of the view from the moon that what he saw was "magnificent desolation". Our teacher is meeting the mother of a student who insists he cannot be taught most of what is in the class because "we don't believe in that". When he sees the recently divorced mother of Jacob, his inertia is gone. How much of his common sense is left the reader will discover, especially when it turns out Jacob's mother has not taught him those things but his father does think the moon landing was faked. That our hero's breaking point regards the Van Allen radiation belt is rather endearing. And while his life has been one that has surveyed desolation, there is magnificence in the ending.

Cancer also figures in Drafting, a story about a young woman recently diagnosed. After chemo leaves her feeling even more ill, she takes up again with a scruffy skateboarder. Even though she realizes his personality isn't half as attractive as he nears middle age, she does go on a joy ride with him, heading for Seattle from Spokane in an old El Camino. Science also features in this story, as Myra recalls what a science teacher told her class once about mountain ranges and river gorges:

The whole world was a clock face with a gliding osprey rising on a secondhand updraft, as if being called to heaven.

It's passages like that which make me wish everyone knew the locations Walter uses as well as I do. Overlooking the Columbia River as it cuts through the buttes and creates coulees on its way to the Cascades and the Pacific, there is both a magnificent desolation and the opportunity to see that clock face. It resonates. Oh, how it resonates.

The Angel of Rome takes place in Rome. A pure Jess Walter hero, an inept young man who wants to leave Nebraska, ends up there on a scholarship to study Latin. His mother thinks he's going to become a priest. He thinks he's going to become someone who is not stuck in Nebraska. He doesn't do well, he is miserable and just as he is about to figure out a way to go back home, defeated, a series of misunderstandings land him on a movie set with an American TV actor and an Italian actress who makes the world shine for him. Yes, he knows it's actually the movie set lighting but it's all because of her. She was nicknamed the Angel of Rome during an ad campaign when she started out as a model, but it's not a name that has worn well over time.

After all, what is an angel but a kind of ghost, untouchable, out of place and time?

That doesn't bode well for any of the characters. Except when it does. The story builds into two perspectives: being one's own true self, or inventing oneself. Seeing how it worked for the various characters makes The Angel of Rome a story that will live with a reader for a lifetime.

Whether in Rome or New York, Spokane or West Seattle, every story in The Angel of Rome conveys what it means to live and to love, regardless of one's past and with an open mind toward the future. These are stories to treasure.





Friday, May 20, 2022

Review: 'City on Fire'

©2020 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

City on Fire
By Don Winslow
Crime Fiction
William Morrow

Families, gangs, armies are all complex organisms that exist as an entity in addition to being a group of individuals. The dynamics between the two types of existence -- as individuals and as a group -- drive the action in Don Winslow's City on Fire, a remarkable new novel that has echoes of Greek tragedy.

The novel opens with the annual clambake Pasco Ferri holds at his Rhode Island beach house. Danny Ryan, loyal soldier to the Murphys, is content to celebrate the end of another summer with the Irish and Italian families that are loyal to Ferri. Through his eyes, the reader is introduced to the people around him, the ways they spend their holiday days and nights, the love he has for his wife, Terri, who is a Murphy daughter. Danny once fished on the ocean to stay away from the traditional jobs on the docks and running certain errands for the Murphys, but that all changed when he got married. And although he's a hard worker and loyal soldier, as well as a son-in-law, he has no place at the table in back of John Murphy's Irish bar. But that's the kind of thing one shakes off when it comes to family and friends.

When Danny and Terri spot a beautiful young woman arrive on the beach, they see things will never be the same. She is a Helen of Troy figure, coming in on the arm of one of the Italian crew. Pam draws everyone's eyes, but none more intently than those of Liam. He's the youngest Murphy son, the one least capable of doing his duty, and the one everyone makes excuses for. Until he insults Pam, and, like Troy and Sparta, the peace is broken. And, like the Trojan War, the toll will be heavy.

The action is twisty and fast-paced in this remarkable story. Danny anchors it, acting as a major player whose fate is not what he chose, but what he is capable of rising to fulfill. He also is a sort of Greek chorus that notices who does what, and why, and what the ramifications may well be. Some events are foreshadowed well in advance while others may well surprise a reader. But they all make sense within the frame of the story.

City on Fire is violent and profane in its raw depiction of what happens when two mob families go into an all-out war. The juxtaposition between what individuals choose to do and the way the families function shows how easily wrong choices can be made, and the deadly consequences that follow. There are echoes of other mob stories, but this stands on its own. Winslow has written about cartels and crime families in his fiction before, and his experience in being able to tell these stories in a compelling manner brings a good fit to the framework of classic tragedy. As the first in Winslow's trilogy that marks his retirement from writing to work as an anti-fascist media advocate full-time, City on Fire is an engrossing send-off.


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.






Thursday, May 5, 2022

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.


Thursday, February 17, 2022

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.








Thursday, February 10, 2022

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.