Review: 'The River We Remember'

 ©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The River We Remember
By William Kent Krueger
Fiction
September 2023
Atria Books

Love of family, love of the land, love of that one special person are all chronicled in William Kent Krueger's new novel, The River We Remember.

The author of the Cork O'Connor mysteries has long written about the hold of the land and of loved ones on a person's heart. His Minnesota-set novels are people-centered, where what is important to the characters is what guides their actions. In this stand-alone novel, every character acts according to the dictates of their hearts, with consequences both dire and delightful.

Jimmy Quinn, the biggest landowner in the county and the biggest bully, has been found in the Alabaster River. There's a big hole from a shotgun blast in his torso that the river's catfish have found. They've also found his face. But because of his bright red hair and size, Dern and everyone else knows it's him.

The suspects are plentiful, but the focus right away on Dakota Noah Bluestone, who returned to the county after a military career. To some, it's bad enough that he's an Indian. To others, it's even worse because he brought with him a Japanese wife, Kyoko. Noah and his late father worked for Quinn, who had just fired Noah for allegedly stealing gas.

Dern would just as soon have the case be ruled a suicide or accident. But his deputy, and former boss, won't have it. Connie Graff wants the truth to be discovered, knowing the county is going to be torn up regardless of who is guilty.

Also drawn into the events taking place after Quinn's death are Angie Madison, a young war widow whose past has not destroyed her, who now is a beacon of light in the town diner owned by her mother-in-law. Her teenage son, Scott, has a faulty heart physically speaking, yet his spirit is strong and true. Scott's best friend Del and his mother are knocked around by his stepfather, Creasy, a drunk who belongs to a hard-drinking, hardscrabble family. Creasy accused Noah of stealing Quinn's gas.

And then there's Charlie Bauer. Charlie, born Charlotte, was put down constantly by her widowed father. She left town and went to California, where she became a lawyer for the defenseless. She has come back home and occasionally takes on cases of the defenseless, when not reading on her porch or sipping whiskey. She becomes Noah's counsel, but he does not want to enter any plea. He doesn't want to do or say a thing.

Jimmy Quinn's big family also have stories to tell. Or hide.

As the author of terrific mysteries, Krueger handles the whodunit aspects of the story very well. As a writer who also has demonstrated wisdom about the frailties and strengths of the human spirit, Krueger adds the layers that make some mysteries whydunits. The revelations about many characters that the investigation uncovers create a novel that explores both individual characters and the character of a community. Other measures of his strong writing are the pacing keeps all the characters separate, and he anticipates a whodunit reader's ideas about the clues presented.

The prologue is a work of art on its own. Krueger circles back to it in an epilogue. Both are about the lure of home along the river, how the river is a source of wonder, fun, solace and, on occasion, danger. And how we are all are part of a river and we all have a part to play.

Our lives and the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end. Because we are only one part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different ...

Those differences, as well as things in common, fit together to be a remarkable story told very well.

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: 'The Other Americans'

The Other Americans
By Laila Lamani
Literary fiction
March 2019
Pantheon
ISBN: 978-1524747145

A daughter seeking to live her own life on her own terms, a dutiful daughter her mother compares her to, a beloved father who is killed in a hit-and-run accident one night, a man who may or may have not seen that hit-and-run but who is afraid of the police, a deputy who remembers that first daughter as his beautiful and kind high school classmate, and his war buddy who is struggling with his return to civilian life -- all of these characters are Americans, those who are us and not us, brought to vivid life in Laila Lamani's latest novel, The Other Americans.

Lamani, a Pulitzer Prize finalist with her prior novel, The Moor's Account, slowly introduces each character in short chapters that are told from their points of view. Regardless of background or any other identifier, each character is fully realized and speaks for himself or herself. Their voices are grounded in how they see themselves and how the world sees them.

Nora is the daughter seeking to live her own life. She is a musician, a composer studying at university with a life not connected to that of her family. Her parents and older sister fled Morocco before she was born in America. Her father, Driss, has owned and run a diner in their small California town for years. One night, he is hit while riding a bicycle, coming home. The vehicle never stopped. Nora feels a great deal of guilt for not being there, and hurries back.

As the family's story, and the stories of each member, unfolds, others connected to the family, the diner and the accident also are revealed. Efrain isn't sure how much of the accident he saw and doesn't want to talk to the police. He is undocumented and has a family. His wife believes it is his duty to report what he knows, because it is the right thing to do.

The cranky bowling alley owner, Anderson Baker, whose business is next to the diner, didn't see anything. The long years he has put in at his alley are showing. Newly arrived Detective Erica Coleman is frustrated by the lack of information as much as she is by the barriers she sees to her son making friends and fitting in. Jeremy, the deputy, remembers Nora's kindnesses to him when they were classmates and stops by the family home to offer his condolences.

The structure has a Rashomon feel. As the various portions of each character's stories show events in different lights, revealing a greater understanding of them and of what happened the night Driss died and what led to that point. Not everything that happens to these characters is by chance, but everything that follows is determined by how they feel.

It is in the nuances of these feelings and reactions that the beauty of the novel lives. When Nora learns of her father's death, she thinks:

I could have talked to him one more time, heard the care in his voice, and yet I had squandered the chance. And all for some bitter coffee in a paper cup, hastily consumed before confronting a class of bored prep-school kids making their way through The Odyssey.

Or Efrain, as he tries to remember exactly what he heard and saw on the night of the hit-and-run:

Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.

Or Nora's mother, Maryam, the woman who relies on her faith in matters great and small, praying for her daughter:

... I murmured a prayer for her, as I had so many times in the past, only this time I prayed for more than her health, more than her safety, more than her happiness. I prayed for her greedily, for the thing I had given up years ago and never found again. Home.

And, Nora again, on this novel's foundation, love, especially within a family:

Only now, after my father's death, did I come to understand that love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving ...

Just as in Lamani's earlier works, the personal becomes the universal. We are the the others to those who are the others to us. When looking at other Americans, what is being reflected back matters as much as the original. Everyone is part of a family, and these ties that bind can be restricting, empowering and supportive, or some of each.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted by permission

Review: 'Today will be Different'

Today will be Different
By Maria Semple
Literary fiction
October 2016
Little, Brown and Company
ISBN: 978-0316403436

Family letting you down, micro-aggressions, President John Tyler's progeny, letting the days slip by and whether you love someone enough to move to Spokane with them are among the ideas in Maria Semple's warm, funny and seriously good Today Will be Different.

In her second novel, following the brilliant Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, Semple again focuses on a Seattle mother of a precocious young child and an accomplished husband. Our heroine this time was behind a cult hit of an animated series years ago. She has had an advance for a book based on the characters but gotten nowhere. Eleanor has been spinning her wheels for years. Her morning mantra that "today will be different" and that she might, say, get dressed and go to yoga after taking her son to school shows how encapsulated her life has become.

Eleanor realizes she has first-world problems. Her husband is a successful surgeon prized by the Seahawks. In Seattle, this practically makes one royalty. (The scene in Costco of people swarming around 12th Man cupcakes decorated with blue and green frosting is repeated across the state. It's not just Seattle. It's not just Costco.) Their son attends a prized, private school. She takes personalized poetry lessons from an aspiring writer. Her worst nightmare is going to lunch with a woman she views as boring.

Through the course of a day that is at times over the top, filled with flashbacks and takes more twists and turns than a hiking trail in the North Cascades, Eleanor shows the reader why she has been spinning her wheels, how much it could cost her and what really matters to her.

One person who really matters to Eleanor is her sister, Ivy. After their mother died, Eleanor took care of Ivy while their father drank away the rest of his life. Her drawings of those times about the two Flood Girls are the foundation of the work she is trying to create now.

The strength of Semple's storytelling is that the following wisdom is not plunked in the middle of finding out what the current situation is with Eleanor and Ivy, but it resonates with this and what happens after the reader finds out what the current situation is:

"If you were raised by a drunk, you're above all the adult child of an alcoholic. It means you blame yourself for everything, you avoid reality, you can't trust people, you're deeply insecure and hungry to please."

This is what has made Eleanor tick. That this truth is not the sole basis of what happened makes the novel even stronger. Whether it's a spouse's evolving belief system, whether it's holding onto the past well past its sell-by date, or whether it's realizing that, like Dorothy, there's no place like home (even if it means moving home to Spokane or Scotland or even New York City), Today will be Different has a strong heart beating under the madcap antics of Eleanor on her wild ride of a day.

"Today there will be an ease about me." Eleanor starts her story promising this. By the end, we see that it may well come to be.

©2016 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Review and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Book of Speculation'

The Book of Speculation
By Erika Swyler
Fiction
June 2015
St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 978-1250054807

Tolstoy may have noted that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, but it may also be true that each family that loves each other loves in its own way.

That’s certainly the case in Erika Swyler’s The Book of Speculation, a whimsical, magical and yet well-grounded novel about mermaids who drown and a heritage that finds each generation without them even seeking it.

In the present day, Simon Watson seems the quietest and dullest of men. He works as a reference librarian and lives in his late parents’ house, which is starting to fall apart around him as it perches on the edge of an inhospitable Northeastern coast. His retired neighbor Frank is over constantly, mending the house and cajoling Simon into having serious work done on it. Frank’s daughter, Alice, also works at the library.

The only things not grounded about Simon’s life are his own relatives. His mother drowned when he and his sister, Enola, were young. He raised his sister while his father took years to die, sitting at the kitchen table. He and his sister can hold their breath underwater for unreal lengths of time. Enola travels with a carnival, reading Tarot cards. She’s getting near the age when their mother walked into the ocean and she’s finally made one of her infrequent phone calls. She’s coming home.

Simon also receives an old book from a rare books seller in the Midwest. It’s not a normal book. There are sketches and tales of a traveling show on the road. There is the story of a mute boy who wandered into Peabody’s traveling menagerie, an old fortune teller and a young woman who arrived in terror.

Each member of the troupe has suffered loss and each can do something no one else can. The boy, who the fortune teller names Amos, can breathe slowly and disappear. The fortune teller has an affinity for a hand-drawn Tarot deck that goes beyond sideshow tales. The woman was enchanted by a carnival man who disappeared, and who killed the one who tried to prevent her from repeating her mother’s sorrowful mistake. Peabody makes her a mermaid act.

The mute and the mermaid fall in love, but it is not a happy tale.

In alternating chapters, Simon’s life is starting to fall apart. He and Alice realize they are even closer than they have always been, but Simon loses his job in these days when libraries are not treasured.

And the book he was sent -- it draws him in as surely as the water has drawn in generations of the women in their family.

Swyler’s alternating stories veer more toward the magic than the real. But whether the things that happened can be explained rationally or not, what remains real and true are the ways in which the characters care for each other. Motives are revealed that explain characters’ actions and enrich their personalities. There are few villains -- even the most selfish are seeking love or forgiveness.

There is evil, however, and at one point Simon fears it lives in the objects he loves most, including books. It’s a terrifying notion for anyone who loves books as Simon does.

For a novel in which many of the characters are hurting deeply, there is little that is morose, in part because Swyler can rely on a narrative voice that resembles a fairy tale.

Like a fairy tale, by the time The Book of Speculation has come to an end, connections are made and resolutions have come to pass. Unlike many fairy tales, there is the knowledge here that things go on and that the characters still have life to experience. And that whatever that experience is, it will include each other:

“We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive.”

©2015 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Review and reprinted with permission

Review: 'Bread and Butter'

Bread and Butter
By Michelle Wildgen
Fiction
February 2014
Doubleday
ISBN: 978-0385537438

Three brothers, two restaurants and falling in love are the ingredients in Michelle Wildgen's winning Bread and Butter, a quiet novel about familiar satisfactions.

Britt and Leo never really left their hometown. Leo started, and Britt soon came in to run the front, of Winesap, a refined yet comfortable restaurant named for the trees in their parents' yard. The restaurant is a well-oiled machine and the brothers are growing middle-aged settling in as essential cogs of that machinery.

Younger brother Harry has kicked around here and there, dividing his time between university courses and cooking. His exploits have included travel, a stint in an Alaskan salmon cannery and cookng at a self-sustaining restaurant on a Michigan island. He's back home now, too, and plans to open his own restaurant. The older two are skeptical but not unencouraging. Until Harry's vision clicks for one of the brothers and he becomes Harry's partner, dividing his time between the new place and Winesap.

At the same time, Britt, who appears as confident, is slightly rattled by the appearance of a confident woman who begins dining at Winesap regularly and who knows Harry. Then Leo's eyes are finally opened about someone who has been there the whole time.

That the ensuing complications and conflicts arise not from the men falling in love with these women -- although their falling in love opens them both up -- is one of the calm delights of this novel. It's a pleasure to read a book that is not about brothers fighting over women or fighting over who is smarter and the better entrepreneur and the more accomplished foodie.

Rather, it is a pleasure to read a novel about brothers who love each other, get to know each other and themselves a bit better, and who enjoy what they are doing.

Also, the parts about food are delicious. Wildgen knows what she is writing about, whether it is family or food.

©2014 All Rights Reserved CompuServe Books Reviews and reprinted with permission