Mesmerizing series of stories of a family's experiences from slavery in Jamaica to descendants' present-day lives in NYC. One of those rare novels wheMesmerizing series of stories of a family's experiences from slavery in Jamaica to descendants' present-day lives in NYC. One of those rare novels where every word feels right and true.
The chapters are loosely connected and chunks of the history are missing (like real life), so readers who insist on resolved endings and complete stories beware.
But readers who love poetry and powerful stories (no matter how fragmented) will want to remember this author's name. ...more
The daughter was right: it doesn't. But you can absolutely trust Maggie O'Farrell to give you a life-of-Mrs. Shakespeare backstory well worth reading. And that is no small achievement.
And those of you who can sense trouble coming from a mile away and a year in advance? O'Farrell has made Shakespeare's wife Agnes one of your prescient tribe. What the neighbors grumblingly label witchy insight frequently turns out to be outstanding good sense combined with a quick mind and faultless intuition. For example, that expensive ruby bracelet her husband gives her? Means nothin' but trouble, and she recognizes that instantly. ...more
I'm slowly evolving the theory that brilliant Kevin Wilson fills his story collections with those notions that are too ironically bittersweet for his I'm slowly evolving the theory that brilliant Kevin Wilson fills his story collections with those notions that are too ironically bittersweet for his novels.
So the characters here are Wilson's usual heroes: sad sacks, burnouts, and minimum-wage minions, mostly seeking redemption, sometimes finding it, always surprising, and to me, always worth it.
Personal favorite: "Wildfire Johnny" in which casual racist Trey inherits a magical straight razor. The razor's inscription promises (view spoiler)[to turn back time by 24 hours if only the owner will use it to slit his own throat. The quest rapidly becomes "how many times a day will Trey need to use it to become a decent person?" Trust Wilson to make it a knowing comedy of manners. (hide spoiler)]...more
Beautifully written and so intense I couldn't put it down. Imagine an unhinged hillbilly Walt Whitman weighed down by years of
[image] In her self-portrBeautifully written and so intense I couldn't put it down. Imagine an unhinged hillbilly Walt Whitman weighed down by years of
[image] In her self-portrait, Flannery O'Connor deliberately gave herself & her pet peacock the same pose & expression
bullying (both as victim & perpetrator). Imagine he sees himself as a Bible-verse-spouting Avenger of the weak and mild.
Imagine lots of absolutely gorgeous nature writing punctuated by convincingly accurate descriptions of hillfolk's daily lives. A poacher mulls over his ethics. A killer lovingly practices speed-field-stripping his favorite gun from Grandpop. The town ne'er-do-well strolls the aisles of Walmart as he casually swills his shoplifted beer.
Imagine an author ballsy enough to steal one of Flannery O'Connor's best lines and several of her ideas without crediting them within the novel. Also picture the ending of the movie (view spoiler)[Seven shamelessly cadged and rewritten with a happy ending with the unhinged killer stopping cold when he hears the voice of God.(hide spoiler)]
I enjoyed this book while I was reading it. But it's annoying the crap out of me now that I've finished it....more
Upstanding citizens of southern Oregon start glimpsing alternate (and sometimes happier-looking) versions of themselves living tantalizingly differentUpstanding citizens of southern Oregon start glimpsing alternate (and sometimes happier-looking) versions of themselves living tantalizingly different lives.
[image] Sometimes your alt-universe self is clearly a stinker. And sometimes it's you.
Day deftly manages a slow-burn nonlinear plot (or two) plus smart, believable characters, each of whom reads a different meaning into the glimpses of those alternate selves. While one character sees a warning, another sees a promise, and still another sees (view spoiler)[a lost loved one alive again. (hide spoiler)]
My only complaint is that character development is thin. We don't always get enough insight or detail to explain characters' momentous life choices. Just one example: would a Type-A chief-of-staff surgeon really (view spoiler)[chuck the hard-won position for love and family so suddenly with no regrets (hide spoiler)]?
So not entirely successful, but tantalizing :) and would certainly get any book group talking (and quite possibly arguing). Probably not a church group, though, because (view spoiler)[the sex scenes are pretty vivid, though brief & appropriate. (hide spoiler)]
p.s. Extra round of applause for Day for revealing (view spoiler)[at the end that we've spent most of the novel following an alt-universe plotline. I haven't seen this anywhere else, and it's a clever, fresh, and gutsy move. (hide spoiler)]...more
This short novel is probably a good starting place for readers new to Anne Tyler's books. Think of it as Tyler Lite,
[image] Barnaby to the rescue againThis short novel is probably a good starting place for readers new to Anne Tyler's books. Think of it as Tyler Lite,
[image] Barnaby to the rescue again
with many of the author's favorite themes on show. A good-hearted underachiever, this time a black-leather-clad 30-something named Barnaby, has a complicated network of friends and earns his living as a cheerful man-of-all work, chiefly for little old people. He is loyal and reliable to a fault.
He's criticized and underrated by his materialistic parents, and his choices are questioned by his peers. Will he listen to them, or persist in following his own earnest philosophy?
And who's he really in love with? It's hard to tell.
The novel unwinds in one of Tyler's beloved gently-declining vintage Baltimore neighborhoods.
Even though this one was published in 1998, (the year Sinatra died & my daughter was born) it holds up well, and has the added poignancy of being dedicated to the author's late husband.
This book was a psychedelic trip, and I couldn't stop reading it.
It's a postmodern, post-apocalyptic fairy tale where a slightly mystic, wholly melancholy Al Swearengen-esque drug kingpin falls for the single woman guaranteed to do him the least possible good.
Matters are complicated by a narcissistic, social media-obsessed princeling and a mysterious (but smokin' hot) waif who's a former castaway from a floating isle of garbage. Dragons circle overhead taking fiery, random potshots. And the newly arrived princess-ish heroine fastens her fur coat with a diamond "Eat Shit and Die" brooch.
The sci-fi subplots are an uneasy mix with the fantasy elements: relationships generally overshadow the intrigues over genetic engineering and toxic contaminants. And the multiple perspectives ultimately become burdensome.
professor-poet would be commonplace as a southern gothic heroine.
So Zink makes her heroine a lesbian creative writing student whose career is waylaid (and sexual orientation hijacked) by an intermittently bi alcoholic serial-seducing poet-professor. Yep, he's definitively bi, and in contrast she's painted more dismissively as merely sexually confused in this book's moral universe.
Fast-forward a few years, and our heroine gets annoyed enough to flee with the couple's young daughter. Mother and daughter hide in plain sight by passing the blonde daughter as black, thereby guaranteeing that she'll be overlooked and underestimated in her school and community.
More satirical hijinks if this kind ensue, and Zink is plenty talented enough to keep us interested and reading, not least of all by thoroughly lampooning southern gothic tropes. But she also gets us seriously questioning the wisdom of the empty attention-getting ploy of making a major black character white. This character bops sunnily through a gauntlet of systemic racist mistreatment and emerges seemingly unscathed at the novel's end (and restored to her privileged white identity). I understand that Zink is trying to highlight white culture's absurd, unexamined, racist double standards. But the end result here wrong-headedly implies that little white girls, given the chance, could totally kick racism's ass.
I can't think of any era (not this one, for sure) that benefits from stylishly trivialized racism.
And the stylishly trivialized sexism isn't especially welcome either....more
I hope Max Porter wins every prize out there for this one, an absolutely lovely tale about an odd-duck child, his bemused parents, [image] Get thee toI hope Max Porter wins every prize out there for this one, an absolutely lovely tale about an odd-duck child, his bemused parents, [image] Get thee to a garden, or better yet, go create something
and his lovable old reprobate of an art tutor.
Don't let the opening chapter discourage you. The chapter is brief and deliberately rambling (George Saunders-style) because its narrator is a Green Man-esque nature spirit. This being 2019, this is a garbage-coated nature spirit who revels in eavesdropping, echolalia, and stirring up mischief in a typical village.
Which fits nicely with the main conflict of Porter's story, villagers' automatic mistrust of newcomers and artists. Porter gives his story moral heft by crafting the villagers' every stubborn assumption and small-minded suspicion in utterly realistic gossipy dialogue.The neighbors are a convincingly bitchy chorus here, pettily obsessed with who's mussed the grass on the precious common verge, ever conscious of appearance.
However, it's a surprisingly uplifting story. Even though it focuses so often on who says what and who fears what, it's ultimately a story that affirms the abiding power of art, artists, acceptance of differences, and trust.
[image]Something narsty (and oh so sad) in the barleyfield
Beautifully written account of English farm life circa 1933, but depressing as all get-out.
Nature-writer Melissa Harrison tries to shake her reputation for plotnessness by covering too many themes (mild spoilers follow):
🔹the disappearance of pastoral life & tenant farms 🔹farmers' grueling lives 🔹farm women's grueling lives 🔹date-rape and PTSD 🔹domestic abuse 🔹provincial superstition and OCD 🔹English anti-Semitism between the wars, white supremacist groups 🔹1980s-90s de-institutionalization of the mentally ill
So many worthy issues, so very little hope. I learned from the novel, but I know I'll never ever want to reread it....more
lucky little cat
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