Category: Modern Fiction

Miller’s Valley

By Anna Quindlen

Published 2016

Read Jan 2021

If you are looking for a book with somewhat flawed but engaging characters, realistic drama with no sermons, great but not syrupy language, a story that speaks to both your head and your heart, find a book by Anna Quindlen.  She does it again with Miller’s Valley.

This story is set in the 1970’s in a rural valley near a dam.  The feds want to extend the man-made lake into the valley but the farmers who live there don’t want to sell.  The farmers, like most small farmers then and now, can’t make a living just farming.  The narrator’s father is a fix-it man who can fix most anything.  The narrator’s mother married into the Miller family which has owned this farm for several generations.  She is actually the primary bread-winner via her nursing job at the local hospital.  Her sister lives in a small house at the back of the property and hasn’t come out doors for as long as narrator Mimi can remember, event when the valley floods during big rainstorms.

Our narrator is the youngest child of three.  Mimi’s oldest brother Ed is fifteen or so years older and is in college studying engineering by the time Mimi’s narration begins.  Her popular and good-looking brother Tommy manages to graduate from high school somehow and enlists in the Marines. He returns from Vietnam physically intact but certainly changed in ways that keep him emotionally separated from the family.   This is especially difficult for Mimi’s mother as Tommy is clearly her favorite child.  Mimi quietly observes her family and seeks to stay under the radar but her academic capabilities are recognized by her teachers who provide her direction to “go beyond”, direction that Mimi’s mother and brother Tommy also echo.

Quinlen does a remarkable job telling the story of this family and giving a sense of the change that is impending for these family farmers and their town and for other small communities as young people leave for college and don’t always return.    This reader grew up in the same time period as Mimi and is impressed by the author’s talent in capturing the flavor of the time and at the same time making the story quite timeless.  This reader looks forward to reading more of this author’s work.

A Gentleman in Moscow

By Amor Towles

Published 2016

Read  April  2020;  Jan 2021

This reader listened to this book in the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic shutdown  and read the written text of this book in Jan 2021, during the phase of the pandemic in which the vaccine is becoming available to tackle said pandemic.  This reader savored the book each time and in both formats.

Towles presents us with Count Alexander Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, and Master of the Hunt, as he is appearing before a committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs in 1922.  He stands accused of becoming an anti-Revolutionary and threat to the current government. This would usually result in being sent to a firing squad.  However Rostov admits authorship of the poem “Where Is It Now”, written in 1913, has been attributed to him. This poem is considered by the committee as a call to action and puts him in the category of heroes of the prerevolutionary cause.  Thus he is spared the firing squad and sentenced to house-arrest in the hotel in which he resides, the Hotel Metropol, a grand hotel in the center of Moscow.  Thus begins our adventure with the Count as he begins his sentence living in the hotel, not in the spacious and pleasant suite he has called home for the last four years, but in a tiny attic room.

The reader follows the Count over thirty-two years of his sentence of house arrest.  He enters his sentence at age thirty-three having had no occupation as it is “not the business of gentlemen to have occupations.” He eventually confronts the fact that this sentence, a sort of forced retirement from his non-occupation of a gentleman who has many interactions with the world external to the Metropol,  is becoming quite tedious and meaningless.  We follow him as he finds purpose to his life in the form of an occupation as head waiter of the elegant hotel restaurant and as a friend to workers and several special guests of the Metropol.  We also follow changes in the politics and culture of the new State as the Metropol’s ballroom holds many organizing assemblies, conferences, and other meetings of the evolving government.   We watch as the Count’s occupation and talents lead him to connections to some officials in the Soviet and American governments that prove useful to them, and perhaps him.  A major event happens to the Count near the middle of the book and a new purpose is thrust upon him, caring for the child of a former resident of the hotel when he had first started his house arrest and when she was a spunky nine-year-old.

The book is not short—it takes Towles 452 pages to cover thirty-two years of a man’s life who has much time to consider what is happening to him and his homeland and how he is reacting and will react to it.  Towles uses several footnotes to expand on specific items, giving the reader the feeling of being “let in” on something of importance.  Most of the time the book is focused on the Count’s activities and thoughts, but occasionally Towles focuses briefly on the activities and thoughts of other characters, generally to forward specific parts of the plot involving them in an efficient and effective manner.

The Count’s self-reflections and realizations of how his sentence has impacted him and how the new State is impacting his homeland in general and his close friends in particular are quite well done.  In the end, however, the book is much more about the evolution of relationships between the Count and the various characters—hotel employees and hotel guests—and the importance of friendship and purpose in a life well lived.   Towles approach to the book’s structure, the language he uses, and the warm and sometimes humorous scenes he chooses to include and the darker and violent scenes that he doesn’t include, but we know happen, make this book a very pleasant and well done read.

The Vanishing Half

By Brit Bennett

Published 2020

Read Dec 2020

Desiree and Stella Vignes are twins born in 1938 in a town called Mallard, LA.  Although  Mallard isn’t officially at town in government terms, the town certainly existed in the mind of its residents.  It was founded in 1848 by their great-great-great-grandfather Alphonse Decuir who was the son of the white man who owned the sugarcane fields he inherited and the black woman that white man owned.  He was light-skinned.  His children were also light, their mother also being a mulatto.  He created a town for “men like him”:  those who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.  By 1938 when the twins were born, the town was populated by fair skinned people, some blond, some red-head, most with wavy hair. 

Desiree and Stella run away to New Orleans in 1954.  Desiree wanted to escape the smallness of the town and especially its obsession with lightness.  Stella had planned to become a math teacher at Mallard High.  Her dreams ended when their mother told them they wouldn’t return to high school in the fall after they finished tenth grade.  Their mother cleaned white ladies’ houses in the next town and needed them to contribute to her small income.  Her husband had been dragged from the house one night when the twins were young and killed. After working the summer cleaning white people’s houses the girls left for New Orleans after the annual Founder’s Day picnic and made their way into the rest of the world.

The book starts in 1968 when Desiree returns to Mallard with her “blue-black” daughter Jude, fleeing an abusive husband.  Although she intended to stay in Mallard only for a short time, Jude was enrolled in and graduated from Mallard schools.   By then Stella had gone her own way which was unknown to Desiree except that she thought she had “passed over” as white when she moved.  We eventually learn that Stella had married her (white) boss (she had been his secretary), a successful businessman,  and they had a daughter, Kennedy. 

The first few book sections alternate between Desiree’s story, told in the present of 1968 and as she recalls her past, and Jude’s story in 1978 in California where she had accepted a track scholarship at UCLA.  Eventually the story moves forward as the twins’ lives slowly converge as their daughters become aware of each other and Kennedy becomes aware of her mother’s past.

The author is generally quite graceful in presenting the conflicts in the lives of each twin and their daughters.  Stella’s life filled with endless fear of being discovered and the weight of her lies to her husband and daughter.  Jude befriends a group of people who are also hiding their true sexual identities and are actively living simultaneously in two worlds.    Kennedy is portrayed as a spoiled brat of wealthy parents—indulgent father and cold and closed-off mother.  Her path is complicated by her own lack of sufficient talent to “make it” in Hollywood/theater and by meeting Jude who says something to her in spite during a falling out they have. She eventually has her own  lies to hide.  Jude hides her knowledge of Stella’s current life to her mother as well as the reason she and her boyfriend haven’t married.

Although a focus of the book may be on the lies we tell to protect ourselves and those we love, that really isn’t the full picture.  The question of the importance of race in determining how we relate to a person is the real heart of the matter.  The twins’ father is murdered in the early 40’s.  We know things like that happened.  Stella’s upper class white neighborhood is “invaded” by a black TV star and his family in the late 1960s and they are persecuted with violent acts until they leave.  We know things like that happened.  The author partially shifts the focus of hidden identity in the 1980s to sexual identity to give us another example of prejudice in action. Jude’s mother is fine with her boyfriend being white; she just wants them to get married and provide her grandkids (and doesn’t know why she’s not getting them anytime soon).  Stella says her complaint with Kennedy’s black boyfriend wasn’t his color but his pompous attitude driven by his education.  The author leaves us with a scene of a black girl and her white transgender boyfriend hand in hand enjoying a swim in the “black” part of the local river.  But what about now.  Have we really become color blind?  Does it matter if you have “black blood”—does that make you “black” and you must lie to say you are white if you choose to “pass”.  This question remains unanswered by the author but one I anticipate she hopes we will seriously ponder and recognize and that we can own what we actually believe ourselves and decide whether it should change.

Dear Edward

By Ann Napolitano

Published 2020

Read Dec 2020

Twelve year old Eddie Adler and his family—parents Bruce and Jane, fifteen year old brother Jordan—board a flight leaving Newark airport for LA.  They are moving from New York City to Los Angeles; their possessions are on a truck and will meet them there.  Unfortunately they don’t make it.  The flight goes down in Colorado and 191 souls are lost.  The only survivor is Eddie. 

Chapters alternate between the day of the flight and Edward’s story after. (Eddie’s Aunt Lacey, Jane’s sister who, with her husband, take Eddie in after the crash, decides that the press should refer to Eddie by his given name, Edward.  That name sticks for him.)   The pace of both parts of the stories is rapid but not hurried.  We get to know Eddie’s family members as well as some of the other passengers as they fly across the country.  We get to know Edward’s aunt and uncle as they struggle to support Edward deal with his trauma and work their way through  their own sadness regarding multiple miscarriages.  Edward’s journey towards a new normal for him rolls out slowly and compassionately. 

This reader devoured this book.  Alternating focus on the flight and Edward’s story both compelled the reader forward but also gave the reader a needed break from each story.  Knowing the crash is coming for these passengers whose hopes and dreams we are learning is difficult.  Relief from Edward’s pain and suffering and the struggles of his aunt and uncle is also welcomed.  But neither story feels neither heavy -handed nor overwrought—hence the desire to keep reading and participating in these multiple stories.

Well done Ann Napolitano!

Unquiet:  A Novel

By Linn Ullmann

Translated from Norwegian:  Thilo Reinhard

Published 2018

Read Oct 2020

This reader listened to an audio version of the book which allowed her to be unaware that Linn Ullmann is the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman.  This reader has since learned that the book, while called a novel, does, at least in part, reflect actual events.  Frankly if the book had been called a memoir and/or the true parental situation of the author was part of the marketing of the audiobook, this reader likely would have not chosen to read it.  But absent that distraction, this reader did choose to read the book and greatly enjoyed it.  Although this reader is generally aware of the celebrated works of the authors’ parents, this reader is just young enough and just uncool enough to have none of their films.  So this reader won’t discuss the real parents any further.

The narrator tells us fairly early in the book that she and her father, a famous Swedish filmmaker, had planned to write a book about him.  They had spent two years discussing the project and planned that they would take a jeep tour when they were done (her father loved driving his jeep).  Unfortunately by the time the tape recorder was purchased and the recordings began, the father’s health had failed substantially and only a few recordings were made.  So the narrator instead provides us with her thoughts about her life—focusing only on her childhood, the time during which the recordings were made, and after his death.

The narrator was the “love child” of a famous Swedish filmmaker and a Norwegian actress. She never names them, which suited this reader, and refers to them by “the father” or “papa” etc.  She was the youngest of his nine children born of 5 mothers.  The filmmaker was married to four of these women but he and her mother never married.  So there was never “the three of them” that she remembered but rather only she and her mother and she and her father. 

She tells of the summers spent with her father and his last wife on his property on an island off the coast of Sweden.  The property had a number of buildings including the narrow house he progressively expanded over the years and a barn that was converted to a movie theater.  She tells of times with her mother including when they were in the United States in a rented yellow house outside of New York City chosen because it had trees and children should be raised with trees.

She tells of the sessions she records on a small recorder but never listened to until after her father’s death so she didn’t realize how poor the sound quality was  despite being told this was the best device for the job.  The dialog between father and daughter is quite sad as it shows the rapid decline of his mental and physical capabilities which contrasts with his robustness when she was a child. 

Absent the knowledge of the true identity of the characters of the book, this book told a story of a girl born of a father 48 years her senior and a younger (by 20 years) mother.  This reader developed a sense that the narrator generally felt distant from both of her parents.  She desperately wanted more connection with her father, a desire that lasted throughout her life.  It seems she had more connection with her father than any of his other children but this connection was still very much on his terms and didn’t seem to take into consideration any needs of hers, perhaps due to expectations of fathers in the timeframe of the story (1960’s), his age, and his focus on his own interests and career .  The mother/daughter relationship seems somewhat universal in many ways:  daughter is annoyed by mother; mother has distinct ideas about what children need  (in this case trees and milk); mother is inconsistent in dealing with her daughter; and likely neither ever understands nor connects fully with the other.  The author moves seemingly randomly through time with her various memories which suited this reader well.  It felt like our own memories which pick varying times when we choose to start remembering. 

The writing was quite engaging.  Descriptions of the wind-swept island, her father driving his jeep fast to make the ferry to buy his papers on the mainland, the drying house where she hid when a young girl—all are quite vivid. 

Forget that the characters are real people and enjoy the beauty of the writing, the way the author reels out memories of a childhood, and the approach she takes to show the realities adult children face when parents’ lives are coming to a close. 

Clock Dance

By Anne Tyler

Published 2018

Read Oct 2020

This reader found this book in one of several Little Free Libraries this author frequents and to which this book will return for a new reader.  You can find a Little Free Library near you here. 

This reader has enjoyed each of the Anne Tyler novels that she has read.  They deliver stories of believable and (not overly) flawed people doing regular life things in an imperfect world.  Tyler welcomes the reader into the world of her characters and provides them a taste of the imperfect and real lives they lead.  Problems usually remain unresolved although the characters are not untouched.

In Clock Dance, the reader spends some time with central character Willa in 1967, when she is in fifth grade and her mother has left the family again for some unknown period of time; in 1977 when she is a junior in college and her boyfriend  Derek is about to graduate and wants her to quit school and marry him and move to California;  in 1997 when her husband Derek makes an aggressive move in traffic to soothe his road rage and manages to die in the accident that results; and finally in 2017 when she gets a call from Baltimore asking her to come to take care of a girl the caller thinks is Willa’s granddaughter while the girl’s mother is in the hospital.

We spend most of our time with Willa in 2017 as she and current husband Peter answer the request to come to care for Cheryl, the daughter of Denise, Willa’s son’s ex-girlfriend.  Cheryl isn’t her granddaughter but the caller didn’t know that and Willa responds anyway.  The readers are treated to living with Willa and Peter and Cheryl and her dog, Airplane, during the summer that Denise is recovering from a broken leg due to a stray bullet from an unknown gun.    We meet characters in Denise and Cheryl’s neighborhood and we learn about Cheryl’s approach to living with a single mother.   We learn about Willa and Peter’s marriage in 2017 although we don’t know when they married or anything about their life together prior to the here and now of this story.

This reader appreciates Tyler’s choices regarding what to tell us, what to show us, and what to leave unrevealed.  Her endings are never abrupt nor do they tie the ends together—what happens next for the charactersis appropriately unclear.  This reader looks forward to finding more Anne Tyler books in Little Free Libraries and in public libraries and to savoring more of Tyler’s stories of people and the families and friends who share their lives. 

Bruno:  Chief of Police

By Martin Walker

Published 2008

Read Sept 2020

Martin Walker is quite an interesting fellow.  He’s currently Senior Director of the Global Business Policy, a private think-tank for CEO’s of major companies, and Editor Emeritus of the United Press International, and Senior Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for scholars…. among other things.  He’s been a journalist, a broadcaster, and historical scholar and he has written widely in various formats.  

 Fortunately for this reader and fellow Bruno, Chief of Police  fans, he finds time to write about Bruno, a policeman who lives in a small village in South France.  Bruno, a former solider, has found his piece of heaven in St Denis.  He’s built his own house out of an abandoned shepherd’s cottage, he hunts, he  owns a dog, he organizes parades and firework displays for the village, he gardens, and  he cooks beautiful and simple meals. 

He also solves crimes.   Martin Walker has given us a series of Bruno books in which the policeman deals with a major crime while tending to the needs of the village and cooking wonderful meals. This NY Times article about Walker will likely engage your interest in Martin Walker and his Bruno series: 

In this first installment, Bruno must deal with the murder of a local elderly North African man who had served in the French army during WWII.  There is a swastika carved into his chest.  He’s paired up with a young policewoman from Paris to delicately investigate this politically charged situation.   Walker confronts the reader with some messy details of French history during WWII providing the reader with both some French history, an interesting mystery, and some French culture of the region.

This reader stumbled on this series in a Little Free Library and reported on The Devil’s Cave which is the sixth novel in the series that currently contains sixteen entries.  This reader did not find it important to read the two books “out of order” although it might be nice to progress through them in the order written.   This reader looks forward to more adventures with Bruno cooking, engaging with the residents of St Denis, and solving crimes. 

Go Went Gone

By Jenny Erpenbech

Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky

Published 2015

Read Sept 2020

The protagonist, Richard, is a recently retired classics professor.  He is somewhat disoriented in these early days of retirement when the highlights of his day may include a trip to the urologist.  On a walk in a nearby square he sees a “tent city” occupied by what he discerns to be African refugees.  He becomes interested in how his German government is dealing with them and he decides to do a “study”.  By the time he has formulated a long list of questions for the refugees he hopes to interview, the refugees have been placed in several living situations including a wing of a nearby nursing home.  He visits there and begins a relationship with several of the refugees.  Their names are complicated for him so he identifies them (only to himself) with names suggested by his classics background—Apollo, Tristan, Olympian, Thunderbolt-hurler.  Over the course of the story he learns about German law regarding refugees, including the agreement with the European Union countries that only the country of original entry into the EU can grant asylum. Most of these refugees from various African countries entered after their (usually overloaded) boat landed in Italy.  Italy has no work for them so they have come to Germany in search of work.  Since they have no official status in Germany, they aren’t allowed to work.  As these refugees are black, they encounter racial prejudice as well as the barriers of their refugee status.

The title Go Went Gone is an interesting one as it applies to several aspects:  Richard’s academic career is gone (he is retired);  his wife is gone (he is now a widower); his lover is gone (she’s left him), the country where he was born and raised (East Germany) is gone (being now part of unified Germany); the refugees’ ability to work for a living is gone (no legal status = no right to work); the refugees’ ability to stay in Germany is going (once their cases are heard they will be deported to Italy); the refugees are endeavoring to learn German and are learning how to conjugate verbs in this new language (although most speak several other languages). 

The author’s depiction of Richard’s disorientation as a new retiree is very realistic based on this reader’s own experience—feeling a loss of identity and associated worth, feeling of isolation from former colleagues, feeling that days are endless in the absence of work. The disorientation is amplified by the loss of his wife and his lover.   A positive aspect of retirement is noted—absent external expectations from the department, university, or other career responsibilities, reading and writing can feel freer and new veins of thinking are available even in texts previously well explored.    Similarly his consideration of the impact of the reunification on the geography and societal aspects of his neighborhood and life as a result of Germany’s reunification are considered more closely now. 

The story provides the reader much opportunity to consider regarding refugees and immigration—who should be allowed to work/what barriers are appropriate for non-citizens to their ability to make a living/contribute to society;  what is the appropriate definition of “citizen” and who has the right to make that definition; are immigration laws truly seeking to protect job access for citizens or are they seeking to prevent “others” from crossing borders; how did political borders get drawn—why and by whom; who has the right to define “other”. 

There are no simple answers and the author doesn’t suggest there are.   The book’s ending is appropriately not the ending of the story for Richard or the refugees he’s met.  The courses of all their lives remain uncertain– as is the actual case for all of us.  What is clear is that the flow of refugees/immigrants has always existed and will continue to exist as people flee war/political issues and/or seek a better life than they have where they are.   Borders are man-made.  Arguments over borders are man-made.  The constant flow of people away from strife will continue to challenge people to decide how they will accept “others” into “their” space. 

Girls Burn Brighter

By Shobha Rao

Published 2018

Read Aug 2020

This premier novel from Rao, born in India but migrated to the US at age 7, depicts the story of two girls’ struggle to retain their “brighter” selves despite relentless abuse they suffer. Poornima’s mother has died of cancer and her father’s alcoholism keeps the family struggling to eat.  He uses a marriage broker to seek a husband for Poornima but his meager estate makes this difficult.  Savitha’s family is even poorer, living on and picking through the local trash heap.  Savitha ends up working for Poornima’s father’s weaving business and the two girls kindle a friendship that helps them continue to “burn brighter” despite the obstacles they encounter.   The novel alternates between the stories of the two girls. The two girls end up in “thrown away” situations for different reasons which won’t be revealed here and are separated. 

This reader listened to the novel.  The reader was generally breathless, except in dialog sections. This reading style became somewhat annoying to this reader.  The non-dialog prose may have prompted this approach as it was sometimes nearly over the edge as it describes the relentless abuse the girls suffer and the girls’ struggle to keep their “light burning” while on their quests.  Poornima’s  quest was to find Savitha.   Savitha’s quest was to escape her appalling slave-life situation.  Her quest also seems pretty hopeless. 

Despite the near implausibility of their quests and an editing issue with respect to timing, the book was engaging. This reader knew that the “finder” at the nearby train station they both encounter at different times was leading them to a human trafficking situation which turned out to be true.  But this reader certainly hoped their quests would be fulfilled despite the odds.  The book paints a very bleak picture of life for Indian girls growing up in this kind of village in this region—having no worth except to have babies (boy babies) and serve the husband’s family.  When this path can’t be achieved, the options are bleak at best.    Unfortunately, this situation is not limited to poor Indian villages but remains true for many women in many cultures throughout the world and even within certain cultural situations in the United States.  This was a sobering book to read during the summer of the 100^th anniversary of women achieving the right to vote in the United States.  Clearly the struggle for basic rights for women remains incomplete. 

Where the Crawdads Sing

By Delia Owens

Published 2018

Read June 2020

This book has been wildly popular.  This reader listened to it while on a summer vacation and understands the appeal.  It is a coming-of-age story. The person coming of age is a young girl abandoned by family and surviving on her own in the swamplands of North Carolina. It has lush language about the landscape. The young girl blossoms into a well-respected author despite many obstacles.  It has a murder mystery, the story of the investigation running parallel to the coming-of-age story.  The reader is engaged to root for the young girl during her struggles to both interact with and avoid society.   It is sweet but not sappy.  It’s a little unbelievable with regards to the ability of a girl of nine to actually survive on her own but as the youngest of a hard-scrabble family she had to learn some things before everyone left and the family from whom she buys gas has their eye on her.

So enjoy reading this book along with lots of other readers even if it’s not one that you  will discuss for many hours with a serious book discussion group.  We need some of these too, especially during these days of a seemingly unending pandemic and this one might provide some needed positive nourishment.