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The Map of Salt and Stars

By Zeyn Joukhader

Published 2018

Read Nov 2019

Joukhader gives us two parallel stories of girls, eight hundred years apart, travelling from Syria across north Africa.  In the modern story, twelve year-old Nour, her sisters, and map-maker mother have returned to her mother’s home city of Homs in Syria, from Manhattan, after Nour’s father’s death.  Nour is the only one in the family who wasn’t born in Syria and she speaks little Arabic.  She does not feel at home in this land.  They become refugees and journey across north Africa in search of safety with family in Morocco.  In the ancient story, actually a fantastical story Nour’s father told her and she now tells herself, Rawiya, a sixteen year-old girl, tricks her mother into thinking she is going to a nearby town for provisions.  She actually disguises herself as a boy and takes her horse on a journey to find and become apprenticed to a famous map-maker.

The two stories parallel each other in the girl’s journey across Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, and Morocco.  Interestingly, each part of the novel begins with a poem in the shape of a country the girls are crossing.  Each girl faces various dangers.  In the modern story, we don’t learn much about the political situation leading to the need for the journey but rather the author focuses on the personal story of what is happening during the journey and what the main character is feeling.  She has the condition/capability of synesthesia which drives her perceptions of various situations and feeling to appear to her in colors.  In the ancient story, the main character faces down various perils including battles with the great white roc—a legendary bird of prey- and giant snakes.  The contrast between the stories is that Rawiya is seeking (and finding) adventure away from her family while Nour is seeking safety with her family. 

At times this reader wished the novel focused on Nour’s story of fleeing Syria and encountering many obstacles on her journey.  Certainly the descriptions of Rawiya’s adverntures were beautifully written.   They just felt somewhat distracting from the “real” story of Nour’s family’s journey.  But that is likely due to this reader’s limited taste for fantasy.  It’s possible that remembering the ancient adventure story with its successes of Rawiya made it easier for Nour to to bear the real challenges her family faces.    And possibly it makes it easier for the reader to read about these challenges.  Joukhader is to be congratulated in using this interesting approach to tell get the reality of the flight of refugees read by an audience that might not readily choose that topic. 

Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

By Olga Tokarczuk

Published 2009

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

This translation published 2018 in the UK and 2019 in the US (different publishers)

Read May 2020

As the novel opens, our narrator has been woken by her neighbor (who she calls Oddball) requesting she help him investigate another neighbor’s cottage.  They find the neighbor (who she calls Big Foot) dead on his kitchen floor.  Oddball wasn’t able to reach the police yet (cellphone connecting to Czech 911 vs their Polish police) and he convinces our narrator to help him dress Big Foot and put him on the couch.  During this process they find a bone stuck in Big Foot’s throat, the probable cause of his demise.  They eventually are able to get their Polish village’s police on the phone and the police take over the case.

Our narrator disliked Big Foot as he was a frequent poacher in the forests.   We get a sense of our narrator quite early: “By now Big Foot had gone, so it was hard to feel any pity or resentment toward him.  All that remained was his body, lifeless, clothed in the suit.  Now it looked calm and satisfied, as if the spirt were pleased to be finally free of the matters, and the matter were pleased to be finally free of the spirt.  In this short space of time a metaphysical divorce had occurred.  The end.”

We eventually learn the name of our narrator, Janina Duszejko, although she insists on being called by her last name only.  She was once a structural engineer who built bridges before she became a teacher.  She is now semi-retired, living in a small rural community near the Czech/Poland border.  Only she and her neighbor “Oddball”, and  previously the now deceased neighbor “Big Foot”, stay on their hill during the winter.  Our narrator watches seven summer cottages for their owners during the winter.  She also teaches English at the local school a few days a week.  She spends her days pouring over the poetry of William Blake and “The Complete Ephemerides, 1920-2020”, the latter being her reference for building detailed astrological charts for people based on their birth date and time.  Her former student, who she calls “Dizzy”, meets with her regularly as they work on translating Blake from English to Polish. 

As the winter turns to spring and summer and the police investigate Big Foot’s death, two other locals are found dead:  the police chief our narrator calls The Commandant and a local fur trader and brothel owner, Innerd.  These deaths give our narrator more fodder for her letters and in-person requests to the police to consider that Animals have killed all these men to avenge the murders of their brethren by these hunters.   “I wish to appeal to the gentlemen of the Police not to shy away from the idea that the perpetrators of the above-mentioned tragic incidents could be Animals”. 

During this period we readers are treated to the narrator’s thoughts.  “The best conversations are with yourself. At least there’s no risk of a misunderstanding”.  In fact the narration feels much more like a conversation the narrator is having with herself than one she is having with the reader.  An entomologist she calls Boros happens into her yard one day.  She gives him tea, allows him to stay a few days while he is waiting for his students to join him and then ““I raised the quilt and invited him to join me, but as I am neither Maudlin nor Sentimental, I shall not dwell on it any further.”  After a time, Boros eventually stops waiting for his students and moves on.

Readers will be glad this reader reveals no further plot elements of this interesting mystery as it unfolds more of our narrator’s story and thoughts.  For this reader, the mystery primarily provides our author a convenient excuse to continue drawing this special picture of our narrator.   She has had an accomplished past and now is semi-retired.  She is progressively isolated from those around her.  Her strident animal protection speech, her devotion to astrology, and her general isolated way of life make it easy for the village to dismiss her.  Her world is shrinking, especially as she lets her neighbors know she can’t be responsible for watching their cottages over the coming winter and she has to give up her teaching.  A man asks her what she has done in life and she remains speechless as she considers this question and answers only to herself:  “For people of my age,” she thinks, “the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there.”  So an interesting and convenient mystery provides a backdrop for this compelling look at a woman who remains vibrant in her thinking but increasing invisible to others.

Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature (awarded in 2019) for “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”. 

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

by Bailli Kaur Jaswal

Published 2017

Read May 2020

Jaswal gives us a novel that provides some insight into the culture of Southall, a Punjabi Sikh neighborhood of London and the challenges London-born daughters of Indian immigrants face as they mature into adulthood.  When Reese Witherspoon added it to her book club list in 2018 she indicated it was “a mystery, a romance, a family drama….and yes it’s 🔥 🔥 🔥!”

Nikki is a modern young woman, born of parents who emigrated from India.  She no longer lives with her widowed mother and sister in London, but rather lives in an apartment above the bar in which she works, the small apartment being part of her salary.  She quit law school before her father died, which disappointed him greatly, but Nikki was uninspired by the law.  A couple of years later she remains unsure what does inspire her but she is certain she is not interested in marriage soon.  Her sister, a nurse, is interested in an arranged marriage despite having a job that can support her outside a traditional marriage situation.   She sends Nikki to a Punjabi Sikh temple in Southall to post an advertisement about her to attract a potential mate.   While there Nikki manages to land a job teaching a writing class at the Sikh Community Association in Southall. 

Nikki assumes she will be teaching creative writing but quickly learns that her students, Pujabi widows, aren’t all literate.  One of the widows can read and write well and discovers a book of erotic stories that Nikki has purchased for her sister as a joke.  When this widow reads aloud from it while Nikki is out of the room, the other women become eager to tell erotic stories as well. 

In between the women’s erotic stories which are recounted in this book, we follow Nikki’s budding romance with a Sikh young man who also seems interested in pursuing a non-traditional route to love and marriage, a mystery around the death of the coordinator of women’s classes at the Sikh Community Association, the progress of Nikki’s sister’s plans towards marriage, and we are provided dark glimpses of a “brotherhood” of young Sikh men in the community who have become self-proclaimed enforcers of appropriate behavior of women.  Some, but not all, of these threads are carried to some conclusion while others are left dangling leaving the reader to wonder their real purpose in the book.

The book is entertaining and engaging.  We get a small look inside a traditional Sikh community co-existing with a modern city.  But some of the themes are quite universal beyond that specific culture, in particular the question of parental expectations of their children.  Fortunately the main character learns her father had accepted his daughter’s life choice before he died (she learns this from her mother).  The murder mystery is solved which relieves the family of the victim (a young Sikh woman whose reputation has been tarnished inappropriately) of some guilt.  But both of these aspects drilled home to this reader the impact parents’ expectations can have and challenged this reader to consider her own expectations of her adult children and whether they are appropriate or helpful.  Thus this reader was more impacted by this book than she expected to be.

The Overstory

By Richard Powers

Published 2018

Read March 2020

The Overstory has received much attention and some critics wonder why.  This reader does and doesn’t agree with that question.  While at times Powers can seem to beat his drum a little loudly, the novel is a great read for those who appreciate often delicious writing, multiple complex characters, several interpenetrating plot lines, and endings that aren’t tidied up with a bow.  This book certainly offers all of that.  

Powers begins the novel with individual chapters devoted to each of  nine characters.  These chapters are essentially short stories each providing a story about a character that will be either revisited in the rest of the novel or who will become firmly connected with the others characters being similarly introduced.  This reader found the first such chapter to be absolutely beautifully written. 

In this  first chapter introducing Nicholas Hoel, we learn about several generations of his family.  Newly emigrated from Norway, Jorgen Hoel meets and marries Irish Vi Powys in Brooklyn and they move to Iowa.  They bring with them chestnuts which Jorgen plants into the Iowan soil.  The trees and the family take root.  In twenty-three pages we learn the story of the family and the chestnut trees they plant.  Jorgen’s son John takes over the farm when his father dies and decides to photograph the chestnut tree with his newly acquired Kodak Brownie camera.    He takes a picture once a month until he dies and his son continues the task.  That Hoel tells his son:  “Listen.  I made a promise, and I kept it.  You don’t owe nobody.  Leave that damn thing be.”  “He might as well command the giant chestnut itself to stop spreading.”  Thus a set of over 1000 pictures of this maturing chesnut tree is the first artwork produced by this farming family.  We meet Nicholas Hoel, a descendant of Jorgen, who goes to art school instead of becoming a farmer, and who will be an important character in this novel.  We also learn about the blight that took out every Chestnut tree in the US.    Powers thoroughly engaged this reader through his concise and beautifully told story covering multiple generations of a family and the maturation of the chesnut tree.

One complaint this reader has heard about the book is that it takes 153 pages to get all the characters introduced before the “real story” starts.  This reader enjoyed each and every one of those 153 pages as interesting characters emerged from individual short stories about them which sets them up for engagement with one of the several stories in the novel:  1)  activists desperately trying to prevent the cutting of centuries old trees in the northwest; 2) a boy who becomes CEO of a videogame company that captures the minds of players world-wide; 3) a couple whose relationship evolves over the course of a couple decades in ways they would never have predicted; 4) a budding scientist whose original and startling publication about interactions between trees is initially heralded and subsequently scorned sending her into a sort of exile from the world. 

The only significant complaint this reader has about the novel is that after the initial set of chapters/short stories introducing the various characters, the book consists of only three chapter, the first being about 200 pages long and the second 119 pages long.  In these chapters, all four of the major stories are progressed.  This reader prefers shorter chapters that make it easier for readers who aren’t able to simply read through 200 pages in one sitting and who like to revisit parts of the book. The lack of delineation within these long stretches makes the latter action very difficult.

Powers can be a bit heavy-handed in trying to drive his points, but this reader appreciates his approach of using a story (or multiple stories) to engage people into learning new perspectives, learning about new cultures, and learning about new science findings. Regarding science and technology, which Powers often includes in his various novels, his character Patricia Westerford is likely based on real-life ecologist Suzanne Simard and the book she writes is likely a fictional portrayal of The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohleben.   He uses his characters Ray and Dorothy to drive the case for books and reading.  Both characters are avid readers but Ray (a patent attorney) reads only non-fiction while Dorothy reads only fiction.  They try over their years together to convince the other of the value of their preferred reading material type.  After a tragic even, they start reading both types together—-long novels and a book useful for identifying and learning about trees—and each comes to appreciate the usefulness of both kinds of books. 

For whatever flaws readers will find in this book, and, given its length, breadth, and structure, many critiques are possible, Power’s The Overstory has much to be appreciated and enjoyed.   It gives us new perspectives to consider.  Likely its readers will consider trees very differently than they did prior to reading this book. 

The Friend

By Sigrid Nunez

Published 2018

Read March 2020

This rather short (225 pages) book is a number of things.  We learn in the first chapter that the narrator has lost to suicide her long-time friend and mentor.  Much of the book is sets of reflections on their relationship and her grief.  She explores the course of grief following a suicide – disbelief, anger, despair, and unending pain.  Another thing the book has is the story of the narrator temporarily housing the friend’s Great Dane dog.  The narrator is a cat person and lives in a building that does not allow dogs.    She convinces the superintendent of the building that the dog won’t be staying, but she never actually makes any moves to accomplish that. She realizes the dog is undergoing great grief as well.  So the dog becomes another friend as they grieve and learn to carry on in the face of their grief.

Intermixed among the narrator’s reflections on grief and discussion of the dog are two other sets of reflections:  one about how the narrator views the calling of writing (yes a calling not a chosen profession for profit) and a second about her job as a writing instructor.  Her views regarding the calling/profession aspect of writing and the writers in each category are often amazingly blunt.  Yet while she seeks to write because that’s what she must do, she also needs to teach to make the rent. And feed the dog.

This is a brilliant piece of writing by an author that has herself remained out of the limelight and says she has sought quiet places to be alone to write.  Fortunately her genius has been recognized in this book which was the winner of the National Book Award in 2018.  That recognition will likely incite this reader and others to read her previous novels and other works.  This reader looks forward to that exploration. 

The Dutch House

By Ann Patchett

Published 2019

Read March 2020

Mr. and Mrs. Van Hoebech in 1922 built a unique house on 200 acres of farmland on the outskirts of Elkins Park, a suburb of Philadelphia , using their fortune made in wholesale distribution of cigarettes in WWI.  Over time their fortunes change and they slowly sell of acreage to pay debts and upkeep.  Mr. Van Hoebech dies in 1940; his wife passes in 1945.  The house and contents went back to the bank but Fluffy, the daughter of the cook and driver for the Van Hoebechs, continued living in the apartment over the garage, commissioned to watch over the house. 

Enter Cyril Conroy, a soldier in WWII who has lived peacefully with his wife and two small children in a small apartment on a nearby military base.  Cyril is beginning to make investments in real estate.  A deal gone really well allows him to buy the Dutch House, as it is always known, in 1946 and he moves his wife and children to the house.  They hire Fluffy to be a nanny and helper to Mrs. Conroy. 

We learn this background from our narrator and son of Cyril, Danny, who provides his family’s long story with this house. 

We learn that the Cyril bought the house without any input from his wife.  She finds the change from a small apartment on base to this large home complete with hired help disorienting.  The Conroy couple change nothing in the house, keeping in place all the furnishings and possessions left by the Van Hoebechs.  The only addition made is the portrait of daughter Maeve which is hung across the room from the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Van Hoebech and was painted when she was about ten years old because the original subject, her mother, refused to sit for a portrait.

We learn that Danny and Maeve’s mother left them after about a year in the house, when Danny is three and Maeve is ten, and never returned.  The abandonment nearly literally kills Maeve who developed type-I diabetes and ends up in a coma.  Danny’s memories of his mother are sparse given his young age when his mother left. 

Cyril eventually marries Andrea who moves into the Dutch House with her two daughters.  In fairly short order, and with no obvious objection of Cyril (at least heard by Danny) Andrea effectively displaces Maeve, who has just started college, from the household.  When Cyril dies of a heart attack, Andrea sends Danny to live with his sister who has just graduated from college and has a small apartment funded by her new job. 

Danny’s narration tells how he and Maeve react to this predicament and over the years and decades live their lives.  Danny joins Maeve’s habit of regularly looking at the house from a vantage point across the street from the house in Maeve’s parked car.

The narration weaves back and forth in time slowly dispensing Danny and Maeve’s story pre- and post-Andrea.  Since the narration is only from Danny’s perspective that’s the only view on this history that we are allowed by the narrator. 

Their story is an interesting one.  Maeve wages war on Andrea by seeking to drain an education fund set up by Cyril—for Danny and Andrea’s two daughters but not Maeve.  All of Maeve’s feelings about this situation can’t be revealed to us but Patchett gives the reader a chance to ponder them—especially as Danny and one of the daughters attend Medical School, but Cyril provides for no further funds for education for Maeve.  We can only imagine he didn’t think it necessary as she already had more education than most young women her age. 

Danny can’t remember his mother, but he can readily describe his close relationship with Maeve who played a motherly role for Danny after their mother leaves.  Their relationship deepens after Danny is sent to live with her.  We also learn this relationship is tested when Danny and Maeve’s mother comes back into the scene. 

Since Danny’s mother left him at age three, he has limited ability to understand the motivation for that event.  This incomplete picture of the circumstances provides the reader an opportunity to consider why a mother would abandon her children and how the time period of the story could influence the situation. 

In contrast, Danny has a very special bond with his father for the few years they had together.  Cyril took Danny with him on Saturdays when he collected rent from his tenants.  Danny develops his desire to follow in his father’s footsteps from these times together.  Danny is aware that Maeve’s relationship with her father is much more limited and includes the stark direction “move on” during Maeve’s grave illness following her mother’s departure.

The descriptions Patchett provides of house known as The Dutch House through Danny give us a vivid sense of how extraordinary it was.  It’s then quite believable that Andrea could be very driven to live in that house which she occupies until her death.  It’s quite believable that Maeve and Danny could spend many hours looking at the house from across the street.  It evoked in this reader the memories of a special house in the reader’s own past and how strong the memory of the essence of that house remains to this day.  They say “home is where the heart is”.  For Danny and Maeve, that home was irreparably disrupted and The Dutch House describes their long journey dealing with their personal catastrophes.  Are they able to “move on” as Cyril instructed Maeve?   You will need to read The Dutch House to learn the answer. 

Asymmetry

By Lisa Halliday

Published 2018

Read Feb 2020

This book has received multiple accolades as a stunning first novel and so this reader began with some expectations.  The first section did not stun this reader.  Alice, a young, pretty assistant at a publishing house who is hoping to be a writer, meets a famous writer, Ezra, forty-some years her elder, and begins an affair with him.  For quite some time he keeps her hidden from others he knows and she accepts this.  She becomes his assistant in many ways—-picking up his various tonics and prescriptions for him as well as specific food stuffs he requires.  They watch baseball in bed together.  They talk about writing.  He goes to his summer home on Long Island without her, part of the keeping their relationship hidden.  Eventually he does allow her to come to that summer home where he enjoys watching her swim laps.  One reviewer commented that she could have enjoyed 200 more pages of this section.  This reader did not share her enjoyment of this story.  What was she getting out of this relationship?  What he was getting was far more obvious.  What would propel her to begin a life beyond him?  Not clear.  Why would she stay with someone who clearly went through young women with little intention of having any commitment to them.  He does eventually pay off her student loans and, of course, buys her expensive clothing.  These acts did little to enhance my view of the character nor change my disappointment that Alice stayed with him.

I learned through reviews that the male character is a thinly disguised Phillip Roth, with whom the author had a relationship with while in her 20’s.  This came as quite a surprise to me.  Why would an author write about a former lover like this?  Was this to be homage or an indictment?  The fact that Roth was still alive when the book was published was also puzzling, knowing that he would likely read it.  Was this to get some validation from him or to sting him? 

Certainly this reader’s views of this part of the book are not shared by several reviewers which may indicate something about this reader’s literary capacity or taste.  Perhaps it’s an age difference.  In the end, this reader is not enchanted by May/December romances that seem quite out of balance when the December man seems to be taking advantage of the situation and seems to show little respect or appreciation for the May woman aside from providing expensive clothes and some cash.

The good news is that the second section of the book was extremely engaging and displays laudable author talent.  The story centers on Amar, a person of interesting citizenship (born of Iraqi parents on a plane while in US airspace and while the family is traveling to the US to live).  Amar is passing through London on his way to Iraq to see his brother who stayed in Iraq when Amar was a teenager and the family was visiting family in Iraq. The brother never embraced being a resident in the US and decided to study and practice medicine in the country he considered his home.  Amar is planning to spend the evening in London with a friend, who is a foreign correspondent, while he waits for his flight the next day to get him close to Iraq.  Heathrow Airport security has “just a few more questions” for him and these few questions take many, many hours.  While Amar is waiting between various questioning sessions, his thoughts take us back to different periods in his life and give us unique insight into the way Amar sees himself given his interesting beginnings, his childhood, education, and work experiences.   

The third section was fairly short and comprised an interview of Ezra by the host of a long-running British show that includes discussing the interviewee’s favorite musical pieces.  Ezra throws out comments about his various young lovers and suggests that one of them has become a writer of sorts although he names neither the writer nor the piece.  Is he trying to help her or hurt her with this approach?  Readers are left to decide this for themselves.  But the reader can conclude that the Amar piece was written by Alice and likely published after their relationship had ended.

Interestingly, this reader was experiencing Assymetry as the controversy over white author Jeanine Cummin’s new novel, American Dirt, about a Mexican bookseller and mother who flees to the US from Acapulco to get out of sight of a drug cartel.  The controversy seemed to center on what “authorized” Cummin to write about a non-white character whose experience wasn’t hers?  So the biggest “asymmetry” in this novel for this reader is that the author offers us Alice’s story, which she is clearly “authorized” to tell as she knows it first hand, and as well gives us the Amar piece, which some could contend she is not “authorized” since she is not male and certainly doesn’t have this kind of history or dilemmas with which to content.  If the author had to write Alice’s story in order to bring the Amar piece to publication, this reader is glad she pursued that path.  This reader has not read American Dirt and cannot comment on its quality. But this reader does believe that authors should not be confined to write only about people like themselves.  This reader has read Asymmetry and hopes that Halliday will write more pieces of the quality of the Amar section and that she finds a publisher willing to allow her to publish it without needing to drape an Alice section in the book as well. 

The Testaments 

by Margaret Atwood  

Published 2019

Read Dec 2019

Although Atwood wrote The Testaments as a kind of sequel to the The Handmaid’s Tale to address a question from readers about what brought down the country of Gilead,  this book can be read without reading The Handmaids’ Tale.   

The structure of this book is interesting.  Individual chapters are either excerpts from The “Ardual Hall Holograph” or transcriptions of testimony from Witness 369A or from Witness 369B.  We eventually learn the identities of the writer and witnesses.  The “Ardual Hall Holograph” was written by Aunt Lydia, a character in the Handmaid’s Tale who we learn in this book was an architect of “the women’s sphere” of Gilead and its leader.  Witness 369A was Agnes Jemimah, an upper-class girl who grew up in Gilead and was the daughter of an important Commander.  Witness 369B was Daisy/Jade/Nicole, a young woman living in Canada who marches in anti-Gilead protests and watches new of its horrors on TV. 

In both this book and The Handmaid’s Tale, there is an appendix which is a set of excerpts from a symposium on Gileadeon Studies.  The symposium described in The Handmaid’s Tale is the 12^th Symposium on this topic and takes place at an International Historical Association Convention in 2195.  That symposium discusses the cassette tapes found in a footlocker that became the basis of The Handmaid’s Tale.  In this book, transcriptions of the 13^th Symposium, held in 2097, are provided.  The same keynote speaker discusses the new findings—Aunt Lydia’s papers and the transcriptions of the witnesses.  Atwood’s humor shows through in these appendices as the academics bemoan the poor dating information on the various materials uncovered and spend time considering what social events the symposium offers. 

While Atwood has indicated she started writing this book to answer questions from her audience about what brought down Gilead, she also uses this book to discuss how the structure and culture of Gilead evolved.   Aunt Lydia’s Holograph describes the breakdown of the government from her vantage point as a family court judge.  She quickly describes the scene prior to the collapse of the government:  floods, tornados, hurricanes, droughts, water shortages, earthquakes, decaying infrastructure, a tanking economy, joblessness, a falling birth rate. The implementation of martial law and suspension of the constitution apparently almost seemed reasonable as armor against Islamic terrorists.   She remarks “you don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you”.  She provides her personal story from her arrest to her rise as the leader of the “women’s sphere”, telling us: “You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one.  In times like ours, there are only two directions:  up or plummet.”  She understands what she has done and why.  She understands why she has been able to stay alive and stay in power [for approximately 20 years] (Gilead has gone through several regime “clear-outs”).  We eventually understand she has over a long time developed a plan to bring down Gilead and are amazed by her patience and persistence.  Atwood has Aunt Lydia hide her manuscript in the cavity of Cardinal Newman’s Apologia ProVita Sua: A Defense of One’s Life,an actual book written by John Henry Newman in 1864 to defend his religions opinions which resulted in his leaving the Anglican Church and becoming Roman Catholic, and to defend himself from the attacks of his opposition, Charles Kingsley. 

The transcription of Agnes/Jemimah gives the reader insight on the structure and culture of Gilead.   She describes her earliest recollections (she was “chosen’ by her mother –she eventually understands this means she was one of the girls taken from their mothers), tells us about her primary school education in Gilead (approximately age 5 to about age 13) and her marriage preparation education where she learns how to behave as a Commander’s Wife. 

So Atwood uses this interesting structure to give us a look at the beginnings of Gilead and the culture and structure that have raised the first generation of girls born in Gilead (or shortly before it is formed).  Blended into this is an exciting story of how these characters come together and undertake actions that are intended to impact the future of Gilead. 

Atwood doesn’t provide a neat ending to the adventure tale.  Neither does she detail the history of Gilead between that adventure and the Symposia she references in the appendix.  However, and as usual, she writes this ‘speculative fiction” to provoke her readers to consider what might happen if….  She claims that she writes nothing that hasn’t already happened somewhere sometime….  Among the questions she leaves us are include: 1)   How does our country not lose its way and devolve into something like Gilead?  2)   Why is a reactive course in a time of substantial strife one of de-evolution of the rights of women and how do we insure against that?  3)  How would we behave if we were arrested and treated as Aunt Lydia was?  4) How do we know if we are heading towards a government breakdown?   We read Atwood to experience both her excellent writing and to be provoked into difficult questions.  This reader looks forward to more from this author. 

The Girls at 17 Swann Street

By Yara Zgheib

Published 2019

Read Feb 2020

This book is written in 91 short chapters which propel you forward through the story of Anna as she spends six weeks at 17 Swann Street, a residential eating disorders clinic.  Anna, a French ex-pat living in St Louis with her husband Matthius, checks into the residential eating disorders clinic at the urging of her husband after he realizes he can no longer ignore the path his wife behavior has taken and the threat to her life it poses.  They had met in Paris, where Anna had been a ballerina until an injury prevents her from dancing.  She and Matthius fell deeply in love and wed.  He leaves for a job in St Louis ahead of her and she accompanies him several months later. 

The plot arch focuses on the six weeks she spends at the clinic—meeting the other residents, getting through the meals that are difficult for all residents (included the dreaded bagel with cream cheese for breakfast), feeling guilty about her situation, and visits from Matthius.  She is told by other residents that she is lucky—she has a reason to leave—Matthius’s unwavering love for her.  Flashbacks provide some of Anna’s backstory and reveal several difficult situations in her past—an abusive boyfriend, deaths of her brother and mother, difficulties in her ballet career.  The author does not tie these issues directly to her current diagnosis of anorexia nor does Anna discuss them with her counselor. 

Although this reader was surprised that Anna’s state is assessed as improved several times through her stay, seemingly early, and she is released after only six weeks, the author does not suggest that she is fully healed and will certainly be successful in the out-patient program she enters.  Having a loving and committed spouse whom Anna clearly loves seems to be a driver for optimism and a reason to move her into an out-patient setting.  However, the author provides examples of other residents’ relapses, lengthy stays, and sometimes deadly failures. 

This is an interesting, engaging book that provides a look at this difficult disease and difficulties faced by sufferers and their families and friends.