RidgewayGirl Reads Books in 2019 - Part Two

A second thread and a very good start to my reading year. The Tournament of Books never fails to give me a list of challenging books, many of which I would never have picked up otherwise. It stretches my reading. And in between the ToB books have been a random selection of what appeals to me at the moment and a renewed love of crime fiction. Now off on the second leg of this road trip!

Here are my categories, largely unchanged from last year.

Let's hit the road!






Currently Reading



Recently Read



Recently Acquired (fine additions to the tbr)



Books obtained: 30 -- I would like to point out that I've been able to read as many books this year as I have brought home. I'd also like to point out that my three biggest annual book buying events are yet to come.

Owned books read: 24 -- Yay!

Library books read: 32 -- the goal of reading at least 50% of my own books is not off to a great start.

NetGalley: 11 -- not sure yet whether this was a good idea or not.

Category One.

Around the World




Create Your Own Visited Countries Map

1. Lying In Wait by Liz Nugent (Ireland)
2. Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama, translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai (Japan)
3. The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones (Australia)
4. The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer
5. The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag, translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg

Category Two.

Diverse Voices



1. Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala
2. Our Man in the Dark by Rashad Harrison
3. A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley
4. Assumption by Percival Everett
5. The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory
6. Ordinary People by Diana Evans

Category Three.

Expats, Immigrants and Works in Translation



1. A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen
2. Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
3. Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury, translated from the Arabic by Humphrey Davies
4. Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua, translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg
5. Dawn: Stories by Selahattin Demirtas, translated from the Turkish by Amy Marie Spangler and Kate Ferguson
6. Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli

Category Four.

Published in 2019



1. East of England by Eamonn Griffin
2. The Churchgoer by Patrick Coleman
3. The New Me by Halle Butler
4. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
5. We Are All Good People Here by Susan Rebecca White
6. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
7. Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky

Category Five.

The Rooster



1. Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
2. Milkman by Anna Burns
3. Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
4. My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
5. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
6. The Dictionary of Animal Languages by Heidi Sopinka
7. The Overstory by Richard Powers
8. So Lucky by Nicola Griffith
9. Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
10. Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Category Six.

Debut Novels



1. Ways to Hide in Winter by Sarah St. Vincent
2. Make Me a City by Jonathan Carr
3. Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
4. The Study of Animal Languages by Lindsay Stern
5. The Altruists by Andrew Ridker
6. American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

Category Seven.

CATs and My Book Club



1. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (RandomCAT and book club)
2. American Pop by Snowden Wright (book club)
3. Staff Picks by George Singleton (book club)
4. First Execution by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar (June TBRCAT)
5. Past Tense by Lee Child (July RandomCAT)

Category Eight.

Books by Women



1. Snap by Belinda Bauer
2. Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
3. Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin
4. The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
5. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
6. The Snakes by Sadie Jones
7. Paris, 7 a.m. by Liza Wieland
8. The Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman

Category Nine.

Books I Own



1. Desert Fabuloso by Lisa Lovenheim
2. The Water Cure by Sophie MacKintosh
3. November Road by Lou Berney
4. His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet
5. The Great Alone by Kristen Hannah
6. Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg
7. Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Category Ten.

Crimes True or fiction, it's all deadly.



1. The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman
2. The Lonely Witness by William Boyle
3. The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware
4. The Wolf Wants In by Laura McHugh

Bonus Category Eleven.

The Overflow



1. Golden State by Ben H. Winters

Happy new thread! I look forward to seeing your thoughts on all the Tournament of Books reads...I've never participated myself, but I always like to follow the discussions!

Oh, and here's my BingoDog card.



1. Golden State by Ben H. Winters
2. Our Man in the Dark by Rashad Harrison
3. Snap by Belinda Bauer
4. Ways to Hide in Winter by Sarah St. Vincent
6. So Lucky by Nicola Griffith
7. Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
8. The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones
12. Past Tense by Lee Child
14. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
16. Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession by Alice Bolin
20. We Are All Good People Here by Susan Rebecca White
21. A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen
22. Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
23. American Pop by Snowden Wright
24. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
25. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Pop Sugar Reading Challenge 2019

1 - A book becoming a movie in 2019
2 - A book that makes you nostalgic -- The Years by Annie Ernaux
3 - A book written by a musician (fiction or nonfiction)
4 - A book you think should be turned into a movie -- My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
5 - A book with at least one million ratings on Goodreads
6 - A book with a plant in the title or on the cover -- Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
7 - A reread of a favorite book
8 - A book about a hobby -- Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken
9 - A book you meant to read in 2018 -- Washington Black by Esi Edugyan
10 - A book with "pop", "sugar" or "challenge" in the title -- American Pop by Snowden Wright
11 - A book with an item of clothing or accessory on the cover
12 - a book inspired by mythology, legend or folklore -- The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
13 - A book published posthumously
14 - a book you see someone reading on TV or in a movie
15 - A retelling of a classic
16 - A book with a question in the title
17 - A book set on a college or university campus -- The Altruists by Andrew Ridker
18 - a book about someone with a super power -- Golden State by Ben H. Winters
19 - a book told from multiple POVs -- Make Me a City by Jonathan Carr
20 - a book set in space
21 - a book by two female authors -- Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
22 - A book with a title that contains "salty", "sweet", "bitter" or "spicy"
23 - A book set in Scandinavia -- The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag
24 - a book that takes place in a single day
25 - a debut novel -- Our Man in the Dark by Rashad Harrison
26 - a book that's published in 2019 -- East of England by Eamonn Griffin
27 - a book featuring an extinct or imaginary creature
28 - a book recommended by a celebrity you admire
29 - a book with "love" in the title
30 - a book featuring an amateur detective -- The Wolf Wants In by Laura McHugh
31 - A book about a family -- A Terrible Country by Keith Gessen
32 - A book written by an author from Asia, Africa or South America -- Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama
33 - A book with a zodiac sign or astrology term in the title
34 - a book that includes a wedding -- Ways to Hide in Winter by Sarah St. Vincent
35 - A book by an author whose first and last names start with the same letter -- Snap by Belinda Bauer
36 - A ghost story
37 - a book with a two-word title -- Desert Fabuloso by Lisa Lovenheim
38 - A novel based on a true story
39 - A book revolving around a puzzle or game -- Past Tense by Lee Child
40 - Your favorite prompt from a past Popsugar Reading Challenge

>13 christina_reads: Christina, it's just a lot of fun. And it's hard for me to not read all the shortlist books when there is competition to do so.

Hal isn't doing very well. Her mother died in a hit and run a few years ago and Hal is not quite getting by reading tarot cards on a pier in Brighton, England. She's in debt to a loan shark when she receives a letter telling her she's named in a will. But the woman named is not Hal's grandmother. In desperation, Hal decides to go to Cornwall and attempt to claim this inheritance that isn't hers.

The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware is a thriller of an old-fashioned kind with a gothic flavor, from the old house to the hostile housekeeper and the many secrets each member of the family are keeping from each other and from Hal, who stumbles around, trying to not get caught out. It's a fun, fast-paced read that hangs together as long as the reader doesn't think about it too much. A fun book for a rainy weekend, but I doubt I'll remember it in a few months.

Happy new thread! You have so many categories and challenges!

Hi, Jennifer, yes, I do! Too many probably, but I'm very ambitious at the start of a new year. It's only around September that reality arrives to let me know I over-reached.

Happy new thread, Kay. I believe you said you would be making tea? English Breakfast please. Although I should probably be drinking water to help hydrate this viral nastiness I've had for almost two weeks. One good thing though, the coughing keeps coworkers from wanting to hold a meeting before the meeting to meet about absolutely nothing *blinks*.

I see you've read My Sister The Serial Killer and are reading Washington Black. I had to suspend my hold on the first and return the other to make room for six books coming in within 12 hours of each other. Time to put them on hold again!

If Lee Child and Daniel Woodrell went to Lincolnshire together to write a novel, it might look a lot like Eamonn Griffin's East of England. This is a gritty thriller, a fast-paced noir set in the flat agricultural areas and amusement arcade-covered beach towns of eastern Lincolnshire.

Dan Matlock walks out of the prison, where he has spent the past two years for accidentally killing a man with his car, and across the road to the adjacent hospital carpark where he steals a car to drive home. He wants to see his father, but first he has a plan he needs to set into motion. Two years has given him a lot of time to think about what happened and to stew in his need for revenge. But even a well-laid plan will not hold out in the light of day and it's not long before Dan is just trying to figure out what is going on.

A lot happens in this novel, much of it violent, but Dan is not entirely on his own. There's his old employer, Big Chris, who he used to help collecting money from people who don't keep up with their payments and there's the old guy he meets in the caravan park where he is renting a place to live. There's the receptionist at the nursing home and, in an odd way, the head of the crime family that sent him to prison. This is a novel where criminals face off against slightly worse criminals, where the seaside attractions are showing their age and the family farms have given way to giant factory farms. Lincolnshire comes to life as Dan goes about his business, but often the plot is interrupted by sections that regurgitated from road maps and guides to local attractions. Overall, though, this is a solid novel and I look forward to seeing what Dan Matlock gets up to next.

>21 RidgewayGirl: You got me with mention of Daniel Woodrell! East of England is going on the wishlist.

Happy New Thread, Kay. You always read such interesting sounding books.

Happy new thread! I continue to love your category pictures. B&W pics really communicate the image differently than if they were in colour.

>21 RidgewayGirl: -I love that book cover. Is this the first book in a possible series? Trying - unsuccessfully - to avoid adding new series to my burgeoning pile, but this one does sound intriguing.

Happy new thread, Kay. May I beg a cup of Assam tea while I drool over the pictures?

Happy new thread! I loved revisiting the B&W photos.

Thanks, Betty. It's been a great reading year so far.

Lori, the author is releasing a sequel to East of England soon. I was drawn to the cover, too.

MissWatson, I've also baked cookies, sit over there in the comfy chair.

Jackie, they do have a different impact.

Happy new thread! Just a couple of days old and already has added to my library with East of England.

"Books purchased: 8 -- the defenses are crumbling. The spirit is weak." I sympathize completely.

I think you'll like East of England, Vivienne. And I am an easy mark when it comes to books.

Washington Black is a young slave working in the sugar cane fields of a Barbados plantation when he catches the eye of the Master's brother, Titch. Titch is a scientist who has developed an aerostat, a flying machine that uses a hydrogen-filled balloon. Titch trains Wash in the natural sciences as well as teaching him the rudiments of reading and Wash finds he has a talent for drawing. But while Titch treats him humanely, Wash is still living on a plantation full of enslaved people and white men who regard the slaves as things. Circumstances cause Titch and Wash to flee in the aerostat, and the subsequent years bring both adventures and fear, as Wash travels to Virginia, the Arctic, Upper Canada, London, Continental Europe and Morocco.

Esi Edugyan has written this book as a traditionally structured historical novel, with plenty of adventure and lots going on. But there's a much larger and more subversive story going on as well. The reader feels Wash's real fear as a black man in a world that is hostile to him, where even when he is in places where slavery is illegal, he knows he can be forcibly taken. His moments of peace are always temporary. And Edugyan also looks at what slavery does to the traditional family structure and with a person's ability to function independently. Titch may be a caring person who can see Wash as a human being, but he's also still fed and supported by slavery and unable and unwilling to stand up against the existing structures. Each place Wash finds himself has its own racist structures in place, even in places known as places of refuge for escaped slaves.

From an abolitionist who studies decay in human corpses, to a woman with tobacco- stained teeth and a mind of her own, to a mute Dutch man more comfortable in the Arctic than at home, this is a novel full of colorful and unlikely characters, all of whom exist in some way outside of borders of respectable society.

>30 RidgewayGirl: Oh a BB for me!

Well written review of Edugyan's latest! I still need to read her debut novel - shameless of me considering Edugyan currently lives in southern Vancouver Island like I do - but I do have both books on my radar screen.

>31 Tess_W: Tess, it's such a solid historical novel, and then there are the additional layers that add so much. I've picked up a copy to give to my Mother-in-Law for her birthday.

>32 lkernagh: Thanks, Lori! I have a copy of Half Blood Blues but it has sat unread on my shelf. I'll be remedying that soon!

>30 RidgewayGirl: Great review of Washington Black. I don't think it'll win the ToB, but it's the book I've enjoyed the most from the ones I've read so far.

Taking the first hundred years of Chicago's history as his starting point, Jonathan Carr has written a novel composed of inter-linked stories in the form of letters, news articles, excerpts from history books and biographies, as well as traditional story-telling. Make Me a City focuses on the ordinary laborer, the failed businessman, the dispossessed, and outsiders to tell the story of Chicago, from it's beginnings through to the early years of the twentieth century. The protagonist of one chapter might disappear, only to reappear in a story set a decade later, or to be a secondary character, or spoken about in a later chapter. It's an effective way to tell a sweeping story and to keep the novel from feeling too much like a collection of short stories.

And through every chapter, the city of Chicago is the real main character, rising out of the wilderness and based on cheating, evictions, grift and regular old corruption, this Chicago also features people doing their best, immigrants working to build new lives in an unfamiliar land, visionaries, and truth-tellers.

Catching up on your last thread and this thread - 6 more BBs taken - dangerous!

I was curious what prompted you to pick up Desert Fabuloso?

>36 LisaMorr: Lisa, back in the late eighties and early nineties, I worked part-time in bookstores. Desert Fabuloso was released as a trade paperback original at the time trade paperbacks were being introduced to readers. I remember we bookstore employees were sure they'd be just a brief flash in the pan, showing how much bookstore employees know. In any case, they were slow to take off and a lot of titles were moved, in due course, from the regular shelves to the clearance table. Coupled with my employee discount, I ended up with a small stack of utterly randomly chosen trade paperbacks over time. I suspect I chose this one because of the cover.

As to why I read it now, after finishing The Great Believers, I wanted to read a book set in the same world but without the horror of AIDs. This both was and was not that book.

Oh, here you are. Happy Reading!

>37 RidgewayGirl: Love the backstory, thank you!

On the day that Yuuki was scheduled to meet his best friend, Anzai, and go on a short climbing holiday, a plane crashes into the mountains, killing over 500 people. As the senior reporter for a local provincial paper, Yuuki stays in the office and is put in charge of the paper's coverage of the crash. Anzai also doesn't make it to the meeting point. He collapses on a city street and is taken to the hospital where he lays in a coma.

What follows is an intense procedural novel about how the news coverage is put together. Yuuki assigns reporters to specific stories, determines which stories go where, navigates the difficult office politics of a paper where the managing director is battling for dominance with the chairman, and anxiously waits for the stories to make it in to the paper before the presses have to roll. And he tries to sneak out of the office now and again to visit his friend's bedside, where he takes Anzai's son under his wing.

Framing the airplane crash story is one set Seventeen years later, when Yuuki sets out to follow the original climbing plan with Anzai's son. Hideo Yokoyama's story is not a thriller or a crime novel, but an oddly compelling detailed look at how a provincial newspaper covered a major story that happened to occur in their area. Set in 1985, the story is devoid of the modern electronics that makes communication so easy, with reporters running for pay phones to send in updates and newspapers could scoop each other by printing a story in an earlier edition than their competitors.

>40 RidgewayGirl: That sounds really interesting!

Lisa, I found the nuts and bolts of what it takes to produce a newspaper (in a provincial city in Japan in 1985) really interesting and also not something that I'd ever thought about.

Ivory Frame is an elderly woman who has been working for decades on The Dictionary of Animal Languages, a compendium of the various noises animals make to communicate, from the clicking of insects to bird songs to the howls of wolves. Ivory has had an eventful life, attending art school in Paris, where she falls in love with another artist until the Second Word War drives them apart. She finds her true calling with the dictionary, and even though she is in her nineties, she continues to work on it.

This is an odd novel about a strong and determined woman. Heidi Sopinka tells the story from a very close first person, so much that there is no clear way to tell the difference between what Ivory is thinking and what she is saying aloud. The novel is set in two time frames; her life in France and her years after the war, as she finds her vocation. Sopinka's prose is not written with clarity in mind, there's a ornate and poetic feel to the writing that I found got in the way more than it gave greater illumination to the story. The best part of the novel was the character of Lev, a Tortured Artist with a truly fascinating and harrowing past in Ukraine and while he is the great love of Ivory's life, there are many hints that she's just the next girl in a sequence that exists somewhere below his art. There was a lot interesting going on and I wanted to like it more than I did. In the end, it was just too opaquely written and the central conflict shouldn't even exist, the solution being so obvious and predictable.

Richard Powers's latest novel, The Overstory, begins with several chapters that read like short stories in which a person's connection to a specific kind of tree is explored. This part of the novel is excellent. From there, Powers widens the story and the various characters interact in different ways as each one reaches the conclusion that saving the trees is important. But the action they end up taking has deadly results.

This is a big book, both in scope and in size. The environmental issues Powers addresses are urgent and important. And a theme of this novel is how the only thing that can change minds is a good story. This is pointed out more than once, in increasingly ham-fisted ways. Unfortunately, this is not that story.

This story is bloated and overwrought. There isn't a nuance or a speck of humor to be found. And we'll leave Powers's skill at portraying women alone except to say that one woman is described using the words of a One Direction song.

I regret the hours spent reading this novel.

Mara has a great life. She's in a relationship and they live in a cute condo. Her job with a large AIDS non-profit gives her recognition and challenges and she's passionate about martial arts. Then, in a few days, it all collapses. Her partner leaves her for another woman and then she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), an unpredictable and disabling disease, which progresses rapidly, exhausting her, rendering her unable of continuing with the physical activity she loves. She loses her job and is quickly isolated, home alone, but also isolated by the distance that people put between themselves and the disabled.

In So Lucky, Nicola Griffith takes a strong, focused and self-focused woman and shows what becoming disabled does to a person. Mara is a fighter, and she's quick to turn her attention and experience to helping ms patients advocate for themselves by starting her own non-profit organization.

But this is not, despite the title, an inspiring book about a woman who overcomes odds or who learns acceptance. Mara is angry and her rage, which is open and uncontrolled, is an impressive thing. I'm used to men's rage. There are entire movie franchises and book series based on a man's rage at an injustice done to a woman he fancies, but here is a woman angry about what has happened to her and not about to sit home and suffer quietly. So Lucky not a comfortable book to read, nor is it a perfect book, but it is a worthwhile book.

>45 RidgewayGirl: Putting that one on my wish list.

During the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israel War, the residents of the city of Lydda (now Lod) were forced to leave their homes. Later, those homes would house Jewish refugees, themselves displaced from their homes in Bulgaria. But a few Arabs, Muslim and Christian, stayed behind in Lydda and were gathered together into what the soldiers guarding them called a ghetto. Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam by Lebanese author Elias Khoury and translated by Humphrey Davies, tells the story of one boy, the first child born into this new version of Lydda.

The novel begins with a long introduction from a university professor in New York named Elias Khoury, who met Adam briefly and disliked him intensely, mostly because they shared a romantic interest in the same woman but also out of consternation. Adam Dannoun is the cook in a falafel restaurant, well-educated and well-spoken, but he speaks both Arabic and Hebrew like a native. When Adam dies, the woman brings a stack of notebooks to Elias. She had been instructed by Adam's will to destroy them, but finds herself unable to do so. Elias, upon reading the notebooks, initially wants to write a novel based on the contents, but decides instead to submit them as they are for publication.

What follows begins as what one might find in the private notebooks of a scholar, a series of abortive attempts at writing the story of a Yemeni poet during the time of the Caliphates, followed by a rambling entry about his life in general, but all of this is necessary to the meat of the novel, Khoury taking his time to set up ideas and the life of this first witness before leading into what life was like for the people who stayed behind in Lydda, after most of the people had fled.

This was a powerful and understated novel about a part of the world whose history I know too little about. Khoury's slow and meandering style was wonderful and I'll be reading more by this author.

Just like an icy glass of coke on a hot summer's day, American Pop by Snowden Wright was a refreshing break to the (slightly) more serious reading that I've been doing. This is a soap opera, a family saga where the story shifts quickly between the various family members, going back and forth in time, to tell the story of an American family's rise and fall.

When Houghton Forster developed a cola drink to serve in his father's pharmacy, he had no idea that it would be so popular. Houghton's a savvy businessman, though, and quickly takes advantage of the soda's popularity to make it a national product that becomes a standard beverage throughout the US and the world. Although firmly rooted at their home in Mississippi, the money that Panola Cola's success brings with it means that the next generation can move comfortably in high society, but not necessarily that they, or the following generation, have what it takes to keep the family business profitable.

Ranging from Panola County, Mississippi, to the battlefields of WWI France, to New York, to Hollywood and the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, American Pop also jumps back and forth through the timeline, so that a character's death is described before his first kiss, or a divorce before the marriage. It's a hard trick to pull off, juggling all the characters and their lives in a non-chronological way, but Wright pulls it off. The novel is pure entertainment that manages not to lose the story in all of that intricate structure.

>44 RidgewayGirl: Oh my, I received that as a Christmas present...I'm guessing that it will languish a bit...

>47 RidgewayGirl: and >48 RidgewayGirl: BBs for me!

In The Journalist and the Murderer Janet Malcolm examines the relationship between the journalist and his subject, through the example of Joe McGinness and Jeffrey MacDonald, the subject of McGinness's best-selling book, Fatal Vision. McGinness was invited into the inner circle of MacDonald's defense team and he spent hours with MacDonald, and he continued to write friendly letters to MacDonald after MacDonald's conviction for the murder of his wife and daughters. When MacDonald read the book, he felt betrayed and sued the author for fraud and breech of contract.

Malcolm was invited to speak with McGinness and to write about the case by McGinness's defense team, but after a single interview, McGinness refused to speak to her again. Malcolm constructed her book out of interviews with various people involved in both cases, as well as the court transcripts, but she notes the absence at the center of the story. Did McGinness cross a line in allowing MacDonald to view him as a sympathetic ear who believed in his innocence? Are journalists free to lie and deceive in order to get their story?

While Malcolm does not provide any solid answers, the presentation of the questions and of the strange story of the relationship between the journalist and the murderer does make for compelling reading and much to think about.

>50 RidgewayGirl: This is a BB for me! I've read Fatal Vision twice and have seen the movie.

>51 Tess_W: You're certain to find it interesting, then. I read the book and watched the movie, but so long ago that I remember almost nothing about it.

That book is taking an unusual angle, as I'd never thought about the writer/murderer other than In Cold Blood.
My husband had a step-father for a few years who claimed to have been roommates with McDonald during medical school. He was a lowlife too.

>53 mstrust: You might enjoy this book for Malcolm's description of MacDonald, Jennifer. She examines the idea that a book like Fatal Vision needed a more interesting and dynamic subject than MacDonald actually was and that McGinness took some liberties there.

The Water Cure tells the story of three young women living on a Scottish island with their parents. They have spent their lives there and know that off the island is a world where men hurt women, the air is toxic and they would surely die. Living in an isolated, decaying hotel, protected by the rites and tests designed to keep them wary and safe, they find various ways to survive. The oldest, Grace, has been rewarded for her diligence with a swelling stomach while Lia, the middle daughter, cuts herself for the good of all of them. Their father leaves one day, and then the two men and a boy show up on their island.

This is an odd and dreamy dystopian novel where the reader is left in the same information-deprived limbo as the three women. They're trying to survive, but what they've been taught might not actually be true and their father was perhaps not the protector they believed him to be. I read this book desperately wanting more information about the world this novel exists in, but by the end of the story, I had just enough to satisfy me, without spelling out everything. Sophie MacKintosh writes evocatively about the inner lives of these isolated women, but if you're looking for clear resolutions, they remain tantalizingly just out of sight.

>55 RidgewayGirl: I can't make my mind up about that one. Since it isn't available yet from my libraries, I'm letting that make the decision for me. I don't think it's one for which I'm willing to shell out money.

>55 RidgewayGirl: It's an odd one, Lori.

After much thought about my Thingaversary, I've decided to celebrate it six months late and blow it all on an unrestrained time at the Decatur Book Festival at the end of August. An additional reason to look forward to the Festival!

>57 RidgewayGirl: - I think that's a good idea. I always delay mine 6 months since it's at the beginning of Jan and I usually haven't thought about it. So 6 months is just about the time the library sales are going full force and I look there first. A Book Festival sounds like a great place to find books.

>57 RidgewayGirl: That sounds like fun. I just posted my Thingaversary haul. I spent more than I should have, but at least I got to count a couple I would have purchased anyway in the haul.

>57 RidgewayGirl: - That sounds like a sensible and fun way to celebrate your Thingaversary.

>57 RidgewayGirl: Sounds like a very good plan! Have fun choosing!

Hello Kay! I've just been reading your thread with the library catalogue open, because there are So Many Good Books! I particularly like the sound of American Pop for the multi-generation saga category of the Goodreads challenge. And of course the reference to Lee Child has put East of England firmly on my list :-)

Betty, clearly great minds think alike!

Lori, you had quite the haul. Had I not spent my Christmas gift cards before Christmas day was over, I would have used them all for my Thingaversary.

Stacy, don't make me feel sensible! I plan to haul an embarrassing stack of books home from Decatur. I did book a hotel room in the middle of the festival, so I don't even have to decide whether I want to carry a book around before buying it.

Thanks, MissWatson! It's so fun to have an enormous book festival not very far from me.

Susan, American Pop is fun. I sat next to the author at a dinner at my local bookstore and that was fun. He was reclusive and stiff and I was reminded about how weird it is that the kind of person happiest sitting alone in a room is the same person we expect to go out and sell the book.

Charlotte is raising her two daughters in a small Oklahoma town where everyone knows everyone else, and things are done as they always have been. She's married to an alcoholic who has trouble keeping a job, although his family's status in the town means he usually has one. It's 1963, and she's suffocating under the need to keep up appearances and with the lack of opportunity for women. She'd like to become a photographer, but that's out of the question. So when her husband slips out after a family dinner, she packs up her daughters and the dog and takes off, traveling west, to where an aunt she's lost touch with used to live.

Frank is a mobster who has worked his way up the ladder. He's got a sweet life in New Orleans, trusted by his boss, able to rely on his charisma and smooth-talking to get things done. But when he realizes that he knows what really happened on that November day in Dallas and that his boss is systematically eliminating everyone involved, he goes on the run. But his boss has a long reach and no matter how carefully he runs, a single man is too conspicuous to get far.

November Road is just a fantastic noir. Lou Berney has every thing in the right places and writes so very well. There's not a misstep or flat note in the entire novel, which demands to be read at far to quick a pace. Charlotte is a fantastic character and there was not a single moment when I was not pulling for her. This is just a superbly written, researched and plotted crime novel. They don't come better than this.

>44 RidgewayGirl: I couldn't manage to get through all the ToB books this year, and The Overstory was one that I initially regretted not getting around to reading, but your review makes me feel better about abandoning it. On the other hand, I still have A Terrible Country on my TBR list (though I won't be able to get to it for a while), based on your earlier recommendation.

Second Person Singular by Palestinian-Israeli author Sayed Kashua tells the story of two men, both Arabs, living in Jerusalem. Superficially, they have similar histories; they both come from small villages and they both came to Jerusalem to go to university and stayed afterward. One man became a successful lawyer, living in a beautiful house with his wife and two young children, he drives a BMW. He's not in love with his wife, but when he finds an affectionate note in his wife's handwriting, tucked into a used book he just purchased, he becomes consumed with jealously and anger and is determined to find the man the note was intended for.

The other man became a social worker. He's struggling financially but he resists his mother's entreaties to return to the village he left. He works during the day for a government agency providing social services to heroin addicts and at night he is the caretaker for a young man his age who due to an unspecified accident, lives in a vegetative state. When events cause him to quit his day job, he becomes more fascinated with the past of his Jewish patient, reading his books, listening to his music and using his camera.

Second Person Singular is just a fantastic book. While neither man is particularly sympathetic, it's impossible not to be drawn into their lives. How Kashua draws the two men's lives together is riveting. I will be reading more by this author, who is well-known in Israel.

>66 RidgewayGirl: Great review! A BB for me!

>67 Tess_W: Tess, I have read far too little fiction from this part of the world. Squeaky_Chu, who posts over on the 75ers forum reviewed this one and as my library had it, I picked up a copy. I'm grateful to both all the LTers who read such interesting books and then post about them and also my little library system, which has a pretty good selection of books in translation.

A Lucky Man is a collection of short stories by Jamel Brinkley. This is a noteworthy collection; not only are short stories a hard sell for established authors, but for a new author like Brinkley, published by a smaller publisher outside of the Big Five to get any attention at all is unusual. Yet A Lucky Man shows up on prize lists as diverse as the National Book Award and The Tournament of Books. The attention the is book is getting is well-deserved, the stories collected here are varied, but all speak to the experience of growing up as a person of color in New York. Like most collections, there were a few weaker offerings sandwiched between the strongest stories at the front and back of the book, but all were worth reading. Brinkley's skill is to bring the inner life of a child to life and to make the reader feel every uncertainty. This is a collection that brings to life the people living in the ungentrified areas of New York's boroughs. It's a good collection and I'll be sure to read whatever Brinkley writes next.

While Noah Glass's two adult children are still making funeral plans and coming to terms with the sudden death of their father, the police arrive to let them know that he is suspected of having stolen an Italian statue. Noah Glass was an art historian and he had recently been in Palermo, but his area of expertise was far removed from the relatively recent sculpture and his personal views made such an accusation unthinkable to his children. Evie, who has traveled to Sydney from her home in Melbourne and is staying in her father's apartment, isn't interested in the subject, but Martin, a divorced father and artist, can't get it out of his mind. So he goes to Palermo, determined to find answers.

The Death of Noah Glass takes each of the three characters, Noah, Evie and Martin, and spends alternating chapters with each of them as they are pulled into environments that challenge and stretch them, even as they come to terms with the past. This is a quiet, but gorgeously told story of family. Gail Jones's writing here reminded me of Anne Tyler's best work, with its tight focus on family ties and reliance on good writing and complex and nuanced characters to tell the story.

Somewhere in your previous thread you recommended Keith Gessen's A Terrible Country. Excellent recommendation. Thank you.

>71 pamelad: Yay! I loved that book so much. I just really enjoyed Andrei's voice and his inept concern for his little grandmother. The author's sister is Masha Gessen, who has written award-winning non-fiction about Russia.

The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of The Iliad, this time from the point of view of Briseis, a young woman married to the son of a king until Achilles sacked her city and she was taken captive as a slave and given to Achilles. While she has an important role to play in the events, it is as a pawn and not as an active participant. In The Silence of the Girls, Briseis is given her voice and tells her own story.

Pat Barker knows how to tell a story well and this novel is no exception. She takes a familiar tale and makes the least important people, the women taken as slaves, the central focus. I really enjoy that these old and familiar myths are not being kept static, but are being reimagined and reinvigorated. It's also interesting to compare this retelling with Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, a substantially different and yet equally compelling version of the same story.

Mark Haines is a security guard, working at a light industry park in the down-at-its-heels city of Oceanside, California. He surfs a bit, enjoys a breakfast burrito and works hard to keep himself together and to himself. He had been the youth pastor at a mega-church until he lost his faith and went of the rails, which left him with a daughter who won't speak to him, an ex-wife who still prays for him and little more. Then, one morning, he pays for a hitchhiker's meal and is pulled right back into life again, but also a lot of trouble. The hitchhiker is a young woman running from her past, but she's been associating with some shady characters, which may all lead Mark into more trouble than even a cynical loner can handle.

The Churchgoer by Patrick Coleman combines two things that I like a lot. The first is a well-told and solidly plotted noir, and the other is a complex and nuanced main character. Coleman does a superb job telling Mark's story and in creating a character whose every action stems from who he is and what happened to him in the past. Mark is a thinker and an analyser, not at all compassionate with himself, but who does understand people. Coleman is also a talented writer. His descriptions of Oceanside and of the communities further inland are atmospheric and razor-sharp. I wasn't sure I'd want to spend an entire novel with a judgmental white dude like Mark Haines, but by the second chapter I was utterly hooked. Literary noir doesn't get much better than this.

Wow, with such high praise, that's going on my WL. Thanks for the review.

>75 mstrust: It's really good. And all the San Diego stuff is pitch perfect.

As usual you are filling up my wishlist! And now, I am adding The Churchgoer.

Judy, I'd be interested in hearing what you think of it.

I have not been keeping up with threads, so perhaps you have already seen this and I missed it, but I just picked up The Wall by John Lanchester from the library and am reading it now. I know you're a fan. So far, this is... very different in concept from previous books but I'm enjoying it.

Shannon, I'm really looking forward to finding out what you think of it. Reviews have been mixed.

Millie is working as a temp in the office of a design company. She answers phones and collates papers and dislikes her co-workers, who return the favor. Despite the mind-numbing boredom, she hopes to be made permanent and the signs are looking good. She thinks about how much her life will be improved by the modest bump in pay and begins her program to become The New Me, better than the old one, a person who doesn't spend all her time watching TV on her laptop and drinking, but who does things like yoga and reading and keeping her apartment tidy.

Halle Butler has written about a character who would fit right in with anything written by Ottessa Moshfegh. Millie is an unpleasant, suffocating person to spend time with and this novel was a delight. There was a sense of things being able to go in any number of directions, most of them very bad. Butler's writing was sharp as knives and nails the atmosphere of office life, a place where we are obligated to be, doing things we don't enjoy, in the company of people we'd rather not be around.

>81 RidgewayGirl: The picture didn't show up on my phone, and I got all the way through the first paragraph before I realized you were talking about someone fictional! Lol

>82 The_Hibernator: There is much to relate to in this novel!

>81 RidgewayGirl: Whoops, the touchstone is going to a different book.

>84 clue: That was careless of me! It's fixed now.

The garden is shaping up nicely. As you can see in this picture, the first cat of the season is almost ripe.

>86 RidgewayGirl: Awwww! Great photo!

LOL!

>86 RidgewayGirl: Some are better than others at "bloom where you are planted"!

The cats love the plant pots outside, but usually they stick to the ones they fit in.

Set in the future, Ben H. Winters's novel, Golden State, posits a world where California exists alone, past its borders lies an unknown wasteland. Truth has become all important, and the protagonist of this novel works as a speculator, a truth cop who can feel a lie. Lazlo is a loner, haunted by the death of his brother and unhappy about being assigned a trainee. But at their first crime scene of the day, his new partner catches something he would have missed and they find themselves investigating a crime that is larger and more complex than he could have imagined.

Golden State works really well as a standard crime novel, albeit with an unusual setting. But it really shines when it comes to world building. There's more to this than lying becoming the greatest crime. Winters has thought of what the implications of this might be and it's fascinating. Winters also refuses to go in any of the expected directions, leading to a novel that never failed to surprise, delight and discombobulate.

I am taking advantage of a rainy Easter Monday to catch up on threads.

>55 RidgewayGirl: - Great review. I have been eyeing that one as a potential ebook purchase but your review has convinced me that I may have mixed feelings about the story, so happy to know that I can pass on it.

>86 RidgewayGirl: - LOL, love that pic!

>91 RidgewayGirl: You read everything. I also enjoyed this.

>91 RidgewayGirl:, That's really good to hear, especially when you talk about world-building. I LOVED The Last Policeman and I'm looking forward to the rest of the series, but it did occur to me that the speculative nature of it came down more to him having a great understanding of human nature, vs. world-building, so I wondered what a more sci-fi/fantasy tale would look like from him. I'll make sure this one gets on my list of to-be-read-sooner-rather-than-laters!

>94 whitewavedarling: It's my first by Winters, although I think I have the first in the Last Policeman series on my iPad. I'm impressed.

>95 RidgewayGirl:, The Last Policeman is definitely worth reading :) I've got the second on my shelf and waiting for a day when I can just sink into it without any other concerns!

>95 RidgewayGirl: and >96 whitewavedarling: Agree, I gave that whole trilogy high marks.

It definitely moved up my tbr after reading Golden State. I'll save it for when I need a book to be good.

The first thing you need to know is that I am a sucker for that particular kind of good writing that doesn't draw attention to how good it is. Which is to say that I am a fan of Percival Everett's writing, which is not only exactly this kind of writing, but is also humane and compassionate in its characterizations. Each character is presented with such compassion that they feel complex and real. Which is to say that before I even opened Assumption, I was all in.

Assumption follows Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff in a largely empty rural county in the mountains of New Mexico. He loves fly fishing, visits his mother a lot and doesn't really like his job, but it does allow him to live where he wants to live. When an elderly woman is murdered moments after Ogden last spoke to her, it seems he'll have to do some real police work, as the case turns increasingly violent.

Assumption reads as though it's a standard noir-style crime novel. It's gritty and violent, but Ogden himself is a steady, if not particularly enthusiastic, lawman who treats the people he encounters with respect. As I read, I fell into reading it as something it only appeared to be on the surface. While Everett here demonstrates that he can write a perfect genre novel, that isn't what he's doing and, eventually, he tips his hand and upends his entire narrative. We're all familiar with an unreliable narrator, but this takes it further. I'm not sure yet what to make of what Everett does here. I plan to give it all time to settle and then reread the novel, in view of what I now know.

>99 RidgewayGirl: I had the exact same reaction. I got this book from my father, had never read Everett before, and had no idea what I was getting into. That was some years ago, and this book has really stuck with me.

>99 RidgewayGirl: Another BB for the never-ending TBR list!

Shannon, I had to reread the final section and everything was clearly mapped out. Now I need to see if there were clues in the first two sections.

Christina, I'd be so interested in finding out how you react to what Everett does.

>99 RidgewayGirl: - If only you wouldn't write such interesting reviews :) BB for me.

>99 RidgewayGirl: Looks like I need to add Percival Everett to the list of authors I need to check out.

Hi, Betty!

Dave, Percival Everett should be far better known than he is.

Toby Fleishman is in Trouble. He and his wife, Rachel, are in the middle of a divorce and while on-line hook-up apps have provided him with plenty to distract him, he's left with caring for two kids who aren't doing well with the divorce when his wife drops them off at his new apartment and disappears. He's also the financially disadvantaged spouse, being only a well-established specialist at a prestigious hospital, which in the wealthy enclaves of Manhattan, makes him contemptuously low-income. This is the challenge that debut author Taffy Brodesser-Akner has set for herself; how do you write a scathing send-up of an Upper East Side family in which the reader is invited to feel sorry for the handsome doctor who is getting laid regularly, but who has to make do with a bare third of a million a year to live on? There's only so much sympathy that can be pulled from Toby's below-average height and chronic insecurity.

For the most part, though, Brodesser-Akner pulls it off. The writing is smooth and having the narrator be an old friend of Toby's, who is now a New Jersey housewife, does ground the story somewhat. The final chapters of the novel are also far more nuanced and better written than the first three quarters, making me wish that the author had included the portions telling Rachel's story throughout the novel. One's enjoyment of this novel will depend entirely on one's tolerance for reading about the troubles of people living wealthy lives in Manhattan, but this does look like the literary vacation novel of the summer. It's an impressive debut that reads like the work of a seasoned author.

In my wildest dreams I can't imagine naming a daughter Taffy. The name of an author probably neither makes or breaks them but at least for me it does give pause.

Clue, someday the president will be named "Tiffany" or possibly "Destini." Start preparing yourself now.

But you have to respect that she didn't change her name to appear more serious.

George Singleton is a well-established Southern author who publishes short stories in small presses. Each story in Staff Picks is firmly rooted in the rural communities of the Carolina upstate, with occasional mentions of "Steepleburg," a pretty obvious stand-in for Spartanburg. With the exception of the title story, each story is narrated by a middle-aged or older white man, and most of them are easy-going guys who feel some regret for the way things have turned out.

The two most memorable stories were Staff Picks, in which a woman is determined to win a radio endurance contest for an RV, and Eclipse, in which a middle-aged recovering addict works a catering job at a community center named for a lynching victim. Things become surreal, although the reader is never quite certain how reliable a narrator the story has.

All in all, this is a solid collection of stories that reflect the location in which they are set.

>107 clue: >108 RidgewayGirl: I think that name was popular for about 5 minutes in the 70s, along with Bunny and Brandi, the cutesy names. She has a publisher, so good for her.

The Study of Animal Languages follows Ivan as he picks up his wife's father, who is definitely not on his meds, and chauffeurs him back to his house. Prue is seen as a shoo-in to be awarded tenure and she's giving a speech which is seen as the capstone of her career so far. Ivan feels that he's losing Prue, but can't put a finger on why or how, only that she seems removed from him somehow. When the lecture is not well-received and the subsequent house party goes even more badly, Ivan is left scrambling to keep everything together, even as he is losing it.

Lindsay Stern's debut novel is a look at communication -- between spouses and within families. It's also a send up of Academia and is often funny and absurd, but the focus remains on Ivan and his dealings with his own feelings as chaos swirls around him in the form of his distant wife, his all-too-present Father-in-Law and his niece, May, who is delightful, but also a lot of work for an over-extended, childless man who is losing his tightly held control over his environment. A Study of Animal Languages reminded me of Anne Tyler's writing. It was a slight but entertaining and well-written novel and I look forward to reading Stern's next novel.

Those are great words and I would use them if only I could pronounce them! ;)

Judy, German is the language of compound words.

>112 RidgewayGirl: Fun!

I have definitely felt Buchendschmerz and Stapelschuldefuhl regularly!

MissWatson, so fun!

Stacy, same!

So behind on book reviews. I'd like a word for that.

From the beginning of His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet the reader knows that Roderick Macrae has been arrested for the murder of three of his neighbors in the tiny village of Culdie, in Scotland in 1869. Macrae admits his guilt and the witness statements are unequivocal. So while what follows may be considered a crime novel, it isn't a whodunnit, so much as a whydunnit. Why did Roddy Macrae do it? Was he driven to it or was he evil? Was he unusually intelligent or barely sentient? As the often conflicting testimonies and evidence is presented to the reader, we are left to come to our own conclusions.

In the small farming village of Culdie, where each family supports themselves off the small allotment of land attached to their crofts and where the landowner controls their entire lives, Lachlan Mackenzie becomes the village constable, upsetting the lives of the Macrae family with his invented transgressions, each which puts Roderick's father ever deeper into debt. But whether Roddy murdered MacKenzie and two of his children for that reason or some other reason is left for the reader to decipher. His Bloody Project is composed of witness statements, examinations of various professionals and Roddy's own accounting, written at the request of his lawyer. It's a fascinating look at life in rural Scotland in 1869, and of how difficult it is to determine motivation across the distance of time, even with ample historical record.

>118 RidgewayGirl: I was a bit surprised I liked that one as much as I did when I read it. I think I appreciated the genealogical research more than the novel itself at the time I read it, but it's stuck with me a long time and my memories of it surpass the rating I gave it at the time.

>119 thornton37814: Lori, I can see that! I liked how the different surviving records painted a contradictory picture of Roddy and the events and how the author left us to draw our own conclusions.

In December 1972, Jean McConville is taken away from her apartment in front of her ten children by masked gunmen. She is never seen again. In March 1973, along with nine others including her sister, Delours Price places four car bombs in central London. She is arrested while trying to leave the country. During her stay in prison, she and her sister go on a hunger strike and are force-fed by the prison authorities.

Using the framework of these two women's lives, Patrick Radden Keefe explores the history of Northern Ireland during the years known as The Troubles, a thirty year span that began in the late 1960s and ended with the Good Friday Agreements of 1998. The Troubles are a complex and maddening part of a long conflict, but by structuring it around a single event, and two women, Keefe manages to control the focus of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. McConville was killed by the Provisional IRA, known as the Provos, and while usually the bodies of anyone murdered by them were left to be found as a warning to others, McConville's was not. The reasoning for that is unclear as is the reason for her murder. The attempt to unravel what happened to her involves learning about what daily life was like for the citizens of Belfast, what drew young people into the IRA and how the Provisional IRA functioned during those years and how it was that they came to decide on peace.

This is a superlatively good book. By keeping the focus on the two women, Keefe was able to give a solid history of the IRA during the years of The Troubles in a manageable and compelling way. Delours Price is a fascinating woman who was in the middle of the things for a long time. And the impact of and ambiguity around Jean McConville's disappearance, not the least what it did to her children, makes her story impossible to set aside.

>121 RidgewayGirl: What a great review. On my wish list it goes!

>121 RidgewayGirl: Ooh, onto the wishlist for me too!

When Leni's father returns from Vietnam, he has changed. He has sudden bursts of rage which make it difficult for him to hold a job and keeps both Leni and her mother constantly making sure they aren't doing anything that might set him off. So when he decides that they will pack up and move to a small, isolated community in Alaska, they both agree. Life on a farmstead in Alaska is hard, but Leni makes a friend in the only other child her age at the school and she grows to love Alaska. But as the years progress, her father's paranoia and extremism increase, alienating everyone they know and the long winter nights make his rages worse. But what can Leni do when her mother refuses to leave?

This is the first novel I've read by Kristen Hannah and, while it was fine, it will probably be the last. While the setting was wonderful, the secondary characters were reliably one-note and didn't change over the course of the novel. And there was so much drama. Just tons of it. And then there would be more. But I can see why The Great Alone was a bestseller, I certainly kept turning the pages, long after I'd begun rolling my eyes with every new plot development.

>122 Tess_W: It really is a great example of what a book about history aimed at the public should be.

>123 Jackie_K: I'd be interested in hearing what you think about it, being in the UK as you are. Especially the stuff about Gerry Adams.

>121 RidgewayGirl: Great review! I'm on a long waitlist for this book at the library. A disturbing item of news recently claimed that the IRA is making a comeback with a new generation.

>126 VivienneR: Yes - I think the GFA is looking pretty fragile at the moment, and Brexit is only making it worse. I wish I could feel more hopeful than I do.

Bea and Dan are that most rare of literary couples, they are happily married. And Bea is happy. She's left her family behind and while she and Dan don't have much money, she loves her job as a therapist, their tiny flat and especially she loves Dan. Dan, who went to art school, is far less content with their life. He hasn't been able to create anything in some time as his tedious job as an estate agent means long hours and returning home in the evening drained. He convinces Bea that they should take their small savings, sublet their flat and go travel in Europe for a few months. He has a list of places he wants to see, but first they go to France where Alex, Bea's brother and only family member she cares about, runs a small hotel in the countryside.

But the hotel isn't what they thought it would be. For one thing, Alex isn't capable of running any sort of business, for another, it's almost entirely unfurnished. And there are apparently vipers in the attic, drawn there by the many mice. And this is where Bea and Dan's solid relationship begins to fray, because when Bea's parents arrive, Bea is tense and withdrawn, overwhelmed with interacting with her dysfunctional family and Dan is startled to discover that when Bea described her family as well-off, what she actually meant was very, very wealthy. And he begins to feel that Bea's peace of mind, the peace of mind she has from refusing to use a penny of that wealth, is paid for with his ability to do his art. When Alex disappears and the French police show up, all the fracture lines are laid bare.

No one writes about the dysfunctional families of the British upper crust quite like Sadie Jones. And The Snakes is perhaps her best novel so far. Both Bea and Dan are complex and sympathetic, even when they are in direct conflict. Dan, who was raised in a council flat in a rough part of London, has no defense against the casual luxuries of the wealthy. And Bea, raised in a stifling, love poor environment, treats that wealth with casual familiarity and distain. And those differences of outlook make what is going on with the police and Bea's family more difficult until the entire situation spirals out of control. The writing in The Snakes is very fine, but what really makes this novel worthwhile are Jones's razor-sharp observations.

That sounds intense. BB! I've yet to read anything by Jones.

>229 She's fantastic. There are some graphic moments and also snakes, as a warning for the squeamish.

I was in need of some lighter fare, in keeping with the Leichtlesbucheifersucht of >112 RidgewayGirl: and so picked up this next one. It was delightful.



In The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory, Alexa and Drew meet cute when they are temporarily trapped in a hotel elevator together when the power goes out. She has snacks in her purse. He has a wedding to attend that he's dreading. It doesn't take long before he convinces Alexa to be his date to his ex-girlfriend's wedding. And they have a great time, so good that they begin a purposefully casual relationship, after all, she has a high powered job in Berkeley and he's a pediatrician in Santa Monica. She's black and wary of being hurt, he's white and told her how commitment-phobic he is when they first met.

This isn't an angsty novel and both Alexa and Drew are adults who are quick to find solutions and the problems that crop up are resolved. A romantic novel without too much in the way of things keeping the lovers apart might be boring, but Guillory writes lightly and lets her characters exist fully in their worlds. Alexa is funny and resilient, Drew is caring and willing to compromise. It's a fun book.

>128 RidgewayGirl: I won't be reading that one. I'm phobic, even of photos (as I scroll by quickly).

>132 thornton37814: I thought of you when writing the review, in which I made sure to point out that the titular reptiles were not only metaphorical.

>132 thornton37814: & >133 RidgewayGirl: I thought of you too when I read Kay's review. I thought of you again the same day when my son told me he found a snake in his (empty) swimming pool. "Oh the poor thing, I don't know how long it's been there" and so on. He washed it (???) and took it outside where, like a magic trick, it immediately disappeared into long grass. It was just a little garter snake but he was a happy guy.

ETA: Forgot to say that Sadie Jones' book goes onto my wishlist!

>111 RidgewayGirl: Your review of The Study of Animal Languages caught my eye, since I'd recently read The Dictionary of Animal Languages. This sounds like a completely different kind of book, but still intriguing!

>134 VivienneR: I wonder how many there are of us who can't read about nope ropes without thinking about Lori.

>135 mathgirl40: Paulina, I struggled with The Dictionary of Animal Languages. Those two books are entirely and completely different.

Annie Ernaux's The Years belongs in that odd genre of auto-fiction, books that are based on the author's own life, but the events of the past have either been altered or the author concedes that their own memories are not necessarily accurate. With The Years, Ernaux takes her own life and memories as a way of telling the story of what life was like during her life, for herself, for women in France, and for France itself.

Beginning in the mid-1940s, the book begins with Ernaux's earliest memories, and with descriptions of family photos of herself. As her story moves forward, it becomes a universal story of a time and place, of what family dinners looked like, what school was like and how things changed over time, with lifestyles adapting to the availability of consumer goods, as the older folks died and so the Sunday dinner conversations moved on from the war to other subjects, like the events in Algeria or student uprisings.

This is a superbly constructed and immensely readable book. I did stop many times to look up names and events, but that was due to my lack of knowledge of French history and popular culture. It was so interesting to look at a time slightly different from my own (Ernaux belongs to my parents' generation) and at a country other than my own. Ernaux mixes the personal with the universal as she writes her way through the years of her life and the result is something greater than either a straight memoir or social history would have been.

>137 RidgewayGirl: Another great review. I'll be looking out for this one.

We Are All Good People Here: A Novel by Susan Rebecca White is the story of Eve and Daniella, who meet at a small, private all-female college in the 1960s. The two girls become instant best friends and the friendship transforms Eve, a debutante raised in a wealthy Atlanta household. Daniella is from the north, Jewish and liberal and Eve is immediately drawn to her views, taking them far further. As the years go by, their paths diverge as Eve becomes more and more radical, eventually joining a group similar to The Weathermen, while Daniella becomes a lawyer at a time when a woman's career is meant to be a pastime until she get married. But fate brings them back together again.

This is a book with tremendous promise. Eve's story alone, and how she went from obedient debutante to underground radical in hiding provides enough substance for a dozen books. And then there's Daniella's fierce determination to forge a career and have a family regardless of the opposition she faced. But all of this is lost in the sheer amount of time and number of events this novel attempts to encompass. Stretching from 1962, to when their own daughters begin university, there's simply too much to fit in one novel and somehow the most interesting bits, from what motivated Eve to join a radical group that flirted with terrorism and what she thought of it all, to how Daniella negotiated her professional life, working to be taken seriously in a Southern law firm, are glossed over in a single paragraph or omitted entirely, in favor of spending many pages describing the traditions of a sorority neither girl joined. The details were interesting, I enjoyed learning about repousse silver tea sets, but I wonder if those paragraphs might have been better used giving an example of how Daniella managed to make the men in her law firm take her seriously, or how she negotiated her pregnancy while working. Or if those paragraphs might have been better used showing how Eve felt about her open relationship or how she was drawn into the radical group and what she thought about it.

Both characters, as well as their daughters are never given the space to become complex and breathing individuals. Daniella's daughter is the most well-rounded character, but as she mainly reacts to the big events around here, from date rape of a friend, to another friend's same sex relationship, she remains a way to show changes in society than a person in her own right. The novel is well-written and when White does go into detail, it's clear she knows what she's writing about. And there was always something happening. But in the end the novel simply tried to do too much and ended up being a frustrating outline of something better.

Some great reviews here and I have added a couple to my wishlist as both The Snakes and The Wedding Date sound good. I was also very taken with His Bloody Project when I read it earlier this year.

You write really good reviews, thank you! I will wish list both The Snakes and The Years.

I also appreciate your reviews, and have added The Years to my wishlist.

Judy, His Bloody Project was so good! Thanks for pushing me to read it!

Tess, thanks, both those books are fantastic.

Pam, one of the most interesting aspects of it for me was the chance to see how life changed over time from the perspective of a French woman. Similar in many ways, but not at all the same.

It's 1793, and Stockholm is not a kind place for anyone lacking in money, name or power. When a badly mutilated body is found in a local pond, really an open sewer, it falls to Mikel Cardell, a veteran who lost an arm in battle, to pull it out. Cecil Winge is asked by the soon-to-be-ousted head of the police to investigate and he quickly enlists Cardell's help. Winge once lived in a fine house with his wife, but since his tuberculosis became a certain death warrant, he lives alone in a single room. The two men are an odd pair but they work well together. Unraveling who the corpse is, who killed him and why poses a difficult challenge to the men.

This is such a solidly plotted, researched and written novel. It was a delight to read a book that had everything it needed, from a vivid setting and characters who were fully realized and complex, to the plot, which held together tightly. The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt och Dag is the kind of well-executed historical thriller that is far too rare. I was invested in it from the opening pages to the final paragraph.

>144 RidgewayGirl: I'm glad you enjoyed this. I read it earlier this year, in German, and I was pleasantly surprised.

>145 MissWatson: I expected it to be a bit slow and plodding, but it certainly wasn't. Anna Stina was such a great character.

>144 RidgewayGirl: - Wonderful review of a book that really kept my attention when I read it!

Is there anything strange about any of this? I don't think so. It's just another day in the Middle East, a bomb or suicide vest going off somewhere, leaving in its wake dozens of broken bodies and a shattered marketplace in a poor neighborhood.

Dawn: Stories is a collection of short stories by Selahattin Demirtas, a Turkish human rights lawyer and politician who is currently a political prisoner, and this shows in this collection. Each story illuminates an aspect of life in Turkey, with a strong emphasis on how women function in Turkish society. The second story, Seher, was so bleak, the titular character so unable to have any agency in her own life, that I had to put the book aside for a few days. But most of the stories, although they often center on the difficult lives of women living in poverty, were hopeful, with each character making decisions and living as fully as circumstances allow. Dimirtas has a lot of love for his troubled country. So while the stories aren't literary masterpieces, they do illuminate the vibrant culture and personal resilience of a wide array of Turkish citizens.

>124 RidgewayGirl: You haven't read The Nightengale? It's really good!

Arthur Alter is in a tight spot. He took the visiting professor job at Danforth College, convinced he'd quickly be hired full-time and be given tenure. Despite moving his family across the country and derailing his wife's more successful career, he never moves into a permanent posting, instead being given fewer classes to teach over the years, so that now he's down to one. His children live far away and don't speak to him. And his wife may have had money when she died, but she left it all to the children. Maybe because Arthur coincidentally started an affair the same day Francine received her diagnosis? Arthur prefers not to think about that. He's got a bigger problem. When they first moved to St. Louis, they bought a house in keeping with Arthur's aspirations, and not his circumstances, which are that he's making a little less each year. And his girlfriend is thinking of taking a better paying job elsewhere. But Arthur can fix it all if he can get his son and daughter to come and visit. He'll convince them to give him the money they inherited from their mother. And once he has the money to pay off the mortgage, he's sure he can convince his girlfriend to turn down the new job and move in with him.

The only problem with this plan is that Arthur has once again over-estimated his powers of persuasion, his girlfriend's willingness to do what he wants and his job prospects, while under-estimating the sheer animosity his children hold for him.

Yes, this is another WMFuN*, that perennial staple of American literature. But The Altruists has some redeeming features. It's set in St. Louis and not New York City. Arthur may be the classic WMFuN protagonist, being both self-involved and oblivious to the harm he causes, but Andrew Ridker isn't asking the reader to side with Arthur, in fact he goes out of the way to clearly show the harm Arthur does. And it's well written, with a relaxed solidity to the writing that is surprising in a debut novel. No, I never warmed completely to Arthur and his equally self-involved off-spring, but no matter how I tried, I was never able to not care about what happened to them.

* White Male Fuck-up Novel

Sounds like an interesting read, thanks for the review! It's going on my WL.

>149 VictoriaPL: Victoria, I guess? If someday I come across a copy at a booksale, I might pick it up. I'm not the WWII fan that you are!

>151 mstrust: Jennifer, it held my attention, even in the parts I was screaming at Arthur for being, well, himself.

Melissa and Michael are the perfect couple. Attractive and well-matched, they are the couple their friends would say is the most likely to be together forever. They have two lovely children and they've just moved into a house of their own. But the new house, far in the outer reaches of London's suburbs, means that Michael has a long commute each day and returns home in the evening tired, and Melissa is finding that caring for two small children isn't something she's managing well on her own. She'd thought she'd be able to do some freelance work during nap time, but nap time isn't guaranteed and even when the baby agrees to a nap, Melissa has trouble getting work done in the limited time. And the house doesn't feel welcoming. There's mold in odd corners and her daughter's skin always seems dry.

Their good friends, Damien and Stephanie are also entering into a year of disquiet. Damien's estranged father has died and while he is sure he feels nothing, he is far more affected than he believes he is. And his own unsettled feelings are causing him to feel stifled by Stephanie's devotion to family life. Which is not something she has any patience for.

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize, Ordinary People by Diana Evans explores the marriages of two black couples living in London in the year that was marked by the election of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson. Evans allows her characters to inhabit marriages as stressed and imperfect as those in any of the many, many novels about white British couples, she's not interested in writing about anyone behaving in an exemplary fashion. There's a lot of substance here, but I was left more interested in the marriage that received far less attention. Evans definitely nails the different ways two people living in the same place can manage to not talk to each other. I was left feeling as though I never really understood any of the characters, but the blame for that is certainly not entirely the author's.

It's my son's last day of school but the cats are already fully embracing the summer holiday mood.

>154 RidgewayGirl: Meow! They are so fun to watch!

>154 RidgewayGirl: Beautiful! Cats can teach us how to relax.

Lori, they are even entertaining when they're sleeping.

Vivienne, it should be noted that both Tarzan and Mercy are relaxing in containers full of catnip. They love to nap in the nip.

Awwww! :)

I'm so envious of your cats, they look so happy and content.

They are cute, rp.

Stacy, they are certainly smug.

When Sadie's brother, Shane, dies of a opioid overdose, Sadie's family is both confused and suspicious. Shane would never have committed suicide, which is what the police think, and Shane's wife is acting oddly. So Sadie starts looking around. Haley is a part of the Pettit family, a long line of petty criminals and drug addicts. She's so eager to leave the small town of Blackwater, Kansas, where everyone knows exactly who her family is and her mother has drifted back into addiction. She just needs to save enough money to leave. She's cleaning the house of the local bigwig and spending time with his son, who is directionless and eager to spend time with her.

The setting is the draw of The Wolf Wants In, a small rural community where the only available jobs are manual and low-paying, where the opioid epidemic rages and anyone who has the means leaves. And the plot is well developed, with alternating chapters switching between Sadie and Haley. The Haley chapters take place several months earlier and Laura McHugh does a fine job of raising the levels of tension equally in each of the timelines. I was set to rate this book very highly, but there's an abrupt end where the mystery is wrapped up in an odd sort of outline, all the bad guys confessing and all the good guys, who had previously been struggling with some serious issues, all received happy endings. I would have much preferred a longer book, better pacing and and an ending in keeping with the tone of the rest of the novel.

He was done with lots of things, he told her. Restaurants, candy, newspapers, parties, cars, airplanes, living in houses. He slept in hotels and traveled by train.

What he needed was to fall in love with another woman, but she saw he was too vain. Ordinary happiness would be a dent in his armor. Happiness was everywhere, like dropped coins. You might feel lucky to pick it up and put it in your pocket, but what could it really buy you?

To be haunted? That set you apart.

Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken is an odd book, full of whimsey and colorful characters. Beginning with the discovery of Bertha Truitt, lying in the cemetery who, upon being revived, makes a new life for herself in the small Massachusetts town she landed upon, opening a candlepin bowling alley, building an octagonal house and marrying the doctor who tended her. That bowling alley becomes a refuge for outcasts and a place where women can be together.

Nobody believed that this so-called Nahum Truitt was a child of Bertha's. The height of him, the denunciations, the way he talked. You could die of boredom. You longed to.

The great strength of this novel is McCracken's writing. By the time I'd finished it, there were dozens of post-it notes sticking out from between the pages, marking out remarkable descriptions and gorgeous sentences. But the beautiful writing did not hide that there were too many characters. Every time I began to understand a character and to fall into their story, they were gone, often forever, lost in the great flood of quirky characters and weird situations. There was never anything or anyone to hold onto. There's no question that the writing is extraordinarily good, but it turns out that even that is no substitution for plot and character development.

He had inherited his predecessor's office as it was, with the books and the ottoman, the manual typewriter that reminded him of a skeleton in a natural history museum--a small dinosaur, one so unfortunately shaped it existed mostly as food for larger dinosaurs. An aquatic animal, probably, with an alphabetic spine.

>162 RidgewayGirl: Are you doing the Rooster "Summer Camp" read? I haven't read any of them yet, but I hope to read some of them. This one intrigued me, but it sounds like it doesn't quite have the substance I'd look for.

Shannon, I am doing the ToB Summer Reading Challenge thing. Without it, I'll never get around to reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf. And I'm glad to have read Bowlaway, even if I didn't like it as McCracken is so fondly spoken of.

Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid is not the sort of book I'd normally pick up, given that the format of the entire novel is that of an interview with the various members and relations of the fictitious band. But with its inclusion in the Tournament of Books Summer Reading Challenge, I found myself with a copy of the book in my hands.

Following the meteoric rise and inevitable dissolution of a rock 'n roll band in the 1970s, it's the story of large personalities clashing, prodigious quantities of drugs, the inevitable complications of sex and fame, all wrapped up with a cast of colorful but well-intentioned people. Daisy is a talented, if untrained, singer who wants to write her own songs. She's paired with the band of the moment, The Six, for a duet written by that band's lead singer and leader. While they don't work well together, as Billy is used to running things and Daisy is determined to have a say in how things are done, they do produce better music together than apart. Daisy's gone well beyond recreational in her drug use and Billy has been through rehab and is determined to stay clean for the sake of his young family. Meanwhile, one guitarist is pining for the keyboard player, while the other is chafing under Billy's sometimes ham-handed leadership. And the drummer? He's just doing his job.

This is the kind of book that makes being stuck in an airport or on a long drive a pleasant experience. It's the kind of book designed for vacation reading. It's utterly involving but also easy to set aside and pick up again. There's no deeper message or subtext, just a fun book about rock 'n roll. And there's even a Spotify playlist to keep you company as you read.

Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg tells the story of Lydia, who longs to experience more of the world than the Southie neighborhood of Boston. She gets a job in a department store across the river, where she eventually meets and marries Henry Wickett, an odd man who has an idea of how to cure people. And so Wickett's Remedy is born.

Wickett's Remedy is a novel about the Spanish influenza epidemic that hit the United States during the First World War, and about a young woman who is determined to do what she can to help care for influenza patients despite her lack of medical training. Lydia is a fantastic character to follow as she works to adapt to whatever circumstances she finds herself in and the story is superbly researched. Goldberg also plays with the format of the novel, adding sidenotes where various characters comment on the events taking place, as well as articles, vignettes and even a secondary storyline taking place at the end of each chapter. Goldberg's writing is very good and the way she plays with structure fits well with the novel as a whole. I look forward to reading more by her.

I'll confess that I've had this book on my tbr since 2009 and it only was pulled off of the shelf because the author was in town signing her new novel, Feast Your Eyes. I really need to get better at reading the older members of my tbr as I am usually pleased with the contents.

After graduating from Vassar, American poet Elizabeth Bishop went to France with two college friends. In Paris, 7 a.m. author Liza Wieland imagines what might have happened to Bishop as a young woman in Paris in 1937. In the novel, Bishop forms relationships of various kinds with a young German woman who is in Paris because Berlin is no longer safe for her and an older woman who lost her own daughter some years earlier. There's a lot going on in this novel, from Nazis, to lesbians, to an amputated hand, to rescuing babies, to hanging out with everyone from Sylvia Beach to Marianne Moore. Yet it never feels over-packed. Wieland's writing is almost dreamy and stays focused on how Bishop perceives what's happening around her, rather than what is actually happening, which puts some of the events at a sort of remove, even as they're happening, while intensifying others.

There is a sense of slowly rising danger in this novel, not for Bishop and her American friends, who return to the US safely, although not without having been changed, but for the Europeans they encounter. Not all the Germans in France are Nazis, some are Germans who have found Germany unsafe for a variety of reasons. And while the heart of the story centers on secretly moving Jewish babies into the safety of a Catholic convent in Paris, the reader remains aware of what tenuous protection that will prove to be.

There are a number of novels out there imagining the details of the lives of famous literary and historical personages and a disproportionate number of them take place in Paris. But Paris, 7 a.m. is different enough and written so well as to be well worth reading.

>166 RidgewayGirl: I read a novel earlier this year based on the Spanish Influenza and found it very interesting. I will take a BB on this one!

>166 RidgewayGirl: Sometimes those sidebars and things are distracting, particularly if there is not a good break to go read them or if one doesn't know where one should read them. I'm not sure I would like that, but the story itself sounds interesting.

>168 Tess_W: Tess, I find that time in history very interesting. My grandfather's little sister died in that epidemic -- it hit so many families. And Wickett's Remedy is clearly well researched.

>169 thornton37814: Lori, it was different to find them in a work of fiction, and while I don't think I'd like to see this often, it did make for a different reading experience. Myla Goldberg enjoys finding different ways to construct a novel -- her new one, Feast Your Eyes, is set up as a catalog to a photography retrospective.

>170 RidgewayGirl: Very interesting! I teach HS history so we always learn about WWI, curiously, not one mention is made in the history text about the Spanish Flu killing more people than artillery of that same war. (500 million worldwide). More than 675,000 young men died of it in Ohio before they even got to the European front. I made up a study pack for my 9th graders and we take 2 days and study this very interesting and important part of history. (https://www.nps.gov/articles/influenza-at-camp-sherman.htm)

>171 Tess_W: Excellent! I hadn't known it hit before many of the soldiers shipped out for France. Somehow I'd thought that they were at war and it was the people left behind who were hit with the influenza. But Wickett's Remedy set me straight on that. I'm really glad you're amplifying the history you're teaching. My son is excited about AP US history next year - he had a very good teacher this past year (10th grade) and I hope the excitement carries through. I mainly remember writing endless essays for that class, but at least for me it was all new as I moved to the US just before my junior year of high school.

>150 RidgewayGirl: - Great review and making note of that wonderful acronym!

>154 RidgewayGirl: - Fabulous pics!

>162 RidgewayGirl: - I do love whimsey and colourful characters so Bowlaway goes on the book list.

>173 lkernagh: Once you've learned that the WMFuN is a thing, you'll be amazed at how many of them you find!

Conversations with Friends is about Frances, an Irish student and spoken-word poet who performs with her best friend, Bobbi. She and Bobbi had had a relationship when they were both teenagers, but now they're just friends, although it's an intense relationship. One night, after a performance, they meet Melissa, an established photographer, who invites them home with her to discuss a possible article about them. From there, they are quickly entangled with Melissa and her husband, an actor. While the outgoing and opinionated Bobbi forms a quick friendship with Melissa, Frances is drawn to Nick. The shifting relationships and accompanying emotions are a challenge for Frances, who is also dealing with the unreliability of her own alcoholic father.

This is a novel about relationships and Sally Rooney really nails the ebb and flow of intense friendship, especially one complicated by an early romantic relationship. She's insightful about the emotions involved in falling in love when one is both young and doing one's best to not admit to any sort of emotional entanglement. This is a brilliantly written book about some very flawed people. It reminded me of Eimear McBride's The Lesser Bohemians, a book I adored. I'm glad her next novel is already out so that I don't have to wait to read more by this gifted author.

I also enjoyed Conversations with Friends and thought her next, Normal People, even better.

>176 pamelad: That's what I've heard, but this one was already on my tbr.

I am desperately behind on reviews, but between last week at the beach (Edisto Island) and this week's trip to a different beach (Tybee Island) for a cousin's wedding, and then a trip to see my in-laws up in New Jersey, it may be awhile. All these activities have not slowed my reading, though.

The Decatur Book Festival is a giant favorite of mine, since last year, when I went and had the best time possible. The list of authors has been unveiled and I'm very excited. If anyone else is planning on going, let me know and we can meet up. If you're wondering if it's worth making the drive or braving the crowds, I can tell you that it totally is.

https://www.decaturbookfestival.com

>162 RidgewayGirl: & >165 RidgewayGirl: - You fared better with these two books then I did. I have enjoyed almost everything else that Taylor Jenkins-Reid has written but could not get through Daisy Jones and the Six. The format just wasn't working for me and I found myself bored with the story. Also didn't finish Bowlaway either but that had more to do with the fact that it was due back at the library and I was having a hard time settling into it. Maybe I'll give it another go when I have more time. The characters were definitely quirky which I can usually appreciate.

>179 LittleTaiko: I've now read all the Summer Reading books, except the Marlon James, which I'm working my way through. I thought Trust Exercise was super interesting and innovative and American Spy was a ton of fun. Lost Children Archive, though, is by far the best book of the bunch. It's beautifully written.

I'll definitely check out Lost Children Archives then. I've enjoyed the couple of books I've read of hers and meant to get to this one eventually.

Then, the next morning, we do something entirely predictable, at least for people like us--foreign but not entirely so--which is to play "Graceland" over and over as we cross Memphis into Graceland, trying to figure out where the Mississippi Delta is, exactly, and why it might shine like a national guitar, or if the lyrics even say "national guitar." The boy thinks it's "rational" guitar, but I don't think he has it right. Our entrance, played against the background of the song, has an epic quality, but of the quiet sort. Like a war being lost silently but with resilience.

A family of four sets out on a road trip from New York to the southeastern corner of Arizona, where the Apaches made their last free home. The drive is leisurely, a last family vacation before they split, the man to a job in Arizona, where he will live with his son, the woman and her daughter returning to New York. As they travel, they explore the history of the end of freedom for the last indigenous tribes of America, and the woman has an added concern; she had been helping asylum seekers and immigrants in New York as a translator and she hopes to find two girls who have disappeared for their desperate mother. The girls were making the desperate journey from central America to her when they vanished.

Lost Children Archive is a story about family, about the troubled history of the United States and about the disaster of our southern border. There's a dreamy, elegiac quality to Valeria Luiselli's writing that had me rereading paragraphs as I went. It's a gorgeous book and I think its one we'll still be reading decades from now.

In First Execution, a retired high school teacher from Naples, now living in Rome discovers that a former pupil was arrested on suspicion of terrorism. After her release, he visits her and she makes an odd request -- that he retrieve a specific book from an apartment.

In First Execution, author Domenico Starnone considers abandoning a new novel he's just begun, then decides to continue it, with a few changes. Later, a contentious encounter inspires him with a different way to proceed with the story.

This is an odd and utterly fantastic book. Starnone alternates between a novel and the author's difficulties in writing that novel. Which should make Stasi's tale feel less real, but despite the way the author alters the plot as he goes along, it all works. I've read books that go meta, but none as effective and interesting as this one.

>183 RidgewayGirl: Interesting request. You've piqued my curiosity.

>183 RidgewayGirl: That sounds fascinating. I'll be on the lookout for it.

Am I right in saying it is your birthday tomorrow? I seem to recall that we share that special date. Whether or not, have a good Fourth of July.

I'm back and glad to be home.

Lori, the entire book is fascinating. Not all experimental fiction works, but this one does.

Vivienne, Happy Belated Birthday to you! Yes, mine was yesterday. I celebrated with the in-laws and assorted others and we all went out for an enormous dinner together and I am still full a full day later.

I bought three books, was given one and came home to an Early Reviewer book waiting for me.

>186 RidgewayGirl: - Sounds like a very successful birthday, Kay. And belated Happy Birthdays from me.

Thanks, Betty. This introvert is glad to be home again.

>186 RidgewayGirl: Isn't that the way life works! Buy a book and it immediately attracts several others.

Glad to hear you had a good birthday and wishing you blissful introverting time now that the celebrations are over!

>189 VivienneR: That explains the quantity of them in my house! And my two favorite booksales are in August, as is the Decatur Book Festival - I've been saving my book money so I can go wild there.

>190 rabbitprincess: I do like people, but I also like some quiet time in between all the people.

Marie is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She's brilliant, knowledgeable and dedicated. But it's 1986 and Marie is a young black woman, so the FBI doesn't know what to do with her, leaving her to fill out paperwork and cultivate assets she'll never be allowed to use. She's seen a family friend sidelined and she's intent on avoiding his fate. So when the CIA comes knocking with an assignment that sounds too good to be true, she's cautious, but very interested. And so Marie becomes involved in the workings of the government of Burkina Faso and with American interests there that may or may not be above board.

This is a well-plotted spy thriller that respects the parameters of the genre while blowing them away with a clear-eyed look at how our government's agencies worked to destabilize foreign governments and how racism and misogyny kept them largely composed of clean-cut white men. Which is not to say that American Spy isn't full of action-packed scenes or fascinating geopolitics. Lauren Wilkinson has managed to write a novel that is a fast-paced thriller and a nuanced exploration of what it means to be a black woman working in a field dominated by white men.

Happy belated birthday, Kay. Enjoy your books!

Here I come with more late Birthday wishes and I am taking away a BB for Lost Children Archive. :)

>193 MissWatson: Thanks, MissWatson! I plan on doing that as soon as I catch up on reviews. They don't write themselves.

>194 DeltaQueen50: Thank you, Judy! I think that we'll all be hearing a lot about Lost Children Archive this year.