Old Mole Reading List: Recent Episodes

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Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian-born theater owner, opens the small town’s first integrated dance hall. His wife Chona runs The Heaven and Earth Grocery store on Chicken Hill, which caters to Blacks and European immigrants, mostly Jewish. Chona is generous and warm-hearted, and though the store makes little profit, she is loved by all the residents of Chicken Hill.All of this wonderful novel, by James McBride, and entitled The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is devoted to the description of the lives of the poor and discarded residents of Chicken Hill. Chona extends credit to the poor residents in spite of knowing she is unlikely ever to be paid. McBride, as a novelist, is able to describe the racism and anti-semitism of the white community in ways neither journalists nor anthropologists could. While in many ways the residents of Chicken Hill struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America, McBride’s story is full of humor and warmth.

Who cared that life was lonely, that jobs were thankless drudgery, that the romance of the proud American state was myth, that the rules of life were laid carefully in neat books and laws written by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ. Their fellow Pennsylvanians knew nothing about the shattered shtetls and destroyed synagogues of the old country; they had not set eyes on the stunned elderly immigrants starving in tenements in New York, the old ones who came alone, who spoke Yiddish only , whose children died or left them to live in charity homes, the women frightened until the end, the men consigned to a life of selling vegetables and fruits on horse-drawn carts. They were a lost nation spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their Yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored , as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists gone, wasted. Americans cared about a money. And power. And government. Jews had none of these things, their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk an honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked—or worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard , you might gain some opportunity, maybe even a shop or business of some kind.

While much of this novel is social criticism, there is much joy in McBrides description of music and dance in the daily lives of the poor on Chicken Hill. Most of McBrides’ prose in this and his other novels is wild and fantastical and full of warmth.

Chona takes it upon herself to watch over the life of a deaf black child, and when the state comes looking for him claiming he needs to be institutionalized, Chona’s black neighbors help her to hide him away. The boy is eventually caught and sent to an insane asylum called Penhurst . Many of the workers at the so-called hospital are black folks from a nearby community; they are called the Lowgods.

We is in the same place, you an I, being colored. We are visitors here. Thing is , us Lowgods, wherever we is from, the old Africaland, I suppose, we were keepers of our fellowman. That was our purpose. We’re still that way. That’s all we know of our history, the one was moved from us before we were brung here. You know what Lowgod means in our language? Little parent.

A local black worker named Nate Timblin, with the help of the Lowgods, is able, nearly miraculously, to spring the boy from Penhurst.

This is a wonderful big-hearted novel by an incredible story teller. McBride’s writing is so unusual and non-sequential that some readers may find it difficult to follow his narrative, but the effort will be well rewarded if you do.

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This story begins in 1469, in the fifth year of the Chenghua emperor’s reign, when Tan Yunxian was eight years old.So begins Lisa See’s superb account of Chinese medicine in the 15th century. On one level it is a simple story of a girl, Tan, who wants to become a doctor and is tutored by her grandparents who are both doctors. Her best friend Meiling is in training to be a midwife, and the two girls pursue their dreams under the kind but demanding eyes of Tan’s grandparents. The book is worth reading just for this simple and lovely story, but See’s real intent is to talk about Chinese medicine, and especially male Chinese doctors.

Confucius made clear that any profession in which blood is involved is considered below us…A midwife’s contact with blood places her in the same base level as a butcher. Furthermore, midwifes are disreputable. They are too much IN THE WORLD.

“Perhaps.” Grandmother sighs. “But since we physicians acknowledge blood is corrupt and corrupting, then how can a woman give birth without the aid of a midwife?”

This appears to be one of the only issues the grandparents disagree on.

“Child look at me,” she says softly. “Respect your grandfather in all things but know as well that midwives are a necessity. A more pleasing phrase we use for a midwife is she who collects the newborn”

As absurd as it may sound to our western ears, Chinese doctors were not allowed even to touch a woman’s body. Insofar as they are involved in pregnancy and child birth it is only behind a screen set up between doctor and patient. A doctor “might attend to a woman in labor—giving her herbs to speed the delivery and make the baby slippery” but that is all.

Each of the young girls envies the other. Tan envies Meiling because she can actually be in the world and help women have safe deliveries. Meiling envies Tan both for her wealth and position and because she able to train to be a doctor.

He grandmother doctor tells Tan:

I’m irritated with men. I’m lucky to love your grandfather, but most men—other doctors especially—don’t like us to succeed. You must always show them respect and let them think they know more than you do, while understanding that you can achieve something they never can. You can actually help women.

Both girls are successful in their studies and, for different reasons, are invited to attend women in the emperor’s court. If they are successful, male doctors will be credited, and if they fail, their very lives may be at stake.

Besides the history of Chinese medicine during this period, See gives the reader a long look at caste systems in China and the incredible history of foot-binding among the higher castes, and the ways in which higher caste girls are kept almost entirely out of the daily world of commerce. Tan continues to envy Meiling’s ability to look at the real world rather than living a shuttered and sheltered life.

After giving birth, the upper cast women do their month attended by a doctor and perhaps the midwife who assisted in the delivery. Watched over during the dangerous four weeks following birth.

Grandmother and I visit Lady Huang every morning to make sure she isn’t affected by noxious dew—old blood and tissue that refuses to leave the child palace…We bring with us different warming medicines. Grandmother has been strict with Cook to make sure Lady Huang is offered warming food only. Her blood has transformed into milk, and the baby suckles well.

Western doctors have certainly had their dismal history of denigrating midwives and failing to progress in the treatment of pregnant women, even for a time refusing to release their patented grip on the use of forceps to aid in delivery.

I loved this book on so many levels: the story, the researched history and the strong feminist bent the narrative takes.

I hear the sound of voices. Miss Zhao, Lady Kuo, and Poppy come into view and begin to cross the zigzag bridge to reach Meiling and me. For much of my life I felt alone, but over the years a circle of women came to love me, and I came to love each of those women in return…who knows , really, how many days might be left for a woman such as myself, and what yet I might do when surrounded by so much beauty and love.

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We are told not to judge a book by its, cover, but I invite you to judge this book by its delicious cover, the content as rich and colorful as its cover. Pomegranate, by Helen Elaine Lee, is deeply insightful, sad and transformative.The book begins and ends with the same refrain:

I live my life forward and backward.
Seems like my body remembers what I can’t afford to forget

Here I am alive and awake. Still going forward and backward. And brave enough to tell about it.

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1900, Travancore, South India

She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together.

So begins Abraham Verghese’s masterwork, The Covenant of Water, a sprawling novel that involves three generations, two continents, and several geographic locations. It is a superb piece of writing, but not, I think, a great novel. There is a huge cast of characters, a dizzying number of locations and episodes, and the sure hand of a compassionate doctor behind the pen.It would be impossible to overview this monster of a novel in a few pages, but I will dip in a bit and tell the reader about some of the major themes. In his Notes at the end of this 700 page wonderwork, Verghese tells us:

The story in these pages is entirely fictional, as are all of the major and minor characters, but I have tried to remain true to the real-world events of that time.

Certainly it reads like a carefully researched historical novel. There are many doctors in this story, and each of them expresses some of the views and the overall compassion of Dr. Verghese himself.The primary family in the novel has a weird connection with water. Each generation has at least one son who dies by drowning, and even the males who fear water and never cross over it find bizarre ways of dying due to water.Big Ammachi is the matriarch of the family and devoted to keeping her first son away from water. Some of the language in this novel is wonderfully mellifluous.

For most Westerners, Malayalam’s rolling ”rhha” scrapes the mucosa off the hard palate and cramps the tongue

However a Scottish doctor by the name of Rune, banters with the children outside his clinic with a Scandinavian lilt to his Malayalam. “Rune’s fees are nominal for the poor and painful for the rich.” I learned so much about medicine and disease in this novel. For example, I learned just how diphtheria kills. I learned what life is like in a leprosarium, and was surprised to read that leprosy is far less contagious than I had thought, but also how it attacks nerve endings and leads to lepers injuring themselves without feeling it at all.There are love scenes in this novel that are so beautiful, but nothing like the steamy scenes of western pornography. Verghese describes how simply seeing a naked foot or feeling the breath of a lover on ones skin can be so erotic.The political content of this novel is both profound and subtle. It is obvious that Verghese favors democratic socialism. His many descriptions of the caste system are pointed but cognizant of its long history.

“Because you loved my father, this is harder for you to grasp…You see yourselves as being kind and generous to him. The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere , were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavey. Their kindness , their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. I’s like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left us—their ‘kindness’! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole!

We’ve been doing the same thing to each other in India for centuries. The inalienable right of the Brahmins. And the absence of any right for the untouchables. And all the layers in between. Everyone who is looked down on can look down on someone else. Except; the lowest. The British just came along and moved us down a rung.

This is such a rich novel, and it is not unremittingly sad. If you take on this lovely book, try not to read it in short snippets before bedtime. The complexity of the narrative and the huge cast of characters would, I think, make it nearly incomprehensible. Read it in as sustained a manner as possible. No speed-reading.

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Let me begin by allowing Eleanora Shearer to say in her own words why she wrote this beautiful/awful novel:

My aim in writing this novel was to bring to life a story about the Caribbean in the aftermath of slavery—a place and time that is not always well-known or well understood. Doing this history justice was incredibly important to me, especially given my family ties to the Caribbean. To make this story as accurate as possible, I have chosen to use some terms—such as “mulatto” and “Negro”—that are offensive to many people today, myself included. There are also characters who express deeply racist views., which were widespread at the time. I do not use these terms or write these characters to condone them, but I want readers to be clear-eyed about the extent of the brutality and oppression that enslaved people faced. As we excavate history through fiction, we can confront the injustices of our past as a way to shed light on our present and work toward a more equitable future

Although I won’t reveal much of the story of Rachel as she searches the islands for her children who were taken from her and sold, I will sketch out some parts. When the King of England announced the end of slavery for Barbados in 1834, that did not mean the slaves were free, it simply changed their title from slave to apprentice, But they were still bound to the plantation owners who went after, caught and often executed so-called runaways.Rachel has two sons and two daughters that were taken from her and sold. During the course of this harrowing but beautiful story, she finally finds two of her daughters and the one son who lived, the other having been killed during an uprising.

When the hurricanes came, they ripped up even the sturdiest tree; and when the white men came, they tore children out of their mother’s arms. And so, we learned to live without hope. For us, loss was the only thing that was certain.

Hope hurts…She [Rachel] had survived for so long by suppressing hope, but when she left, she dared to believe her children might be found…Hope led you to dream things that could not be, like freedom wrested from the white man’s unwilling hands, or a family reunited.

On her journey from island to island, Rachel is assisted by others One man, Abraham, has lived as a hermit.

Me don’ think about it when me was young. When me first get here. Me think about going home. But that’s why the white man love to keep us on islands—how can me get home? The sea help them keep us here.

I found myself wondering why Shearer adopted the odd grammar and the pronoun Me instead of I. She answers that question in her author’s note.

The other bit of historical accuracy I grappled with for this novel was how to write the dialogue. I wanted the characters to speak in a way that reflected the wonderful creole languages of the Caribbean, but also was accessible to non-Caribbean readers. In the end, I went with dialogue that is not always perfectly in line with how someone like Racheal or Mama B would have spoken at the time, but that still follows some of the rules of Caribbean grammar. Language such as Bajan creole do not conjugate many verbs, which lends an immediacy to Caribbean storytelling…

This novel reads as a kind of epic, and at least for this reader, there was no problem with suspending disbelief at some of the wild adventures. There are grisly scenes of chase and horrible descriptions of some punishments meted out. But as Shearer herself says, “I hope this sense of possibility, of love, is something readers will take away from the novel.”Both her academic training and her own history lend authority to this historical novel. I agree whole heartedly with Shearer’s evaluation:

Women like Rachael (and the real Mother Rachael) set out to make a kind of freedom for themselves when they brought their families back together again. There is something so wonderfully hopeful in those stories. They are histories that need to be told.

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The best way to introduce you to young Demon Copperhead is to let him announce his entrance:

First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.

On any other day they’d have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she’d be, little bleach-blond smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she’s captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it’s going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we’re discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl, worming and shoving around because I’m still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life

Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he’d spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn’t beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.

Here is Barbara Kingsolver showing her genius again, managing to take on the voice of a young boy and keeping that voice with all its grammatical blunders and peculiar wording for seven hundred pages of monologue. I can imagine writing a short story in the voice of my younger self, but to be able to convincingly hold that voice not just for a short story but for a very long novel simply astounds me.There is no way I could do justice to sketching out the whole story of Demon’s life, but I could easily assemble a series of terse bits of advice he gives to the reader. Although it says his name is Damon Fields on his birth certificate. “Did she think she’d even get me off her tits before people turned that into Demon?” And once he got his copper-wire hair, he became Demon Copperhead.Like Dickens’David Copperfield, Demon is passed from foster home to foster home and works dangerous, low-paying jobs from the age of eight on. His mother loses custody and regains it several times, but takes in stray men one after another. The worst of these men, Stoner, beats on both him and his mother until Demon is taken from her by Children’s Services. “At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.”Demon’s great talent is drawing, and he loves to draw super-heroes. He draws his friends and tells them what super powers they have.While he is with one family, the McCobbs, Mrs. McCobb takes him to Walmart and using money he has made sorting junk for a junk-dealer, she buys him new clothes, not so much for him but to protect her family’s good name.



 

But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.

At one point, in desperation he seeks out his grandmother, hoping to be taken in and cared for.

My grandmother had no use for anything in the line of boys or men, “Any of them that stands up to make water,” was how she put it. Bad news for me.

Still, his grandmother, his father’s mother, does provide for him and an uncle who lives with her encourages his art and provides sage advice when others only laugh at or curse him.While Demon’s life is sad and his very existence precarious, this novel is often humorous and Kingsolver’s wisdom shines through. She exposes the many stereotypes applied to hill country miners, so-called hillbillies, and looks long and hard at opiate addiction. In her afterward, she acknowledges her debt to Charles Dickens:

I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.

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Joy Castro is a brilliant writer of historical fiction. Many of you readers will know her for her novel Flight Risk. Today I want to talk to you about her 2023 novel, One Brilliant Flame. In her afterward entitled “Gratitude”, she explains part of her motive for writing the book:

For most of my life—and I am fifty-four now—I knew nothing about the political history of Key West or its importance as a rebel base for the anti-colonial insurgency in Cuba. It is a moment in US history that has been largely forgotten or erased—a utopian moment of hope for true racial and gender equality. Unfortunately, it was eclipsed by Key West’s Great Fire and the events that followed.

My ignorance is much more profound than hers, and I found this novel to be fascinating on so many levels. Besides the well researched historical content, she also creates a wonderful cast of characters and a juicy story. Most of her lead characters are girls or women. Chaveta is a powerful figure who begins working in a cigar factory at the age of twelve, stripping and cleaning tobacco leaves.

By the time I was twelve and the Flores Cubana factory would hire me, I was already the fastest stripper on the bench. I worked for only a year on the top floor with the other children and some women (smaller hands) before they moved me down to the main floor. At thirteen, I became the youngest roller in a shop of five hundred souls.

Zenaida is a young writer, a girl who writes poetry (unheard of!), and also a roller who is paid by the number of cigars she rolls in a day. Sofia is the very much spoiled daughter of the owner of the factory—contemptuous of the servants and all those she considers beneath her. She is imperious, but distrusts boys and men and means to stay clear of them until her father dies and makes her a rich free woman.Feliciano is a rebel fighter who fights for the liberation of Cuba from Spain, and, unlike most of his follow fighters, sees freedom for Cuba must be linked to freedom of girls and women. As his friend Chaveta points out:

“If you are willing to kill and die for Cuba to be free”—she glanced around sweeping the whole auditorium with her gaze—”then must you not also liberate every girl and woman in your midst? Must we not all be let alone, free and unmolested, to do as we will, and to choose whomever we want—or choose no one at all?”

Every year in the town there is a pageant held to decide on the most desirable girl in the village. All the mothers seem eager to have their daughters appear at the pageant, partly for the monetary reward, but more simply for the recognition. But even Sofia, usually the good girl who curries favor with the older more conservative members of the community senses the pageant-stage is not so far removed from, the auction block.

Standing there in a row with other girls to demonstrate our figures and fine posture, gazed at by hundreds of eagerly chattering Cubans. I could not help thinking of the auction block.

Among the many political discussions on how to liberate Cuba and whether or not to enlist the help of Americans, the topic of art arises, what it is and whether it can ever be used politically without compromising it. Poetry begins to appear on walls in town and shows the rift between various factions fighting for Cuba’s independence. The factory owners certainly have different interests and goals than the factory workers and the rebel fighters. The radical poet is named The Thorn and everyone assumes the writer is a man. Women can’t write poetry. Of course eventually the town is in for a surprise.A tremendous fire destroys Key West and sixteen of its cigar factories and essentially quells the dreamed of rebellion.

When I was growing up the period of Caribbean/US history was not taught in public school or college. In my own lifetime, we were mostly poor and marginalized people: my father and older relatives never talked about the past.

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Most readers know of Walter Mosley via his masterful Easy Rawlins mystery series. His faithful readers would no doubt hurry to get hold of a new book in that series, but my hunch is that Mosley wanted to speak with a different voice than the relatively well off Easy Rawlins who has both money and muscles on his side. Instead, the hero of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned is Socrates Fortlow, a man of the streets, a convicted murderer who spent twenty-seven years in jail and has been out of jail and has lived in Watts for eight years.Like the Greek philosopher, Socrates, Socco is a deep thinker and one who questions those around him. The Greek philosopher Socrates says that his only claim to wisdom is that he knows that he knows nothing, and he sets out to expose those who make grand and unjustified claims to wisdom. He calls himself a gadfly (a kind of horsefly) that has attached himself to the flanks of the state, stinging with questions. To those who claim knowledge, he asks simply, “What is knowledge?” just as he asks politicians, “What is justice? What is good?”

Socrates of Watts who lives in a two room shack and works at a chain supermarket is also a man who asks questions, and then questions the answers he receives.

“…we don’t want nobody cain’t stand up to what’s got to be done,” Socrates said.

“And just what is that?” Howard asked.

“What’s the biggest problem a black man have?” Socrates asked as if the answer was as plain as wallpaper.

“The po-lice” said Howard.

Socrates smiled. “Yeah, yeah. It’s always trouble on the street—and at home too. But they ain’t the problem--not really.

So what is?” Stony asked.

“Bein’ a man, that’s what. Standin’ up and sayin’ what it is we want. An what it is we ain’t gonna take.”Say to who?” Right asked, ”To the cops?”

“I don’t believe in goin’ to the cops ovah somethin’ like this here.” Socrates said. “A black man—no matter how bad he is—bein’ brutalized by the cops is a hurt to all of us. Goin’ to the cops ovah a brother is like askin’ for chains.

There are fourteen interlocked stories in this marvelous little book, and each is a kind of morality tale. Tales about what to do and what not to do. Like the historical Socrates, Socco is trying to live a good life. In one of the chapters, Socco runs into a young man who steals from the rich while dressed in a suit and tie, and then quickly covers his suit with overalls and becomes an invisible black man.

“I’m sayin that this good life you talkin’ ‘bout comes outta your own brother’s house. Either you gonna steal from a man like me or you gonna steal from a shop where I do my business. An’ ev’ry time I go in there I be payin’ for security cameras and’ security guards an’ up-to-the-roof insurance that they got t’pay off what people been stealin’. An’ they gonna raise the prices higher’n a [expletived] to pay the bills, wit’ a little extra t’pay us back for stealin’”

Along his way Socrates runs into a young boy who is perilously close to joining a gang, because he needs street protection. Socco lets the boy sleep in his shack and he feeds him and tries to get him away from the neighborhood where is in danger of being killed or killing others.

Socrates thought about a promise he’d made. A murky pledge. He swore to himself that he’d never hurt another person—except if he had to for self-preservation. He swore to try and do good if the chance came before him. That way he could ease the evil deeds that he had perpetrated in the long evil life that he’d lived.

In my not-so-humble judgment, I think Socco is wiser that the Greek Socrates who lets the state convict him of a crime he did not commit (atheism and corrupting the youth), when he could have saved himself, instead leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves while he takes the hemlock.

As for religion coming to the rescue, Socrates’ aunt Bellandra Beaufort tries to set young Socco staight.

“God ain’t nowhere near here, child…He’s a million miles away, out in the middle ‘a the ocean somewhere. An’ he ain’t white like they say he is neither.”

“God’s black?” little Socrates asked the tall skinny woman. He was sitting in her lap, leaning against her bony breast.

“Naw baby,” she said sadly. “He ain’t black. If he was there wouldn’t be all this mess down her wit’ us. Naw. God’s blue.

“Blue?”

Uh-huh. Blue like the ocean. Blue. Sad and cold and far away like the sky is far and blue. You got to go a long long way to get to God. And even if you get there he might not say a thing. Not a damn thing.”

It is no accident that Mosley chooses Socrates as the name for his new lead character. Mosley understands the dialectical process of Socrates, But unlike the historical Socrates, Mosley’s charter does not revel in his ignorance. He is an evangelist for good.

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Although this happened more when I was younger, I occasionally run into an author who so impresses me that I know I will read all of her work as soon as I can get hold of it. Sue Miller is just such an author.  I have now read all but one of her long list of excellent novels including her memoir of her father, The Story of My Father. 

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I know next to nothing about horses and am, at best, a sloppy historian. Geraldine Brooks knows tons about horses and is a superb historian. Her 2022 book, Horse, fascinated me from the first page to the last. Her character Jess, in 2019, is an articulator, i.e. a combination artist and zoologist who puts together skeletons. She is hired by the Smithsonian Museum to dis-articulate and then re-articulate a famous horse skeleton. Dr. Catherine Morgan is a scientific researcher whom Jess has been assigned to assist. Says Catherine:

One of my areas of interest is the effect of conformation on the locomotor biomechanics of the horse. Basically, I’m trying to determine what bone structure allows them to run fast while avoiding injury. To do that, I’m measuring and describing all the great racehorses whose skeletons are still available.

Catherine stepped up to the exhibit label on the plinth and drew out her reading glasses. “Horse!” She read. “I can’t believe it. I don’t suppose you people have the Mona Lisa stashed somewhere, labeled Smiling Girl?”

“Not just Horse,” she said. THE horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.

Jess’ story is just one of the threads in this magnificent historical novel. Warfield’s Jarret is a slave on the farm of a famous horse breeder, not given a last name, but identified by his owner’s name. Thomas Scott is a not well known artist who is commissioned to paint a portrait of Darley, a racehorse who has been given to Jarret’s father, Harry, who has bought his own freedom. The horse is given to him in lieu of a year’s wages, and yet it is against the law for a negro to own a racehorse, let alone to race him in stakes races. So, the horse must be officially registered in Warfield’s name.

It is Jarret who raises and trains the horse, and in a manner that differs in important ways from tradition. Unlike today’s thoroughbreds who are raced as two year olds. Darley is not even ridden until he is much older.

“When can we ride him? She asked.”

“Long time yet, miss Clay. His bones got to grow. Best let that happen in its own good time. Harry, “didn’t hold with the newfangled idea of racing two-year-olds.”

Instead the horses are not raced until they are four or older, and they are trained to run four mile heats, sometimes three such heats in a single day.

Alongside the story of Darley the racehorse, there is in this carefully researched novel another more serious strain regarding slavery and the perilous lives of slaves who can be bought and sold on the whim of the owner. Jarret’s father intends to buy his son out of slavery, but he has already depleted his funds in buying the freedom of his wife, and is counting on the purses from races to buy Jarret’s freedom.

Jarret is close to horses from his infancy. “Look at him…He’s half colt himself.”

The first bed he could remember was in a horse stall. He shared straw with the two geldings in the carriage house while his mother slept in the mansion, nursemaid to the mistress’s infant. Jarret hardly saw her. His first language had been the subtle gestures and sounds of horses. He’d been slow to master human speech, but he could interpret the horses: their moods, their alliances, their simple wants and many fears. He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea of how to be with them.

Much of this novel is about the mounting sense of rebellion among the slaves, wanting to run and to be free, but so aware of the consequences if caught. Theo, the Englishman horse painter is well aware of how negroes are depicted by artists, and is writing a dissertation on the depictions of Africans in British art.

He planned to write of Coon caricatures, Oriental fantasies, the decorative enslaved servant in ornate livery, proffering fruit or waving peacock-feathered fans for a White master. His thesis argued that these paintings were never meant to be viewed as portraits of individuals, merely status signifiers of the privilege, wealth, and power of the White sitters. The reality of quotidian Black life didn’t merit depiction…

This is a superb novel on so many levels, and the journalist, historian Brooks juggles the various stories with the same craftsmanship that won her the Pulitzer prize for her earlier book March.

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He’s been much more careful in his marriage to Annie. More careful and more faithful. Yet not entirely faithful. Which is partly what’s making him remember the end with Frieda.Because he’s done it again.Sue Miller has done it again: written an astounding novel about family life and all of its complexities.

In her newest novel, Monogamy, published in 2020, Miller undertakes to describe in meticulous detail the marriage of Graham and Annie. I will not be spoiling the novel for you readers by telling you that the anatomy of this marriage is described after Graham dies in his sleep of a heart attack. Viewed as an ideal couple by those who know them, Miller shows us the underside of the marriage as Annie begins to deal with her grief.

Both Annie and Graham have been married before. During the 70s Graham and Frieda had decided to experiment with an open marriage.

An open marriage. They’d agreed on it at first. It had been that era—the world was shifting and changing rapidly around them, and Graham had stepped into this altered universe eagerly, along with what seemed like half of Cambridge, compelled by all the things it seemed to promise—among them a different meaning for marriage, for sex.

The problems was that Graham had been happy in this new world, and Frieda hadn’t. She tired, she dutifully had a few lovers in the first year or so. But then she got pregnant with Lucas and realized that she’d really never wanted any of it.

As was so often the case, men jumped at this new freedom while so many women simply went along with it, or pretended to, in order to preserve their marriages. It is Frieda who steps away from the marriage, taking Lucas with her. Eventually, Graham and Frieda become friends and share custody of their young son. Frieda also, though not by choice, assumes the role of confessor for Graham, and he confesses to her his infidelity with a recently divorced woman in their circle of friends, Her name is Rosemary, and he also tells his oldest male friend about his new ‘slip’.

The problem is that Rosemary—Rosemary Gregory, the woman he’s slept with maybe four maybe five times—has started to behave as if there’s some kind of commitment between them, as though she has a claim on him...He needs to end it, but that’s something he’s never been good at—disappointing people. At being, as he sees it, unkind.

After his death, Annie discovers that both his best friend and Frieda knew of the infidelity, and it seems as if perhaps everyone knows but Annie.

What is most amazing about Miller’s writing is how completely she develops her characters and how thoroughly she describes their lives. Although describing only an incident here and there, a memory of the past, an anticipation of the future, it feels to the reader that they are being told everything in detail. Philosophers who called themselves phenomenologists argued that philosophy should be a description of lived life, and as Iris Murdoch has pointed out, if this is, indeed, the task of the philosopher, then novelists are the very best at doing this. And Sue Miller is of the first rank in this description of the lived inner lives of her characters.

In the past couple of months I have read four of Miller’s novels, all close descriptions of marriages and family life. The Senator’s Wife equals the exquisitely detailed description of the slow dissolution of a marriage. While I Was Gone also displays the immense emotional intelligence of Sue Miller.

It is hard to do justice to her novels by reviewing them, since their greatness is in the magnificent description of the relationships. She does not preach, and tells us that she has no great insights about monogamy or marriage. But I think you will disagree with the author’ own assessment of her work if you swim into her wonderfully articulated stories.

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Preeti Desai is a successful corporate lawyer who has, in her estimation, finally achieved the assimilation into American culture that she had striven all of her life to achieve. But then a horrible accident involving her brother and sister-in-law, call her back to India, and she realizes how much she still walks like and elephant. Her mother has told her this so often. “I was around nine years old when I realized she wasn’t calling me fat. She meant that I wasn’t demure and obedient—qualities ever good Indian daughter should have.”And so begins this fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking story of an Indian family that has immigrated to the U.S. and parents who desperately want their two children to assimilate and succeed as Americans, but also want them to retain Indian values and culture. Mansi Shah, with her incisive and lovely prose lays out this story in her 2022 novel, A Taste of Ginger.

Preeti has not talked to her mother for months:

Not since she found out that my boyfriend—now ex-boyfriend—and I had been living together in Los Angelas. Cohabitating with a dhoriya was, in her opinion, the most shameful thing her daughter could have done. Living with a white boy was right up there with marrying someone from a lower caste or talking back to your elders.

Preeti and her brother, Neel, have been striving since childhood to sluff off Indian clothes and habits in order to succeed in this new home in Chicago.

Despite living in America for over twenty years, my parents didn’t have any friends who weren’t Gujarati. Much to my chagrin as a teenager trying to fit into this new country. Devon Avenue gave my parents the option of living in the West without giving up the East, and expecting their children to do the same.

When her brother and pregnant sister-in-law are seriously injured in a rickshaw truck accident in India, Preeti must fly ‘home’ although she risks losing her job at the law firm where she works 60+ hour a week. And there she finds as an NRI (non-resident Indian) that she is as singled out and foreign as she has been in the states. Unlike in Los Angela, in India she looks the same as those around her, but is immediately set apart.

Having been born in a higher caste, her family had lived a relatively wealthy life in India with servants to care for their daily needs; in America her engineer father is not recognized for the educated man he is and must take on what for him is menial labor. It is not until she returns to India that she really realizes how much her parents had given up to come to America. Neither had she really understood the Indian caste system, which she is forced to recognize when she has the audacity to associate with an Indian photographer who is of a lower caste. And finally, she did not realize that her mother had been unhappy in this country, yearning for her old life in India, but unwilling to go back.

As an immigrant child of immigrant parents, I grew up knowing my future had to be their future. That meant getting the best grades , going to the best college, and getting the best job to ensure the sacrifices they had made for us were validated.

While her brother Neel has also had to work hard to assimilate, he has been able to retain some core Indian values. He marries a very traditional Indian girl who seems to easily balance the two cultures. Preeti admires but also resents her apparent ease as she reverts to Indian values. “You guys are among the lucky few that have a love marriage that fell within the biodata matches of the arranged system, and you have to protect it...You have to give me hope that someday, somewhere, i will be able to find that kind of happiness too.”

Although her sister-in-law survives the accident, the baby does not, and it turns out that Preeti must stay in India much longer than intended to help her loved brother re-unite with his grief-stricken wife.

Shah develops her story and her charters slowly with a keen eye and forgiving heart. Over the time there, she finally manages to reconnect with her mother, and to realize how she has struggled in her American life. She also comes to understand how limited her knowledge of the caste system is.

During my Indian childhood and infrequent trips back, I had never had occasion to be around anyone from another caste outside of servants and vendors, and I wasn’t familiar with the differences in lifestyle between them. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were public schools here because I’d only known people who went to private ones. What I knew of India applied only to the upper caste, and I realized I knew nothing of how most of the country lived.

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Judy Blunt wrote these lovely snapshots of thirty years of life on wheat and cattle ranches in northeastern Montana as memoir. It stuns me that I had not run across this book before, finally gathered together as a book in 2002. Many, even most, of my reader friends had read this long ago. I’m happy I discovered the volume on a friend’s bookshelf during a recent train trip to Salt lake City.

In August of 1986, I left Phillips County with a new divorce and an old car, with three scared kids and some clothes piled in back. We followed the sun west for hours, climbing mountain passes, crossing river after river, until we spanned the final bridge into Missoula. The kids started school the next morning, and within days I started my freshman year at the University of Montana, the four of us holding hands and stepping together into a world of mountains and shopping malls.

I have to suppose the title is ironic, since the break was anything but clean. First, at thirteen, she fought against turning into a woman, then married a man twice her age whom she started dating at fifteen and married at eighteen. A marriage more of inevitability than choice.

I was eighteen when I walked down the aisle on my father’s arm. The groom was almost thirty, a man of simple tastes and few passions, staunch honor and little experience. I joined him at the alter, bristling with independence yet eager to please, desperate for attention yet filled with fierce energy born of old anger—a riddle behind my homemade veil. From my parents to the unwitting hands of my husband I passed the terrible power of judgment and reward, the absolute authority I connected with love.

Blunt understand how two edged the praise was for tough ranch women. ‘allowed’ to do men’s work, but never to own land or livestock.

In my real-life, out-west community, the depressing sequel was being written as i watched, and the work parts were harder to skip. I knew women savvy to the working of cattle and horses, women who rode the hay rake in June and took to the fields at harvest. But without exception, they picked up a thank-you and walked back to tackle the work that was theirs alone. Women’s work. If I learned nothing else in my early years, I learned the scorn that twisted those words into insults.

The prose in this book is simple but so beautiful. Hard to believe she did not really start writing until she was in her thirties. I could easily make this review simply a string of quote from the book.

Womanly arts be damned. I wanted the ease, the power, of my mother, horseback. I wanted the real myth, and I set out to get it.

That fall, as I turned twelve, the sole member of my peer group defected. My cousin Lois turned thirteen and despite our blood-sister oath forbidding such things, she put on a bra, ratted her hair into haystacks and kissed the hired man. I worked on my own appearance with grim determination. I spit and crossed my legs like field hand. , I peeled my nails off with my teeth, and kept my hair bobbed away from my face. I preferred stacking bales and working cattle, and ducked house chores when I could. I climbed trees, rode the milk pen steers to a standstill and strung frogs ten-deep on a willow spear. I read myself into the strongest characters of half the Malta library. I made it last a year. And when, in the inexorable process of time, as my body betrayed me, my rage was terrible....Dark brown hair, sun-faded to the color of hay, ear length and shaggy, needing a wash. A big, raw-boned girl my mother said. Tall for twelve. A square, horsy face, I thought, yet hidden by owlish glasses, chin jutting like a shoehorn, my father’s chin and his wolfish teeth wrangling for space behind my tight lips...That night I tiptoed to the bathroom, selected a clean sock from the laundry basket and gripped it in my teeth, just in case. After dabbing my bare chest with alcohol, I attempted to lance my breast buds with a darning needle.

Unable to prevent either her periods or her budding breasts, she finally succumbs to adulthood. While many of these little vignettes are sad or frightening, they are not without humor and and told as only a born storyteller can tell them.

I loved this book. It returned me to the simple joy of reading. Judy Blunt is a tough and brilliant woman who finally broke clean in her thirties and pursued the education she had always dreamed of. She had to defy her husband and her community to do it. She shows us a tough ranch-women’s brand of feminism built in the crucible of hard work and bearing children.

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Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who, perhaps unfortunately, is also beautiful.Once a research chemist, Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be.

The main character in Bonnie Garmus’ delightful 2022 novel, Lessons in Chemistry is as stubborn as she is brilliant. She refuses to be seen as simply an extension of her Nobel Prize nominated boyfriend whom she lives with but refuses to marry. Her hiring by a scientific think-tank is already viewed by the male workforce as due to the influence of her famous boyfriend. And she realizes that no matter how brilliant her work is, she will be seen as riding the coat-tails of Calvin Evans.

Elizabeth meets Calvin when he discovers her stealing beakers from his lab, which she explains is due to a lack of funding for her research.

“The problem, Calvin,” she asserted, “is that half the population is being wasted. It’s not just that i can’t get the supplies I need to complete my work, it’s that women can’t get the education they need to do what they’re meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be in a place like Cambridge. Which means they won’t be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. They’ll start at the bottom and stay there. Don’t even get me started on pay. And all because they didn’t attend a school that wouldn’t admit them in the first place.”

The action in this novel takes place in the 60s, but Garmus thinks not much has changed since then.

Garmus creates some really funny and delightful characters including a dog who understands a very large number of words and a precocious daughter “who could hum a Bach concerto but couldn’t tie her own shoes; who could explain the earth’s rotation but stumbled at tac-tac-toe.”

The plot of the novel is less important than the commentary on science and society that Garmus provides. Briefly put, Calvin dies, and Elizabeth is fired from the research institute soon after his death. Out of a job and nearly broke, she has little to do but work on her already very accomplished cooking skills. Cooking she insists is like chemistry, in fact it is chemistry at the practical level. Eventually in this whacky story, Elizabeth becomes the reluctant star of a cooking show, Supper at Six. Unexpectedly, the show is a huge hit, and she soon has a devoted following. Between recipes, Elizabeth provides running commentary on the absurd exclusion of women from science, making them stay at home and make babies in a form of legalized slavery.

The all-male workforce at the institute sees Elizabeth’s research project as unimportant and bound to go nowhere, and after she is fired, her work is simply stolen by one of her male colleagues. Only Calvin recognizes her brilliance, and he is no longer there to defend her.

Darwin had long ago proposed that life sprang from a single-celled bacterium, which then went on to diversify into a complex planet of people, plants, and animals. Zott? She was like a bloodhound on the trail of where that first cell had come from. In other words , she was out to solve one of the greatest chemical mysteries of all time, and if her findings continued apace, there was no question she would do just that.

As her fame blossoms as cooking-show host, Elizabeth has only one real friend, Harriet, whom Elizabeth has hired as her assistant. They agree on most things, but not on one essential point.

According to Harriet, men were a world apart from women. They required coddling, they had fragile egos, they couldn’t allow a woman intelligence or skill if it exceeded their own. “Harriet that’s ridiculous,” Elizabeth had argued. “Men and women are both human beings. And as humans, we’re by-products of our upbringings, victims of our lackluster educational system, and choosers of our behaviors. In short, the reduction of women to something LESS than men, and the elevation of men to something MORE than women, is not biological: it’s cultural.

I did not choose this book for its political significance, but simply because it sounded delightful and it is. Bonnie Garmus has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine and education, and she shows off her considerable talents in this wonderful comedic novel. Like her zany character Elizabeth, Bonnie decides, “Don’t work the system. Outsmart it.”

If you as a reader sometimes read a book just for the delight of reading it, this is a book for you, easily the funniest and most clever book I have read this year.

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Teacher seeks pupil. Must hast have an earnest desire to save the world
Apply in personThis ad enrages the narrator of the book, Ishmael. Although he has in the past sought a teacher, he is now disillusioned, and angry at the naive audacity of the ad. He answers the ad simply to expose the person who wrote it as a fake. Imagine his response when he discovers just who that is.

Because it was backed by darkness, the glass in this window was black—opaque, reflective. I made no attempt to see beyond as I approached. I was the spectacle under observation. On arrival, I continued to gaze into my own eyes for a moment, then rolled the focus forward beyond the glass—and found myself looking into another pair of eyes.

I fell back, startled. Then recognizing what I’d seen. I fell back again, now a little frightened.

The creature on the other side of the glass was a full-grown gorilla.

And so begins one of the most captivating and insightful books I have read in years. Actually the book had gone through several iterations until Quinn published the current version in 1992.

I’m surprised it took me so long to discover this brilliant treatise on human’s destruction of the earth, quite a fitting topic for our earth-day show.

Yes, he is being interviewed by a gorilla and a very clever one at that. A poster on the wall reads

WITH MAN GONE

WILL THERE

BE HOPE

FOR GORILLA?

This koan recurs many times in the book. The gorilla announces, “I am the teacher,’ and so begins an incredibly complex discussion of how we got to where we are, and how we might save ourselves and the rest of sentient life forms on earth.

Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you ‘How can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’ and if you do this, people will look at you oddly and wonder what the devil you’re talking about. In other words, if you take this educational journey with me, you’re going to find yourself alienated from the people around you—friends, family, past associates, and so on.

There is a whole philosophy of history spun out in the gorilla’s lessons, from creation myths to a tracing of the history of agriculture. The story of The Leavers and The Takers. The story is too complex to simply overview, nor am i anything like as clever as Quinn and the gorilla.

“And so your account of creation ends, ’And finally man appeared.’

“Yes.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that there was no more to come. Meaning that creation had come to an end.”

“This is what it was all leading up to”

“Yes.’

“Of course. Everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.”

“Yes.”

“When man finally appeared, creation came to an end, because its objective had been reached. There was nothing left to create.”

“That seems to be the unspoken assumption.”

Ishmael is a wise if impatient teacher and he does not simply lay out his theory of how we came to this precipice we are on, he proceeds in Socratic fashion, urging the narrator to dig out the story, and play his part in discovery, to bring out of concealment the story of our own destruction.

At first I thought that the author must have read The Sixth Extinction, and was playing off of it, but if anything, it is the other way around since this novel predates the publication of The Sixth Extinction and centers more on economic history than on scientific data.

In essence, the world was made for man, and man was made to rule it. But since the world would not meekly submit, man had to conquer it.

“I’m saying that the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.“

Martin Heidegger tells a similar story in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in which he claims that the present worlding, the world we are bringing into existence, treats nature as standing reserve, that which stands in reserve for us to use and use up. Quinn’s version of the story sis far less pompous than Heidegger’s and far more entertaining.

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Black Cake is a sprawling, brilliant debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. It is hard to believe it is a debut novel, since the writing is so rich and complex, but she has been writing for a long time. Benedetta Bennet (known as Benny), and Coventina (Covey) have been best friends for life, and their voices are two of the most important narrative voices in this novel, although there are a host of narrators representing generations of families. The chapters are split between then (1965) and now (2018). Benny and Byron, once super-close siblings have drifted apart as they matured, but the death of Eleanor Bennett, their mother, brings them together, and the narrative she has left behind for them shows them that Eleanor was not the person they or others thought she was. Benny and Byron, or B & B as their mother likes to call them, have been summoned to Eleanor Bennett’s attorney’s office and are given a handwritten note and a USB drive. The note says simply “B and B, there’s a small black cake in the freezer for you. Don’t throw it out.”

As Wilkerson tells us in her Author’s Note:

It was my personal familiarity with a particular Caribbean food, black cake, that led obliquely to this book. It started me thinking about the emotional weight carried by recipes and other familial markers that are handed down from one generation to the next. Then it had me writing about characters who must hold fast to their sense of self when they learn their lives have been built on a dubious narrative.

What we call holiday fruit cake is as close as most of us come to black cake. But the Caribbean black cake is made with fruit that has been soaked in alcohol over long periods of times, and is especially treasured as a wedding cake.

Not everyone sits down to write a book but everyone is a storyteller, in one form or other. As I wrote this novel, a lifetime of anecdotes and fleeting impressions shared by the Caribbean members of my multicultural family helped me to develop some of the fictional characters and scenarios from the 1950s and 1960s. The scenes from the unnamed island in the Caribbean reflect some of the geography and history of Jamaica...The fictional town where members of the book’s older generation grew up is inspired by the northeast coast of that island and uses a mix of actual and invented locations.

Without telling you much of the story that unfolds as B and B listen to the story their mother tells them, one of the two best friends is given by her father as a bride to a much older and powerful money-lender. Benny, who is a great long-distance swimmer helps Covey to escape the island and the marriage, but must then escape and change her own identity because of the long reach of the money lender and his family.

While B and B slowly learn the real history of their mother, scores of other characters are introduced. Covey eventually becomes a kind of food anthropologist telling family stories via food traditions. Benny becomes s world famous open-water distance swimmer, and eventually marries and moves to the United States.

In many ways Wilkerson displays the dangers for Blacks living in white communities., and in this way the novel seems very current. A black man pulled over for a busted tail light, and while trying to get his wallet, the officer pulls a gun on him.

What was the kid supposed to do if he was asked to show his driver’s license?

How is a person supposed to reach for their wallet? Are black people in America not allowed to have hands?

Byron would like to believe that this epidemic of mistreatment, this bullying of unarmed black men is just that, an outbreak, though prolonged, that can be brought under control. He wants to keep believing in law enforcement officers, to respect the risky work that they do, knowing that every day they step into unknown territory. He wants to know that he can still pick up the phone and call the cops if he ever needs to. There’s a lot of anger out there. A lot of hurt. Where are they all gonna end up—black white, whoever—if things don’t get better?

Good question, and Wilkerson is a master at spotlighting this and so many contemporary issues. This is a wonderful novel, one of the best I have read in the past two years, and a fitting tribute to Women’s History month.

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Try to imagine what it would be like to not be remembered by anyone. Adeline Larue has made the mistake of praying to the dark gods to be free and to live without fear of death. The title of this Faustian tale is The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by V.E. Schwab.The author warns us in a prefatory note which she attributes to Estele Magritte, 1642-1719:

The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle , unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

I am not a big fan of fantastical literature, but this novel raises so many fascinating philosophical questions about personal identity and its link to memory that I continued to ponder the questions long after I had finished reading the story, a story which stands on its own even without the philosophical meandering, but which is so much better as a book because of the reflections on personal identity.

Adeline is a girl who lived at the cusp between 1698 and the eighteenth century. Much loved by her father, a woodworker, he always takes her with him when he takes his wares to market. “Adeline is seven, the same as the number of freckles on her face. She is bright and small and quick as a sparrow.” She continues to leave her small village three times a year to go to the city of Le Mans, but when she turns twelve, her parents decide she should no longer be allowed to go to the large town, that it is unseemly for a young girl to wander the market.

“You are not a child anymore.”

And Adeline understands and still does not understand at all—feels as if she’s being punished for simply growing up.

And then she is sixteen and, against her will, betrothed to a man more than twice her age.

I do not want to marry.

“I do not want to belong to someone else,” she says with sudden vehemence. The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. “ I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of having no choices, so scared of the years rushing by beneath my feet. I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all.

This she tells to a shadow, a handsome man with dark curls and green eyes, a man she comes to call Luc.

The novel jumps from France in 1714 to New York City in 2014. Addie’s wish has been granted and she has lived for over three hundred years. The curse for her freedom and apparent immortality is that no one remembers her. She is forgotten simply by turning her back or walking away. If she takes a man to her bed, she knows he will awaken in the morning startled by the stranger in bed with him. Although she can get money, usually by stealing, landlords will not rent to a lone woman. It is only when she begins to wear trousers and a buttoned coat, a hat that is pulled down over her face that she can roam freely.

The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing as freedom for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.

I will return to the story in a moment, but let us first ask about the connection between memory and personhood. Oliver Sacks describes a man who has no short-term memory at all, but only a hazy recall of a distant past. If philosophers are right, memory is a necessary condition of personal identity, of being the same person over time. Sacks tells of tricking a client (he does not like the word “patient”) into looking into a mirror and seeing not the person he thinks himself to be, but a much older man. He is horrified and confused, and Sacks chides himself for such a cruel trick.

I agree with Sacks and others that memory is crucial to personal identity. But what of Schwab’s clever trick of asking whether a person not remembered is really a person. Will they feel as Addie does, that she is really invisible because unknown.

Eventually, Addie wanders into a bookstore, The Last Word, and steals a copy of The Odyssey, in Greek no less. She knows that even if the clerk sees her theft, by the time he confronts her on the street, he will have forgotten who she is and what he is doing with her. Imagine the shocked surprise when she returns to the shop a few days later asking to exchange to book for an English copy, and the clerk says, “I remember you” and scolds her for her impudence in trying now to exchange the stolen book for another. But all Addie can hear are his words, “ I remember you.”

Finally she is known, remembered, but how can this be so, how can the clerk, Henry, remember her in spite of the curse? To discover the answer to that question as well as the fates of Adeline and Henry, you will have to read the book.

While this novel will more than stretch your ability to suspend disbelief, I think it will also enchant you and lead you to ask questions about your own identity and what it depends on.

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If you are one of the many who believe that eugenics was a tool only of Nazi Germany, you should read the excellent and thoroughly researched historical novel by Louise Fein entitled, The Hidden Child.Often, the best way of really bringing home the horrors of a practice is to embody it, to show how real people are affected by the practice. Louise Fein has done just that in her sad but wonderful novel. As Eleanor is watching over her beautiful five year old child, Mabel, frolicking in a park, suddenly and out of nowhere Mabel begins to act in a most frightening way. A postman has just dropped his bike in shock as he points to the beautiful child in front of him.

Eleanor turns in confusion.

Mabel! Sticks scattered around her, she’s sitting on the dusty ground, face twisted, her eyes weirdly rolling back. Her chin drops to her chest, once, twice, hands twitching.

Eleanor’s feet are rooted to the ground in horror. Her daughter looks as though she’s been possessed, her normal sweet expression vanished behind the contorted features of her face.

But this is not the first nor the last of these fits. Eleanor’s instinctive reaction is to brush of the momentary behavior, and she implores the postman not to fetch a doctor. Besides her inclination to deny and hope the momentary aberration is just that, passing and of no significance, she is married to a psychologist who is a leader of the eugenics movement in the U.K., and who would be most embarrassed to admit his daughter is among the unfit who need to be weeded from society.

Fein skillfully weaves her story. Edward, the psychologist husband, insists that Mabel’s ailment must not be discovered, both to protect the child from being singled out and ridiculed, and to protect his own reputation within the movement. He insists that it will be best for all concerned if Mabel is locked away in a sanitarium and kept from public scrutiny.

Although heartbroken, Eleanor cannot stand up to her husband and his professional stature and eventually defers to his judgment. Unable even to visit her young child, she slowly becomes more and more aware that her husband sees only what he wants to see and that he even skews his research to omit evidence that would count against his theories regarding the improvement of the race via incarceration, sterilization and other drastic measures.

The story itself is compelling and so well written, but the controversy behind the theory is really the most important part of this novel. Fein, herself, has a child with epilepsy, and that no doubt adds to her careful and thorough research in writing this book. In her notes at the end of the novel:

I was therefore rather shocked that when I began to look into the ideas behind the inhumane treatment of people with disabilities, including epilepsy, in the 1920s, I found , in fact, that Nazi Germany took its lead in this area from widespread and accepted eugenics ideas circulating in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The eugenics movement had been born in England in the late nineteenth century and was extremely widespread in the first thirty years or so of the twentieth century.

The pseudo-science of eugenics and other theories such as craniology are thoroughly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould in his superb set of essays, The Mismeasure of Man. Like Edward in this novel, many of the experiments meant to support the theories were manipulated such that only confirmatory data was allowed and contra evidence swept under the rug.

This novel and the story stand on their own quite apart from the eugenics controversy, but the social and political importance of the book needs to be emphasized.

I will end with another quote from the author’s end notes:

Legislation was proposed for compulsory sterilization and incarceration of those considered “weak-minded,” a catchall phrase for those with learning difficulties as well as epileptics, criminals, those with behavioral difficulties, alcoholics and anyone else considered “undesirable” and ruinous to the health of the population in general.

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Believe me, I am giving nothing away by beginning my remarks by quoting the last page of Elizabeth’s Strout’s new novel, Oh William

And then I thought, Oh William!

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too?

Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!

Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.

But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

Strout in her unique way, again reminds us that there are no ordinary people, that everyone is extraordinary, and that the simplest of day to day events is filled with mystery.

As she does in each of her novels, Strout revisits old characters. This time it is Lucy Barton who reappears. Like Strout, Lucy Barton is an author. Her most recent husband, David has died leaving her buried in grief. And she decides to tell us a few things about her first husband William with whom she has remained good friends after their divorce. They have two adult daughters together, and the two daughters have a half-sister from William’s last marriage. William has been married three times: Lucy, Joanne, and Estelle.

William has been having terrifying dreams and he finds it quite natural to confide in Lucy regarding those dreams. He wonders if the dreams have simply to do with getting older.

“Maybe,” I said. But I was not sure this was the reason. William has always been a mystery to me—and to our girls as well. I said, tentatively, “Do you want to see anyone to talk to about them?”

Strout’s writing is so simplistic, so flat, and yet her readers understand they are being given a very wise view of the world. At times her writing seems almost like the awkward journal jottings of a high-schooler. And yet, and yet there seem to be profound insights about marriage, about raising children, about respecting old relationships and getting beyond petty jealousy.

Both William and Lucy have had sad, lonely childhoods and few warm feelings about their mothers.

There is this about my own mother:

I have written about her and I really do not care to write anything else about her. But I understand one might need to know a few things for this story. The few things would be this: I have no memory of my mother ever touching any of her children except in violence. I do not remember that she ever said, I love you, Lucy.

The rather complicated and often humorous plot of this novel is, I think, much less important than Lucy’s asides; asides about choice and loneliness and not being able to let go of past hurts.

People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.

The only other writer I can think of who is as skillful in uncovering the extraordinary in ordinary lives is Alice Munro, and like Munro who writes almost exclusively short stories, Strout makes her points in passing, in throw-off comments. Her insights cannot be easily summed up, her messages not easily articulated.

I will leave you with this heart-rending quote from Lucy.

There have been times—and I mean recently—when I feel the curtain of my childhood descend around me once again. A terrible enclosure, a quiet horror: This is the feeling and it was with me my entire childhood, and it came back to me with a whoosh the other day. To remember so quietly, yet vividly, to have it re-presented to me in this way, the sense of doom I grew up with, knowing I could never leave that house (except to go to school, which meant the world to me, even though I had no friends there, but I was out of the house)—to have this come back to me presented a domain of dull and terrifying dreariness to me.: There was no escape.

When I was young there was no escape, is what I am saying.

Oh Elizabeth, you genius story-teller, please keep writing.

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It is 1932, England and all of Europe is still under the cloud of World War I. So many men died in the war that there are thousands upon thousands of young widows or unmarried ‘spinsters’ who are dubbed ‘surplus woman', woman who will be unlikely to marry or have children. Violet Speedwell is one such woman; at thirty-eight, she has lost both her older brother and her finance, Laurence. Violet’s mother is inconsolable over the death of her oldest son, and is super-critical of her daughter, so much so that she makes Violet’s life miserable, and Violet longs to get away from her home and town where she feels suffocated by the life of caring for her aging mother.When Violet spots an ad for a typist in a nearby town, she applies, and immediately accepts the low-paying job when it is offered.

When it became clear that Mrs. Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Good-bye, Mother” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.”

Mrs. Speedwell sniffed,. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.”

And thus Violet begins her new life, living in a boardinghouse with other young women and working long hours typing forms for an insurance company. Excited by the new freedom, she puts up with meals of sardines on toast or beans on toast.

She took herself to the cinema every week—her one indulgence, which she paid for by going without a meal that day.

Her life is dreary and lonely until one day she goes to the grand cathedral in Winchester and happens onto a particular service, one filled with mostly older women. She is not at the church to pray, ”prayers had died in the war alongside George and Laurence and a nation full of young men.”

It turns out to be a special mass for broderers, i.e. women who embroider seat cushions and kneelers for the hard wooden benches of the cathedral. At first blocked from entering the group, she persists and eventually is allowed to be a part of the group. An so begins a new and much less socially impoverished life as she befriends other broderers and comes under the very kind tutelage of Miss Pesel, one of two women in charge of the group of women.

When I picked up this novel, I knew nothing of spinning, weaving, crocheting , or embroidering, but I was fascinated by the descriptions and by the friendships between the women. Although Violet has had very limited introduction to needlework, she quickly takes to it under the watchful eye of Miss Pesel. She also becomes friends with an older man, Arthur, who is a bell-ringer for the cathedral. Arthur is married to a woman who is frail and ailing, unable to recover from the loss of her son in the war.

In order to be allowed to attend the daytime broderers meetings, Violet comes up with a plan to improve efficiency in the insurance office such that it will allow both she and Olive, the other typist to attend the meetings.

“But, Miss Speedwell, I shall say this idea came from me, if you don’t mind,” he added with a frown. “I can’t think what management would say about a girl having such a ...progressive idea”

The author, Chevalier, has such a wonderful ear for the nuances and prejudices of this time in a Europe decimated by one war and on the eve of another.

Violet decides on a walking tour in the country in place of the holidays of the past spent with her mother and younger brother and his family. She has a frightening encounter with a man she calls the corn man, having met him in a cornfield and then followed by him. Having walked to Sthe small town where Arthur lives, she confides in him about the scare she has had. “ He frightened you?”

“Yes” Arthur looked at her waiting.

“It’s not easy being a woman on your your own,” Violet explained after a moment. “No one expects it, though there are plenty of us. The ‘surplus women’. One would think it would not be such a surprise to see a woman walk through a field, or have a cup of tea in a pub.”

This is such a lovely little novel; I didn’t expect to be so intrigued by it, reading it as a kind of respite from two rather heavy novels, but by the end, I knew I had to call it to the attention of other readers.

Among the broderers, Violet becomes a special friend of Gilda, and Gilda seems to light up when yet another woman, DJ, Dorothy, shows up at meetings.

When Gilda appeared—out of breath and shouting hello—DJ started, and suddenly solidified, as if outlined by solid black. She did not stop smiling, but her eyes drifted toward the corner of the room as if to dodge attention. Gilda too seemed out of sorts, looking everywhere but at DJ, and laughing a little too brightly as she removed her cloche...Violet discovered that there was something to discover, though she did not yet understand what it was.

Only Violet and eventually Miss Pesel accept the relationship between the two women.

There was something around them that made them seem closer than others, although they were not actually standing closer or even looking at each other. It was like an invisible fence, penning them together.

“That’s what can happen when you’re a spinster.”

It was said quietly, behind Violet, one woman to another. There was sarcasm in the words and a harshness, and something like fear..

Violet comes to see just how lovely and natural the relationship between Gilda and DJ is, opening her eyes to new possibilities.

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This is primarily a love story, a love triangle between two best friends and one girl loved by both. But it is an incredibly complex story full of lies and secrets. Stewart Goodman, known by all as Goody and Santamo Piccolo, known as Pick, are unlikely best friends. Goody is a quiet and reflective boy who ponders all the big questions, while Pick is brash, cynical and dismissive of all things spiritual. Laura is Pick’s girlfriend and the love of his life. The three become fast friends at the boarding school all three attend.Years after the three leave the school, a teacher, Griffin, becomes the dean of the school, and as the story begins Griffin is felled by a stroke, and his last conscious words uttered to his secretary who sees him fall are, Pick and Goody. Throughout the book, Griffin is suspended between life and death, on life support machines. There are other characters who sometimes act as narrator, but I’m not going to try to sum up the story. The author jumps from time to time and character to character in a dizzying manner, that makes the entire novel read as a kind of stream of consciousness.

I’m more interested in conveying a theme returned to again and again in the novel which I will call a struggle, a tension, between clear cold reason and spirituality. I see it as the author’s argument with himself about this tension. Much like Ian McEwan’s wonderful little novel Black Dogs, in which it is clear that McEwan favors the life of reason his philosopher brother defends , but feels the pull of that which reason seems not able to explain. The black dogs represent the two sides; we might even say the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Plato uses a similar metaphor in his description of the tripartite soul: the black steed of passion or appetite, the white steed of spirt and reason as the charioteer.

Pick has a no nonsense view of all things, while Goody seems open to all religions. At one point, Pick takes Goody to task for talking admiringly of Jesus, though Goody is a Jew.

“They want you to behave a certain way,” Pick went on, “so they throw Jesus at you. Look at history, for Christ’s sake”

Goody shook his head. “It wasn’t propaganda when it started though.”

“You think he was the Son of God?” Pick asked. “I didn’t think you guys were allowed to”

Goody crumbled up some more hash and dropped it into the pipe bowl. “To me, Jesus is...he’s like the older brother, you know? Like the ultimate older brother”... I mean God is the father, right? Everybody at least agrees with that.

“Everybody who believes in God.”

Goody looked at him, to see if he could actually mean that. “Well when you’re a kid, you know, your father...he’s this powerful thing.

“He’s this force,” Goody went on. “And he’s above you and he’s mysterious and everything comes from him. And then Jesus, he’s like your older brother—he explains your father to you. He’s off to the side, just a little. And from there he interprets things. So that you can understand what the hell is going on sometimes.

Pick looked at him. “That’s what the Jews think?”

“I don’t know what they think. Nobody ever talks about him.”

While I am clearly on the side of reason and defend atheism, I have a sense for what both McEwan and Arch are wrestling with.

This is a truly beautiful love story. The love between Goody and Pick is lovely and both characters are drawn fully and carefully. The love Laura has for each of the boys in turn Is beautiful rather than trashy or deceitful. The love of Griffin for his wife and son, all of these loves are described so well.

Because of the many narrators and the sudden, unannounced shifts of time and place this is not an easy novel to follow. Added to that is the obvious fact that Arch is most comfortable as a screen writer, so almost all of the text is in the form of monologue or dialogue.

This is just a beautiful book, and as touching an examination of the many kinds of love as i can recall. This is not a book I would have picked up as a matter of course, but it fell into my hands from one of the readers in a small group of friends who pass along books to each other, and I was deeply touched by it.

In many ways Griffin, who never speaks for himself, is the glue that holds the book and the characters together. Does he survive the stroke and return to his school and his family? That is something readers will have to determine for themselves.

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It’s 1979, Olivia Murray, who is a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper, has aspirations of becoming a photojournalist. Out of the blue, she has a chance to go to Iraq with her Kurdish boyfriend, ostensibly for a weeding of his cousin, but also because he needs to reunite with his family. And so begins this remarkable 2021 novel by Gian Sardar, Take What You Can Carry. In her acknowledgments at the end of the book, Sarder explains that "... Kurdistan is spread over four countries, so isolation has been both geographic as well as political." While Sardar is quick to point out that her book is a work of fiction, it is based on true events. Sardar’s father is from Kurdistan, and her mother an American. She explains that her father’s tales about his life in Kurdistan provide the kernel of the story she tells in the novel. “Growing up in Kurdistan of Iraq, my father and his family endured atrocities I could never fully capture with words.”

In many ways this novel is a love story, Olivia and her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, find their love and their very lives in danger. Delan has called his parents in Iraq to tell them he might show up for the wedding, but they must speak in code, since the family is political, and they know the government taps their phones, and he is not sure from their coded conversation whether his mother is telling him to come, that it is relatively safe, or whether instead she is telling him not to come, that the risks are too great.

Even before his trip to Iraq, Delan agitates in the U.S to inform his friends of the plight of the Kurds in Iraq.

The United States and Kissinger had encouraged and funded them in a rise against the Iraqi government, as a favor to the Shah of Iran, but abandoned them when they no longer served their purpose...They never wanted us to win. That’s what the committee found. They wanted us only to fight and keep Baghdad busy. We were a pawn. Kurds quit their jobs, school, you name it. Everyone joined in to fight and to die in a battle we were never allowed to win.

More than two hundred thousand refugees when they abandoned us, when we were being slaughtered, and not one dollar of humanitarian aid from the United States. Our leader, Barzani, he begged Kissinger for the United states to help.

There is a lot of drama in this novel, and I don’t intend to give much of the plot away. Delan has a brother, Soran, who is a passionate gardener, and who says he must stay out of the fray, since he has an adopted daughter, Lailan, to care for. At one point Olivia questions Soran about his habit of bathing at night. He replies:

People in our family, they’ve always been political. So even in peace we had problems, Arrests. Imprisonments. But then the the kingdom was toppled in ’58 and the republic created. From then on no Kurds had peace. And the government bombed during the day.” He stops, as if this is all that needs to be said, but then sees that’s not the case. “Imagine, not having clothes on when the sirens go off or when the ground starts to shake and you have to run. Imagine soap in your hair when you see the shadow of the plane.

We learned to live at night. To work, to bathe. When the time came, you had to run. Take what you can carry to the mountains. That is where we would go. The mountains to be safe.

Olivia learns to hear the common saying, Head for the Hills, in a new light.

Juxtaposed with the harrowing arrests and raids and constant fear, Sardar manages also to describe the colors and sounds and smells of Iraq, and to understand the history of that ancient land. She describes the vibrant colors of the dresses at the wedding they attend, so different than the bland whites of American weddings.

In the field, she catches a flash of silver: the bride’s sisters and friends are dancing with knives. “They’re dancing with knives”

He turns “They’re about to cut the cake. That’s to let him know they can handle knives. That he should be good to their sister. That they will protect her.

There is so much color and excitement in this novel, and while it is often sad and frightening, there are also moments of great beauty and courage. Delan is known for his spontaneous kindness and generosity which is often impulsive and even dangerous. But one of his acts of kindness, turns out to save the family when there is an attack by government forces. This incident is one that Sardar explains is based on a real events in her Kurdish father’s life.

This is a wonderful book and I am so grateful that it fell into my hands. I was all set to review a different book, The Five Wounds, by, KIrstin Valdez Quade. But I read that book weeks ago, and it was already vanishing from memory, so I decided on this novel that I had just finished.

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Gabriela Garcia’s 2021 debut novel is really a collection of interconnected stories, spanning several generations of women. The first story is about women cigar rollers in pre-Castro Cuba.

The air thickened. Maria Isabel had by then breathed so much tobacco dusts she developed regular nosebleeds, but the foreman didn’t permit workers to open the window slats more than a sliver—sunlight would dry the cigars. So she hid her cough. She was the only woman in the workshop. She didn’t want to appear weak.

A quick overview: Carmen came from Cuba to the U.S., and has always felt displaced. Her daughter, Jeanette, is addicted to drugs, and is determined to find out more about family history, and thus goes from Miami to Cuba to learn more from her grandmother than her very reticent mother will tell her. Carmen has taken in the daughter of neighbor who has been detained by ICE. Jeanette travels to Cuba and the stories of the three women unravel in snippets via the stories of women who write down their histories.

Once in Cuba, now under Castro, she begins to hear or read the stories.

Study has become a habit among them; today they leave behind the cockfight in order to read a newspaper or book; now they scorn the bullring; today it is the theater the library, and the centers of good association where they are seen in constant attendance.

While the author is quite willing to expose the difficulties of the poor in Castro’s Cuba (and the racism that is denied, and claimed to be only an American problem), she makes it clear that most are much better off than before when American corporations took from Cuba its wealth of natural goods and gave back little.

The grandmother in Cuba has seen the brutal treatment of those who shout for change. She sees the coming revolution that is born of blood and poverty. Married to a disenchanted intellectual who joins the struggle, she is denied access to the group of agitators once he knows she is pregnant.

She placed one hand on her belly and felt the something in her move and stretch as if seeking its freedom, felt as if the whole world were her womb. She wanted to write her own words. She wanted to write her life into existence and endure. Perhaps a piece of her knew death crouched close.

While much of the book is concerned with the political struggles that led to the overthrow of corrupt, American controlled dictators, and then the new set of problem under Castro, the author is also swept away by the incredible natural beauty of Cuba. In a chapter titled “An Encyclopedia of Birds”, the birds a metaphor for captivity and the struggle for flight and freedom:

The burrowing parrot also known as the Patagonian conure also as the burrowing parakeet is the only bird species with eyelashes. This is a little-known fact. Another little-known fact is that burrowing parrots, while often purchased as pets, become exasperated if caged too long. Burrowing parrots need interaction. They need color. If you separate two burrowing parrots, in short order the one left behind will die. She will die of loneliness.

Birds fly even if it kills them.

She speaks of the baby jails where the children of deportees are kept, and of the children’s crayon drawings of birds, there is no sun in the drawings.

I don’t know what you remember, but they didn’t tell us where they were taking us. I thought we were going before a judge finally. I thought I could argue my case, my credible fear. I had practiced. Instead they boarded us onto a bus with bars on the windows and dropped us off in Mexico. We were Salvadoran by nationality but Mexico was just a few hours away, and that’s where we’d come from , so there they left us. Said, Find you way home. We were supposed to be turned over to Mexican immigration officials, but I guess they didn’t show up. Or they thought we were Mexican.

Story after story about women and children.

Jeanette had added her own words, We are more than we think we are.

I will leave you with the last words of the book which sum up the author’s view well.

And though Ana had no idea why Jeanette had written those words, she chose to believe the sentence, the scribble, was a cry across time. Women? Certain women? We are more than we think we are. There was always more. She had no idea what else life would ask of her, force out of her, but right then there was cake and candles and this, a gift. She thought that she, too, might give away the book someday, though she had no idea to whom. Someone who reminded her of herself maybe. Someone drawn to stories.

Garcia is a wonderful story-teller, and she understands the power of stories.

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What Jess Walter shows us in his 2020 novel The Cold Millions is that he is a wonderful story-teller, a fine historian, and like one of his characters guilty of “first-degree aggravated empathy.”This lovely historical novel is on one hand simply a story of the love between two brothers, Gig and Rye Dolan who hop freight trains together, traveling from town to town and job to job. They are part of the cold millions, that is, the millions upon millions of workers who struggle day to day simply to live, while a few wealthy owners live lives of almost unfathomable wealth and luxury.

While Walter is quick to inform us in his afterward that this is a book of fiction, he also makes it clear that some of his characters are based on real life people, one of whom, is “the great labor organizer, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn”, a key character in the book. Gurley is a mesmerizing and powerful speaker and organizer. Even the skeptics listen when she speaks.

Listen brothers and sisters, have we ever seen such trying times? She went through a list of outrages, fifteen-hour workdays and women dying at their sewing machine, men crushed in cave-ins while their families got nothing, copper kings and shipping magnates living like royalty while poor workers couldn’t even afford a flop bed, families in tents and hovels, workers given no rights and tossed aside when they were too broken or sick or old to work.

Clearly Walter shares the sense of outrage expressed by Flynn. He tells us that his own father was a union man. Gig, the older brother joins the IWW, although he discourages his brother Rye from getting involved. While Walter’s sympathies are clearly with the so-called Wobblies, he carries on a kind of debate regarding the efficacy of their non-violent methods. One character, Early Reston, clearly thinks non-violent methods will not work, and that rather than piecemeal reform the whole structure must be blown apart. At times in the book both Gig and Ryan become disenchanted with the methods of the IWW.

Rye felt demoralized. It didn’t matter what he did, what Gurley did, what Fred Moore did, what any of them did. Somewhere there was a roomful of wealthy old men where everything was decided. Beliefs and convictions, lives and livelihoods, right and wrong—these had no place in that room, the scurrying of ants at the feet of a few rich men.

It made me think that Early Reston was right, in his way ... that maybe it was the castle that needed to be blown up...

While it is clearly the struggles between owners and labor that is the focus of this novel, the side stories are also fascinating. The story of Ursula the Great, a performer who enters a cage with a full grown cougar, and then strips to near nudity as the crowd looks on partly horrified, partly titillated. There is also a sweet tale of budding love Rye feels for Gurley, although she is married and pregnant, and nothing comes of it.

I much appreciated the argument Walter has with himself throughout the book regarding the possibility of real change and the methods that can achieve it. At one point when Rye is called out as one of the Wobblies by a salesman:

Rye didn’t answer. But at that moment, he felt done with it all—done with the beatings, done with Taft, done with Lem Brand and Ursula, done pretending they could stand on soapboxes and draw justice out of the air. Early was right. Rye didn’t believe in anything but a job, a bed, some soup.

If you read this novel, be sure to leave some good reading energy for the acknowledgments and the short closing essay by Walter: “The Undercurrents of History”. Walter talks of his own growing up in Spokane, Washington, and of how “The World came to me in books.”

With The Cold Millions, I set out to write about the sort of working-class Spokane family in which I had grown up. My dad’s father, a rancher named Jess Walter, first arrived in Eastern Washington on a train he’d hopped as a vagrant field-worker; my mother’s dad, Ralph, was an itinerant laborer in the 1930s who later died on a construction site when a crane fell on him. My own father, Alfa Bruce Walter, was a lifetime steelworker and union leader who worked almost forty years in an aluminum rolling mill.

For those readers who want to go to original historical sources, Walter provides an extensive list of his own sources in addition to his personal experience. For all who have labored, and for all who feel keenly the injustices of the world, this is a must read, and it is also a wonderful story.

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Easy Rawlins is a tough and hard-boiled as any detective in the mystery genre. He has been asked by a Viet Nam vet to look into a possible murder in a southern California orange grove.

I would have turned him down out of hand if it weren’t for my understanding of the America I both love and loathe.

In America everything is about either race or money or some combination of the two., Who you are, what you have, what you look like, where your people came from, and what god looked over their breed--these were the most important questions. Added into that is the race of men and the race of women. The rich, famous, and powerful believe they have a race and the poor know for a fact that they do. The thing about it is that most people have more than one race. White people have Italian, Germans, Irish, Poles, English, Scots, Portuguese, Russian, old-world Spaniard, new-world rich, and many combination thereof. Black people have a color scheme from high yellow to moonless night, from octoroon to deepest Congo. And new-world Spanish have every nation from Mexico to Puerto Rico, from Columbia to Venezuela, each of which is a race of its own--not to mention the empires, from Aztec to Mayan to Olmec.

I’m a black man closer to Mississippi midnight than its yellow moon. Also I’m a westerner, a Californian formerly from the South–Louisiana and Texas to be exact. I’m a father, a reader, a private detective, and a veteran.

In his most recent novel, Blood Grove, WalterMosley lets Easy describe the America of the 1960s in which a black detective is a rarity. In lieu of payment from a client, Easy is given a yearlong lease of a pale yellow, 1968 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI which will become his at the end of that year unless he is paid sixty thousand dollars. Since he has a written contract showing he has the right to drive such a fine car, he decides to drive into Beverly Hills.

I had even made it a block or two past that when the flashing red lights appeared in the exta-wide rearview mirror. It was one of those wake-up calls that happen in the lives of black men and women in America when they mistakenly believe they have crossed over to freedom.

I pulled to the curb, put both hands on the steering wheel, and sat patiently awaiting the rendering of the calculation of my situation. That equation was a matter of simple addition: Rolls-Royce + black man without driver’s cap + any day of the century = stop and frisk, question and dominate—and, like the solution of pi, that process had the potential of going on forever.

The whole process took about half and hour. If I added up all the half hours the police, security forces, MPs, bureaucrats, bank tellers, and even gas station attendants had stolen from my life, I could make me a twelve-year-old boy versed in useless questions, meaningless insults, and spite as thick as black tar.

Although the story told in Blood Grove is a detailed and interesting one, what I find much more interesting is the social commentary Mosley provides along the way. Easy quickly garages the Rolls and borrows a plain blue car, knowing that the he will be unable to drive the Rolls to do his business without daily repeats of being pulled over and questioned or worse.

In this, his newest novel, Mosley adds an ingredient he had touched on in an earlier novel Little Green, his fasciation with counter-culture youth.

Driving west down the Strip was slow going, but I liked the streets filled with hippies, head shops and discos. There was what they were calling a cultural revolution going on among the youth of America. They wanted to drop out and end the war, make love for its own sake, and forget the prejudices of the past. These long-haired, dope-smoking, often unemployed wanderers gave me insight into what my country, MY COUNTRY might be..

There is the usual cast of characters in this novel: Easy’s adopted children, Jesus and Feather, the dangerous best friend Raymond, called Mouse, who is usually called in to do the dirty work for Easy, a couple of good cops who help Easy obtain information and get him out of scrapes with the law.

After many harrowing adventures, Easy helps the Viet Nam vet and solves the mystery, giving the reader his summation of Easy’s reflections on the state of the world.

Nineteen sixty-nine was an interesting year. There was strong anti-war action from the colleges and universities and all kinds of black political insurgence. The sleeping giant of white guilt was awakening and there seemed to be some hope for the future. If you were innocent enough, or ignorant enough, you might have believed that things were improving in such a way that all Americans could expect a fair shake.

But of my many flaws, neither innocence nor ignorance played a part.

It seems to me that it is easier to describe and call out racial injustice as a writer of fiction than as a social scientist or reporter. Walter Mosley describes things as he sees them, and he does so with the direct experience of what it is like to be black and poor in America. He also understands how racism and sexism are connected, and he blows the whistle loudly and clearly. If you, like many readers I know, have read Devil in a Blue Dress, but not others of Mosley’s many novels, I recommend them all to you as wonderfully told stories and stark pieces of social commentary

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I know next to nothing about circuses or aerialists, but reading Pam Jenoff’s fascinating novel, The Orphan’s Tale has me wanting to know lots more about both. This novel is about two women who, for very different reasons are on the run during WWII. Noa is a young woman whose parents have kicked her out of her home because of an unwed pregnancy.

The girls’ home where I lived after my parents found out I was expecting and kicked me out had been located far from anywhere in the name of discretion and they could have dropped me off in Mainz, or at least the nearest town. They simply opened the door, though, dismissing me on foot. I’d headed to the train station before realizing that I had nowhere to go.

When her very non-Aryan son is born with dark eyes and olive skin, she is not allowed even to hold him, before he is whisked away. Working as a cleaner in the railway station, she lives in a tiny storage room. One night she hears a sound coming from a boxcar. “The sound continues to grow, almost a keening now, like a wounded animal in the brush.” When she slides the door of the boxcar open, “There are babies, tiny bodies too many to count, lying on the hay-covered floor of the railcar, packed close and atop one another. Most do not move and I can’t tell whether they are dead or sleeping” But one baby has woven booties on and on impulse, she grabs the now crying baby and takes it to the little storage closet where she sleeps. Once she realizes there is no way she can keep the child and still do her job, she runs away with it.

The second woman, Astrid, is Jewish and comes from a circus family. She is married to German officer who turns her out to save his career. Although her family circus is no longer together and, for all she knows, has been arrested or killed by the Nazis, another circus shelters her and takes her on as an aerialist, a trapeze artist.

Noa stumbles onto the circus as she runs from the police, and she, too, is taken in by the kind circus owner, both she and her stolen baby given shelter. The two women with such completely different backgrounds start a relationship that begins in hostility but blossoms over time into a wonderful friendship.

I will not give away much more of the story here except to say that Astrid trains Noa to become an aerialist and both travel by rail with the circus into Nazi occupied France. As we learn from the author in her afterward remarks, the kernel of the novel begins from her reading two stories, one about a boxcar full of babies, “ripped from their families and headed for a concentration camp, too young to know their own names,” the Unknown Children. And the second about a German circus that sheltered Jews during the war.

The author obviously researched extensively about circuses in general and about The Circus Althoff in particular. The reader is treated to long descriptions of how the circus travels from town to town, set up from scratch at each location. We readers are also given hair-raising descriptions of how the aerialists perform protected only by their skill and very inadequate nets.

While it is obvious that author Jenoff mainly wants to tell the story of how Jews were sheltered by German circuses, she develops her characters carefully and fully so the story, itself, is fascinating quite aside from its political and moral messages.

I am told by reader friends that there is a large circus community in Portland, and I find myself driven to learn more about the history of circuses and aerialists. This is love story of the very best sort; it is heartwarming and frightening in equal measures. Although a fairly long novel, I predict that most readers will read it in a sitting or two. Once started it is hard to put down.

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There are three narrative voice in this novel: Lotte, a young girl with Downs syndrome; her older brother Rune, whom she calls Roo; and the ghostly voice of their mother that comes to them only in words written long before.To give a rapid sketch of the novel without giving away too much, it moves back and forth between Then, January 1989, and Now, 1999. And from West Germany to East Germany both before and after the fall of the wall.

Mama has tried to escape with her children many times, running from her abusive husband. But he is a powerful person in the West German police, and he uses his influence each time to drag her back home. Finally, in desperation, she flees to East Germany to find an old friend who runs a home for battered women, and she takes with her documents of her husband’s that she will use as bartering tools with the East German communist leaders to find safe passage for her and her children.

Rune and Lotte are incredibly close, and Roo vows to care for her always. He, being older, remembers much of the abuse that his mother (and eventually he as well) has suffered from Papa. Lotte, only five when they make their escape, loves her Papa, and believes him to be her protector.

When a strange package appears in the mail with a notebook and many pages of drawings, Papa, in a rage, tears it all into tiny pieces and tells Lotte that it is all lies from her whore mother. Lotte manages to gather together all the pieces and tries to make sense of these words from Mama whom she has been told is dead. When she reads of a group of women who are trying to reconstruct documents shredded in haste by the East German secret police as it became obvious that the wall would fall, she decides she has to find these puzzle women to help her reconstruct Mama’s words meant for a her and Rune.

Saying, as her brother and her mother have always told her that she is more than her Downs and that she is inde-pen-dent, she sets off on her own to go to Nuremberg and the Puzzle Women.

Turns out Lotte is incredibly good at putting together the fragments of her mother’s pages, and several of the women take her under their wing and help her with the task. Sweet, kind Lotte is loved by most who meet her and look at more than her medical condition.

Slowly, the mother’s voice emerges in wonderfully poetic strings of words meant for her loved children. The more or less stream of consciousness words of Mama are often hard for this reader to follow and make sense of, but there is a wonderful, poetic beauty to her words.

‘Mama, Roo says…’ Lotte started, hair across her face and her cheeks pink from sleep; disheveled, more a baby when awoke from sleep than any other time. She’s growing up so fast.

The innocence of her wrapped around me and swelled in the room like a sunrise: expansive, hopeful. Her pajama bottoms scrunched up on one side, hair in a tangle. Moo Bunny under her arm, the cold morning light at her back, but standing in front of me was the warmth of my child fresh from sleep.

A light within light.

Awoke from bliss, to the world … and into a world that has changed.

Rune is a wonderful artist who begins his artistic career as a graffiti-ist , but who has great talent in portraiture and other forms of art. Hoping in 1999 to escape from his abusive father and take Lotte with him, he applies to an art institute that would provide housing as well as a stipend. Alas, his father manipulates behind the scenes and makes sure that his application for admission is rejected, in spite of the fact that the teachers are very impressed with his portfolio.

While this is primarily a novel about spousal abuse, there is much about the two Germanys both before and after the fall of the wall. Mama and her children do find refuge in the East, and the novel is quite fair regarding the good things about East Germany. But Rune is drafted into the Pioneers, and made to inform on his neighbors and even on the remarkable woman who runs the shelter. The poor boy carries with him tons of guilt over not having been able to save his mother, his inability to keep Lotte safe, and finally for the consequences of his informing on others.

While this novel is difficult to read, both emotionally and because of its form, I think it is a wonderful novel, and recommend it to all serious readers. I don’t think it lends itself to piecemeal reading.

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The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War—an estimated 3 to 6 percent of the human race.This quote from the author’s note about her novel The Pull of the Stars set the scene for this gripping and beautiful book. Many of you will know about Emma Donoghue because of her novel, Room, which was made into a movie. I was very impressed with that novel, but honestly have found other of her novels even more impressive. Donoghue is a writer of immense talent and a huge heart.

There are three main characters in this novel: a young nurse, Julia Powers, who works in a severely understaffed hospital in Dublin, where for three days she finds herself in charge of a unit for pregnant women who have come down with the dreaded flu, and thus have to be isolated from the other pregnant women. Bridie Sweeny, who is an even younger volunteer helper, and who finds herself quite suddenly in the middle of a rather chaotic scene with no training, but a deep need to be of service. And, finally, a rarity for the times, a woman Dr. Kathleen Lynn who is rumored to be a Sinn Fein rebel on the run from the police.

Nurse Powers can serve in the ward because she has already had the flu and is therefore immune. The novel begins with her on her way to work, part way by bike and then by tram.

Children carrying suitcases were filing into the train station as we swung past, being sent down the country in hopes they’d be safe. But from what I could gather, the plague was general all over Ireland. The spectre had a dozen names: the great flu, khaki flu, blue flu, black flu, the grippe, or the grip…(That word always made me think of a heavy hand landing on one’s shoulder and gripping it hard). The malady, some called it euphemistically. Or the war sickness, on the assumption that it must somehow be a side effect of four years of slaughter, a poison brewed in the trenches or spread by all this hurly-burly and milling about across the globe.

The chapters of the book are related to the course of the disease, Red, Brown, Blue, Black.

Well, I said, it starts with a light red you might mistake for a healthy flush. If the patient gets worse, her cheeks go rather mahogany. (I thought of the turning of the leaves in autumn.) In a more severe case, the brown might be followed by lavender in the lips. Cheeks and ears and even fingertips can become quite blue as the patient’s starved of air….

Bridie Sweeny asked, Is blue as far as it goes?

I shook my head. I’ve seen it darken to violet, purple, until they’re quite black in the face.

Most of the book is taken up with the particular stories of the three or four pregnant women who are isolated together in the small makeshift ward.

While the nurses deal immediately with the pain and suffering of the patients, they have very little power, unable to administer pain medications without the direct order of a physician, and not even allowed to use the medical equipment at hand. Dr. Lyon is a rare exception in that she tells Nurse Powers that she can use her own judgment in administering aspirin and even opiates.

Although this is not a political novel, the asides on the Sinn Feiners are perceptive and clearly show Donoghue’s sympathies. Dr. Kathleen Lynn’s character is based on a real life doctor, described by one of the the cynical orderlies as “a vicar’s daughter from Mayo gone astray—a socialist, suffragette, anarchist firebrand.” In spite of the severe shortage of doctors in the hospital, during one of the times of greatest need and chaos, she is summarily arrested and taken in chains from the hospital.

I learned a lot about maternity from this superbly crafted work and a lot about the sexism in the medical profession which, while somewhat improved these days, is still very much with us..

Nurse Powers notes the ridiculous methods of prevention and alleged cures by the ignorant, not so unlike certain idiot’s responses to today’s covid. One young patient finds it hard to believe she has contracted the flu since she has been so careful. “Gargling with cider vinegar and drinking it to.”

Some placed their trust in treacle to ward off the flu, others in rhubarb, as if there had to be one household substance that could save us all. I’d even met fools who credited their safety to the wearing of red.

Next we’ll be hearing of drinking bleach as a cure.

The compassion and wisdom of Emma Donoghue shines forth in this novel, and while much of it is sad, there are also many moments of joy and bravery. One of the pregnant women had been living in a Catholic home for unwed mothers, and Bridie also has been raised in a Catholic orphanage. Nurse Powers learns that a woman who is cared for in one of these homes is expected to stay and work for a year after the birth of her child as payback for being allowed to be in the home during her pregnancy.

I puzzled it through. So for the crime of falling pregnant, Honor White was lodging in a charitable institution where tending her baby and those of other women was the punishment; she owed the nuns a full year of her life to repay what they were spending for imprisoning her for that year. It had a bizarre, circular logic.

And at the end of that year, the women were not allowed to take their babies with them when they left.

Emma Donoghue is a giant among writers. I have read three other of her novels since reading The Pull of the Stars; each is utterly different from the other except for the power of her prose and the acuity of her mind.

This is a novel you really need to read.

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Recently, it was suggested to me that I buy two novels as companion pieces; Relative Fortunes, and Passing Fancies, both written by Marlow Benn. They are indeed companion novels, and so I am recommending them to you as a pair. While in one sense, they are light reading, in fact there is much substance to each of the novels. They take place in 1920s Manhattan. You should read Relative Fortunes first, and I suggest that you then move directly to Passing Fancies. The heroine is an elegant and fiercely intelligent character by the name of Julia Kydd. She has returned from Europe to Manhattan in order to collect her inheritance which has been held in trust and meted out in increments by her much older half-brother Phillip. She is to gain control of the inheritance when she turns twenty-five, and there is much made in the novel about the ridiculous laws that make it difficult for women to control their own money without the need of a male (husband, father, relative) to advise and control.

For some reason (and Julia really does not understand what it is), Phillip has decided to contest the will that his father made leaving a small fortune for Julia, who was born to his second wife. Phillip does not need the money, since he already has a much more considerable fortune, and yet he makes it clear he intends to challenge the interpretation of the will, and to deny Julia her portion.

Since she has no residence in New York, she is invited to stay at Phillip’s brownstone, and the repartee between the siblings is witty, intelligent and captivating. The two discuss events of the day, the foibles of so-called high society, and women’s suffrage. Julia insists she is not political at all and she wants only to launch her own private press with the emphasis on the beauty of the books more than the content.

While Julia claims not to be political, when it comes to the treatment of women, she cannot and will not be quiet. When a famous suffragist, Naomi Rankin dies suddenly, and it is deemed a suicide, Julia is more than skeptical, and suggests to Phillip that she may have been murdered. This thread in the novel makes it read like a mystery, and the repartee between siblings reminds me a lot of Dashiel Hammet’s delightful Thin Man.

The reader comes to discover that Phillip is, in fact, very sympathetic to the suffrage movement and to the emancipation of women. He is also (if somewhat secretly) really enchanted by his young half-sibling. He proposes to her that if she can prove that Naomi’s death was in fact a murder, he will drop his challenge of his father’s will.

Clearly, author Benn is more interested in the history of the period than in simply writing a good mystery. The combination of mystery, comedy, and serious social political content make this a delightful read.

Without revealing the twists and turns of the mystery in the first volume, let me turn to the second, Passing Fancies. The political content of this second novel is obviously the controlling theme. Julia’s desires to launch her publishing company lead her into what is now called the Harlem Renaissance, described on the novel’s jacket as “a literary movement…where notions of race, sexuality, and power are slippery, and identities can be deceptively fluid.’

This second novel, published in 2020, is remarkably relevant to current issues. Julia becomes acquainted with a singer, Eva Pruit, who has written a book that is rumored to reveal ”lurid details about the Harlem nightlife.” A nightclub owner is furious about the book, because he thinks his character is the inspiration for it. When he is murdered and the manuscript and Pruit are nowhere to be found, Julia Kydd steps in to solve the mystery.During a police raid on the nightclub, Eva is treated very badly, and would have been treated worse if Julia and her brother Phillip had not been present. Julia’s friend Christophine is informed of the raid:

Christophine was angry but not shocked to hear of Eva’s treatment. The police she knew were not white-lady police.

It was a horrid term, crawling with implications. It suggested there was no such thing as what Julia had always referred to as simply “the police” (Didn’t everyone? Or rather, didn’t every white person of her acquaintance?). The definition she considered standard and universal—a helpful force for public safety and well-being—was apparently only one version of a widely varying realty. Even more unsettling to consider: Eva’s experience might be the more common, and Julia’s the more rare. The notion upended something foundational.

Eva is an African-American woman who has passed for white, but once she is outed, she is treated as simply another Black troublemaker.

I hope I have not given away much of the intricate plots of either of these novels, and yet said enough to encourage readers. The greater distance I got from my own reading, and the more I heard from reader friends I passed them on to, the more I felt it important to recommend them to Old Mole readers.

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I want to talk to you today about a truly extraordinary debut novel by a Nigerian author. The title of the book is, The Girl With the Louding Voice and the name of this incredible new voice in literature is Abi Dare. The book won the Bath Novel Award for unpublished manuscripts in 2018, and fortunately for us readers, it was published in 2020.It is the story of a fourteen year old Nigerian girl, Adunni. When her mother dies young, her penniless father takes her out of school and sells her as a third wife to an old man. It had been her mother’s dream that Adunni would stay in school and get an education. As her mother told her before she died:

“In this a village, if you go to school, no one will be forcing you to marry any man. But if you didn’t go to school, they will marry you to any man once you are reaching fifteen years old. Your schooling is your voice child. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.”

That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become a teacher because I don’t want to be having any kind of voice…

I want a louding voice.

Certainly this poetic and lyrical novel is in a louding voice. It takes a bit of getting used to the verb tenses and expressions used, but within not many pages, what seemed awkward and difficult to follow becomes a marvelous look at the world through the eyes of a girl who wants above all to get an education.

…he [her father] was telling me three years ago, that I must stop my educations. That time, I was the most old of all in my class and all the childrens was always calling me “Aunty.” I tell you true, the day I stop school and the day my mama was dead is the worst day of my life.

When her first old husband dies, she is sold again to a younger man and has to move to her husband’s family house where she is lorded over by a tyrannical mother-in-law. She escapes that house and husband, and is secretly sold as a domestic servant to a wealthy household in Lagos. The woman of the house sells fabrics to other wealthy women. Adunni addresses her as Big Madam. Subjected to the frequent rages of Big Madam, and always on guard against the lecherous advances of the shiftless man of the house, fortunately one of the servants, Abu, takes pity on the girl and manages to slip her food and aids her in other ways as well.

Her dreams of an education seem doomed until she meets a progressive and enlightened Nigerian woman at one of Big Madam’s parties. Ms. Tia slips books to Adunni and helps her with her English. Adunni is sure that if she can learn to speak ‘good’ English, she will somehow, someday be able to pursue her dreams of an education. The author quite subtley makes fun of the very notion of proper or good English, although it takes Adunni years to discover just how really good her English is.

Ms. Tia is from abroad, and while Adunni has little idea of just what that is, she senses that is the direction she needs to follow.

I didn’t too sure I understand what Ms. Tia is talking about, or why she is calling her Abroad peoples white and black when colors are for crayons and pencils and things. I know that not everybody is having the same color of skin in Nigeria, even me and Kayus and Born-boy didn’t have same skin color, but nobody is calling anybody black or white, everybody is just calling us by our names: Adunni, Kayus, Born-boy. That’s all.

This wonderful book is peppered with what to me are amazing facts about Nigeria and its place in the world. In a short prologue to the novel, Dare tells her readers:

Nigeria is a country located in West Africa. With a population of just under 180 million people, it is the seventh most populous country in the world, which means that one in seven Africans is a Nigerian. As the sixth largest crude oil exporter in the world, and with a GDP of $568.5 billion, Nigeria is the richest country in Africa. Sadly, over 100 million Nigerians live in poverty, surviving on less than $1 a day.

As I was looking over the book again yesternight (one of Adunni’s many so logical uses of the language), I was swept away again by the passion of this louding voice, and hoping I could to justice to the novel in reviewing it.

Abi Dare succeeded in getting an education; she holds degrees in law, project management and creative writing and lives in the UK.

Adunni is a character I will not forget. Her louding voice sings to me, whispers in my ear, and should give hope to many young girls all over the world who want to learn and to choose their own futures.

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I want to talk to you today about a 2020 novel by Brit Bennett entitled, The Vanishing Half. It is the story of twin girls who run away from a small town when they are sixteen, and only one of them returns fourteen years later; the vanishing half, Stella, is missed and searched for by Desiree, the twin who returned.The small town from which they run is named Mallard.

It was a strange town.

Mallard, named after the ring-necked ducks living in the rice fields and marshes. A town that like any other, was more idea than place. The idea arrived to Alphonse Decuir in 1848, as he stood in the sugarcane fields he’s inherited from the father who’d once owned him. The father now dead, the now-freed son wished to build something on those acres of land that would last for centuries to come. A town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. His mother, rest her soul, had hated his lightness; when he was a boy, she’d shoved him under the sun, begging him to darken. Maybe that’s what made him dream of the town. Lightness, like anything inherited at great cost, was a lonely gift. He’d married a mulatto even lighter than Himself. She was pregnant then with their first child, and he imagined his children’s children’s children, lighter still, like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream. A more perfect Negro,. Each generation lighter than the one before.

Like Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Bennett takes on questions of race, gender and identity.

It is Desiree who is the restless one and feels compelled to escape the small town, but since the twins are inseparable, Stella agrees to leave with her, and it is Stella who does not return. Their mother and other town-folk are sure they will return soon. “They’d run out of money and gall and come sniffling back to their mother’s porch. But they never retuned again. Instead, after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting evenly as their shared egg. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.”

Although Stella is bright and has many skills, when she applies for office jobs and honestly identifies herself as Negro, she is turned away. But when she allows employers to see her as white, she is hired. “At work, Stella became Miss Vignes, or, as Desiree called her, White Stella.”

Bennett spends a lot of time describing the many shades of color of negroes, from clabber white to blue black. Ironically, Stella doesn’t really decide to pass for white, she simply lets others see her as they choose.

But what had changed about her? Nothing, really. She hadn’t adopted a disguise or even a new name. She’s walked in a colored girl and left a white one. She had become white only because everyone thought she was.

But then Stella begins to date a man from her office, and eventually they marry. Of course she cannot let her husband find out; now she must disappear completely into her new white life. She has a daughter, and it is the daughter who eventually discovers Stella’s secret and despises her for it.

Because of a photograph of the twin sisters that Stella’s daughter discovers, Stella is finally forced to acknowledge her true history. In order to find her estranged daughter, Kennedy, she returns to her hometown and to Desiree. “Like leaving, the hardest part of retuning was deciding to.”

I have focused primarily on questions of color and race, but this is also the story of a family, from the 1950s to the 1990 and all the political turmoil of those times, the assassinations of the Kennedys and of Martin Luther King. Author Bennett mainly simply observes and describes, but the descriptions make clear where her allegiances are.

I think this is a wonderful, important and insightful novel. It sent me scurrying back to Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I hope I have not given away too much of the plot, since this is partly a kind of mystery story along with its social commentary.

I intend to go back to Bennett’ earlier novel, The Mothers. She writes with great heart and wisdom.

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I started whispering in her ear, but so quiet I wasn’t sure she could even hear me. It was more like making the words with my lips against her ear, but then just this tiny breath of air that was the sound.I said, “Brave girl, quiet girl.”She said it back to me, just as quiet, which really surprised me. She stopped her run-up to that big cry and whispered back to me, “Brave girl, kiet girl,” right in my ear. She didn’t really get the kw sound in quiet—I think she was too young to have gotten the hang of that sound--but anyway I knew what she meant so what difference did it make?Catherine Ryan Hyde’s 2020 novel, Brave Girl, Quiet Girl, begins with a violent car-jacking. Brooke, a divorced single mom is driving her mother’s expensive Mercedes with her two year old daughter, Etta, strapped into her car-seat in the back, but she is dragged from the car by the thief, and watches helplessly as the car drives off with her daughter still strapped in.This occurs in the first few pages of this frightening and yet lovely book about Brooke, Etta, and Molly, a sixteen-year-old homeless girl. Molly is with her also homeless male friend late at night when she spots Etta, still strapped in her car-seat on the sidewalk. With no phone, no money, and no idea how Etta got there, Molly is faced with the daunting challenge of returning the little girl to her family.I have sometimes put aside one of Hyde’s many novels because it seems just too sentimental, too sweet, too full of pathos. And this novel is certainly high on the pathos scale, and yet it captured me early on, gripped me, and I just could not stop reading it until I was finished.Molly is homeless and on the streets because she has been tossed out of her home in St. George Utah and told not to return unless, and until, she has shed the devil that she has brought into her family home. Molly, under pressure from her girlfriend, had decided to come out to her mother, and that is what her mother labels bringing the devil into the home.I won’t divulge much of the story here, but I will tell you that the reader is kept on tenterhooks during the early phases as Molly tries to care for little Etta and to hide her away from other street youths who intend to grab her from Molly and hold her for ransom. Molly had helped raise her two younger sisters, and so is a competent and loving caretaker, but with no funds for food or diapers for the toddler. After several very frightening events, Molly is finally able to race after a police car with Etta holding on for dear life, and thus begins the reuniting of Etta with her mother Brooke. Initially, Brooke is angry with the young girl, not understanding why she did not alert the police earlier or find a way to call Etta’s mother in spite of the fact that there is an amber alert out for her. The rest of the novel is devoted to the interactions of mother and daughter and the intervention of a sympathetic female police officer who firmly but gently leads Brooke into a better understanding of Molly’s heroic actions in saving Etta. Although Brooke, herself, has a very troubled relationship with her own mother, she assumes that Molly must have done something horrible or unlawful to have provoked her mother in to forcing her from the home. She decides to drive from California to St. George to confront Molly’s mother, and to, hopefully, get Molly back into her family home. When Brooke finally confronts Molly’s mother and learns of her super-fundamentalist religious beliefs that treat homosexuality as a dreadful sin and a chosen life-style that can be discarded like a filthy cloak, she begins to reassess Molly and to try to care for her in something like the loving ways Molly has cared for Etta. While the plot is what drives this novel, it turns out to reveal a deep understanding of street-kids, and the many different reasons that people find themselves homeless and living on the streets. I find myself very impressed by both Hyde’s excellent story-telling and her desire to talk about social issues and the meaning of love.Baby Etta loves Molly from the start, and calls out Molly, Molly, Molly whenever she sees her. While it takes much longer for Brooke to begin to see the sterling qualities of Molly, the relationship that develops between the two women is heartening I suppose there will be some readers who find this book to be corny and much too sentimental, I thought it to be a beautiful story about love, and redemption.

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It is always such a pleasure to stumble onto a writer previously unknown who absolutely commands attention. Tess Hadley is such a writer. Today I want to talk about her 2019 novel Late in the Day. I am so struck with her writing and her wisdom that I find trying to review her work daunting, and I’m not at all sure I’m up to the task. Like the great author, Elizabeth Bowen, whom Hadley deeply admires, Hadley writes primarily, even exclusively, about domestic scenes. While her characters may be more brilliant and creative than most people, what she tries to describe, carefully, minutely, are the everyday concerns of people living intimately together. Christine and Lydia have been devoted friends since their early twenties, and their two husbands, Alexander and Zachery, are nearly as close. Zach and Lydia own a small but well known art gallery. Christine is an artist and her husband Alex is a teacher and art dealer. The foursome are as close as any four friends could be, and are drawn even closer in that each has a daughter of roughly the same age who grow up together in the bosom of that extended family.Suddenly and unexpectedly, when all four are in their fifties, Zach dies of a heart attack, and in the aftermath of his death, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine and the two daughters Grace and Isobel stay in Isobel’s flat. All agree that Zach is the most irreplaceable, the glue binding them together. At first, it seems that the loss of Zach will bring the other three closer together, and in many senses it does. But eventually, due to entanglements from their pasts as well as the different ways they cope with the loss, the relationships begin to fray.The story is far too complex to simply gloss, and it is not really the story or its outcome that matter most to Hadley; it is the almost minute by minute transformations that she expertly reveals. I first started reading this book in 2019, but gave up on it after about fifty pages; it just seemed too complex, and I’m sure I moved on to something lighter and less demanding. This is not a novel that can or should be read in small snippets of weeks or months; like another book of hers (The Past), it is best read in a sustained manner, not quickly, but with rather complete attention. In broad terms, suffice it to say that when Christine and Lydia first met Alex (who was himself already married), it was Lydia who became obsessed with him, who felt she must find a way into his life.

But Christine felt how Alex didn’t respond to this charm [of Lydia’s] as he was supposed to. Lydia’s audacious frankness, her wide-eyed delivery, complacent like a purring cat, which had been so confounding to other men, didn’t impress him. In Alex’s presence , so perfected and adult, Lydia’s cleverness seemed flawed and home-made, embarrassing like a precocious child’s.

And so it is Christine who ends up marrying Alex, though as the story unwinds, it becomes obvious that the flame in Lydia for Alex lies smoldering through the years to come. There is much discussion among the friends and their little community of intellectuals and artists about the nature of art, of what constitutes great art, and with the question of whether women can be serious artists.

Lydia put in her own remarks among the men, and they all deferred to her, but Christine saw that they didn’t quite take what she said seriously—not because they thought it was stupid exactly, but because her appearance blocked their attention, like a dazzle of sunlight in a reflection off glass. They were exaggeratedly solicitous and encouraging when the girls spoke, as they were with one another. There was a danger, Christine thought, that you might end up performing for them, like a curiosity—and Lydia was inclined to show off if she had an audience.

Eventually, the situation devolves into a love triangle, or perhaps I should say a love quadrangle. Angers and resentments boil up over many things. Zach comes into a great deal of money (which allows him to buy the art gallery and to begin to buy and trade prestigious artworks). Rather than being envious of Zach and Lydia’s wealth, it is Zach’s attempts to help the other couple financially that begins to cause rifts in their relationship.Hadley is not one to tie things up neatly in the end; like real life, things are left dangling and incomplete. “Alex had said once that she (Christine) ought to give up her hope of wholeness, of a meaning, because it was naïve.”

Letting herself into the flat she was glad to be alone. Solitude and silence had begun to be sensuous pleasures for her. It would have been awful in that moment to give false explanations to anyone, perform the sociability she did not feel. Instead she slipped off her shoes before she walked around the rooms, as if she didn’t want to intrude even her own presence noisily.

Besides her four novels, Hadley has also published several volumes of short fiction. I intend to read all of her work. She is a rare find and a superb writer.

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I admit I was pierced with loneliness. There is something about a lighted room when you are standing outside it in the cold night.

Good morning readers. Although I was already aware of what a fine writer Molly Gloss is from having read her novel Jump-Off Creek, I must admit I was stunned by the depth of her wisdom in her 2000 novel Wild Life. Writing as Charlotte Bridger Drummond, or simply C.B.D., Gloss creates a character who is tough, independent, and a fully fledged feminist. Set in the early 1900s in a small logging town on the borders of Oregon and Washington, Charlotte is a widowed mother of five boys who supports her family by writing women’s adventure novels. Charlotte is fiercely independent; she wears men’s clothes, smokes cigars or a pipe in public, eschews domestic tasks as far as possible, and creates for herself a private writing space, a room of her own.

Charlotte is irreverent and often very humorous in her descriptions of men and of their laughably absurd views of the weakness of women. The men in the logging camps are fond of telling tall tales about Wild Men of the Woods, and while Charlotte, herself, is not opposed to to wild-west tales, she is scornful of the way men tell their stories as attempts to scare women and children.

The novel is as much about writing as it is about the adventure Charlotte goes through when she joins a search party looking for a young girl, Harriet, who has been lost in the woods and who loggers claimed was carried off by a huge, hairy ape-like animal. As the story begins to unfold, it transpires that Charlotte, herself, becomes separated from the rest of the search party.

Quoting Samuel Butler as she begins to describe her life lost in the wild, Molly Gloss begins to prepare her readers to suspend disbelief and allow her to spin her story.

When anything in [my books] is strange and outre, it is probably drawn straight from nature as close as I could draw it; when it is plausible, there is probably no particular and especial foundation for it.

Even the domestic help Charlotte has hired to free her up from many domestic tasks is outwardly disdainful of Charlotte’s lack of femininity,. and scolds her for spending so much time away from her children and locked in her writing shed.

She was half inclined to cry at being unable to devote herself entirely to her work, though she considered the work only a means to an end, which was the support of her family. In later years she would discover that the work was everything to her—everything—but now she tossed and tossed, trying to explain and defend something that shifted and was elusive; and at such times she has secretly—horrifyingly—wished for a calamity that would free her of the weight, the otherwise inescapable burden of her maternity.

If I had been born a man, I would have created for myself a world full of work and egoism and imagined that my whole life belonged to me. But since I was born a woman, I suffered the usual girlish desires and aspirations; and I believed that my life should eventually be joined to a husband.

Both a mother and a wife by the age of twenty, and then within ten years a widowed wife and mother of five boys. All of this novel is peppered with stories and quotes from women about what they are expected to write about.

I have said nothing yet about Charlotte’s life while lost in the wild, and I don’t intend to reveal much of that story to you. Suffice it to say that Charlotte , starving and near dead is taken in by a family of human-like creatures who allow her to hunt and gather with them and who cause her to question her previous beliefs about the relations between humans and creatures of the woods. If you are a reader wholly opposed to fantastical literature, then this may not be the book for you, but I would also remind you of the splendid books of Ursula K. Le Guin, and invite you to suspend for a time your skepticism.

Gloss may well be describing herself, or Le Guin, or countless other women writers as she speaks in the voice of C.B.D.:

As a thoroughgoing Feminist and a woman who has herself thrown over the traces of domestication as much as can be done without risking arrest, I do my best to swim against the tide. For heroine of a scientific romance, I will always choose the scientifically inclined daughter or sister of a world-renowned anthropologist; and for the western romance, look for a girl who can ride and shoot, a ranch girl born and raised in the West…

Although I, myself, have in the past rejected most fantasy writing, in the past couple of decades I have been more open to fantasy fiction as a vehicle for environmental issues, for women’s fiction, and simply for the delight of the stories.

This is a book I could well have reviewed simply by stringing together quotes from the novel. It is a wonderfully humorous novel as it pokes fun at men and holds up to the light expectations of women not only of the West or of days gone by, but of us-here-now.

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Over the years, certain stories in the history of a family take hold. They’re passed from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely from the implausible.

Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.

Christina Baker Kline was fascinated with Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World from the time she was a little girl, and the fascination remained as she grew into the wonderful writer she is today. I share that fascination as I’m sure many of you do. There is something austere and haunting about the painting. As Kline says in her Author’s Notes: “Throughout my childhood I made up stories about this slight girl in a pale pink dress with her back to the viewer, reaching toward a weathered gray house on a bluff in the distance.”

In her fictionalized account of Christina, Kline tells the story of a girl who is crippled from childhood on—victim of a degenerative disease that renders her more and more unable to move much or to care for herself. While Kline is adamant that her novel is fiction, nevertheless it is obvious that she has researched both Wyeth and Christina extensively giving the book the feel of autobiography. The character Kline creates is austere, unsentimental, and fiercely private.

Alvaro, Al, is Christina’s brother and eventually her caretaker; he gives up his own dreams and even his hopes for a wife and family of his own to care for his sister. As a very young girl, she is cared for by her father, but he is embarrassed by her ‘infirmity’ and so keeps her out of school and pretty much sheltered from the world.

I want more than anything for Papa to be proud of me, but he has little reason. For one thing, I am a girl. Even worse—I know this already, though no one’s ever actually said it to me—I am not beautiful.On top of that, there’s my infirmity. When we’re around other people, Papa is tense and irritable, afraid that I’ll stumble, knock into someone, embarrass him. My lack of grace annoys him. He is always muttering about a cure.His shame makes me defiant. I don’t care that I make him uncomfortable. Mother says it would be better if I weren’t so willful and proud. But my pride is all I have.

Christina knows that her father was drawn to her mother because of her mother’s great beauty, and thus always feels judged as both awkward and ugly.

Through a friend whom Christina mentored as a young girl, and who comes back into her life as a young woman, she is introduced to the then young and unknown painter Andrew Wyeth, who lives in the shadow of his already famous father who is well known for his illustrations. Young Andrew begins to hang around the house, sketching the house and the farmland around it. He sketches Al doing his chores. He is allowed to convert an unused bedroom into a studio and becomes a kind of fixture. “He doesn’t see us as a project that needs fixing. He doesn’t perch on a chair, or linger in a doorway, with the air of someone who wants to leave, who’s already halfway out the door. He just settles in and observes…He understands why I’m content to spend my days sitting in the chair in the kitchen, feet up on the blue-painted stool, looking out at the sea…There’s more grandeur in the bleached bones of a storm-rubbed house, he declares, than in drab tidiness.

Andrew also suffered from an ailment that caused him to walk with an awkward gait, and although she refuses his requests to paint her, she is comfortable in his presence and comes to see him as a friend to both her and Al.

There is a lovely slow pace to this novel, and I found myself often looking at the print of the famous painting in the back of the book. What is it about the painting that makes it so magnetic and yet so sad?

Although Andy hangs around the brother and sister for thirty years, Christina only allows him to paint her after many years of refusal.

Again from the Author’s Notes:

For the next thirty years, Christina was Andrew Wyeth’s muse and his inspiration. In each other, I believe, they came to recognize their own contradictions. Both embraced austerity but craved beauty; both were curious about other people and yet pathologically private. They were perversely independent and yet reliant on others to take care of their basic needs: Wyeth on his wife Betsy and Christina on Alvaro.

There is little action in this novel, and it takes some getting into, but you readers will eventually be as drawn to to the novel as to the famous painting, and for much the same reason.

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I want to talk to you today about a book that is at once extremely sad and incredibly lovely. The book is The Butterfly Girl, by Rene Denfeld. Ms. Denfeld is an author, journalist and licensed public defense investigator. I have previously reviewed her other two novels, The Enchanted, about death-row inmates, and The Child Finder. I won’t tell you too much about the story-line since it is a kind of mystery, and I would not want to be a spoiler.

There are two primary narrators in this novel: Naomi, an investigator who specializes in finding lost children, and Celia, a twelve year old girl who lives in a sort of community of street children. Naomi has decided she will not take another case until she finds her younger sister with whom she was abducted years before. Naomi escaped, but her sister did not. She has no picture of her sister and no name, but she is determined to find her. Naomi remembers very little of her own escape, but one lead has led her to Portland, Oregon, and it is there that she continues her search.

Celia is on the run from an abusive stepfather and a mother who is an addict. While she occasionally checks in with her mother, she is afraid to give away her location.

Celia disappeared inside herself. She was used to doing that. She could make herself vanish even as she stood there, just another street urchin with no future in sight.

Celia who believed in nothing but herself and the butterflies, knew that the worst fears of the streets were always real. You can find that out the hard way, or you can be watchful.

Naomi and her husband Jerome are staying with one of Naomi’s old friends while Naomi continues her search. She wakens from a dream of still being in captivity, and hearing the voice of her sister “back there. In that place.”

She breathed out in relief that the dream was over but still felt the anxious echo of the call.

I’m getting closer, she thought. This is why she was here in the city with Jerome. After almost a year of searching for her long-lost sister, their investigation had brought them here.

Celia and her street friends Rich and Stoner sleep under an overpass at night, and offer each other friendship and what protection they can provide.

When Celia first encounters Naomi on the streets where Naomi is asking questions of street people in hopes of coming up with some leads, Celia does not trust this well dressed and seemingly assured woman, but eventually as the story unwinds she begins to trust her, and Naomi, for her part, cannot ignore this streetwise child even though she is on her own search.

Denfeld is an incredible writer, not simply sympathetic to the street people, her connection is much deeper. She could be describing herself as she describes Naomi during a period in her investigations.

Naomi was standing outside the Aspire shelter. The smeary brick, the narrow streets, the shapes huddled in the doorways—all felt familiar to her now. She has crossed the threshold. The world of the missing had become her own world. She knew the regulars, the bruised-cherry alcoholics, the families on nodding acquaintance, the street kids like Celia.

There is no condescension in Denfeld’s dealings with the homeless, no us/them dichotomy. No wonder she can create such believable characters, can give the reader views from the inside.

As in her novel The Child Finder, Denfeld is intrigued by and describes meticulously how children who are held captive and cannot escape may create a kind of escape with their minds. Celia escapes via her world of beautiful butterflies, her guides and guardians on the streets.

If you take a burrowing animal and deny it anything but a glass cage, it will break its own claws in the madness to escape. Naomi, who once had no escape, had created one with her mind.

Margaret Atwood, who is herself an amazing and deeply insightful author says of this book, “A heartbreaking, finger-gnawing, and yet ultimately hopeful novel…”

I have no intention of telling you in what ways the novel is hopeful or of revealing much more of the plot, but I am certain you will find this a socially significant and rewarding read. In her acknowledgements Denfeld credits libraries for her books and for her salvation. Like many of us she finds books to be a window into a better world.

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In a wonderfully perceptive and often humorous debut novel, Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid takes on issues of race and class in a delightfully light-handed way. It is the story of two women, a white woman, Alix Chamberlain who writes a kind of inspirational blog urging women to take power in the workplace, and a twenty-five year old black woman, Emira, who babysits Alix’s wonderfully precocious three year old daughter, Briar, so that Alix can work from home. Emira and her three closest friends, Zara, Josefa, and Shaunie are all recent college graduates; they often go our drinking and dancing together, and the novel opens with the four women at a birthday party for Shaunie. Due to an egging at the Chamberlain house which includes a rock being thrown through a doorway window, Alix calls Emira begging her to come take Briar away from the home for an hour or so since the police have been called, and Alix and her husband Peter do not want young Briar to be exposed to the hubbub of flashing lights and police in the home.

Emira agrees, though explaining that she is dressed for the party and does not look much like a baby-sitter. No problem, insists Alix and promises to send a cab and to pay her double for the inconvenience. Since this opening scene is pivotal to the rest of the novel, I will recount a bit more without giving away much of the storyline. Emira takes Briar to a very upscale little convenience story nearby to keep her entertained during the police visit. Zara has accompanied Briar and Emira to the store and they end up dancing down one of the aisles with Briar leading the way. An overzealous security guard decides that, since Emira is obviously not the mother of the child, he needs to intervene. A very tall young white man begins to use his phone to capture video of the encounter and to offer up advice to Emira.

“Hey hey hey.” The man behind the cell phone tried to get Emira’s attention. ”Even if they ask, you don’t have to show your ID. It’s Pennsylvania state law."

Emira said, ”I know my rights dude.”

"Sir?” The security guard stood and turned. ”You do not have the right to interfere with a crime.”

“Holdup holdup, a crime…what crime is being committed right now? I’m working,I’m making money right now, and I bet I’m making more than you."

“Okay ma’am?” The security guard widened his stance to match hers. ‘You are being held and questioned because the safety of a child is at risk.'

Emira manages to call the Chamberlain’s home, and within minutes Peter shows up; the security guard completely changes his demeanor and the situation de-escalates. The young man who tried to intervene, Kelley, turns out to be a central character in the rest of the novel.
Much of the early parts of the novel are taken up with conversations between Emira and her best friends, and Alix and her best friends. All of the friends are various shades of color, and the repartee between the women is often very funny and enlightening about working women in New York and Philadelphia, and the struggles with childcare.

Although resistant at first, Emira begins to date Kelley. They trade stories about their lives and soon realize how compatible they are. The third star of this book is Briar, or simply B, and her many interactions with Emira (who she calls Mira).

Alix, who loves the relationship between her daughter and Emira, begins to try to make Emira a part of the family, and seems to genuinely love her. Alix’s parents had come into a lot of money at some point in Alix’s childhood, and used it to buy extravagant homes and cars. As it happens, Alix and Kelley had a tumultuous relationship in high school, and that relationship causes near disastrous consequences for Emira and Kelley as well as Alix.

Emira learns that not only does Kelley have a lot of black friends, but that he seems to date only light skinned black women. The many conversations between the women reveal so much about race and class issues, but author Reid is, I think, extremely skillful in stepping back as narrator and allowing the characters themselves to bring out the issues. Even when the novel turns very serious in the end, Reid refuses to enter in as omniscient narrator or even to provide commentary on the actions that take place.

Given that this is Black History month, I had initially intended to talk about Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara, all of whom I have reviewed in the past years. But there is something so fresh and crisp about Reid’s writing and such a here-and-now look at questions of race and class that I felt I must review her novel. Hard to believe it is a debut novel, but then she has been writing for a long time and has published in many magazines.

The combination of humor and wisdom in this book make it one that I hope will be read widely.

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This long and beautifully constructed novel bounces back and forth between Vienna in the late 30s and early 40s, Melbourne 2016, and Shanghai (also in the late 30s and 40s).It is the story of a friendship between a beautiful Shanghai girl, Li, and a Jewish refugee, Romy. They meet in Shanghai in 1939. The two become instant best friends who explore densely populated Shanghai “Paris of the East”. While author Manning insists that it is a work of fiction, it is nevertheless a well researched historical novel. As she explains in the author’s notes, “Shanghai had opened its doors to more than twenty thousand refugees fleeing Europe, at a time when no other country would.”The story begins in Vienna as Romy, 12, is literally dragged along by her parents through a scene of chaos , smoke and flying glass everywhere as the Jewish ghetto is raised in what would come to be known as Kristallnacht. Both of Romy’s brothers are dragged off by Nazi soldiers only one of whom lives long enough to be sent to a concentration camp.Without telling too much of this novel, suffice it to say that Romy and her father eventually escape Vienna by fleeing first to Italy which was not yet conjoined with Germany, and then by boat to Shanghai. Romy’s father is a doctor and soon finds employment in the Jewish hospital in Shanghai and Romy begins her exciting relationship with Li. The third strand of the story takes the reader to Melbourne in 2016. Alexandra has recently left London and a relationship she had thought would culminate in marriage and rushes to Melbourne to be with her dying grandpa, Wilhelm and her grandmother Romy. The author takes the readers through the four sections (or con cessions) of Shanghai: the International Concession, the ghetto where Jews are permitted to live and work,, the zone controlled by the Japanese, and the French concession full of luxury hotels and shops. Manning always takes the time to describe in detail the huge variety of food and flowers to be seen there. Knowing so very little of Shanghai, and nothing of its tolerance of Jewish refugees during the war, I was stunned by the descriptions of this magical city.The character of Li, while fictional, is based on a very famous Shanghai singer; Li lives in a luxurious hotel that she and Romy come to know in great detail. Theirs is one of several close friendships between female characters in the book. Another is that between Romy and Nina, both Jewish refugees who end up in Melbourne.Alexandra wants to learn of the histories of her grandparents and after the death of Wilhelm, her grandfather, she goes to Shanghai and begins her search to uncover their stories.

While I was writing a story about refugees and how China opened their doors and hearts to the Jews, Australia was locking up refugees who attempted to come there by boat. Why haven’t the lessons of history taught us to treat people better?

Besides introducing me to Shanghai and is treatment of Jews during World War II, the author also discovers many other interesting bit of war history.

I also discovered that before 1940 it was possible to be released from a concentration camp if you had a valid passport, visa, permit to take up residency in another country, and proof of transport. Such release was always subject to the prisoner leaving Germany within a limited time. The time frame and the documents needed varied from case to case.

As you read this lovely if often frightening book, I think you might begin to hear echoes of the song of the Jade Lily, almost able to see the beautiful Li as she sang for her enthralled audiences. It is obvious that the author has been captured by the sights and sounds of Shanghai, and she manages to give her readers a window into that world.One strand of the novel I have not touched on is that of the relationship between traditional Chinese medicine and mainstream medicine. Both Romy and her mother had a keen interest in Chinese medicine as does author Manning, seeing them as adjuncts rather than opposites.

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I want to talk to you this morning about a delightful book about a luthier (maker of violins and other stringed instruments), his granddaughter, and a cello with a soul.

When Braden Healy’s mother takes him to a violin shop to buy him a violin, a cello across the room beckons him, speaks to him, and so begins a love affair that will last a lifetime.

Ophelia MacPhee, Phee for short, is eighteen years old and has been working in her grandfather’s shop, MacPhee’s Fine Instruments, for many years when he calls her to his apartment to give her her birthday present. She expects, perhaps, her grandmother’s emerald ring or something related to the luthier business. Instead, her grandfather tells her he is giving her the business. With his attorney present as a witness, he induces Phee to sign a contract saying she will take over the business.

I Ophelia Florence MacPhee, being of sound mind and purpose, do hereby swear a sacred oath to accept and discharge all obligations, tangible and intangible, related to the post of luthier.

Although uneasy about signing and wondering about the intangible obligations, she signs the document . Her grandfather explains he is dying of cancer and that necessitates the rush to have her sign.

The eccentric grandfather has, of course, sold many fine instruments over the years, and in a few cases has insisted the purchaser enter into an agreement to play the instrument until his/her death, and then the instrument is to be returned to the luthier. ‘A forever home, you understand. A marriage. This cello is not a thing to be acquired and cast aside. And when you die and the bond is broken, your next of kin will bring the cello back to me. Here”

Braden Healey is only twelve when he enters into this bond, and while the luthier thinks him a bit young to enter into such a bond, he remarks only that the cello has spoken. “She is the boss of us, yes? Not the other way.”

If the bond is broken, there will be dire consequences.

And so the scene is set, Phee must keep her oath concerning this cello and a handful of other instruments sold under similar contracts. Unfortunately, many years later, when Branden is a successful cellist with a seat on the Seattle symphony, his hands are severely frostbitten as he attempts to save his brother-in-law who has fallen through a hole in the ice while ice-fishing.

When Braden can no longer play the cello, he sinks into a depression and into alcoholism. On several occasions, Phee meets with Braden to exhort him to return to playing the cello. He laughs ruefully, displaying his hands which he can use for day to day things, but which can no long feel the strings of the cello.

The author is thinking of her character Braden (and others) when she opens her novel with this quote from Nietzsche, Without music, life would be a mistake.

Adding to the tragic life of Braden, his wife and son are killed in a car accident, and he returns to his home to try to salvage a relationship with his seventeen-year-old daughter. She is also a cellist, but gives it up after her mother and brother die. While both she and her father hear cello chords echoing in their lonely house, neither plays the lovely instrument as it languishes in its corner. It is every bit as important as a character in this novel as the others I have mentioned. Kerry manages to convince me that the cello does have a soul, its voice rising and falling as the events in the novel occur.

The granddaughter, Phee, was there the day that Braden signed the contract, entered into the oath, and when he returns home, she Is diligent in her attempts to get Braden to honor his contract. She believes in the curse her grandfather has put on Braden should he break his bond. Slowly, Phee falls in love with this boy-become –man, and their relationship adds a sweetness to the story, as does a budding relationship between Allie, Braden’s daughter, and Ethan, a boy who dates wild girls and rides a motorcycle.

Stars and boys like Ethan are great at a distance. Too close, and they’ll burn your wings and dump you into the sea., a lesson she learned both from the story of Icarus and watching the dramas of other girls who have dared to fly too close to the sun.

In addition to really interesting talk about music and fine instruments, this is a compelling story. I played Bach’s marvelous cello suites as I read it, and soon, like Braden and Allie and Phee, I began to hear cello chords throughout the day. Braden refuses to talk about the particulars of his brother-in-law’s death in the frozen lake, and this mystery adds one more layer to a really captivating tale.

Will Braden play again, and what will be the dire consequences if he does not? These and other questions await your reading of this splendid novel.

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For almost all of my reading life, I have tended to prejudge pop novels and pop novelists. Certainly, that prejudice has saved me from reading many bad or so-so novels, but it has also led me to miss some real gems. Today, I am going to say a few words about two 2019 novels. Although I don’t intend to reveal much of the storylines, I want at least to recommend these books. The first has been on the best seller lists for quite a long time. It is a novel about a house, The Dutch House, and the family who lived there in a period spanning five decades. I have shortchanged Patchett before; it took me several years to get around to reading (and reviewing) her fine novel, Bel Canto and almost as long to read The Magician’s Assistant.A man who has been poor all of his life suddenly comes into a lot of money, and one of the first things he does is buy a house he thinks to be the grandest he has ever seen. He buys if for his beloved wife, but she is uncomfortable in the house from the beginning and comes soon to hate it. Time and time again, she leaves the house and her two children Danny and Maeve, and stays away for greater and greater lengths until finally she leaves for good. The two children are inseparable, only comfortable in the world when they are together. Maeve attempts to be the lost parent for her younger brother, after they are forced out of the home when their father dies and leaves his entire estate to his second wife. The characters of the two children are very well fleshed out by Patchett, although their father, Cyril Conroy, is more a shadow than a fully developed character. The one provision Cyril had included in his will for his son Danny was a fund to pay for his education including any graduate program he enters. Clever Maeve devises a plan to keep her brother in school for many years, until he receives a medical degree, thus keeping a least some of their father’s money from the merciless stepmother. I did not find this novel to be particularly important as a socio-political statement, but since the time span includes the Viet Nam war and the political turmoil in this country right up to the present, Patchett does provide some insights into the separation of rich and poor and a running commentary on political events. Still, the most important relationship described is that between sister and brother. The scenes between them are touching and very believable and explore what I would call a kind of emotional incest.The second book, Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew, is a wonderfully researched book about World War II and the Holocaust. I have been somewhat put off by Hoffman’s inclusion of magic in her early hugely popular novels like Practical Magic and The Rules of Magic, and magic enters this novel as well, but in a way I found much less intrusive.

In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her. She would do whatever she must to save those she loved, whether it was right or wrong, permitted or forbidden.

Hanni’s doctor husband has already been murdered in a riot outside his Jewish hospital when the reader is introduced to the surviving members of the family. Hanni knows she must do something to protect her beautiful 12 year old daughter from the Nazi regime, but how can she protect her? While Hanni is able to prevent a sexual assault on her daughter by a Nazi soldier, she does so only by killing the assailant, and knows that the consequences will be dire. In a desperate move, Hanni takes her daughter, Lea, to a renowned rabbi pleading with him to help hide her daughter and to get her out of Germany. It is the rabbi’s daughter, Ettie, who steps in to save Lea, and she does so by creating a golem. “A golem…may look human, but it has no soul. It is pure and elemental and it has a single goal, to protect. Ettie explains that the incantations must be exactly right, and that if she makes a mistake, it will mean instant death to her. She finally agrees to create the golem in spite of the great risk, but only if Lea buys identification papers and a train ticket for Ettie’s little sister, so that she, too, can escape from Berlin.The rest of the novel describes the journey of Lea and Ava (the golem) as they escape to France and then through a long series of events that will get them to a place where they can join the French resistance and fight the Nazi occupation.It is very clear that this book was a labor of love for Alice Hoffman, and in my estimation the most serious of her many successful novels. The bibliography at the back of the book evidences just how through Hoffman’s research was in creating this novel. Lea and Ettie’s life paths are entwined from the moment Ettie creates Ava and begins the long journey towards the south of France. There are so many wonderful and believable characters created by Hoffman as Lea and Ava continue their escape and find ways to enter into the fray, and to help oher Jews to escape Nazi rule.So two hugely popular novels that deserve to be read.

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I want to talk to you this morning about a book that simply fell in my lap, loaned me by a reader friend. The book, Don’t Skip Out On Me, by Willy Valautin is not one I would have picked up on my own. For one thing it is a book about a boxer, and I don’t care for boxing. It is also one that is written in simple, almost flat prose, and I tend to favor books by accomplished word-weavers, but this short little novel gabbed me and would not let go. I finished it in the Salt Lake City airport with tears streaming down my cheeks and surrounded by passengers waiting for a New York City flight. I was not ashamed of the tears; the author had somehow so transported me that I felt as if all those around me were also finishing the book and so would understand. Horace Hopper is a young man half Paiute, half Irish, whose Indian father abandoned him and whose very ill mother could not really take care of him. Lucky for Horace, he spends most of his young life on a sheep ranch owned by Mr. and Mrs. Reese who love him like a son and fully intend to leave the ranch to Horace. But Horace, ashamed of his mixed heritage decides he must prove himself in the world, and he decides the way to do that is to becoming champion of the world in his weight class. He has read (many times) a self-help book that challenges the reader to build his boat one brick at a time, and to devote everything to become a champion.Although Horace is very close to the Reeses (whom he always addresses as Mr. and Mrs. Reese), he tells them he must leave the ranch in order to pursue his dream. While Mr. Reese pleads with him not to leave, and Horace is well aware that Mr. Reese will not be able to maintain his twelve hundred head ranch much longer without Horace, who has been his right hand man for many years, still he feels honor-bound to make it on his own. Horace is convinced that Mexican boxers are the best and toughest in the world, so when he leaves the Nevada ranch and travels to Tucson, He changes his appearance and his name. He becomes Hector Hildago , and tries to learn Spanish and tries to like Mexican food (though it is too spicy for him).Hector manages to find a trainer who will train him for a price, and he soon gets a golden gloves fight. Mr. Reese has offered to drive Horace/Hector to Arizona, but the boy says “That there were certain times when you had to do things alone.Mrs. Reese asks her husband why Horace needs to be a boxer.

I’m just not sure, he whispered. I’ve thought about it over and over and I’m just not sure. But remember, he’s young, and a lot of young men want to prove themselves.

It turns out that Hector is an incredibly hard hitter, but not really a boxer, so from his very first fight, he takes a lot of punishment. Diego, his trainer tells him: “You hit as hard as any kid I’ve seen in a long long time. You walk into punches but man oh man do you have power.” While he wins his early bouts, he is very badly beaten in almost every one. While the descriptions of the fights are grisly, they are well done and soon the reader becomes used to the fact that in almost every fight Hector’s nose is broken, and eventually it will just not stop bleeding. In addition, his retina is detached in one fight, and a doctor tells him he should not fight again, and that if he does, he risks losing sight in one or both eyes.While I have concentrated so far on Horace’s life as a fighter, I think the book is really about honor. In his dealing with women, with managers, and with poor folks he simply meets on the street, Horace is utterly honorable. He gives away his money simply because he sees others that need it more. Mr. Reese has taught him that the important thing in life is to be honorable and truthful, and Horace is both almost to a fault. On the book cover, one critic says, “No one anywhere writes as beautifully about people whose stories stay close to the dirt. Willy Vlautin is a secular—and thus real and profoundly useful—saint.”And yes, the simplicity, the simple elegance of Vlautin’s prose carries this story along. I intend to read all that he has written. When it becomes obvious that Horace will not become champion of the world, and really can’t fight anymore, he knows he can go back to the Reeses and the ranch; he knows they want him to come home, and in most ways he wants to go home.

When he got back to his room each evening he crawled into bed paralyzed with anxiety and shame. Why did he have to tell Mr. Reese everything? Why couldn’t he have just kept to himself that he wanted to be Mexican and wanted to be a world champion boxer? The nights crawled by. Hours seemed like days. He would get lost in thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Reese, the ranch, and the horses and dogs, and when he did his stomach would give out and he would feel like he was falling. He wanted more than anything to go back to them, to the comfort of them, but always something inside forded him not to.

Will Hector Delgado revert to Horace Hopper, and will Mr. Reese finally find him and take him home. The answer to this question will require you to read the book. It is a wonderful little book and you will be glad you read it. I feel I really learned something about honor and truthfulness.