Tag: books (Page 4 of 7)

Book review Tuesday: six quick book reviews

June 10, 2014 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

As usual, I’ve fallen behind on my blogging. My excuse is that it’s Bachelorette season, which means I’m covering the carnage for Previously.TV, plus I’m revising my mystery novel (more on that later, hopefully!), so things are relatively busy. But, in the last few weeks that I haven’t touched my blog, I’ve read a bunch of books, and want to talk about some of them. So, without further ado, here are six quick book reviews.

Her: A Memoir, by Christa Parravani: A devastating and beautiful memoir written by a woman who lost her identical twin sister to a heroin overdose. Parravani is a photographer who often featured her sister, Cara, in her work. Throughout their adult lives, Christa and Cara Parravani, both artists, struggled with addiction and maintaining healthy relationships, but after being violently raped, Cara’s drug use spiraled out of control. As Cara fell deeper and deeper into self-destruction, her relationship with Christa became increasingly strained. Over and over, Christa would attempt to help Cara and then become frustrated with Cara’s refusal to try to help herself. The cycle repeated itself until Cara’s untimely death. The book explores the tension between loving a person more than anyone else in the world while also resenting (and at times even hating) that person. As Christa writes in one passage about Cara’s struggles, “Not only did she not want to suffer alone, she demanded co-suffering from all who dared love her.” I teared up reading this book. Some of it was difficult to read. But I’m so glad I read it. (Here’s an NPR interview with Parravani).

Source: NPR

Harbor, by John Ajvide Lindqvist: I love a dark, Nordic thriller, and so I picked up Harbor, the story of a mysterious Swedish island whose inhabitants have struck a bargain with a sinister force. The author, John Ajvide Lindqvist, also wrote Let the Right One In, so I figured his creepy pedigree was strong. The book starts off with a family — two parents and a young girl — skiing from their cottage on the small island where they live to a lighthouse in the middle of a frozen channel. Within a few minutes of reaching the lighthouse, the little girl has disappeared. There are no other people around, no trace of a body, no hole in the ice. The girl appears to have been swallowed up into thin air. The book follows the girl’s desperate father as he searches over the coming years for his missing daughter and unravels the island’s dark secrets in the process. Harbor is not so much a thriller as a supernatural horror story: think a Stephen King novel set in small town Sweden instead of small town Maine. It’s weird, and creepy, but it can be a bit ponderous, at times. Overall, though, it was an engaging read, and something different from your standard Dean Koontz-style horror novel.

The Visionist, by Rachel Urquhart: My mom was the one who recommended this book about a Shaker community in 1840s Massachusetts. First, a disclaimer: I don’t always like historical fiction because I find it can be a bit dry, a bit draggy, or a bit too infused with modern sensibilities (which is why I love Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series so much, because it avoids all of these pitfalls). The Visionist, like much other historical fiction I’ve read, was a bit draggy at times. However, the book’s detailed portrait of life inside a Shaker community kept me engaged. I knew next to nothing about the Shakers before reading this novel, but now I feel like I know what it would have been like to live among them. The titular “visionist” is a teenage girl, Polly Kimball, who is sent to live among the Shakers after she leaves her abusive father to die in a house fire. Her mother wants Polly and her brother to have a better life than she can provide, and so she leaves them at the City of Hope, a Shaker community headed by the severe Elder Agnes. When Polly gets carried away during a worship meeting, the Shakers assume she is receiving divine visions and elevate her to the position of “visionist.” The ensuing tension that unfolds between Polly, a suspicious Elder Agnes, and Sister Charity, Polly’s trusting friend within the community, feels both sad and inevitable.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler. The less I say about this brilliant, funny, and touching book, the better, because it’s quite easy to spoil. Please do yourself a favor and just read it. Now. You’re welcome.

Source: NPR

Sleeping Murder, by Agatha Christie. As I may have mentioned, I’m writing a mystery novel. To get my brain in fighting shape for the task, I’ve been reading a lot of mysteries. In terms of expertly crafted, tightly written, clever sleuth novels, no one beats Agatha Christie. Reading her novels is a great object lesson in What To Do while writing a mystery. The woman was a genius! I’ve enjoyed every Christie book I’ve read, and Sleeping Murder is no exception. This was the first Miss Marple mystery I read and I will be reading more; the character is a delight (and she knits!).

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. Speaking of geniuses, Margaret Atwood is one of the most inventive authors of our time, especially when it comes to imagining post-apocalyptic hellscapes wrought by human arrogance and foolishness. Oryx and Crake imagines a world in the not-too distant future in which humankind has been effectively wiped out by a human-manufactured disease. The world before the disease was dominated by Monsanto-like corporations that cranked out horrific animal hybrids and mutations such as Chickie-Nobs: headless, brainless, motionless chickens harvested in labs for their meat. Atwood’s dire vision of our potential future is gloomy, to put it mildly, and can feel heavy-handed at times, but it’s also fascinating, and so well written that I kept turning pages, even as I was horrified by what I was reading. Even more incentive to read Oryx and Crake: it’s part of a trilogy of novels that’s being turned into an HBO series!

Source: Amazon

What are you reading these days? Any recommendations? I’ve just started Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (and am loving it so far) and next in the hopper is Christina Garcia’s King of Cuba. Happy reading!

Book review Monday: You Should Have Known, by Jean Hanff Korelitz

April 28, 2014 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

Reading Jean Hanff Korelitz’s You Should Have Known was sort of like entering into a brief but doomed relationship. At first, you’re over the moon about your new flame, and the object of your affection can do no wrong. Then, after spending some time together, the cracks start to show. Little things start to annoy you. By the end, you feel cheated and betrayed and just want it to be over, already. Then, after the dust has settled, you look back with some fondness on the whole thing, through a haze of nostalgia, and wonder if you were being too harsh all along. This metaphor, I think, is particularly apt given the plot of Korelitz’s novel, which focuses on a relationship expert whose own relationship, in fact, is not what she believes it to be.

[Warning: spoilers ahead!]

In You Should Have Known, we meet Grace Reinhart Sachs, a successful therapist in Manhattan who’s just written what is sure to be a bestselling book, provocatively titled — you guessed it! — You Should Have Known. The premise of Grace’s book is that women facing failed relationships have no one but themselves to blame: they should have seen it coming from the clues their partners were dropping the entire time. This smug premise may rub people the wrong way, Grace knows, but she believes with all of her heart that an ounce of prevention is the key to ensuring happy relationships. In other words, Grace’s message to women can be boiled down thusly: just don’t marry the wrong man, and you’ll be fine. As the book unfolds, we learn, from Grace’s perspective, about her picture-perfect life: she’s married to a successful pediatric oncologist, has a thriving therapy practice, and is mother to a bright twelve year-old boy who attends a prestigious private school, Reardon (the same school that Grace herself attended). Everything’s hunky-dory until a fellow Reardon mother turns up murdered, and Grace’s husband becomes the prime suspect. As Grace revisits her life with her husband, examining what appear to the reader to be fairly giant red flags that she somehow ignored for the past eighteen years of her marriage, she realizes, with dawning horror, that she married a psychopath. Accepting that her husband did in fact do the very bad thing he has been accused of, Grace skips town and takes her son with her, settling in her family’s cottage in Connecticut as she licks her wounds and starts over. Unfortunately, as Grace flees Manhattan, the book loses its way.

I was so excited about You Should Have Known when I started reading it because it had such great promise. The idea of a relationship expert who finds herself hoisted by her own petard when she realizes that she failed to take her own advice with spectacularly awful results (she married a murderer, whoops!) is delicious, and the suspenseful chapters in which Grace figures this out are wonderful. I loved Grace’s dawning horror as she realizes that everything she believed about her relationship was a lie. But the suspense that Korelitz builds is frittered away when Grace packs up her kid and drives to Connecticut, where she starts an idyllic new beginning in her family’s rustic lake-house and begins to fall in love with the handsome neighbor. Bluh.

All of the potential for drama and suspense escapes out of the plot like air out of a balloon as Korelitz subjects the reader to Grace’s reawakening at the lake-house. As a reader of a psychological thriller, I’m far more interested in the direct aftermath of the main character’s marriage with her husband, the dangerous sociopath, and a confrontation with said husband than I am in seeing the main character reconnect with old friends, develop a crush on the guy who lives in the next lake-house, and enroll her son in a good public school in Connecticut. It begs the question: as an author, why create a dangerous, sociopathic husband if he’s not also going to stir up a little trouble for his family? As murderous sociopaths go, Jonathan’s kind of a dud. Sure, he kills the lady in the beginning, but then he makes no attempt to make things difficult for Grace, who’s cooperating with the police, or to reclaim his son, who Grace has removed from the scene with nary a protest from anyone. In fact, Jonathan spends the entire novel off camera, which, in the beginning, helps to build a sense of unease, as if he could spring from behind a corner at any moment, but by the end, feels like a big wasted opportunity.

Also, being a writer, I took issue with Korelitz’s overuse of certain words and phrases. I guess I should take this up with her editor, but someone should have intervened after the seventh time she used the word “unlovely” to describe a building. My inner Hemingway was also cringing at all of the adverbs. SO MANY ADVERBS. Her favorite was “not unkindly,” as in, “he said, not unkindly.” Let me tell you: no one was unkind, ever, in this book. Adverb abuse gets my hackles up. And I know that no non-writers care about this, at all, but I am a writer, and I do care, so it affected my enjoyment of the book.

So, was this book a waste of time? No! I did enjoy large swaths of it. I loved the descriptions of life within the upper echelons of Manhattan, particularly in the close (and catty) environment of a private school. I thought the character development of Grace was fantastic (and, for what it’s worth, I pictured her as looking like Heather Dubrow from the Real Housewives of Orange County). I even enjoyed reading about Grace’s interactions with her long-lost friend Vita, from whom she had become alienated after her marriage to Psycho McGee (one of those large red flags I referred to above). But these things do not a psychological thriller make. I wish that Korelitz had followed the momentum of the first half of her book to its thrilling conclusion. It would have been a much different book, yes, and, in my view, would have been a better read.

Book review Monday: eight short book reviews

April 7, 2014 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve written any book reviews here; this isn’t because I’ve stopped reading, but more because I’ve allowed myself to slip into indolence with my blogging. It’s much easier to read a book and move on to the next than to have to recall that book’s details and ruminate on its meaning. Ruminating can be so exhausting. But it seems a waste to read so many books and then not even share my opinions on them with anyone. So, as a sort of stopgap measure, here, in no particular order, are eight very brief reviews of some of the books I’ve read over the past few months. Since I read some of these in January, which was eons ago, I’ve forgotten some of the details, hence my brevity. But hopefully these short reviews will get to the heart of the matter.

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, Anne Lamott: A slim little book in which Lamott documents her son’s first year of life, in sometimes excruciating and often funny detail. Lamott was a thirty-five year-old single woman when she gave birth to her son Sam and was by turns apprehensive, terrified, enraged, enthralled, exhausted, and overwhelmed by the experience. While the book chronicles some of the minutiae of raising an infant, Lamott also gets philosophical about life, late 1980s politics, gender, motherhood, religion, mortality, and family. While Lamott’s flights of fancy about God and angry tirades against George Bush (the first George Bush, at that) can border on the hackneyed and the dated, respectively, there’s a lot of universal stuff in here about the experience of being part of a family, and the difficulties involved with being a human grappling with unanswerable questions.
The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst: After reading (and loving) The Line of Beauty, I just had to get me some more Hollinghurst. Unfortunately, The Stranger’s Child was a disappointment. Following several intertwined stories spanning several generations, and somewhat centered around the characters’ connections to a young poet named Cecil Valance who died in WWI, The Stranger’s Child is a meditation on the unreliability of memory and the subjectivity of the past. Hollinghurst’s writing is, as always, spectacular. But fantastic writing is not enough to save this book, I’m sorry to say. The plot was complex and “layered,” yes, but needlessly so. The time-shifting, often done without explication or table-setting, was jarring and exhausting. The characters, many of whom had the same or similar voice and interests, became muddled together. By the middle of it, I began skimming, and I never skim. Well, almost never. I enjoyed the unreliable narrator Paul Bryant, and I think I get the point Hollinghurst was trying to make with all of this, which is that ALL narrators are unreliable, and memory is a tricky thing, and the past is not a monolith, and whatever, but could he not have done it with a more streamlined and plot-driven vehicle? I just kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did.
The UnAmericans: Stories, Molly Antopol: I read a glowing review of this book on NPR and since I love sinking my teeth into a good collection of short stories, I thought I’d give this one a whirl. Unfortunately, I came away a bit disappointed by The UnAmericans. My basic problem with the collection was not with the writing, which, sentence to sentence, was excellent. I found Antopol’s stories inconsistent in terms of character development and relatability, which meant that, while reading several of the stories, I found myself bored and disengaged, despite the marvelous descriptions of setting. There is a lot of good work in this collection. Some of the stories, like “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story,” about Eastern European Jewish refugees during World War II, are gripping and vivid. Others, though, like “Duck and Cover,” about communists in Southern California during the McCarthy area, left me cold. All of the stories feature Jewish protagonists, many of whom are struggling with questions of identity – religious, national, familial, or otherwise. These are broad questions and provide fertile ground for interesting storytelling, and sometimes, Antopol nails it. But the stories varied too widely for me to wholeheartedly recommend this book.
Dear Life: Stories, Alice Munro: It’s hard to say much bad about Alice Munro. Part of her gift as a storyteller is her ability to take seemingly mundane situations in less-than-fascinating settings (often, rural, mid-20^th century Ontario) and create compelling, emotionally rich stories. One of the most interesting things about this collection is Munro’s inclusion of four final works that “are not quite stories,” but are essays that are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” These four semi-fictional works form a mini-memoir at the end of the collection of stories and give a window into Munro’s own upbringing and early family life.
Flowers in the Attic, V.C. Andrews: Somehow, despite being born in the early 1980s, I totally missed reading the 1979 classic Flowers in the Attic. I was aware of it, of course, but by the time I fully grasped that it was a “young adult” book with sexy bits in it, I was too old and world-weary to bother reading it. Then, I read this piece by Tara Ariano, one of my editors at Previously.TV, about what the book meant to her as a kid, and I decided to read it, for the first time, as an adult. As everyone in the world who has read FITA will tell you, it’s terribly written, outrageously cheesy, laughably unrealistic, and completely weird on every level. But the weirdness is kind of what works about the book. It’s so creepily bizarre that you can kind of get past the terrible writing and just enjoy the craziness. This book certainly isn’t going to win any literary accolades, but it is going to last, because it’s just the kind of macabre, taboo love story that teens (and, okay, adults) eat up. If you want to give your brain a rest and be weirded out at the same time, give FITA a go.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman: My husband’s youngest brother gave me this book for Christmas this year. I had never read any Gaiman before, but as soon as I got into the story, I understood why people enjoy his writing. This story is small, and quick, but it sticks with you. Told from the perspective of a man revisiting the English village where he grew up, it’s a reflection on magic, family, and the fluid interplay between childhood safety and danger. I loved Gaiman’s simple, evocative writing and the sense of magic and promise in this story.
The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara: The People in the Trees is an interesting and disturbing read. It tells the story of (the fictional) Dr. Norton Perina, a Nobel Prize winning immunologist who was arrested in 1995 for sexually abusing one of his 43 adopted children. Told from the perspective of Perina himself, as well as his trusted confidante and defender, Ronald Kubodera, the story traces Perina’s early life and career as a scientist before getting into the meat of the story, Perina’s journey in 1950 to the (fictional) Micronesian country of U’ivu, where he discovered, on one of its islands, people who had seemingly found the answer to eternal life. Perina’s subsequent handling of his discovery and his ensuing notoriety form a large part of the story, but it’s not until Perina begins to adopt children from U’ivu that things get decidedly twisted. The New York Times review can be found here.
The Valley of Amazement, Amy Tan. I’m a huge, lifelong Amy Tan fan. The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses are among my absolute favorites, but I’ll read anything she writes. Her latest effort, The Valley of Amazement, while an impressive work of historical fiction, didn’t move me the way that some of her earlier books have. As always, Tan is an expert at capturing complicated mother-daughter relationships. But in The Valley of Amazement, the story wanders so much from the central relationships, and contains so many twists and turns (not all of which are particularly interesting) that I found myself bored and wishing it were more streamlined.

These eight aren’t the only books I’ve read over the last three months, but they’re the ones I felt like writing about, maybe because, in one way or another, they stuck with me (even the ones I didn’t care for). Have you read any of these? What did you think?

Book review Monday: The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

January 13, 2014 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

Programming note: book reviews are back on Mondays (for now), as my Tuesdays will henceforth be consumed by blogging about The Bachelor over at Previously.TV (you can check out my posts here).

I’m a big fan of Donna Tartt — really, as big a fan as one can be of an author who has only produced three novels. I thought both of her first two books were brilliant: both The Secret History and The Little Friend were well-crafted, chilling, and un-put-downable. So, I was really excited to read Tartt’s latest effort, The Goldfinch. Since I’m an enthusiastic fan of her work, I dove into The Goldfinch without even bothering to read its flap-copy, let alone a review. Unlike how I approached Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, I went into this thing completely blind, and I’m glad I did. The Goldfinch is one of those books with a twisty, turn-y plot that’s more enjoyable if you have no sense of what to expect; it’s like a haunted house ride, and you’re constantly waiting for the next ghost to pop out of nowhere and give you a thrill.

The barebones plot summary of the book is as follows: thirteen year-old Theo Decker and his mother are wandering through a museum in New York City when a terrorist’s bomb is detonated. Theo survives, and — for reasons that are a bit complicated to go into here — walks away from the scene with an exceedingly rare painting, Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch, in his possession. The novel then follows Theo from his early teenage years into adulthood, tracing his wild, unstable trajectory as he’s bounced from house to house, state to state, country to country, and his increasingly precarious situation as an international art thief. Even though the novel is a hefty 755 pages long, the plot moves — and changes — so quickly, that you understand why Tartt expended so much ink capturing the many facets of Theo’s story.

As always, Tartt’s writing is impeccable. The characters, like real people, are colorful, yet sympathetic, understandable, and yet essentially mysterious. Theo, as the narrator, is complex and multi-dimensional. At various times, I felt sorry for him, was annoyed by him, rooted for him, and wanted him to fail. Tartt masterfully develops the jarring conflict between Theo’s inner life — one wracked by guilt and self doubt — and his seemingly confident and respectable outer life. Other characters are also given their own layers; although there are a few stock characters thrown in (Kitsey and Andy spring to mind), most of the main characters seem like real people, with their good sides and bad sides, noble impulses and cowardices.

One of the characters who plays a major role in the story is Hobie, the proprietor of an antiques shop whose life and livelihood eventually become intertwined with Theo’s. Although Hobie was one of the few characters — perhaps the only character — in the story who seemed to have no human failings apart from a few mild eccentricities, I enjoyed Tartt’s descriptions of him nonetheless. I particularly loved this passage:

By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn’t actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world. Though he enjoyed going out to the movies, there was no television; he read old novels with marbled end papers; he didn’t own a cell phone; his computer, a prehistoric IBM, was the size of a suitcase and useless.

Now, a small complaint. As gifted as Tartt is as creating marvelous, complex, interesting characters, her ear for dialogue seems, to me, to be fundamentally off. The characters in this book are so real, and yet they don’t talk like real people — or, at least, not like real people in this century. For example, Kitsey, a love interest, is supposed to be a young, modern woman in her mid-twenties living in present-day Manhattan, and interested in fashion and parties and glamour. Yet she sounds as if she was plucked from a Connecticut estate in the 1940s. She says things like, “Really? Are you sure it’s all right? We none of us drink it — Daddy always ordered this kind…” and, “Do say, Theo, I know you must prefer one of the two.” Similarly, Theo, as a teenager in the mid-2000s, said, in one passage, “Say, you ought to try one of these peppermints.” Say? What kind of old-timey teenagers has Donna Tartt been hanging around with, if this is her impression of how young people talk? I often found the dialogue to be so jarring that it took me right out of the story, and made me wonder whether Tartt wrote this novel from inside of a time machine.

My only other complaint about this book was the finish. Without giving too much away, things get pretty neatly tied up by the end in a way that felt out-of-step with the rest of the story, which was consistently wild and unpredictable and chaotic. Also, at the very end of the book, Theo, the narrator, spends a long time pondering the meaning of life, death, and art in a way that I didn’t find particularly engaging. I understand that Tartt was trying to imbue the story with greater meaning, but I don’t think a soliloquy was necessary. On the contrary, I think Theo’s relationship throughout the book with The Goldfinch in particular and with art in general spoke for itself, and didn’t need to be elaborated quite so explicitly at the end of the novel.

Despite my little complaints about the book, overall, it was a great read, and Tartt’s writing is astonishing. As a writer, I appreciate her exceptional ability to cast otherwise mundane objects, moments, and feelings in a meaningful light. I recommend this book for other Tartt fans, for those looking for a long but engaging read, and for those interested in fiction involving art.

Book review Tuesday: Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple

November 26, 2013 / Stephanie / 10 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve read a novel as fast-paced, witty, and enjoyable as Where’d You Go, Bernadette. I had heard good things about this book for close to a year but hadn’t bought it because, as usual, I had about a million other books stacked in my Kindle queue already. But then I heard Linda Holmes mention it on Pop Culture Happy Hour last month and decided it was time to dig in. (Also, I unquestioningly trust everything Linda Holmes says).

Where’d You Go, Bernadette is narrated principally by Bee, an eighth grader at Galer Street, an aspirational private school in Seattle, who is searching for her missing mother, Bernadette. When the story begins, we meet Bee’s father, Elgie, a big deal at Microsoft who spends most waking hours at his office working on a high profile robotics project, and her mother, Bernadette, who was once the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant and a rising star in the world of architecture, but who now spends her days in a trailer behind the family home, refusing to come out or interact with the world unless absolutely necessary. When Bernadette does interact with the world, bad things happen: accusations of assault, unintentional landslides, and escalating gossip and rumors. As Bernadette increasingly alienates herself from the cliquey, upper-middle class, Seattle-focused world of the other mothers at her daughter’s school, she turns to help from an online personal assistant in India, a decision that ends up having unforeseen and rather dire consequences. Without giving the entire plot away, suffice it to say that Bernadette decides, just before a planned family trip to Antarctica, that she has to split. She disappears, leaving Bee and Elgie to try to figure out where in the world she went. They travel from Seattle to Antarctica and back in search of Bernadette, with surprising results.

There were several reasons this book was so immensely enjoyable to read. First, its structure: the story is told by Bee, the narrator, who has collected and is commenting upon a series of documents — emails, letters, faxes, pamphlets, invoices — all of which serve as clues in her mother’s disappearance. This makes for fast, fun reading, as the reader is taken into the minds and goings-on of a number of characters, including Bernadette’s array of sworn enemies, her old architecture colleagues, her husband, and others. The result is a complex, incisive portrait of upper-middle class Seattle. Some of the wittiest (and most damning) descriptions of Seattle come from Bernadette herself, who openly despises the city and its ethos, despite having lived there for close to two decades. In one bit of correspondence, for instance, Bernadette sets forth her disdain for Seattle’s collective fashion sense thusly:

Remember when the feds busted in on that Mormon polygamist cult in Texas a few years back? And the dozens of wives were paraded in front of the camera? And they all had this long mouse-colored hair with strands of gray, no hairstyle to speak of, no makeup, ashy skin, Frida Kahlo facial hair, and unflattering clothes? And on cue, the Oprah audience was shocked and horrified? Well, they’ve never been to Seattle.

There are two hairstyles here: short gray hair and long gray hair. You go into a salon asking for hair color, and they flap their elbows and cluck, “Oh goody, we never get to do color!”

This brings me to the second reason this book is so fun to read: voice. Maria Semple absolutely nails the individual voices of the characters, bringing them to vibrant life even through small snippets of conversation and correspondence. Semple avoids creating two-dimensional stock characters, even for bit players. Bernadette, who is without a doubt a flawed, damaged, and cantankerous woman, is also lovable and relatable, and I found myself rooting for her, despite her poor choices. And man, the characters are funny (some unintentionally so). Bernadette gets some pretty solid one-liners off throughout the book. In one of my favorite scenes, Bee and Bernadette are in the car listening to a program on public radio about the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the systemic use of rape as a tool of war. Bee is disgusted and turns the radio off.

“I know it’s horrific,” Mom said. “But you’re old enough. We live a life of privilege in Seattle. That doesn’t mean we can literally switch off these women, whose only fault was being born in the Congo during a civil war. We need to bear witness.” She turned the radio back on.

I crumpled in my seat and fumed.

“The war in Congo rages on and with no end in sight,” the announcer said. “And now comes word of a new campaign by the soldiers, to find the women they have already raped and re-rape them.”

“Holy Christ on a cross!” Mom said. “I draw the line at re-raping.” And she turned off NPR.

The third reason I enjoyed Where’d You Go, Bernadette is its plot, which weaves together many sub-plots to create a layered and absorbing story. My only tiny complaint is that occasionally, Semple relies a bit too heavily on neat coincidences to solve the mystery of where Bernadette went, but I had so much fondness for the story and its characters that it didn’t bother me that much. (This also might be one of those things I notice keenly since I am in the middle of writing a novel and often have to steer myself away from tying things in a bow with fortuitous coincidences, which I fear would end up making the story less believable and a bit too pat). I want to stress, though, that this is not a major detractor from the story; it’s just a small nitpick of mine.

All in all, I highly recommend the novel for anyone looking for a fast, fun read and a peek into the particular world of Seattle’s upper-middle class. Here is a glowing NY Times review, by the way. Also, word on the street is that they’re making the novel into a movie. Better read the book before that happens so you can be on the cutting edge!

Book review Tuesday: Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King

November 12, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

A while back, I wrote about reading Stephen King’s The Shining, and the surprising discovery that it blows the movie of the same name out of the water. As you can imagine, when I found out that King had come out with a sequel to The Shining, I pre-ordered that business immediately. So, last month, I bought and devoured Doctor Sleep, King’s follow-up to The Shining, within a few days. It turned out to be one of those books that I had trouble putting down. I read it on the Tube, in waiting rooms, and before bed. And when I finished it, it stuck with me. It’s taken me almost a month to write this review because I’ve been doing other things (like writing a new novel!), but the fact that the book is still fresh in my mind a month later is a testament to Stephen King’s ever- impressive storytelling abilities.

Doctor Sleep skips forward several decades from the end of The Shining and focuses on Dan Torrance, the preternaturally gifted son of Wendy and Jack Torrance, who is now all grown up and an alcoholic, just like his father. At the beginning of the book, Dan is a wreck. He drinks, does drugs, has high-risk sex, and is generally miserable. After a particularly traumatic experience following a drugs/booze/sex bender, he escapes to a small New Hampshire town where, with the help of a few compassionate people, starts to remake his life. He gets clean and sober, secures a job as a caretaker at a hospice, and becomes active in his local Alcoholics Anonymous chapter. Things are good. But Dan is still affected by the “shining,” the ability to see into the future and read people’s thoughts. One day, Dan starts receiving messages from someone named Abra, who needs his help. Abra, we learn, is a young girl in a nearby town who is endowed with a very powerful dose of the shining. She is being pursued by a sinister group of beings called the True Knot, who seek to kill children with the shining and feed on their “steam,” or supernatural essences. The True Knot disguise themselves as “RV people” and travel unnoticed across the country, murdering children and using the children’s steam to bolster their own powers. Abra and Dan must band together to defeat the True Knot and its scary, beautiful ringleader, Rose the Hat. As Dan is pulled deeper into Abra’s dilemma, he struggles with his demons: memories of his father, the urge to drink, and his own regrets.

The book, like every Stephen King book I’ve read, is a page-turner. The plot is fast-paced and gripping and the reader is made to care deeply about the characters, particularly Dan, who we’ve known since he was a child wandering the haunted halls of the Overlook Hotel. But the book also goes deep into Dan’s struggle with alcoholism, to moving effect. The Shining was also about alcoholism: it portrayed a man in the grips of a disease that was destroying him and his family. Doctor Sleep, meanwhile, is about a man who trying to swim against the destructive tide of his addiction, and mostly succeeding. King wrote The Shining when he was in the dark depths of his battle with alcoholism; he wrote Doctor Sleep after decades of sobriety. The most noticeable difference in perspective between these two books is that, unlike The Shining, Doctor Sleep offers hope for redemption even for people who have messed up their lives profoundly with drugs and alcohol. The Shining was about survival: getting out of the Overlook before it exploded. Doctor Sleep, though, is about creating a life worth living after escaping the wreckage.

This novel is highly recommended for Stephen King fans and anyone looking for a quick but emotionally satisfying page-turner. One word of advice: read (or re-read) The Shining first. It helps to have the original novel fresh in your mind as you delve into the world of Dan Torrence.

In case you’re interested, here’s what Margaret Atwood writing for the NY Times had to say.

Book review Monday: Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter

September 23, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

Warning: This book review contains (minor) spoilers. Proceed with caution.

A few weeks ago, my Kindle broke. This was an emergency of epic proportions, as I rely on my Kindle to get me through even the shortest moments of boredom: standing in line, riding the bus, waiting for my coffee to filter, lulls in conversation with Al — you get the idea. When it broke, I was in Edinburgh, and, in an odd coincidence, I had also broken my iPhone screen that day and had to go to the mall to get it fixed, so I popped into the mall’s bookstore and stocked up on paperbacks to tide me over until I could get my Kindle fixed. Now, I’m happy to report, I have a new Kindle, and I finished the paperbacks I bought to fill the gap.

One of these paperbacks was Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter. I picked it up in the store without knowing anything about it, mostly because I liked the cover, which shows a 1960s-ish looking couple gazing toward (if not directly at) each other, backed by a seaside cliff dotted with little houses. So, you know, I judged a book by its cover.

The verdict? I liked it. It was a quick, fun read, but there was emotional power behind it. Walter pulls together several interconnected narratives, taking place at different points in time, to weave a complex story about regret, love, and ambition. The emotional heart of the story lies with Dee Moray, a young American actress who, in 1962, while an extra on the set of Cleopatra, falls pregnant but is told she is dying. Thinking she has little time left, she travels from Rome to Porto Vergogna, a tiny, ramshackle Italian town just outside of Cinque Terre. There, she stays in the Hotel Adequate View, which is overseen by the shy and dreamy Pasquale Tursi. Theirs is not a love story, necessarily — they both have other complications in their lives that prevent a traditional romance from taking place — but their relationship, while short, is meaningful, and creates ripples that stretch fifty years into the future, when they finally meet again.

There are other characters in the book who play a role in Dee and Pasquale’s story, and who are living out their own complicated stories of love and loss, as well. There’s Claire, the “executive assistant” to Michael Deane, a coldhearted and eccentric Hollywood filmmaker. There’s Shane, an unsuccessful but ambitious screenwriter who’s determined to make an epic film about the Donner Party called “Donner!”. There’s Pat, Dee Moray’s grown son, who struggles with addiction. And there are other characters, some of whom enter in one part of the story and reemerge in surprising ways later on. The book, while light and fast-paced, is not an ephemeral beach read; it has something deeper to say about the choices the characters make and the lasting effects of those actions.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Beautiful Ruins, though, was a brief interview with the author, Jess Walter, in the back of the book. In it, Walter talks about his writing process. And if there’s one thing I love, as a writer, it’s reading about other writers’ processes and understanding how they think about character, plot, pacing, and all of the other elements that make a story click. Walter has a lot of interesting things to say about writing, and the specific details of how he came to write this particular novel, but one of the things I found most interesting were his remarks on the importance of character in a story or a novel. The interviewer asked him what he thought the difference was between embarking on writing a short story versus a novel. Walter replied:

The embarking is always the same. Early to the desk. Fingers on the home keys. Coffee and a giant cookie. I don’t usually know where I’m going until I get some pages. I have a thousand ideas for stories but I tend not to know much about them when I start, even whether it’s a story or a novel. … Then I just write, figure out who these people are, why they’re doing what they’re doing. I think character is elemental; if you pay attention to the people, you’ll get the action right.

I love a lot about this answer (including the bit about the coffee and the giant cookie), but the thing I found most helpful was his comment about figuring out characters’ motivations before building action. I had never thought about it that way before, but it makes perfect sense. Characters in a story, like people in real life, act the way they do because of something. People don’t just do things or say things; there are reasons behind every action. Those reasons might be totally bonkers or self-defeating or evil, but they exist, and it’s important, as a writer, to understand what they are. When I first read this interview with Walter, I was finishing up a short story that I was pretty pleased with. But then I looked back on it and started to wonder about one of the characters’ motivations. Why is she doing that? I wondered. Why would she behave that way? That line of inquiry opened up a whole new window onto my story and allowed me to add depth and realism to it — it even ended up changing what happened in the end, because once I understood why the characters were doing what they were doing, I could more easily imagine how the action between them would progress. I’m grateful to Jess Walter for this extremely helpful tidbit; even though it may seem obvious, it’s something that I had never considered before while writing a story or a novel.

On that note, I need to finish editing the aforementioned story and ship it off to various publications in the hopes that someone will publish it. Thank you, Jess Walter, for the inspiration!

Book review Monday: The Passage, by Justin Cronin

September 2, 2013 / Stephanie / 1 Comment

Generally, I like to use Book Review Monday to help spread the word about great books that are worth your time. But sometimes, I need to use this space as a public service announcement, to warn you off of books that have received positive reviews or lots of hype but are, in my opinion, crap. Today is one of those times. Brace yourselves.

The Passage, by Justin Cronin, was billed as a thrilling, sprawling vampire novel and received positive reviews from such respected publications as The Washington Post and The New York Times, among others. But I disliked it so much, I couldn’t even finish it. Let me emphasize that for me, to not finish a book is a rare thing. I struggle through books that I feel lukewarm about all the time. But my policy, since discovering at age eleven that I wasn’t obligated to read all of the Sunday comics, including the ones I hated (looking at you, For Better or For Worse), is that I shouldn’t feel bad about abandoning ship on a book, movie, or TV show that I’m not enjoying. Life is too short, right? To be fair, I made it 67% of the way through The Passage before calling it quits, so no one can say I didn’t give it a fair shake.

Here were my issues with this book, in convenient list format.

1. It’s derivative. No, like, really derivative.

I don’t throw around the word “derivative,” because when you think about it, everything created by a human being is in some sense derivative of some earlier work. But The Passage goes beyond “derivative” and lands firmly in “blatant rip-off” territory. Cronin has put together a poorly rendered copy of plot points and themes from Stephen King’s The Stand and Salem’s Lot, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and a number of other better written books. Even the reviewer from The Washington Post, Ron Charles, concedes this point, writing:

Imagine Michael Crichton crossbreeding Stephen King’s “The Stand” and “Salem’s Lot” in that lab at Jurassic Park, with rich infusions of Robert McCammon’s “Swan Song,” “Battlestar Galactica” and even Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” A pastiche? Please — Cronin is trading derivatives so fast and furious he should be regulated by the SEC. But who cares? It’s alive!

That last sentence is where I part ways with Mr. Charles. This book is not alive. It’s so boring and unimaginative as to be dead on the table. If I wanted to read a well-rendered and chilling vampire novel, I’d read Salem’s Lot. If I wanted a futuristic, post-apocalyptic vision of the world, I’d read The Stand or Cloud Atlas. If I wanted a boring supernatural saga with a strong but sexy female lead, I’d watch Battlestar Galactica (except I wouldn’t, because Battlestar Galactica sucks).

Let’s talk about how badly Cronin rips off The Stand, in particular, in case you’re not convinced yet. Here are the main elements Cronin lifted wholesale from Stephen King’s masterpiece:

Government-created super virus with fun nickname kills everyone in America and the rest of the world;
Survivors of virus experience dreams of forces of good and/or evil as embodied by a good woman and an evil man;
Survivors escape to the Western United States, including Colorado and Las Vegas, of all places; and
Elderly African-American woman, aged 108, delivers homespun wisdom.

When one considers these elements together with the fact that The Passage is a vampire novel (because we don’t have enough of those already!), one starts to wonder if there is anything original in this book at all.

2. The historical details, including the characters’ vernacular, are bizarre and inconsistent.

The book opens in 2018, when the US government is testing the vampire super virus on death row prisoners (as you do) and then fast forwards 100 years, after the experiment has inevitably gone awry and vampires are roaming the Earth. The story’s Mother Abigail clone, Ida “Auntie” Jaxon, is now 108 years old. That means she was eight years old in 2018, which would mean she was born in 2010. We learn that she’s from Philadelphia. Okay. So first question: how many babies born in 2010 are named Ida? More importantly, how many babies born in 2010 who grew up in urban Philly would say things like the following:

“Folks call me Auntie, on account of I never could have no children of my own, and I guess that suits me fine.”

“There were other trains, I do believe.”

“I’d been sick myself so it scared me about out my skin when she told me this.”

AND SO ON. Let’s give Cronin the benefit of the doubt and assume that Ida somehow picked up her old-timey, vaguely Southern vernacular from her parents. Even with a generous reckoning, assuming Ida’s mother gave birth to her when she was forty, her mother would have been born in 1970. What person born in 1970s Philadelphia says stuff like “I do believe” and “suits me fine?” It’s like Cronin got so caught up in recreating King’s Mother Abigail, who was supposed to have been born in Nebraska at the end of the 19th century, that he lifted her patterns of speech and transplanted them onto the character of Ida for no other reason than that they are both elderly black women.

Another inexplicable and weird vernacular thing I noticed: instead of using normal curse words, the characters say “Flyers!”. This is never explained.

I only have one question: WHY?

3. The dialogue is painful.

Just trust me on this one.

4. The plot is repetitive and boring.

The characters nearly get killed by vampires — but barely squeak by! — every. single. chapter. There are also long, plodding descriptions of where the characters are walking and what, exactly, they are thinking about as they walk. The characters are so dull as to be forgettable, and I found myself rooting for them to all be eaten by vampires. Also, did I mention this book is a million pages long?

*****

Perhaps alone, each of these issues would have been surmountable. But together, they added up to a book that I couldn’t truck with, and thus The Passage has been relegated to the proverbial dustheap of my Kindle. Have you read The Passage? Did you like it? I’m curious to hear if other people were as bothered by it as I was. If you haven’t read it, save yourself some time and pick up The Stand instead. You’re welcome.

Book review Monday: My Education, by Susan Choi

August 19, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

Susan Choi’s My Education is an enjoyable but often frustrating read. It’s enjoyable because Choi is a great writer with a keen understanding of complex human relationships, especially those relationships in which power dynamics are irredeemably skewed, but frustrating because of the maddeningly insecure and irritating main character, which, I suspect, was Choi’s intent. The book is about the frustration of loving someone more than he or she can love you back; so I suppose it makes sense that the reader should experience a similar sense of frustration while reading.

The book takes place at an unnamed Northeastern liberal arts college — there are references to gorges, so I’m guessing Cornell or its fictional clone — in which the main character, twenty-one year-old Regina Gottlieb, a grad student in English literature, becomes a teaching assistant to Nicholas Brodeur, a brilliant, enigmatic professor with a reputation for inappropriate contact with his undergraduate students. While working with Nicholas and his other teaching assistant at Nicholas’s grand house one afternoon, Regina comes into contact with Nicholas’s wife, Martha, a professor at the same university. Martha, who has just had a baby and is on maternity leave, instantly fascinates Regina, and soon after their first meeting, the two of them kiss at a dinner party. What happens from there is unexpected and quite dramatic: Regina and Martha embark upon a torrid affair, Regina becomes obsessed with Martha, things do not go as Regina had hoped, and Regina begins to throw her life away, piece by piece. Along the way, other people get involved, feelings are hurt, and several melodramatic gestures are made. I will keep my descriptions of the love triangles (and quadrangles) intentionally vague so as not to spoil the plot, but really, the main pairing the novel is concerned with is that between Martha and Regina.

What seems clear to the reader from the start is that this love affair between Martha and Regina is not going to work out. For one thing, Martha is still married to Nicholas. She has a baby, and a house, and a career. But more importantly, she is over a decade older than Regina and in a completely different stage of life. She has responsibilities. She understands what is realistic and what is not. Regina, on the other hand, is blindsided by her love for Martha, and will do nearly anything to keep her. Regina’s desperate longing for Martha reads as grasping, naive, and immature. We, as readers with some remove on the situation, can see how farfetched it would be for Martha, a married professor with a child to raise, to run off, permanently, with a twenty-one year-old girl, but Regina can’t see this. Choi does a fantastic job of conveying Regina’s frustration with Martha’s inability to return Regina’s feelings of uncomplicated love and loyalty. Regina thinks that she and Martha are fated to be together; Martha thinks of Regina as a thrilling — but ultimately short lived — sexual fling. This disconnect, this failure to see the relationship in the same terms, becomes the central tension of the novel.

Any amount of time later I’d far better understand what at that time I barely understood at all, though Martha might have approved of my incorrect, seafaring view of our progress: sometimes against the wind, sometimes with it, but always forward. She might have approved, in her maritime way, but she would have been equally wrong. We weren’t zigzagging forward but wildly seesawing, the ups ever higher, the downs ever lower, our fulcrum nailed smartly in place. Martha’s flights of hedonism — Martha’s brooding resolutions and remorse. Martha’s desire — Martha’s duty. I’d like to say I defied gravity just as often as feeling its snare, but my efforts were more likely spent clinging on with white knuckles to not be dislodged. Still, that was my heroism — my tenacious fidelity to her, though it was based on a grave misperception. I thought desire was duty. No trial could not be endured nor impediment smashed in desire’s holy service, or so I believed, with naive righteousness. I didn’t grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often do.

Regina wants Martha to acquiesce, to say out loud that they will be together, that they are the loves of each other’s lives, but Martha can’t do this. Martha constantly reminds Regina of her responsibilities, especially as a mother. Regina, meanwhile, feels as if Martha uses her duties as a mother and wife as a weapon to make Regina feel unimportant, to convey to her that her opinions or desires do not count as much because she is young and unencumbered. Regina can’t understand why Martha can’t throw everything away for the sake of pursuing love.

Years later, of course, Regina gains some perspective on her relationship with Martha. She narrates the story when she herself is a married mother, and now understands intimately the demands that were on Martha back when they undertook their affair:

Again I thought of Martha, and her very imperfect example of motherhood. And, though I might have expected to judge her more harshly, I found myself forgiving her instead, for those countless superiorities of hers, by which I’d felt crushed, which she turned out to have never possessed. She had not been infallible. The realization was melancholy instead of triumphant, and I remembered my confusion, a few years before, when I’d found myself having lunch in Manhattan at the same restaurant where amid untold glamour she’d treated me to my first oysters. The intervening decade alone could not have accounted for how small and out of style and even shabby it had somehow become.

One can be fooled into thinking the grown-up Regina has matured completely and left her old, desperate self behind; however, in the very last scenes of the book, Regina does something that made me question whether she learned anything from her disastrous affair with Martha, at all. Overall, My Education was a satisfying read, despite the ending, which felt pat, unrealistic, and deeply unsatisfying. I was frustrated that the character made the choices she made; but really, I was frustrated with Regina’s decision-making throughout the novel, so perhaps the ending is merely in keeping with who Regina fundamentally is, as a person.

I would recommend this novel for fans of university-based fiction and those who enjoy quiet, emotion-driven drama. There are no big twists, turns, or surprises here, but it is packed with emotionally resonant storytelling.

Book review Monday: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra

August 12, 2013 / Stephanie / 0 Comments

I’ve read several enjoyable, thought provoking, stick-in-your-craw-in-a-good-way books recently, including Stephen King’s The Stand, Susan Choi’s My Education, and Monica Ali’s In The Kitchen. Perhaps I will review some or all of these in the coming weeks. But today, I want to talk about a book that I can’t stop thinking about, even a week after finishing it: Anthony Marra’s spectacular novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

ACOVP (as I will abbreviate it) did not immediately suck me in. In fact, I started it a month ago, read ten pages or so, and then put it down, because I couldn’t engage with the story. In the meantime, I read several other books (see above) and then picked up ACOVP again, and this time, something clicked. After getting over an initial hump of confusion in the opening pages, I became completely lost in this book and its fascinating, sad, weird cast of characters, all of whom are trying, imperfectly, to navigate their way through a hellish and inescapable situation.

The story begins in 2004, in and around the city of Volchansk, Chechnya. In the opening scenes, a man, Akhmed, is helping a young girl, Havaa, escape from “the Feds,” the government forces who have kidnapped her father — believing him to have been colluding with Chechen separatist rebels — and are now looking for her, as well. Akhmed and Havaa were neighbors, and Akhmed is now the only adult left in the village who Havaa can rely upon. Not seeing any other options, Akhmed brings Havaa to Hospital No. 6, a bombed out wasteland with few supplies, which is staffed by one nurse, the ill-tempered Deshi, and one doctor, the bitter and haughty Sonja, an ethnic Russian who returned to her native Chechnya from London in 1996 to try to find her missing sister, and never left again. Akhmed, who trained as a doctor but was spectacularly unsuccessful — he is renowned as the worst doctor in Chechnya — offers his services in return for Sonja’s allowing Havaa to stay at the hospital, hidden away from the Feds. Sonja reluctantly agrees, given the hospital’s desperate need for extra hands, and so the story begins.

As we learn about the characters and how they are all connected through messy webs of birth and death, the novel flashes back in time to paint a startling, chilling picture of war-torn Chechnya. I was not familiar with Chechen history before reading this book, but Marra makes Chechnya’s troubled past vivid by showing how individual characters’ lives are shaped — and often stunted — by their homeland’s constant unrest. The primary narrative of the novel takes place in 2004, during the second Chechen War, which began in 1999 when Russian troops invaded Chechnya in response to the invasion of Dagestan by a Chechnya-based Islamist militant group. The war between Russian forces and Chechen separatists continued into 2009. The novel also looks back to the first Chechen War, which lasted from 1994 to 1996, also between Russian forces and Chechen separatists, and Marra looks back even further to Chechnya’s long, turbulent history of subjugation and war, including the mass deportation of Chechens to Central Asia during World War II. One of the characters, Khassan, is a historian who has written a long and painstakingly detailed history of Chechnya, beginning in prehistoric times. The novel describes Khassan’s difficulty in keeping his book up to date as Chechnya rapidly changed with the fall of the Soviet Union:

Everything did change, faster than his fingers could type. What he had been too cautious to hope for was pulled from his dreams and made real on the television screen. At that momentous hour on December 26, 1991, as he watched the red flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — the empire extending eleven time zones, from the Sea of Japan to the Baltic coast, encompassing more than a hundred ethnicities and two hundred languages; the collective whose security demanded the sacrifice of millions, whose Slavic stupidity had demanded the deportation of Khassan’s entire homeland; that utopian mirage cooked up by cruel young men who gave their mustaches more care than their morality; that whole horrid system that told him what he could be and do and think and say and believe and love and desire and hate, the system captained by Lenin and Zinoviev and Stalin and Malenkov and Beria and Molotov and Khrushchev and Kosygin and Mikoyan and Podgorny and Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko and Gorbachev, all of whom but Gorbachev he hated with a scorn no author should have for his subject, a scorn genetically encoded in his blood, inherited from his ancestors with their black hair and dark skin — as he watched that flag sink down the Kremlin flagpole for the final time, left limp by the windless sky, as if even the weather wanted to impart on communism this final disgrace, he looped his arms around his wife and son and he held them as the state that had denied him his life quietly died.

What I loved about this book, apart from Marra’s skill in bringing human context to the horrors of war in Chechnya, was the beautiful, evocative descriptions of places. Marra’s writing allows the reader to picture, perfectly clearly, places where the reader has never been or even dreamed of going. For instance, I loved this description of a nightclub in Chechnya where one of the characters, an ethnic Russian named Natasha, used to frequent:

She spent her Fridays at a nightclub called Nightclub, situated in what had been an aviation assembly plant. The floor spread across the eight-story hangar, wide enough to contain the gyrations of half of Chechnya. Nightclub had never reached, and never would reach, capacity. After downing drinks at the bar, Natasha and her friends shimmied their way to the center of the hangar. There, red velvet ropes created a ten-square-meter dance floor where the young, well-dressed, and secular could press against each other, shrieking and shaking in epileptic spasms of floodlight, freedom found in the ruins of empire.

Finally, this book is remarkable for its ability to meld humor with tragedy. The characters’ lives, in many ways, are hopeless, because they are in an impossible situation with no conceivable escape. But there are still moments of levity, and even joy. One of my favorite conversations in the book takes place between Sonja, the foreign-educated surgeon, and Akhmed, an unskilled doctor from the village. Akhmed, who is not stupid but who is rather unsophisticated, reveals to Sonja that he thinks the President of the United States is named Ronald McDonald. Sonja heaps scorn upon him, but later, feels badly and tries to apologize.

“I’m sorry I called you an idiot.”

“You only implied it. Do you want to make it up to me?”

“Not really,” she said.

“Then tell me who Ronald McDonald is.”

“Very soon I’ll have to apologize for calling you an idiot again.”

“Imply,” he reminded.

“No, this time I’ll likely come out and say it.”

“I already know he isn’t the American president.”

“I think you’ll be disappointed.”

“I almost always am.”

“He’s a clown.”

“A clown?”

“A clown who sells hamburgers.”

“Does he cook the hamburgers?”

“Does it matter?”

“I may be an idiot,” he said gravely, “but I would never eat a hamburger cooked by a clown.”

There are plenty of other instances of dialogues that crackle with dry wit, despite the horrifying backdrop to the conversations. These moments of lightness are part of what makes this book, which otherwise might be bogged down in doom and gloom, readable, enjoyable, and lovable.

Highly recommended for one and all. Here is what the NYT had to say, in case you’re interested.