New Century Reading

American Street

I was intrigued by the plot summary provided by the publisher for American Street, which focused on how teenage Fabiola Toussaint, American-born but having lived most of her life in Haiti, is now returning to the U.S. with her Haitian-born mother to live with family in Detroit. But when they arrive in New York, Fabiola's mother is detained by immigration, while Fabiola is allowed to continue to Detroit without her.

Obviously this would be very traumatic, and the plot summary hones in on that. I expected to find a young adult novel about a teenage girl going through a massive cultural shock as she adjusts to a change in life from Haiti to Detroit, and I expected to find a deep look at immigration policies in the U.S. and how they affect families.

There's some of that in this book, but not nearly enough. Once Fabiola reaches Detroit, there's a too-brief moment where she tries to adjust, then bam--she's an American teenager. An American teenager who keeps a Vodou altar in her bedroom, yes, but still. And as far as her mother is concerned, her detention appears mainly to be a variation on a deus ex machina, in which the detention in turn leads to something else (not going into spoiler land here). Otherwise, it's just a blip in the story. 

Instead, we get the requisite teen romance of which we have zero idea why the two are attracted to each other; we have Fabiola's cousins, who are one-dimensional at best; we have drugs and guns and danger in Detroit; we have abusive romantic relationships. The whole thing strains to have so much plot that characters and what should be the heart of the story are lost. I found the ending not terribly plausible, especially since the plot seemed to force it in one direction. 

It would have been so much more interesting if the book had just focused more on Fabiola and her mother's dilemma, and maybe even more about Fabiola's life in Haiti and how it contrasted with Detroit. It's also possible that my reading this book right after The Hate U Give was a mistake on my part, in that the latter was so much more character-driven, which in turn kept the plot from being too sensational. 

 

The Hate U Give

This book has been getting lots of hype lately, and for once, the hype is correct. It's a young adult novel with a plot ripped from the headlines: Teenaged Starr is in a car with her friend Khalil when they're pulled over by police. They're both black, and Starr has been trained by her parents in how to behave in this situation, but it appears Khalil didn't have that talk. Khalil, unarmed, ends up shot dead by the police officer. 

But even though the topic is, unfortunately, all too relevant, author Thomas doesn't let the plot run roughshod over the characters. Instead, Starr and her family, and their relationship with the rough neighborhood they live in, take priority over the plot, and that's what makes this book work. We watch Starr struggle to understand how people could think Khalil deserved to die because there are rumors he sold drugs; we see her try to balance her life in this neighborhood with her privileged schooling 45 minutes from home, a school possible because her mother is a doctor and they can afford a better school than the local one; we learn along with Starr how the different people in her life affect one another, and the ramifications those effects can have. Most of all, we root for Starr, who's in the horrific position of being the only non-police-officer witness to this tragedy, and what that ends up meaning to her.

The title comes from Tupac Shakur, who had THUG LIFE as a tattoo. He saw the phrase as an acronym that stood for The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody--meaning what society gives to youth ends up hurting everyone. That's the overarching theme for this book.

There are some parts where I felt like the author was straining to put as much context in as possible, and there were some conversations between Starr and her white boyfriend that didn't quite feel real, but overall, this book really worked. And it has a lot to say and to teach. If you can read this book and not be moved by it, and not be challenged in how you view race relations in America today, well...I don't know what to say.

Displacement

Displacement would make a wonderful companion to Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? As I said when I reviewed the latter, if you have elderly people in your life or plan to become elderly yourself, you should read this. Heck, read them both.

Lucy Knisley wrote and illustrated this brief book about goes with her very elderly grandparents on a cruise to act as caretaker and guide. This was no small undertaking, as her grandparents were both physically and intellectually struggling, so getting them on two planes and keeping track of them on a large ship was no small task. Even when Lucy tried to get some time to herself and take a little snorkling trip, the plans she made for someone else to watch over the grands (as she calls them) go awry. Caretaking is a huge commitment at any time, and having two 90-somethings out of their routine and home space is even more trying. (The cruise was the grands' idea, by the way, and Lucy stepped in because she worried about their safety on their own.)

As the cruise goes along, Lucy spends evenings after the grands go to sleep washing her grandfather's urine-stained pants and reading a memoir he wrote about his time in WWII. And she reflects on getting older, and her family and the family's history. There are parts that are very funny, and there are parts that may have generated a lump in my throat.

It's a quick read, one that can be done in one sitting. The illustrations are colorful and sometimes whimsical, and do a wonderful job complementing the text. I can't recommend this one enough.

The Tidal Zone

I have mixed feelings about this book. It's the story of the Goldschmidt family, told by Adam, dad and husband. He's a would-be academic, part-time college instructor, and mostly stay-at-home dad to two daughters, Miriam and Rose, while wife Emma works as a doctor. One terrifying day, he gets a call from 15-year-old Miriam's school, saying there's been an "incident." The incident is that Miriam stopped breathing.

To the hospital they go, and after two weeks they know very little about what caused the incident (which reappears in the hospital on occasion) or how to prevent it. Finally the doctors figure a few things out, but not enough to give comfort, and they send Miriam home, where Adam and Emma must learn to cope with this uncertain and terrifying new future.

"Harrowing" is kind of a cliche when it comes to books, but parts of this book truly are; if you're a parent, the thought of some barely known, not-preventable and possibly fatal condition affecting your child will make your own heart nearly stop. Author Sarah Moss' writing about this is direct and terrifying. She's also excellent at exploring the role of the stay-at-home dad, and she bravely faces what can happen to a marriage under this kind of tension (as well as career tension on both sides).

However, the book itself is too long. There are two subplots that, while interesting on their own, drag the story down. They act as metaphors for the major story, I get that, but how much metaphor is necessary when the main story is so compelling?

Still, I'm not sorry I read it and was never tempted to drop it. 

Jane Austen Read-All-A-long

James is hosting a Jane Austen Read All A-Long, starting July 1st. He's going to read Austen's novels in order of publication, one per month. He's a congenial host who doesn't demand an all-or-nothing approach; if you feel like reading Pride and Prejudice or Emma and no other, he's cool with that. So if you're up for some Austen conversation, it'll be starting next month. I'm going to try and do all the books, but you know, sometimes life happens. So we shall see. There are a couple I've never read (bad Austen fan), so this might light a fire under me.

Woman No. 17

I wasn't wild about Edan Lepucki's debut novel, California, but then, I'm a hard sell on dystopia. I did like her writing, and when I saw her second novel was not dystopic in the least, I thought I'd give it a try. 

I have to report mixed results. This novel is told from two POVs: Lady Daniels (Lady is a childhood nickname that stuck), whose marriage is falling apart, who has sons from two different relationships, the older of which is mute, but not deaf. The other POV is that of the nanny Lady hires to care for her younger son while Lady writes a memoir about her older son. Esther, or S, as she asks to be called, takes the job for motivations unknown to Lady. But that's fair, because there's a lot going on with Lady that S doesn't know. And although they don't know it right away, they both have significant Mommy issues with their own mothers.

So there's conflicted parenthood, conflicted women, conflicted daughters, and around all of this, the art scene. It should be right up my alley, kind of a good pairing with Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, which I loved. There's also some excellent writing, zippy imagery, darkly funny lines, and some wildly honest writing about being a mother.

But. Here's the funny thing. I figured I'd be most interested in Lady's story, since I'm closer in age and life stage to her, but by the end, she annoyed me. She's somewhat unlikable, usually a plus to me--love a good unlikable character--but she just feels shallow and whiny. In contrast, S is a young 20-something who has plenty of issues, but somehow she was far more interesting to me. Even though chapters alternated between the two, it's pretty much Lady's book. I ended wanting more of S, a lot more, and S's ending felt just dropped into place rather than fully fleshed out.

Yet Lepucki's writing is strong enough that I will definitely read her next book. And kudos to her for not just recycling her work in California, but striking out into new territory.

Lucky Boy

In Lucky Boy, Solimar Valdez is a young woman from a going-nowhere village in Mexico. She wants to get into the U.S. and find a better future. After taking a dangerous and horrific route, she manages to cross the border and meet up with a cousin in San Francisco. The cousin helps her by putting her to work as a house cleaner, and gives Soli stern warnings about not getting caught by police. But it's not long before Soli realizes that she's pregnant, the result of a brief tryst on the journey from Mexico. She thinks about getting an abortion, but can't bring herself to do it, and soon looks forward to having her own child.

Kavya Reddy is married and wants nothing more than to become a mother. But to her distress, getting pregnant turns out not to be a simple thing for her. After giving artificial insemination a try, she and her husband, Rishi, decide to try the adoption route, going through the foster care system.

Can you see where this is headed?

Sure enough, Soli's undocumented status catches up with her, and her baby boy Ignacio (Nacho for short) is taken away from her when she's sent to detention. After all, the baby is an American citizen, while she is not. Kavya and Rishi are given Nacho for foster care, with warnings that it may not be a permanent placement, depending on the outcome of Soli's legal woes.

It sounds a bit like Jodi Picoult's territory, but thankfully author Shanthi Sekaran is miles above Picoult in writing. Here she gives us two mothers who both desperately love and want this little boy. One mother has the means to give him pretty much the American dream; the other doesn't, but loves him so fiercely that it does make a reader (this reader, anyway) reflect on whether strong maternal love is enough to make up for lack of amenities and options. 

Then there are other issues; should a baby be separated from his biological mother, even if they have different passports? Is that fair or right? Is it fair or right that because Kavya and Rishi are more privileged, they should be able to take this baby from its biological mother? But if they also provide a deeply loving, nurturing environment, does that make them better qualified?

These are all unsettling questions, and obviously very timely. It's a tough, gut-wrenching situation, made worse by the fact that neither side is easily the favorite or the completely best choice. 

I did have a few qualms. The book is longer than it needed to be, and included unnecessary detail about fostering a toddler (I'm glad the author did her research, but she didn't really need to show it all to us). At times, it teeters into melodrama territory, and some of the action (including how Soli ended up in detention) just didn't really work. But those are minor quibbles. This is a book well worth the read.

The Book of Joan

There is a whooooooooooole lot of stuff going on in The Book of Joan. The book takes place in an unspecified time in the future, where wars and environmental devastation have made Earth virtually uninhabitable. Survivors are on board a spaceship circling the planet, continuing to drain it of whatever resources it can still find. The people on board have become hairless and sexless, essentially creepy sentient blobs. We're introduced to Christine, who tells us in a barely suppressed fury, of the things that have brought humanity to this point. She also tells us about Joan.

Joan is, of course, a futuristic Joan of Arc. It's believed by most that she was burned to death by the forces of Jean de Men, the now-evil leader of the spaceship. However, as it turns out, she's not dead; she's still on Earth. Christine hears that Joan is still alive and begins plotting to get her on board to bring Jean de Men down.

So, dystopia mixed with a saint. Joan here is no saint, but she is unearthly in ways that terrified her family as a child, and in ways she herself doesn't understand until much later.

Great premise. And author Yuknavitch is an excellent writer. But oh, my, there is just so much going on, and the sheer rage from the characters never abates long enough for the reader to catch a breath. There are some weirdnesses; sometimes the book is told from Christine's third-person POV, then from her first-person POV; other times,it's told from Joan's third-person POV, then first person. Not sure why that was necessary. It's distracting.

The meaning of nature and the environment gets a lot of coverage here, sometimes to the point that it slows down the narrative. Then, in the last third, some seriously weird shit begins to happen that left me feeling entirely meh. Your mileage may vary. Lots of people love this book, and I am somewhat tired of dystopia (hell, we're on the verge of living it right now).

I hadn't read anything by Luknavitch before, and while I thought there were many amazing passages of sheerly wonderful writing, overall, the book just left me shaking my head. And wanting to read this about Joan of Arc instead.

Fever Dream

Fever Dream is a short, read-it-in-a-day volume, and that's appropriate. Like a real fever dream, it's intense, and not something you'd want to drag out any longer than necessary.

Which is not to say it's not worth reading. I could hardly put it down. The premise is deceptively simple. A woman is sick in bed, dying, and she's talking to a young boy. He is not her son. How they're connected, how she became sick, why she's dying, and what happens along the way, that makes up their conversation (the book is entirely in dialogue, but it works). And what, exactly, did happen? Something mysterious. Something related to an environmental disaster.

Or is it? Or is she hallucinating? Is any of this real?

There are clues and repeated motifs. The woman thinks repeatedly about "rescue distance": the distance required to rescue her young daughter at any given time. Ropes tightening. A green house. Horses. Ducks. All in a style that's both hallucinatory and hyper-realistic at the same time.

This is a book that continually forces the reader to question what's happening, what's real, what's not, in a good way. Even after finishing it, I'm not entirely sure what I think happened--but it did make me think.

Anything is Possible

I so loved Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton, and I couldn't wait to read this one after hearing that many of the people mentioned in Barton would appear here, including Lucy herself. I even reread Barton in preparation (and loved it even more the second time around, if that's possible). So maybe my hopes were just too high.

Like Lucy Barton, this collection of interwoven stories is a quiet one, often with what's not being said as important as what's being said. But when we learned about the characters in the new book in Barton, we saw them through Barton's eyes, through her memories, and through her difficult, shifting memories involving her family. Now we see the characters through their own eyes, and yes, we gain insight on some of the things the earlier book touched on.

But it felt a little too disparate to me. There were some stories I liked very much. There's a very creepy one about an affluent couple who are keeping some disturbing secrets, and another where Lucy comes home to visit after a 17-year absence, and her brother and sister have quite different feelings about her visit. The dynamics are tense and frustrating and perfect.

But then there's a meandering story that takes place in a bed-and-breakfast, and a story about the kind janitor who used to let Lucy stay after school instead of going home right away because he suspected something wasn't right at home. The story strains to get to its conclusion. And the less said about the closeted gay farmer story, the better.

Ah well. Strout is still one of my favorite authors, thanks to Barton and Olive Kitteredge. I'll keep the faith and await her next book.