Hamnet

 Fiction by Maggie O'Farrell

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

William Shakespeare, the real historical person, had two daughters called Susanna and Judith with his wife Anne (or maybe Agnes.) Apparently, he also had a son who died as a child, and the name of that son was Hamnet, which may be considered the same name as "Hamlet." 

This novel is about that family.

With a book is subtitled "a novel of the plague," obviously one can't expect a happy story; still it is a very well-written and emotionally affecting novel. 

American Dirt

Fiction by Jeanine Cummins

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

I read a lot of good things about this book before I got a hold of it. Everyone was talking about this novel. It’s even an Oprah’s book club selection, which I didn’t realize was still a thing. (Who knew Oprah still had a book club? Didn’t that disappear in like 1999?)

Anyways my point is that this book had a lot of hype to live up to, and I doubted it would be THAT good. But good news! I was wrong.

I knew the story was about immigration, and quite honestly I prepared myself to be preached to. But fortunately, it was a STORY first and foremost. 

The novel follows a Mexican woman and her son who are escaping serious trouble in Acapulco and hope to get to El Norte, which is what they call the USA. (Incidentally I think “El Norte” would have been a better title, but what do I know?)

This was a great story!

The Revolution of Every Day

Fiction by Cari Luna. 

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

In the mid nineties, a group of people who have been living in (and taking good care of) abandoned buildings in New York City try to defend their “squatters’ rights” to hold on to the homes they’ve been in for many years.  The city wants to tear the buildings down for “development,” but the squatters try to take both a legal and physical stand against the "establishment." (I'm using a lot of quote marks here. I think the weirdly pretentious air of the book affected me. These people were kind of self-righteous for a bunch of homeless hippies. Still, they were interesting.)

This was a strange story. I liked the characters and wanted to know what happened to them, but ended up rather disappointed. 

The Girls at 17 Swann Street

Fiction by Yara Zgheib.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

I wasn't sure what this book would be about based on the title; what is this house at 17 Swann Street and why do only girls live there? I thought perhaps the address mentioned contains a block of student apartments, or a brothel? But 17 Swann Street is not a house; it's a treatment center, and the patients there are all suffering from eating disorders. So... that's why they are all girls....

This book contains a sometimes-too-realistic portrait of what it's like to have anorexia, and how hard it is to recover.

We Must Be Brave

Fiction by Frances Liardet

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Oh, this was a lovely story!

At the beginning there is Ellen, living in a small English village in 1940 trying to cope with various war evacuees. Ellen finds a motherless little girl called Pamela and takes the child in, although she has told her husband from the beginning of her marriage that she doesn't want children, knowing that he cannot physically father any. When her husband protests, Ellen explains slightly scornfully, "I don't want children. I want Pamela."

This story resonated with me a good deal. A mother's love is an amazing and fierce love, a very personal love of a particular human child. It doesn't matter how many children she has, a mother loves each one for him or herself. That is why it's ridiculous for people to say, in the terrible event of a loss, "Well, at least she has other children. She won't miss that one." But she will. She will always miss that one.

I'm getting a little maudlin with this description, but this book really affected me emotionally. It is not a war story, or a thriller, which I think maybe the negative reviewers I read on b&n.com were disappointed by. It's a life story instead. I loved it.

How It Happened

Fiction by Michael Koryta

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Rob Barrett is an FBI agent who specializes in confessions; he knows both how to get suspects to confess, and how to tell if the confessions he hears are true or false. Or at least he is supposed to know all of this, and it's on the basis of this expertise that he gets assigned to return to the small Maine town where he spent summers with his grandfather as a kid, searching for what really happened to a pair of eighteen-year-olds who are presumed dead.

But when Barrett finally gets what he is sure is a true confession from an unreliable girl called Kimmy, he can't understand why her story doesn't seem to check out. Is Kimmy lying again, like everyone thinks she is? Or is something else going on?

I also read by this author: Those Who Wish Me Dead

Little

Fiction by Edward Carey

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was an interesting story about a diminutive servant girl in eighteenth-century Switzerland and France with special talents. I enjoyed it a lot because I liked the characters, but it was a bit odd.

Hunger

Subtitled: A Memoir of (My) Body
Nonfiction by Roxane Gay

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

This is definitely a memoir of the author's body, and hers alone. I think she's trying to make a statement about women in general and our love-hate relationship with our own fat-thin bodies, and I get that, but it doesn't really fly well. It's mostly a navel-gazing type of book, which is not my favorite style. Even though the navel she's gazing at does look quite a lot like my own, as a "woman of size" in a world that tells me to take up less space.

Really the only interesting thing in this book is what she says about the (annoyingly frequent) claim that inside every fat woman is a skinny woman trying to get out: "Yes; I ate that skinny woman. She was delicious but unsatisfying." HA!

The Turn of Midnight

Fiction by Minette Walters

https://www.barnesandnoble.com
This is the sequel to The Last Hours, a historical apocalyptic book I read last year. Yes, there can be a historical apocalyptic story-- people during the Dark Ages who experienced the The Black Death were pretty certain it was the end of the world, I think. When over half the population just dies, it's pretty darn scary.

This was a good sequel; I had really wanted to know what would happen to the people in the previous story, and the wrap-up done in this book was satisfying. I don't think the author plans another book in this series, but I could be wrong.

I also read recently by this author: The Shape of Snakes

The Three-Body Problem

Fiction by Cixin Liu

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

This story is science fiction written in Chinese and translated to English. I had a lot of trouble following it and kept getting confused or bored.

I borrowed this book from a friend who said it was really good, and so I tried to like it, but if it takes me two weeks to sort-of finish a book, I'm obviously not enjoying it. I think maybe I'm not smart enough?

The Mother's Promise

Fiction by Sally Hepworth

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Alice Stanhope is a single mother of Zoe, an emotionally fragile teenager. She has no other family, besides an alcoholic brother she can't possibly depend on. Zoe's father is "not in the picture," and Alice has very few friends. So when Alice is diagnosed with cancer, it falls to a kind nurse and a hospital social worker to "support" her, which they do with varying degrees of helpfulness. 

(For example, it was helpful to answer Alice's phone during chemo and try to straighten things out with Zoe's school. It was NOT helpful to have Zoe forced into foster care while Alice was having surgery.)

This was a really good book!

I also read recently by this author:  The Secrets of Midwives

The Readymade Thief

Fiction by Augustus Rose.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Lee is an eighteen-year-old girl all alone in the world, and she is indeed a thief. Only some of her many troubles are her own fault, and her story is quite absorbing.

I really liked this book most of the time, but some of it was hard to understand. It seemed to keep trying to be an intellectual story, or a puzzle story, when really it worked best as a character story, I thought.

Educated

Nonfiction by Tara Westover.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Well, this must be memoir month for me! This is the fourth one I've read recently.

I borrowed this from my sister-in-law, who assured me it was really good, although the brief synopsis-- "a story of a woman's educational journey" --sounded terrible. Fortunately, it was not terrible.

This story, like The Sound of Gravel, was about a girl growing up in a crazy fringe-group-Mormon family. But Tara's father was not a polygamist; he was just a paranoid fundamentalist who wanted to live off the grid. Tara's family was afraid of being under the government's control, which meant avoiding many things, such as schools and doctors. Tara and her siblings were "homeschooled," which to her mom and dad meant, "taught to read and then put to work."

Just like the other pair of similar memoirs I just read (All at Sea and Happiness) I couldn't help comparing these two books as well. So this story was good, but not quite as good as the other one.

(By the way, I'm aware that normal Mormons are not like Tara's or Ruthie's family, any more than normal Christians are like the crazies who protest soldiers' funerals. All the real Mormons I've ever met are perfectly nice folks.)

The Sound of Gravel

Nonfiction by Ruth Wariner.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

This was a really good memoir! Ruthie was born in a polygamist colony in Mexico, the 39th of her father's 42 children. Her father was killed shortly after her birth over a religious dispute-- the murderer, her uncle, was dubbed the "Mormon Manson"-- but her mother married right back into another polygamist family in the group, making Ruthie the fourth (I think!) of her mother's eventual ten children.

This story is well-told and really makes you understand what went on in this rather crazy family.

All at Sea

Nonfiction by Decca Aitkenhead

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Another memoir. I read this right after Heather Harpham's Happiness, and couldn't help comparing the two.

This story is also about an artistic-type woman who is a later-in-life mother of two young children, and she seemed similar to Heather in personality. But Decca has a very different story.

Decca is on holiday with her family at the seaside and her three-year-old son Jake swims out too far in the ocean. Her partner Tony goes out to save his son, and drowns in the process. It's a shocking thing.

This was a pretty good memoir too, but not quite as good as the other.

The Book That Matters Most

Fiction by Ann Hood.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Ava's husband Jim has just left her for another woman after some twenty-five years together. The children are on her side, aghast at their father's betrayal, but it doesn't help her much as they are both abroad, one studying in Italy and the other in the Peace Corps in Africa. So Ava joins a book group for solace, and the group is embarking upon the theme, "The Book That Matters Most." Each book club member will choose a book that they think is the most important to them personally and have everyone in the group read it.

Personally I find this theme a little grandiose, and in general I dislike being asked things like, "What is your FAVORITE book?" or "What book has influenced you the MOST?" I just love too many books to choose just one, and also it seems like one is pressured to pick a Classic or Intellectual Book of some kind in order to not look like a dullard. And these people in this story did just that, almost invariably choosing books your high school English teacher would make you read. (Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, The Catcher in the Rye, etc.) Still, one character does remark cheekily, "Mark Twain's definition of a classic is a book you have heard of but never read."

But Ava's book choice is a personal one, a reminder of her troubled past, and throughout the book club year we learn about her life, and about her daughter Maggie, who is indeed abroad, but she isn't actually studying. And will the faithless Jim come crawling back? We can only hope...

Mischling

Fiction by Affinity Konar.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

This was an almost-poetic novel about children in Auschwitz, if you can believe that. The title refers to a German word for half-breed or mixed blood, something the Nazis detested, but the main characters are not really mischlings at all. Sasha and Pearl are a pair of identical twins, Polish Jews plucked from the cattle car by the infamous Dr. Mengele for study in his laboratory.

The story is both beautiful and terrible, and I feared to finish it because I hated the thought of these poor girls' destruction. (Even though, you have to expect that in  Holocaust book, I know.) Even at the liberation of Auschwitz it still looked really bad for Pearl and Sasha, and that was the point I'd been hoping for things to get better. But the good news is that they don't both die....

I would recommend this book, as long as you know it's very sad, but that there is hope at the end.

Harmony

Fiction by Carolyn Parkhurst.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

Alexandra Hammond is near the end of her rope in dealing with her "on the spectrum" daughter, 14-year-old Tilly. Then a charismatic man called Scott Bean offers her a hope of helping Tilly, but it will require her family to change everything and commit to a completely new way of life. Alexandra and her husband are hopeful, but you can tell from the beginning that this is not going to work out.

The story is told from the perspective of Iris, Tilly's younger and "neurotypical" sister, and (interestingly) in the second person from Alexandra's point of view, which draws the reader in.

It's a really good story with fascinating characters. There's a blurb from Jodi Picoult on the cover, who is one of my favorite authors. and this writer reminds me a lot of her. I recommend this one!

The Summer Wives

Fiction by Beatriz Williams.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com

I thought I'd read other books by this author, but apparently I haven't. Well, I will now! This book was really good.

On a small island off the cost of New England, there is a sharp divide between the summer "Families" who vacation there, and the year-round residents, who are lobstermen and working-class folks of mostly Portuguese descent. In 1931, when the story begins, the two sides come briefly together in a way that will have disastrous consequences for years to come. The story stretches to 1969, when Miranda Thomas returns to the island as a grown-up movie star, ready to confront the past.

I'd definitely recommend this book.

Lying in Wait

Fiction by Liz Nugent

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

This story starts with a murder in 1980. Andrew, or more likely his wife Lydia, kill a woman called Annie Doyle and hide her body in the first few pages. There's no mystery about it; this is not a spoiler. The story is about how this terrible act affects the couple, their son Laurence, and Annie's sister.

It's a dark book but fascinating to read. I didn't expect the ending.

I also read by this author: Unraveling Oliver (Apparently I never posted this book here on my blog, but I know I read it last year and it was also dark but fascinating.)