Notice

Hello dear friends,

I am suspending my blog after posting weekly for 10 years. It has been a fun ride. I have had books on my mind every day since I began accepting advanced reader copies.

 I have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to gracefully end the endeavor, and I finally decided that I would just have to quit. 

Thank you for your kind attention. I hope that you have enjoyed my meanderings. Best Wishes. Miriam

A Good Neighborhood

By Therese Anne Fowler
St. Martins     2020
311 pages     Literary

 Well this is an interesting conundrum. I really wanted to like A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler. I tried extremely hard to like it. Here is a synopsis of the book. In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son. Xavier is headed to college in the fall, and after years of single parenting, Valerie is facing the prospect of an empty nest. All is well until the Whitmans move in next door—an apparently traditional family with new money, ambition, and a secretly troubled teenaged daughter. Thanks to his thriving local business, Brad Whitman is something of a celebrity around town, and he's made a small fortune on his customer service and charm, while his wife, Julia, escaped her trailer park upbringing for the security of marriage and homemaking. Their new house is more than she ever imagined for herself, and who wouldn't want to live in Oak Knoll? With little in common except a property line, these two very different families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over a historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.

 I was so intrigued by the structure. In the book, the neighbors in that “good” neighborhood serve as a Greek chorus, and just like all neighbors in “tight knit” communities, they seem to know the details before anyone else. (Frankly, that is why I moved out of a small community.) And, I might add, as the storytellers, the neighbors are proud to know the details and to be telling the story. This is a neighborhood much like mine—middle class, established, fifty to eighty year-old homes, educated population, pretty much white. The Book Page reviewer says of the structure: “Throughout, a chorus of neighbors intrudes to speculate and offer background information, an intriguing mix of omniscient narration and gossipy lamentation. Although the transitions between the chorus and the other perspectives aren’t always seamless, this structure adds depth to the sense of Shakespearean tragedy ... fast-paced and thoughtful.”

Fowler excuses herself in the acknowledgement as a white woman trying to speak from the perspective of the two African American residents—mother and son. She says that she did her homework, as was recommended by author, Zadie Smith. At the same time, the characters all seem to be one-dimensional and to a certain extent to be caricatures. Particularly Brad Whitman, who bandies around his success as a businessman for all to see. He is a creepy step-father to Juniper, the teen-aged daughter of his wife, Julia. He thinks that he can have her in the same way that he can have a fancy car, a huge house, and six television sets. He appears as a character without depth, as does his wife Julia, although Julia, in the end, shows some guts and leaves the man.

Xavier, the bi-racial teenager is a striver. Yet, he can never get beyond the fact that his mother is black and his deceased father was white. And Juniper, the teenage girl in the story has to deal with her own stigma—that her parents made her take a purity oath when she was fourteen. Please!

Yeah, I didn’t like any of these characters. Didn’t like the plot. I think basically all I liked was the structure, and I kept reading because the structure fascinated me. The reviewer in the New York Times, Kiley Reid, who is the author of Such a Fun Age, helped me put into words what I was feeling. After having been burned by the negative cultural reviews of American Dirt, I perhaps was extra sensitive to the cultural inferences and assumptions in A Good Neighborhood, so I was receptive to what Reid wrote. Reid says, “’A Good Neighborhood’ is a pitch-perfect example of how literary endeavors. . .can limit a novel’s understanding of human behavior.” Her review is quite scathing, and frankly, I had to agree with it. She also says, “But her novel breaks the promise of its premise, revealing weaknesses in both craft and conviction. In the same way that activism cannot be sold for $26, black characters cannot be bought when they lack depth and accessibility.”

Read A Good Neighborhood if you are interested in reading a book about good intentions, good development, but very poor understanding of cultural norms.

Wow, No Thank You

By Samantha Irby

Random House     2020

311 pages     Humor/Essays

Discovering Samantha Irby is like being transported to humor heaven. Filled with zingy one-liners about all facets of life, Irby is in rare form in Wow, No Thank You. The essays in the book cover an enormous number of topics, from Crone’s disease, to marrying a woman with children, to house repair, to being an introvert,  to urination and poop. Nothing is taboo to Irby, and everything in life can be a source of humor.

The other day, my sister said to me, “You laugh inappropriately, you know!” Well, I have to tell you I did a lot of inappropriate laughing while reading Wow, No Thank You. Frankly, my favorite people are those who don’t take themselves too seriously, and if there is one thing that can be said about Samantha Irby is that she doesn’t take herself too seriously.

My favorite essay concerns her move to Kalamazoo. Wait??? Kalamazoo??? I live in Kalamazoo. How did I not know about her? Then, as I looked closer, she started to look familiar to me. Had I actually met her sometime? She describes herself as a “middle-aged depressed lady with chronic diarrhea.” Well, many of my friends are middle-aged depressed ladies with chronic diarrhea. Finally, when I watched an interview on You Tube, I realized that while I hadn’t met her, I instantly identified with her work and her views on life. On the other hand, I think that I may have met her wife, who is a Kalamazoo school social worker and works part time at our neighborhood bookstore, Book Bug. Actually, the book launch was supposed to happen at the Book Bug this week. By the way, you can buy an autographed copy of Wow, No Thank You at This is a Bookstore, which is part of the Book Bug.  Kalamazoo friends, run, don’t walk, over there. Grab a copy before they are gone. They will curbside deliver it to you.

One of her favorite topics is her introversion. She says that she used to party a lot. “The only reason I stopped is because I got too old to do it right.” Being an introvert has become her theme for the interviews that have come since the book was released on Tuesday of this week. Because of Covid-19, she hasn’t been able to do any book launch events. Therefore, there are many, many online interviews. Here are a couple of interviews that I found especially pleasing: a written interview and a video interview.

When asked about how she was surviving being housebound for the past few weeks, Irby mentioned  that she is the master of social distancing, so being stuck at home was not a problem for her. What being housebound offered for me was the opportunity to revel in Irby’s crazy humor, quirky thinking, and downright gross musings. Would that I had the kind of verbal guts Samantha Irby has! You gotta love her! The New York Times reviewer absolutely adores her writing.

Irby says that she has had trouble making friends in Kalamazoo. Samantha, I want to be your friend. Find me on Facebook.

The Hope of Glory

By Jon Meacham

Convergent Books    2020

112 pages     Spiritual

The historian and author, Jon Meacham, is a frequent speaker at Episcopal churches. In his book, The Hope of Glory, these meditations on the final words of Jesus were presented at Good Friday services in Meacham’s church in New York City. The book contains a prologue telling about how Meacham came to write these sermons, or meditations. In the prologue, he also describes how the words purported to come from Jesus came to be important in scripture and in the foundations of the Christian church.  He says, “I am sharing these meditations in the hope that a sense of history and an appreciation of theology might help readers make more sense of the cross in a world too much given to the competing forces of hostile skepticism, blind acceptance, or remote indifference.” He is interested in “illumination, not conversion.”

Meacham then devotes one meditation to each of the seven phrases or sentences that Jesus spoke from the cross. He outlines the traditional historical reasoning for why each of those phrases were spoken and why these particular phrases are included in the scriptures. Within each meditation, Meacham elaborates on what he considers to be the theological meanings for each phrase.

I read each of the chapters as a daily meditation, and found that Meacham has a very similar outlook to his faith as I do. At one point, he acknowledges “that we cannot know everything does not mean we can know nothing.” He also suggests that “for the thoughtful believer, then, there is nothing more certain than the reality of uncertainty, nothing more natural than doubt, which is perhaps thirty seconds younger than faith itself.”

I found myself underlining many of Meacham’s thoughts as I pondered these last words of Jesus. By reading some every day, I was able to really think through his ideas and come to my own understandings. Beyond Meacham’s meditations on Jesus’ words, I was able to have a Lenten time of growth in the midst of anxiety and mountains of bad news. As Meacham says, “Light can neither emanate from, nor enter into a closed mind.” For this time of meditation and insight, I am extremely grateful.

A couple of other things. When I was a girl, my Good Friday always included a presentation of the oratorio of The Seven Last Words of Christ by Theodore Dubois. My father, a tenor, always sang the tenor solos, wherever we were. A very fond memory. Here is a beautiful YouTube presentation from a church in Texas.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that the Kirkus reviewer complained that the theology of The Hope of Glory  is very Episcopalian, and said that the book was a “middling contribution to Christian studies.” I, on the other hand, found the book to be insightful and thoughtful, and I could see it being used for a Lenten study series or a book discussion for “progressive” Christians, as the Publisher’s Weekly writer suggests.

 

The Familiar Dark

By Amy Engel

Dutton     2020

245 pages     Noir

Just when I thought I could settle down a little and read something fun, I picked up The Familiar Dark to read and review. Incredible book but very shocking and unnerving. One reviewer called it rural noir, and it most definitely is that. I kept thinking about Once Upon a River and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters by Bonnie Jo Campbell and Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. If anything The Familiar Dark is grittier than these other tales, both fictional and autobiographical.

Amy Engel’s setting is small town Missouri in the middle of the Ozark mountains. Eve is a 30-something single mother of a 12-year-old, Junie. She is a waitress in the local diner. The opening scene really grabs your attention when Junie and her best friend, Izzy, are discovered murdered at the neighborhood playground. Who would kill two pre-teen girls? While the narrative is third party, the story is told completely from the perspective of the devastated and grieving Eve. She sets out to take revenge on whoever killed the girls.

When the back story emerges, we find that Eve and her brother Cal raised themselves. Their mother is a rather stereotypical trailer-trash character, drinking, smoking, selling and using meth. One reviewer called the mother, a “pit bull.” Most of Eve’s inner dialogue is concerned with her relationship with her mother and her brother, who has become a local police officer. Much of her anxiety stems from her inability to escape her past and the corrosiveness of the community in which she was raised. She thought that by being a good mother, she could help Junie escape. The major question of the novel is “Can anyone escape their background? The way they were mothered?”

For several years, I lived with my family in small town Michigan. The village was just as small as the village where Eve, Cal and Junie were raised, but because it was on a major highway, it was much more open to the wider world. At the same time, it was very confining. I remember the exact moment that I realized that this atmosphere was much too small and confining for my children. I saw that our children were not going to have as much intellectual stimulation as we wanted, and I convinced my husband, who had been raised in a rural environment, that we had to move for our children’s sake. The benefit of small town living is that everyone knows you; this also serves as the major weakness. This dynamic plays out well in Engel’s village.

The Library Journal reviewer says, “Not just a fine thriller but a fine character study, plumbing family and particularly mother-daughter relationships and showing Eve, her mother, and Izzie’s mother, too, as women unbendable as oak.” I could really relate to this analysis, because The Familiar Dark, in many ways, moves beyond noir to explore the depths of relationships. It is a worthwhile read under any circumstances, and if you can find a warm, restful spot in the midst of a pandemic, an excellent addition to your library. It will be released next week.

By the way, once I read the book, I really appreciated the title. Sometimes we embrace the dark (whatever the “dark” is) because it is something we know. Sometimes it is better than stepping out into the light. Here is Amy Engel’s website.

American Dirt

By Jeanine Cummins

Flatiron     2020

400 pages     Literary

First, a word of advice: don’t try to read American Dirt if you are at all stressed out about being stuck at home during a pandemic. As Maureen Corrigan said on NPR’s Fresh Air, “American Dirt is the novel that, for me, nails what it’s like to live in this age of anxiety, where it feels like anything can happen, at any moment.”

I downloaded a copy of the book when it first came out in January because of the tremendous press it was receiving. Then the controversy began, and I decided I needed to read it because of what people were saying—that it was “trauma porn,” according to several Mexican and Mexican American writers. The major criticism seems to be who is allowed to tell the story—is this a case of cultural appropriation? An article in Slate explains the story. I’ll leave it to my readers to sort through the controversy.

In the novel, Lydia, a bookseller from Acapulco, and her little son Luca escape a mass killing of their entire family on the orders of the local cartel kingpin. Lydia had become acquainted with him at her bookstore, and consequently her husband Sebastian, a local journalist,  had written an expose of him. The tale then follows the mother and son’s harrowing journey to El Nord to escape the kingpin’s wrath. Along the way, they meet people traveling north under a variety of circumstances. They form alliances and have fearsome encounters as they travel.

I  am not sure that Lydia is typical of Mexican immigrants to the United States. Some readers and reviewers felt that she was too educated, too privileged. I reached out to Kathy, the lawyer at our local Justice For Our Neighbor (JFON) site, but she had not read the book. Although I work with JFON, I have not met enough of their clients to know just how typical Lydia is. I liked her a lot—her feverish protection of her son, her intelligence, her courage, and her endurance. Actually, almost all of the characters were interesting and well-defined.

The most important lesson I learned from American Dirt is that everyone has a story and everyone has a life experience. The people we meet in the book on the journey North all have stories to share—stories that tell why they came on this journey, where they are going, and what has motivated this journey. 

Despite its review challenges, I believe American Dirt is an excellent choice for individual or book club reading—just not during a pandemic. By the same token, don’t read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel right now, because it is about the results of a pandemic. Incredible book but scary just the same. Read something fun. That’s what I intend to do next.

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

By Jonathan Safran Foer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux     2019

272 pages     Nonfiction

If you are expecting a “how to” about cooking and eating a plant based diet, Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, We are the Weather, will not satisfy that need. If you are looking for a fact-based study of climate change and our response to it, as the title might suggest, you are not going to find that either. But, if you are seeking a beautifully-written argument for changing our behaviors for the benefit of the planet, this book is just what you are seeking.

My husband and I read We are the Weather aloud to each other as part of the community “Reading Together” program  in anticipation of Foer’s visit on March 10. (OMG, was that just a week ago? Feels like a month!) We attended the lecture and finished the book this morning, with a lot of questions and not too many answers. (Actually, his lecture was the last public event we attended.)

What I didn’t realize until we were well into the book was that it is written as a series of essays, divided up into five sections. Primarily, Foer gives a philosophical argument for eating a plant-based diet, at least before dinner. He does this in a methodical way, building his argument step by step. One chapter is extremely powerful—even though it only indirectly talks about climate change. Foer tells the story of a man named Jan Karski, who was a part of the Polish underground. He made his way to the United States in 1943 and finagled a meeting with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to tell him of the atrocities happening to the Jews in Europe. After listening to Karski’s story, Frankfurter said that he was “unable to believe what you told me.” Foer concludes: “Frankfurter didn’t question the truthfulness of Karski’s story. Rather he admitted not only is inability to believe the truth but his awareness of that inability.” Foer concludes that the response of most people regarding climate change is much the same. We kind of know that we should be concerned, but there is a part of us that just can’t believe it. In the rest of the book, Foer tries to convince us that it is our duty to act, and one way to do that is to change the way we eat. Chapter by chapter, Foer’s philosophical argument convinces us.

The most cleverly written chapter is an argument that the reluctant Foer has with his soul. It’s a bit hard to read out loud, but it is extremely effective in convincing the reader that the change is up to each of us. Foer’s in person lecture was just as effective as that soul argument. He let it be known that he struggles with his own inaction every day. He says, “We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane, and bad at things like deciding to get out of the way.”

Foer’s argument, coming as it did for us in the midst of Covid-19, hit a note. Certainly, we understand with our minds what is happening, it is something that is hard to believe in our souls. Like keeping ourselves secluded from the virus, which we definitely understand, we need to come up with a plan to do our part to reduce our consumption of animal products.

The Kirkus reviewer closes his review by saying, “Foer is not likely to sway climate-change skeptics, but his lucid, patient, and refreshingly short treatise is as good a place to start as any.” I am going to prove by our change in menu that old dogs can learn new tricks. Here is a presentation by Foer at the Philadelphia Library, very similar to what we heard in Kalamazoo.