Moreno-Garcia not only understood the assignment, she did the extra credit! Silver Nitrate delivered all that a modern gothic horror should: slow, building ripples of doubt and uncertainty (the kind that make your eyebrows knit and you second-guess yourself), a female lead whose existence is threatened, a feminist focus in which oppression of the social kind is the baseline terror, actual monsters and gory scenes.
Silver Nitrate as the title suggests, reads like a film noir played out in intimate, literary detail. It is a must-read for film fanatics and bookish folks, alike.
The story revolves around a young woman and her best-friend, a man she grew up with and who also ended up in the film industry, and the tension between them. Both become friends with an elderly man, a former director of Mexican horror and their connection with him develops into an interesting — but ultimately deadly — project. The result of their collaboration opens up histories best left buried and occult forces beyond their control. Madness and death ensues.
Like true gothic horror, the novel and the madness unravels slowly, and the focus of the novel is character-driven. The reader is given a first row view into the woman’s mind, her desires, her fears, her past and present, as she slides into a dark world that was hiding all along within the one we all know and live in. It is, as with most good novels, a story about us and what lurks within. Moreno-Garcia is a pithy mistress of the genre.
What more could I say about this classic work of the Shoah? I’ll start with when and how I obtained my copy. I won it as part of a Goodreads giveaway in 2022, when Maus was hitting its school/library book ban (to date) and the book was featured in all sorts of news media, for better or worse, and copies of it were whizzing off online and physical booksellers’ shelves (a good thing!)
I was thrilled to get a copy as I had never read it, though of course, I know and teach the Holocaust in my classroom.
Reading it humbled me, as all novels and non-fiction of the Holocaust does and should, but the visual aspect of the graphic novel did it in ways I had not expected. As one can guess from its iconic and unforgettable cover, Maus is populated with mice, cats, and dogs rather than humans. The dehumanization of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime was no less poignant for this swap. Perhaps it is even more powerful; animals are an obvious metaphor: the hunters and the hunted, the obedient and the illicit.
Aside from the personal, intimate view into the Holocaust experience, I deeply appreciated Spiegelman’s portrayal of adjustment to emigration, and the struggle of the following generation to understand the depth and pain of those who had suffered through it. What happens afterward is equally worthy of attention as the event(s) of the Holocaust itself; really, these are not discrete events. These scenes made it clear the Holocaust is not a finished incident, but a deep intergenerational open wound spanning decades.
This novel knocked the breath out of me. It’s a punchy, unabashed novel that does not hold back for the delicate senses of the reader. And that’s really its purpose: to strike, to aggressively announce blackness and the terrible history of being black in America.
The Nickel Boys are children and teens who have been sentenced to a juvenile detention center of the same name, a place that announces its purpose is rehabilitation and calls itself a school in name only. This is where the state of Florida shuts away its poor, young white and black boys. The novel follows a young man who, after seventeen years of successfully avoiding the racism roaming the streets in the form of cops, finds himself arrested and carted off to Nickel for his sentence. Here, he and reader have their eyes opened to the brutalities of being a black boy in a white man’s world.
Like Whitehead’s other novels, The Nickel Boys is written with an urban lyricism unique to him. The way Whitehead’s prose and story weaves in on itself, producing by the novel’s end, a symmetrical structure is deeply satisfying and alluring to this reader. Throughout the novel there are little hints at its ending, as if its ending was never — should never — be a surprise (though it is, and purposefully so). Whitehead is a master at unravelling just enough thread to keep the reader dangling, tying off all the knots at the end to zip it all up.
The Liberators is a powerful punch of a novel packed into a mere 240 pages. With an economy of words, almost bordering on stinginess, Koh delivers full fleshed characters and a tragedy of relationships and history. This is a masterful work of historical fiction.
The novel revolves around two intertwined narratives, one historical and the other intimate. The division between North and South Korea is the constant thread of grief and loss that plays against a more personal tragedy in the form of a young couple’s romance, marriage, and slow death thereof as the husband and wife are separated through migration and tradition. Nation here becomes an actor itself; the North and the South, like siblings or lovers torn apart by foreign forces, growing in ever divergent directions. This parting is mimicked by the husband and wife, until at last reconciliation seems impossible.
Here is a complex interweaving of expectations and desires that become thwarted by forces of history and culture in ways that are beyond any individual’s control.
Alpha Bette: A Novel by Jennifer Robbins Manocherian
I’m still not quite sure what to make of Bette, the eponymous protagonist of this novel, and I think that might have been the point. She’s definitely a character that sticks with you, someone you don’t really expect. Indeed, the quirky cast of characters is the primary draw of this novel; they’re ordinary, but uniquely so, and thereby, strangely unforgettable.
Alpha Bette revolves around Bette, the ancient matriarch of an urbane New York family, who, recently widowed, has been left to sputter out the rest of her life in an upscale apartment with her night nurse and daytime housekeeper. Her children, grandchildren, and great grand child are grown, living lives of their own without her. Bette wakes up one morning and decides she’s going to throw a dinner party. Over the course of the frantic day during which Bette and her housekeeper attempt to make all the necessary arrangements, Bette’s neighbors and others on the periphery of her life, present and past, are woven into the story and the dinner party plans.
The novel is about those encounters, the myriad of ways in which we connect — or don’t — with those closest around us, whether they are family, friends, employers, employees, neighbors, enemies, etc. The novel dregs up those age-old existential questions posing them in charming ways: What’s the point of this all? What really matters in the end?
Indeed, “charming” is the perfect descriptor for this piece of contemporary fiction. The characters — even the crotchety ones — are charming in their own ways. The story itself, charming. The life Bette lives and has lived, charming and charmed. All in all, this is an enjoyable, entertaining read with tangible, fleshy characters, some of whom you’ll like and some you’ll enjoy hating.
Lay Them to Rest: On the Road with the Cold Case Investigators Who Identify the Nameless by Laurah Norton
I thoroughly enjoy my true crime reads, gruesome and terrifying as they are. I especially enjoy the intricacies of police work and investigation, probably that’s a side of the analysis that I can both relate to and have no idea about. I love learning about the ways in which investigations of this nature are conducted, the nuances of analysis and the low and high technology that comes into play.
Lay Them to Rest delivered… and yet, also didn’t quite hit the high notes for me.
The bad part first. I didn’t enjoy the degree of personal involvement and commentary Norton provided. While it is common for writers to relay their personal trajectories and use it to form the narrative arc of their non-fiction books, I found the way in which Norton did this to be distracting. The injection of her personal thoughts felt like intrusive minutiae. This is, of course, a subjective opinion; other readers may very much enjoy Norton’s personal journey. For this reader, not only did this detract from the primary story of the victims and their cold cases, but Norton’s self-deprecating approach undermined her credibility and authority, coming off as fumbling. I believe the intention was to code Norton’s “character” as endearing, but its delivery did not persuade me of this view of her.
But now, the good. Norton’s partnership with a biological anthropologist produced an academic perspective which I greatly appreciated. It is clear a great deal of research had been conducted, both by Norton and Amy Michael, as well as the many others Norton shadowed, interviewed, and worked with. The book provides a great deal of information, and Norton’s delivery of that — along with the abundant necessary context — was accomplished with both straightforward utility and finesse. Norton’s prose was smooth, its language accessible while still necessarily full of the argot of the subject matter. Norton distills an enormously complex subject into easily digestible and palatable parts.
Lay Them to Rest is built through the cold cases of several victims, Jane Does, found dead and abandoned. Norton uses these cases to relay to the reader a nuanced view of the layered landscape of police work, forensic analysis, and dysfunctional systems of databases for DNA tracking used for investigating and solving crime. The focus here is not on the victims, or their families, or even on the police or investigators who strive to solve their crimes; Lay Them to Rest focuses on the structural elements of criminal investigation, the organizations and systems which organize and sift through the millions of bits of data and information that can be gathered about victims and the crimes against them. This angle into the world of criminal investigation was a novel one for me; most of the true crime I have read have not delved into this specific aspect of investigation. I found this perspective refreshing and intriguing.
Readers of true crime will find Lay Them to Rest a worthy addition to their libraries. Or, at the very least, well worth the time and effort of reading it.
This novel gut-punched me in ways that only good novels can. I could feel tears sting along those nerves behind my eyes. Sometimes I felt my skin get sweat-clammy. The Unsettled unsettles, just like Mathis wants it to.
Right from the start, The Unsettled knocks you down and it doesn’t let up. Its breathless, relentless struggle, the way it forces the reader to keep grasping for relief mimics the feeling that its protagonists feel, trapped in a transient limbo of poverty and abuse and disappointment. This is a novel about what it is to be black and working class in urban America.
The novel revolves around a young boy and his mother, forced to live in temporary housing because of an abusive stepfather and husband, because of racist, classist inequities, because life has dealt them a harsh hand. The novel documents their life before and during their stay in this housing, the people they encounter there, at school, in their former and current neighborhoods. Interwoven between these grim chapters is the story of the mother’s past, her mother and a different world of an all-black enclave in the deep south. In this place too, there is the struggle for blackness to simply exist. The two stories are linked by several threads, the most salient of which is the structural oppression of blackness in America; both stories eventually merge into one, culminating in an explosive end.
Mathis writes with a machete, its edge as sharp as a scalpel. The prose in The Unsettled is blunt, straightforward, and will absolutely cut you down. But the pace of this beating does not exhaust; I was compelled to return to the book again and again until it was done with me (and not I done with it). Its characters were there with me, around me, so fleshy and tangible. I read mostly in bed, where I feel warm and safe, and there were more than a few times when I put down the book and nearly cried, wishing they did not have to live in such an unsafe, cold, grey place.
American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 by Zusha Elinson & Cameron McWhirter
This is the book you dread to read, not because you think it will not be interesting (it is) or because you don’t agree with the object its centered on (I’m not a gun owner), but because the subject matter is too real, too terrifying, too… unavoidable. I saw this book and I said to myself, “I have to read this. I don’t really want to, but I have to. I have to.”
I did. I read it. I felt disturbed by its contents. I cried uncontrollably through one of its chapters (on Sandy Hook), and I thought, “This is the history book of our present moment. I am glad I’m reading this.” And I am. I am glad I read it, but it felt like hell to do it.
I’m getting a copy of this book for my personal library. I have to.
Elinson and McWhirter have produced a very well-researched, deeply nuanced, and straightforward history of the AR-15, the ArmaLite semi-automatic rifle designed by Eugene Stoner in the 1950s, as the Cold War threatened to heat up. The first half of this monograph lays out the very mechanical, step-by-step process of politics and engineering that lead to the creation of this weapon and its eventual adoption by the American military. After the chapters on its use in the Vietnam War, the book turns to the political life of the weapon: its feature in the anti-gun legislation and Americans’ varied responses to it and those proposed bans. Here the writers also highlight the life of the gun as it was used in civilian situations, in mass shootings, which began far earlier than most people know in the 1970s and 1980s. It is here that the AR-15 becomes much larger than it is, becomes a symbol larger than itself. The monograph ends with the current debates around the use, ban, manufacture, and cultural life of the weapon.
This is a brilliant cultural history of the semi-automatic gun, from its inception, manufacture, to its bloom as a totemic idea, a fulcrum upon which other ideological debates flux and see-saw as society and its values fluctuate. Readers on any (every?) side of the aisle on the issue of gun control should read this.
On the Way to the End of the World: A Novel by Adrianne Harun
I wanted to like this novel more than I actually did. Some parts of it utterly exhilarated, drove me on to the next page. Other parts dragged. Ultimately and sadly, many of the endings in the novel unravelled the tight twists of its mysteries into mere frayed ends.
But, that said, Harun’s prose and character building was phenomenal; I could almost feel their breath in the air as I read. For readers who enjoy the gossip and politics of living in a small town, this is the novel for you. The tensions were real and tight and very appealing.
The premise of the story, while it falls flat, is an intriguing one. The novel centers on a strange community building exercise instigated by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, exhorting citizens to walk fifty miles within twenty hours. This brainchild, the Kennedy March, is the event which brings together an odd collection of a Pacific Northwest’s townsfolk: boy scouts, middle and high school students, a widow, the town’s telephone operator, and a mish-mash of others. It is an informal, poorly organized march, mapped out for the participants and then nothing — they are left to navigate the route on their own.
What occurs during those twenty hours is what draws them together, asks them confront and perhaps reconcile the restlessness of their personal trajectories, forces them to look upon one another with suspicion. The rag-tag group encounter secrets along their march and in doing so must sort out who they think they really are.
Embedded in their adventure are the misadventures of others in their town. It is here that I was disappointed. There are mysterious lures… there is the promise — actually several — of scandal and thrill, but the story never fully resolves those mysteries, abandons them. I read on hoping that the novel would return to those threads, but it didn’t. At least not to my satisfaction.
Nonetheless, an intriguing and character-centric read, one that will please fans of literary fiction.
I absolutely love love LOVE this novel. That said, it took me four attempts to actually become immersed in it. My first attempt told me that this was a gorgeously written novel; I could tell immediately that the prose is sharp, precise as a scalpel, so on point that one could cut diamonds with these words. But my mind wasn’t in the right place; I couldn’t focus on the investigation, my mind wandered. It happened again on the second and third attempts.
And yet, I refused to give up on this novel. I shelved it, but I kept picking it up. I knew something good was in it, but my head wasn’t in the right space. Could there be some truth behind Pardo’s emotion counts? Do feelings linger in the atmosphere?
My fourth plunge into this novel was as deep as I could get. I finished it in two and half days, prolonged because work interrupted my reading.
This novel is everything a reader could possibly want. The Shamshine Blind is amazingly original in its concept and delivery, even while it builds on the roman noir, hard-boiled detective trope. Its guts make it a mystery and thriller, but the prose that flows is literary liquid.
Its landscape is foreign and familiar, its world is one of speculative fiction; the setting is 2009 in an alternate reality where the Argentines won the war against the United Kingdom for the Falkland Islands — the Malvinas — and then went on to decimate the rest of the world. The Argentines’ weapon of mass destruction was a work of chemical genius: capturing emotion and concentrating it into a deadly debilitating bullet. The science didn’t stop there and in this reality society must now grapple with mind-altering drugs, psychopigments, which alter our emotions, our reactions and responses, our behavior. “Your Emotions Are Not Your Own” is a warning repeated in the novel.
Kay Curtida is the detective put on a psychopigment case, a homicide — which, when its layers are peeled away, reveals something much larger and far more corrupting than simple murder is at foot.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 