Tag: fiction

The River We Remember: A Novel by William Kent Krueger

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The River We Remember: A Novel by William Kent Krueger

As a reader, we all yearn for those novels that truly take us to another moment in time and hold us there until we feel like our own world is strange. We are lost when we return to our reality, feeling a little fuzzy in the head. I felt that way with this novel.

The River We Remember is a historical murder mystery, a story that is almost a cliché: the cowboy-like detective of a small, rural town, embroiled in the politics and corruption that all small towns seem to have and own proudly, must cut through all that to discover the truth. Along the way he has to confront his own loyalties, his own foibles, his own prejudices. He’s a flawed human being. Indeed, that’s part of Krueger’s skill here as a story-teller. His characters are fleshy, flawed beings, each with their own set of ambitions and darkness.

The River We Remember documents the seediness of life in a small town that looks perfect and serene on the exterior. That’s the kind of atmosphere Krueger builds here. Exposure of what lies in the shade. The crime rips away the comfort of that darkness, makes everything come into the glaring light.

The brilliance of the story aside, Krueger’s prose and dialogue, both the internal reflection of its protagonist and what is voiced, creates a lively world. Readers can almost hear the breath of the characters as they brush past the invisible reader in their midst.

The Dyatlov Pass Mystery: A Graphic History by Cédric Mayen

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The Dyatlov Pass Mystery: A Graphic History by Cédric Mayen and illustrated by Jandro González

I don’t often read graphic histories, but I was intrigued by this one, not knowing much about the mystery of the Soviet team who were lost while passing through these mountains in the 1950s. On February 1st, 1959 a group of young Soviet students who were hiking through the mountains disappeared without a trace. It has never been fully understood or revealed what happened to them.

The graphic novel tracks along two timelines: the team as it traversed the snowy mountain trails and the investigation afterwards. In the former timeline, the reader is given a fictionalized glimpse into the relationships and conversations between the teammates, their hopes and dreams, and an understanding of who they were as individuals. The latter time line offers the reader an understanding of the politics surrounding the mystery and its investigation, an event potentially embarrassing to the then-regime.

It was an entertaining read, if thin on history.

Speech Team: A Novel by Timothy Murphy

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Speech Team: A Novel
by Timothy Murphy

I picked up this book by chance, walking past it in my local public library. I know we’re not “supposed” to judge books by their covers, but I do. When I turned the inner flap to read the synopsis, I knew immediately I had to read it.

The premise is that a member of a high school debate team commits suicide later in life, and a former team mate and friend sees this on social media. In the suicide post left behind, is an accusation against the teacher who ran the debate team, that he had said some awful things. What follows is a series of enlightening conversations between the surviving friends, revealing that all the team mates experienced some kind of denigrating treatment at the hands of the debate teacher.

As an educator, I know that the words I say have an incredible impact on my students, for the better and for the worse, though I hope for the former. Sometimes I say things I wish I had said differently, or not at all. The semester before I read Speech Team I had a student breakdown in my office during a private meeting. They were debilitatingly afraid of submitting their assignments to me, for fear that I’d be disappointed. They told me that in middle school, they overheard a teacher telling someone else how disappointed the teacher was in them, thinking that the subject wouldn’t hear. The teacher had expected more of my student and was complaining to another person. It cut deep and my student never forgot it, and it ruined their experience of school forever.

The story is supported by Murphy’s excellent prose. Like most literary fiction, it is deeply introspective and thoughtful in its content and approach. Murphy excavates what has become a quotidian trauma — the rod-wielding nun, the grouchy math teacher, the demanding and unyielding debate team teacher — drawing out complex feelings, leading to even more complex and perplexing actions/reactions. Readers will find a piece of themselves in these characters, perhaps more than one.

This is an extraordinary tale of an ordinary epiphany: what happens when we discover there is more than one authentic version of our past, sometimes hidden from ourselves by ourselves, and that the view of it looks different from other angles and through other eyes. That sometimes it takes time to understand our traumas.

Speech Team struck a nerve. I couldn’t put it down. I had to know what happened. If you’re a teacher of any kind, read this, and re-read it.

The Bandit Queens: A Novel by Parini Shroff

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The Bandit Queens: A Novel
by Parini Shroff

I absolutely loved reading this book. Every twist, every shift of the story was both unpredictable and comfortably familiar. It was gratifying. I won’t give it away, but I found myself saying, “I knew it!” and “Oh, noooooo!” equally as frequently.

The story unfolds in a small rural Indian village (a fact about it I love; too often the novels I’ve read of India focus on the urban experience) and revolves around a woman whose husband has vanished under mysterious circumstances. The villagers suspect nefarious reasons and the woman is ostracized as a witch, though nominally included in a number of village activities, including a micro-financing program run by one of several foreign NGOs.

As the women become empowered through their new wealth and skills, they find themselves unwilling to bow to the patriarchal norms of Indian culture and so they seek out the witch in their midst to help rid themselves of their problems in the way they imagine she did.

Mayhem and hilarity ensue. Vengeance too. And redemption. Really, this novel has it all.

Shroff’s prose is another worthy reason to pick up this novel. Her voice is clear, bell-like and unique; her voice as an author, like the the women she writes is individual. The prose is confident and bold, clear and evocative. In several parts, Shroff touches too close to the reality of being a woman in a patriarchal society. I twinged when I read those words, both out of appreciation at being seen and discomfort, being confronted with the fact that women are universally abused.

I especially appreciated Shroff’s portrayal of rural Indian women. The characters here are fleshy women who disrupt the stereotype of the unworldly, uneducated, unintelligent village woman. This is a work of decolonization, unravelling the orientalist stereotype too many Indian women have — and are — burdened with.

I cannot wait for Shroff’s next book.

A Cowardly Woman No More: A Novel by Ellen Cooney

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A Cowardly Woman No More:
A Novel by Ellen Cooney

I utterly love, love, love this book. I never knew about or read any of Ellen Cooney’s fiction before, but I am a fan now. And to think, I only found this novel by mere chance. I happened to visit a branch of my local library system that I used to go to quite a bit, but hadn’t for awhile, and I happened to walk past the new arrivals shelf. The title, so striking, so challenging immediately appealed to me. I picked it up, felt its heft in my hand (slim novel as it is) and decided it was coming home with me.

I read it in a day and half. I couldn’t tear myself away. I felt so connected to this woman, felt her latent simmering dissatisfaction so keenly, I had to keep reading.

The novel revolves around a woman who leads an ordinary life, as most of us do: she works for a local company, a office job, and she’s married with kids. She’s hitting her middle years. She’s good at what she does professionally. She is encouraged to and does apply for a promotion. She doesn’t get it, which would be devastating enough — but the kick in the head is that the job goes to a man who is clearly under-qualified for it. It all comes to a head at the company’s annual banquet, held at a famous, local restaurant.

The woman walks in one way, walks out another.

That’s all I’ll say. You have to read this book.

Cooney’s words are knives and silk ribbons. Perhaps they are silk ribbons with edges as sharp as knives; they slice and soothe all at the same time. Women of this age — or, really, of any age once they’ve had a taste of the patriarchal world in which we all must live — will find this novel tragically relatable. It is so nice to hear a chorus of voices bounce back to us, to know what sounds like an echo is not merely our own voice, but the sound of many others screaming same complaints, announcing the same snubs and hurts and disrespects that have been inflicted on ourselves. The isolation Trisha Donahue, the novel’s protagonist, lives is a dark we all know. Cooney shows us that though we may not see each other, she does.

The Librarianist: A Novel by Patrick deWitt

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The Librarianist: A Novel by Patrick deWitt

The setting of the novel and its title intrigued me; it’s set in Portland, OR, near where I live and I love books and libraries. Is this a book about books? About loving reading? About libraries?

No, it isn’t. It isn’t about any of that, not at all.

If there is any relation to books at all, it is that the novel is about the chapters that make up the narratives of our lives. Well, Bob Comet’s life, to be specific. Bob is a quiet man, a retired and retiring kind of man, who becomes entangled in the drama and lives of the residents of a kind of retirement home near his own. While there, his interactions with the attendants and residents force him to reconsider the trajectory and decisions of his own life.

In the course of his discoveries about himself, he finds he must witness a direction his life did not take, a love lost and unrecovered.

The Librarianist is a melancholy glimpse into life and its traumas, large and small. This novel makes me think of rain in the Pacific Northwest: ever-present and daily probable, quietly dripping dripping dripping, a small cluster of molecules that is incredibly important to life. Like rain, the quotidian in The Librarianist is vital. The life that unfolds in this novel reminds me of the verdant luxury of green in moss, pine, conifer that emerges after the flush of rain.

Readers who love Stoner by John Williams or Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov will appreciate the life deWitt writes for us.

In the Upper Country: A Novel by Kai Thomas

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In the Upper Country: A Novel
by Kai Thomas

I was very excited to read this, and it did not disappoint. In The Upper Country offers readers a new perspective, one of many histories, of the Underground Railroad, and the people who traversed it, were borne out of it. This is a story about ancestry and descending, the diverse and convergent ways in which histories flow, often beyond our control and understanding.

Several stories, seemingly disparate, come together here to bring a fleshiness to a spectral kind of history.

The story is set in Dunmore, a town in Canada were black people who have escaped slavery can be free — and yet, of course, not, living as they are within a white world. An event shakes the town, the criminal refuses to be cowed and the result is a tense struggle between generations to grapple with North American chattel slavery and the concept of freedom. The result is a portrayal of the tragically disjointed and yet deeply connected lives of black slaves and free blacks. Lensinda was born free. But she must still live with the past. The past must learn how to reconcile itself.

This is the kind of story that must be read and re-read, the reader accepting that with each re-reading a different understanding of the characters and their ideas of freedom and bondage will become visible.

Caught In A Still Place: A Novel by Jonathan Lerner

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Caught In A Still Place:
A Novel by Jonathan Lerner

I enjoyed this short novel so much I bought a copy for my cousin for Christmas! For readers interested in environmental fiction, literary fiction, and poignant, reflection, Caught In A Still Place delivers on all points. This novel deserves a come-back.

The story revolves around a small community, reeling from some kind of environmental and social fall out. The world has come to an end. Not the end, for people continue to live, though not as they used to. For this small enclave of neighbors in Florida, they are learning to manage. This is the tale of how they begin to navigate the same needs and desires in new circumstances, new contexts; humanity has changed, humanity remains the same. This is a story about how everything and nothing changes.

As a reader, I am left wanting more — but I do not think this is a detraction. Rather, this left me feeling immersed in the lives of its characters. I felt like the characters must feel at the end of each day: a little hopeful, mostly uncertain, but inevitably alive.

The Magpie Funeral: A Novella by Adam Galanski-De León

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The Magpie Funeral: A Novella by Adam Galanski-De León

A short, but poignant and profoundly moving story about family and the spaces between us that we must navigate, the narratives we tell ourselves and others, the ways in we lose our connections to one another. There are many ways to read The Magpie Funeral, many ways to interpret the events and the silences the characters leave behind.

This is one of the strengths of the novella; its ability to mean different things to different readers.

On its surface, this is a story about a man trying to connect to his heritage, his roots, by seeking out a grandfather who abandoned his family. The man is searching for an answer to some missing piece of his life. This is the story of what he finds and the people he encounters along that path.

This is a very literary novel, one that mimics life and its harsh realities. Readers who seek coziness and comfort should expect to have their hopes dashed. Reader who enjoy realism and the unpredictability of reality will be intrigued by the novella’s turns. Readers who enjoy reflection will encounter a myriad of emotions as the characters — lifelike as they are — are not the perfectly self-aware beings we might wish them to be. Readers will experience some form of loss in reading this book, a performative element of the story itself.

Antiques and Drinks: A Novel by KC Bellinger

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Antiques and Drinks: A Novel
by KC Bellinger

It’s cute. And cozy. And there is a mystery lurking in this suburban-y, bougie town. Antiques and Drinks delivers on its promise. For readers who enjoy light mystery with a bit of cheeky humor, this novel will be a delight.

The novel revolves around a middle-aged woman, alone and without family, who runs an antique shop in a tourist town. A set of plates is brought on to be put on consignment, but the owner of the plates rescinds the deal. The plates are not as they seem. They are enchanted and the results are fatal. This is how the mystery — and the fantasy — begins.

I did not enjoy it as much as I hoped to. However, I think this is more about myself as a reader, than the merits or demerits of the novel itself.

On that note, a few things which lessened my enjoyment of it. First, I could not get a full sense of place or person through the dialogue or exposition; the novel failed to flesh out the physical environment of the town, the store itself, and the atmosphere of the place. Similarly, the characters did not come to life for me; they were unique, but did not become tangible in a way that would bring me into their world. Second, there were elements of the story that felt like reaching, or seemed to me to be so outrageous as to feel like farce.

On a more positive note: the novel is amusing and the twists of its mystery are unexpected and — perhaps because of their absurdity — compel the reader to keep going, if only to see what on earth could happen next. Another factor in its favor: Bellinger writes well. The expectation here is not for literary prose, but the prose is clear and thoughtful. It is perfect for a cozy mystery.