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.
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.
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 have never read anything by Isabel Allende before this novel. I know she’s a well-known, well-respected author, critically acclaimed and with a string of best-sellers. I just hadn’t come across her books before — and so, when I got the chance to read this, I was thrilled to!
The novel is a historical and contemporary work of literary fiction; weaving together multiple, seemingly disparate threads, across time and distance. This is a story of multigenerational, intergenerational trauma and the power of found family, the connections we build through shared experience and history. The novel begins with a young boy, left bereft by World War II and the holocaust, then segues into the latter end of the 20th century, refocusing on a young woman whose own life was torn apart by political and real warfare in El Salvador. The paths of these two individuals merge together in 2017 when the United States begins its policy of deporting refugees and refusing asylum to those at the Mexican-US border.
This is a harrowing story, one designed to evoke an emotional response, to serve as an act of resistance and resilience, a political statement and work of activism. It delivers on all these points.
To meet the novel’s objectives, Allende writes simply. The language is straightforward and direct, with little metaphor or room for interpretation; it is accessible in order to reach diverse readers. The prose possesses a determined clarity, one which all readers will appreciate. But readers should not confuse simplicity for lack of depth; Allende’s writing is emotionally charged, it reveals a deep awareness of human frailty and response to trauma.
It is this reader’s opinion that few readers will able to walk away from this novel unmoved by its content and message.
I stayed up all night to read this book, finished it in two days because I couldn’t tear myself away from it. This is an enduring story about love, sacrifice, friendship, longing, and emotional strength. At the end of this novel I felt like a lifetime had passed.
October in the Earth is about two women, one, Adella, who flees from her stifling life as a preacher’s wife, and another Louisa, who is trying to find a way back home. In the mire of the Depression Era, the 1930s, these two women ride the rails as hobos, each one trying to find a way to silence the trauma of their lives. Through their travels and travails, they find paths that lead to their true selves.
Hawker writes these women as women want to be written and seen, felt, known. Adella and Louisa are fleshy, palpable characters. Hawker creates a wide emotional landscape for the reader.
This novel reminds me of another American classic of the same historical period, Ironweed by William Kennedy, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; there is a deep sense of melancholy that permeates the book, a kind of grey film that is simply life in its most vulnerable form. In October in the Earth the grey veil is burlap, coarse and harsh, an irritant.
I saw this book posted over and over in a subreddit I frequent, and, being a Pulitzer Prize winner, I was intrigued. The book did not disappoint, though I hesitate to say it delivered on my expectations. This is a novel that defies expectations.
Trust is an unusual book and for many reasons, not least being its format. The novel is a work in metaphor, being a novel-within-a-novel in part. Trust is divided into four part parts: the first is a novel by Harold Vanner, a romance between Benjamin Rask and his wife, Helen. Both embody the Gilded Age of New York; this is the world of Edith Wharton, one of immeasurable, incomparable wealth, culture and romance. The second is a memoir, “My Life” by Andrew Bevel, who is the man Benjamin Rask was based on. It is a far less romantic version of events. The third takes the Trust into totally different territory; this is an account by Bevel’s secretary, Ida Partenza, who comes to learn about the real individuals behind Vanner’s novel: Andrew and Mildred Bevel. The fourth section brings the reader into the present; the novel ends with Ida Partenza’s return to the Bevel mansion and the discovery of Mildred’s voice.
This is a complex novel, one woven with a very clear and meticulous vision in mind. A novel which explores several interlocking themes and multiple facets. On one level, the novel is about power, those who have it and those who do not. It is a novel about money and wealth, access, and agency; in a word, class. But the novel is also about, on a deeper level, about perspectives and performance, and the intricate dance we must all perform in order to get what we want — or, even if we do perform, how we do not get what we want anyway.
The novel is about distortion as well, and history; indeed, the distortion of history as an easily done thing.
I read in this novel a critique of history and historians, but perhaps I am biased because of my profession. History, according to Trust, is a corrupt artifact, one which is corrupted and which corrupts as it is passed down from one decade to the next. Or perhaps, Trust suggests history is in constant revision, always awaiting revision.
I read in this novel an analysis of gender, the patriarchy, and the oppression of women and voice, which crosscuts differences of class. Ida and Mildred occupy different ends of the class spectrum, but wealth does little to protect Mildred from the savagery of patriarchy.
Content alone should not persuade you to read this novel. Diaz is a sophisticated writer, one who knows their characters well and intimately; the multiple voices come through in these sections, distinct and palpable. It is brilliantly written, deserving of its praise.
This was, by far, the most imaginative novel I have read this year. This is speculative fiction at its very best. Perilous Times will keep you hooked from start to end.
The novel opens with a strange awakening. Kay, an Arthurian knight emerges from the earth, no longer a corpse, but alive and tasked with a mission to save Britain – only he has no clue what this means or what he has to do. Immediately, he becomes entangled with a young woman, Mariam, who is on her own mission: to rid the world of corrupt corporate leaders who are poisoning the world and leading its few remaining inhabitants closer to environmental ruin.
The novel is set in the near future, when our climate has been so altered that most of Britain is now underwater and our environment is a grey wreck. Small bands of people live in squatter-like conditions and even smaller bands of rebels have formed to bring order to the world.
Fracking and profit-greedy corporations run public operations. A magical cadre operates on the highest level of corruption and government, and they have a secret weapon: King Arthur and the immortal knights of his roundtable.
But… this all it seems? This is a world stripped of romance and chivalry, and the knights of this mythic time are no less human than those they are tasked to save.
I will leave my description there. If this has not intrigued you yet, well… Hmph.
The ending will also put you in a spiral.
Lee also delivers the story with tremendous skill, the right dollop of humor, and the perfect dry drip of British snark. This novel is a joy to read on multiple levels.
I was very excited to read The House of Doors, being Malaysian (though now living the diaspora). Tan did not disappoint in any way. I was profoundly moved; the setting of the novel, in high colonial era Penang, evoked a sense of lost history for me, being so far from Malaysia, and culturally divorced from all that home invokes, but I also suffered for the characters and felt the grief of their romantic losses.
This novel is a romantic anti-romance, the kind of romantic novel that mimics tragic, realistic romance in life, with all the attendant unhappy endings and disappoints, guilt and regret, nostalgia and memory that romance actually delivers.
There are two intertwined stories here, that of Lesley Hamlyn, a middle aged British woman living in Penang with her lawyer husband, and “Willie” Somerset Maugham, the novelist who comes to stay with them for a short holiday (which turns into a research and writing expedition). They are products of their British Colonial culture; this is the 1920s, the peak of British rule in Malaya, and they represent the elite class that enjoys all Asia has to offer.
Lesley and Willie form an unusual friendship, and in doing so, the stories of their respective romances is unveiled and threatens both of them and their place in society. Love brings both of them pain and escape; traps them and offers them a way out.
Tan tackles tough subjects: queerness, interracial romance, sexuality and sex, gendered expectations — all things the British were (are?) notorious for suppressing at home and abroad. Tan does this with great skill; the writing is gorgeous. A particular ocean scene utterly devastated me; I was as submerged as the characters in it.
This is a book I will need for my personal library.
Perfume River is a New Adult bildungsroman, revolving around a young woman named Sam as she navigates her life around competing stakeholders: lovers, friends, herself. She is also wrestling with her past, specifically, her dysfunctional childhood and relationship with her parents. She encounters a young black boy, also suffering through his own life and problems. Together, they attempt to make sense of the world around them and the demands made upon them, to be adults, to grow up, to take on the consequences of others’ decisions.
My review of the novel is mixed. On the one hand, the novel is well-written, in a technical sense; Patrick’s prose is smooth, even, and consistent. As with her other work, her use of words is sparse and succinct, leaving the reader to indulge in their own imaginings of the space and events. The pauses and silences are evocative.
On the other hand, unlike Patrick’s other works, Mercy and Anxiety in the Wilderness, Perfume River lacks emotional depth. Overall, this novel does not deliver on its emotional promise, the one made in its synopsis.
There are absences which flattened Sam and Rexel as individuals. The muteness of Rexel’s family and the superficial context of his life beyond his encounters and engagement with Sam were a detraction for this reader. The reader is treated to one facet of Rexel’s emotive life: his wariness, his diffidence, his armor. Sam doesn’t seem to really break through Rexel’s armor in a meaningful way so that the friendship benefits him. A deeper view into Rexel’s life beyond Sam, perhaps his own chapters, would flesh him out further as a primary actor in this story. (Or, perhaps, the story isn’t or shouldn’t be about him. Is this really Sam’s story and not his?)
Ultimately, for this reader, what is lacking in the story is change. Sam’s metamorphosis is too subtle, delivered too late in the novel. Much of the novel feels like it isn’t “going anywhere” as the events which are meant to serve as catalysts are given too brief of a treatment. This reader found it difficult to connect with the other characters in order to feel the tension between them and Sam. Much of the tension that exists is situational, but the internal psychological turmoil they cause is left unsaid; this absence hindered this reader’s ability to connect with Sam and these other characters.
For this reader, the Prologue was the most compelling element of the novel; it was intriguing and suggests a story about dysfunctional families. However, the distance between Sam’s childhood and adulthood is not bridged by the remainder of the novel.
Overall, for this reader, the novel did not deliver on its synopsis’ promise; it feels unfinished, like it hasn’t had time to fully develop. Its characters feel under-developed, as if the author hasn’t had time to get to know them fully yet, and as a result, this story of their lives only skims their surfaces.
All this said, I am a fan of Kathleen Patrick’s work and look forward to her next novel.
Under the Java Moon: A Novel of World War II by Heather B. Moore
For those interested in the Pacific theater of WWII and the lived experiences of Japanese occupation, Under the Java Moon delivers a poignant and moving story of loss and perseverance.
The novel follows the Vischer family, Dutch colonials living in Indonesia when the Japanese arrive and occupy the region. George, an engineer is drafted into service, separated from his family, who are marched out of their home and into the enemy alien camp at Tjideng. Told through the eyes of George, Mary, and their young daughter, Rita, the reader is immersed in the experience of living through war.
The novel and story is emotional and psychologically nuanced, but — for this reader — sanitized. While I felt sympathy for the Vischers, I felt no emotional pull, no real heart-wrenching, which — perhaps strange to say — I expect to feel from a story of this genre.
Moore’s novel is well-crafted as a historical novel; pertinent historical events serve as the structure of the story, without it turning into a history textbook. But it is unfortunate that we only see the Dutch perspective of WWII here, and very little of the Indonesian experience. I would have liked to seen a little more balance of perspectives.
Overall, an enjoyable read, though less profound that its subject suggests.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 