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
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.
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.
The Shoe Box Waltz is the story of lives intertwined, each one shaped by the others it touches. Each of these lives is in turn shaped by single defining moments, a moment that we never expect to possess such impact. This is a novel of the power of such encounters, seemingly so fleeting and unimportant at the time, as they become amplified. While its author, Kathleen Patrick, labels this a psychological novel, I am inclined to class it as a literary fiction: character-centric and deeply reflective, rather than psychological in the academic or manipulative sense.
The novel revolves around a young woman, Cora, and takes us through three interlocking periods of her life: her youth, her childhood, and her adult life after a traumatic event. As she moves through these periods of her life, she encounters people whose decisions shape the course of her own experience: Nancy, Caitlyn, Maureen, and later, Ian and Ray. There is also an unnamed external narrator, perhaps a sentient persona in Cora’s subconscious. This reader found the novel to focus heavily on the experience of being a woman and the trials of womanhood; a topic I enjoy and appreciate as a woman. A note: Readers should be aware they may find elements of the novel triggering; but, as women generally know, a woman’s life in this patriarchal world is inherently fraught with trauma.
Divided in two parts, bifurcated as Cora’s life becomes, the reader is given a view into the inner perspectives of each of these individuals in Cora’s life, as well as a her own. Each chapter is narrated by a different individual, some also switch position from 1st to 2nd to 3rd, offering the reader a wholly different voice and understanding of Cora’s story. In some cases, the switch of perspective is jarring, but overall, the mechanism works to deliver an unusual reading experience.
Patrick’s prose is literary; thoughtful and evocative, stealthily drawing emotion from the reader. That said, some descriptions and phrases read poorly, dated, and somewhat cliché: “shapely legs” for instance, provides no real fleshy image for this reader. Despite this, I was compelled to read on, finishing the novel in the space of three days. Cora’s story — and Nancy’s intervention in it — was magnetic.
Readers who enjoy historical literary fiction, with a feminist tint, will be sure to find The Shoe Box Waltz a moving and emotional experience, well-worth the effort of reading it.
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.
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.
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.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 