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.
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.
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.
ReSet: Be Good, Your Life Depends On It by (A Novel) by Savanna Loy
A horror/dystopian novel premised on a popular trope — but delivered from a novel perspective. In ReSet the world as we know it has come to an end and a new oligarchy has come into power. A committee of a few men now decide who lives and dies and the terms which everyone must now abide. Failure to do otherwise results in the collective execution of whole communities, a reset. The novel reveals all through the eyes of one of its elite families, those chosen to plan and carry out the gruesome task of resetting.
The premise is inherently intriguing, given the climate change, political and social turmoil of the American nation at present; one cannot help but wonder what consequences we may need to confront — and perhaps sooner than we would like to admit. ReSet plays on those fears. In that vein, the novel is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and the eugenically driven political world of Gilead. A central theme of the novel is the corruption of power and the terrible consequences this can lead to.
For all its unique perspective, I found the narrative arc of the story predictable and the peak of the novel, its crescendo, slightly disappointing and less explosive than promised. The drama of that moment is confined to a small circle, decreasing the visibility of its larger impact on society. Given the drastic shift in culture that the apocalypse created, I expected a greater dramatic backlash or swing in equal measure. The ending suggests a sequel, and perhaps this is where the novel leads — rather than to a terminal ending.
On the whole, the novel was well-written, though there were some parts which unfolded in confusion — deliberately, I suspect — which detracted from the flow of the novel for this reader. Nonetheless, this is a minor complaint. Likewise, characters are well-developed and tangible, though some better than others. On the whole, an intriguing read for readers who enjoy dystopian possibilities.
Dr JoAnn LoSavio 