BookBrowse | Book Reviews and Recommendations

Reviews by Reid B. (Seattle, WA)

The Naming Song
by Jedediah Berry

A rose by any other name.... (6/20/2024)

It is always risky for someone who uses words as their craft to write a book about words. It can (and often does) become a sort of meta-narrative about the profundity of language or some such thing, a naval-gazing experiment in letting us all know how very erudite the …more

The Wren, the Wren: A Novel
by Anne Enright

The curse of the poet (8/21/2023)

Life is largely mundane. This is not a complaint, really, just a factual observation. And a poet's job is, quite often, to romanticize the mundane, to make of it something more than it is. Of course, some also celebrate that mundanity (the red wheelbarrow, after all) but …more more often than not poets attempt to limn the commonplace with the glow of artful language (it is undeniable that raging against the dying of the light is much more attractive than "He died peacefully in his sleep", if not considerably more effortful and mostly futile). And, after all, why not? We need not celebrate the quotidian; we must live it every day, why overburden it with a significance it cannot carry? Very few of us want to read poems about washing the dishes or wiping our bums.

The danger comes from confusing a poetic view with reality, of coming to believe that one should be able to breathe that rarified air at all times. Phil McDaragh, the poet at the center of this luminous novel, is one such deluded being, crashing through life demanding his due, leaving destruction in his wake that extends through generations. At one point his wife becomes ill and he leaves; many years later he simply says, "She got sick. Unfortunately, and the marriage did not survive," as if leaving one's sick wife because her illness did not comport with a romanticized view of life was perfectly normal, moral, and reasonable.

Though Phil is the canker in the heart of this novel, it is the women who survive him who tell the tale and whom we get to know intimately. Carmen is his daughter and Nell his granddaughter. As so many deeply scarred women before them, they have learned to cope the best they can in a deeply unfair and misogynistic world. The most moving aspect of this novel is that Enright does not resort to easy platitudes or epiphanies, but allows these women to be who they have become and let the chips fall where they may. We must not give Phil too much credit for this, of course; that would only reinforce the sexist idea that women are shaped by men. It would be deeply simplistic for us to consider Carmen, in particular, as having become the misanthrope she is purely in response to one asshole of a father. Rather, she has looked at life and the people in it and concluded, not unreasonably, that there simply isn't much good in most of them. Nell is a bit more romantic, and tries to find that good while incorporating a healthy dose of her mother's skepticism.

Overall, this is a deeply satisfying exploration of what allows the fragile connections between us to thrive and how the casual cruelty we encounter so often can break them; once broken even time and love cannot always heal those rifts. (less)

Hotel Cuba: A Novel
by Aaron Hamburger

A beautiful homage (4/24/2023)

What a delightful surprise this book is! It is not surprising that this author might write a truly masterful novel, but considering the subject matter and the fact that the main character is not only a woman, but a woman emigrating from Eastern Europe to the United States …more via Cuba in the time between the World Wars, one might expect that Hamburger might have struggled to convey the emotions and travails of Pearl, his primary character.

But, as the acknowledgements make clear, this is a labor of love, as Pearl is modeled after his grandmother. And he has obviously done his homework, discovering what life in the Old Country would have been like, including the brutal pogroms against Jews. He has imagined with great care her journey from there to the United States via Cuba, which he has lovingly portrayed in all its beauty and brutality.

Pearl and her sister Frieda set sail on the S.S. Hudson in search of a new life. They are leaving behind the poverty and violence of a region that is being contested between Russians and Poles. Stuck in the middle between them are the Jews, reviled and brutalized by whomever is in power. Their older sister is already established in New York, but immigration laws being what they are, the girls must first land in Cuba, where they hope to find a way to join her.

Though this is a master work all the way through, Hamburger's greatest accomplishment is Pearl herself. Though there are several expertly drawn characters here, Pearl is by far the most fascinating. Yes, she is a simple village girl from a tiny, poor shtetl, neither well-educated nor sophisticated, but she is intelligent, capable and not easily intimidated as she makes her way in these new worlds.

One minor criticism: considering the loving care he lavished on the development of Pearl's character throughout the early chapters, when she reaches New York it seems to me that she changes with an unseemly rapidity from a confused peasant woman in an enormous city to a skilled sophisticate. Not that I think the Pearl who left Cuba could not have become the Pearl he portrays, but it feels forced for that transition to have happened so quickly.

But this last is simply a minor criticism of a work that is such a work of art and clearly a work of great love. This is why we read, to find ourselves in the company of such characters and the skilled prose that brings them so vividly to life. (less)

Scatterlings: A Novel
by Resoketswe Martha Manenzhe

Sad, beautiful, rich, and engaging (11/13/2022)

This is a beautiful, sad book, an examination of what it means to be of a place, to take a country or a continent into your heart and make it a piece of you, even as that place rejects you for merely being who you are. It is also an indictment of our historical and ongoing …more

The Family Izquierdo: A Novel
by Rubén Degollado

El amor es todo (8/20/2022)

Ruben Degollado has a well-regarded young adult novel, Throw, to his credit, and has published many stories, so it is not precisely accurate to call this his debut, yet it definitely has that feel to it. By this I do not mean that it is in any way amateurish—it is far from …more

Fencing with the King: A Novel
by Diana Abu-Jaber

Insightful and well-crafted (12/12/2021)

Amani is a Jordanian-American woman who feels the pull to visit the country of her ancestors. When her father, Gabe, is invited to return to Jordan to fence with the king at his 60th birthday celebration, his daughter decides to tag along. She is recently divorced, a prize- …more winning poet who hasn't written in years, and a college professor without much drive to teach. She has also just found, in one of her father's books, a piece of her grandmother's writing which is clearly the work of a sharp and insightful, if disturbed, mind. Amani never met her grandmother, who is long dead, and this writing whets her curiosity about her, the country she fled, and the Jordan which cradled her and where she bore her sons.

There is also the curious case of Musa, Gabe's cousin who may or may not still be alive somewhere in Jordan or the surrounding desert. Thought by many in the family to be long dead, Amani has an inkling this might not be the case and that there may be considerably more to his story. What she knows of him is that he was a gentle, intellectually limited man with a unique perspective on the world. She sets out to find him, if she can, in the brief time she and her father have determined to be in the country.

Gabe was invited to Jordan at the behest of his older brother, Hafez. Gabe is the youngest and their middle brother, Faroqu, is a wealthy merchant and their host at his lavish estate. Faroqu's son, Omar, becomes Amani's co-conspirator, guide, and interpreter.

At the beginning, this novel is a bit confusing; a family tree would have been helpful to keep everyone straight, though it only takes 30 or 40 pages for the relationships to become clear. I was also a bit uncertain about what Amani's motives might be in coming to Jordan and feared early on that this vagueness would permeate the book. I need not have worried. Diana Abu-Jaber, it turns out, is a masterful guide and her characters' uncertainty is deliberate and in service of an emotionally complex, carefully constructed story of one woman's movement toward reconciliation with herself as a woman and writer. She understands the stakes, acknowledging that "she'd begun to lose faith. It seemed as if it wasn't worth so much to write fearlessly if you didn't know what to fear. In fact, she'd started to think maybe it was more courageous just to be afraid."

While on her personal journey, Amani simultaneously works to resolve her family's mysteries and the clotted, intertwined relationships they have inhabited as they grew into middle age and beyond. But the journey will not be easy. As Gabe reflects early on, "the longer you're away, the bigger and more elusive the past becomes; a beautiful monster." The final 100 pages or so are particularly moving and perceptive.

One curious aspect of Fencing with the King is a strain of elitism displayed by the characters and, it seems, the author. These privileged people think nothing of obtruding into the lives of their servants and others who might be considered lower class. At one point, Amani and her cousin rummage through the possessions of a servant, seemingly without any compunction. I might have written this off as a cultural anomaly, but they are clearly worried about being caught doing something wrong, while at the same time they have no concern about the violation they are committing, nor does the author comment on it, leading me to believe that, while it might be thought of as naughty, this intrusion is acceptable on some level. This is only the most egregious example of the assertion of privilege on the part of the comparatively wealthy in this story. Until quite late in the book, servants are dismissed as less than fully human and those who don't live Westernized lives are casually marginalized.

Despite this blind spot, I ended up thinking this quite an excellent, insightful, finely-crafted work of self-discovery and growth. I look forward to reading more of this author's work in the future. (less)

Flesh & Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life: A Memoir
by N. West Moss

Another memoir of illness (8/14/2021)

This is a memoir of illness, though of course it is also much more than that; just as we cannot write of our grief without revealing much about ourselves, digging deeply into what makes us uniquely who we are, we cannot contemplate illness without the same sort of …more

A Million Things
by Emily Spurr

A startling debut (7/19/2021)

Rae is left on her own to cope with life. I will not say how this happens, though it is revealed early on, because the way it is organically woven into the story is quite well done. Suffice it to say that this nearly 11-year-old girl is on her own with only her dog, …more

The Fortunate Ones
by Ed Tarkington

Rich white people in love (10/15/2020)

Charlie Boykin lives on the wrong side of the tracks or, at least, in the wrong part of Nashville. His mother fled her affluent life at 15 because she was pregnant with Charlie and defiantly unwilling to part with him. For over a decade she lived a hand-to-mouth life, …more raising Charlie, working as a waitress, living with her cousin, an aspiring singer who never moves beyond the local bar scene.

Then Charlie lucks out. His mother dresses them both in their Sunday best and takes her son to an interview at the exclusive private boys' school, Yeatman. Much to his surprise, he is admitted to the school on full scholarship. Better yet, he is paired with Archer Creigh, a cultured young man with the pedigree of Nashville royalty. Arch is kind and benevolent, and takes Charlie under his wing. He also introduces him into the Haltom family, a nouveau riche addition to the Belle Meade community. Jim Haltom is his benefactor, for reasons that Charlie does not interrogate too closely, nor discover until many years later. But Charlie thinks mostly and with great pleasure of the reprieve he has been given. With great relief he falls under the spell of all this genteel wealth. Of course, all of it's too good to be true (it wouldn't be much of a novel if it were otherwise, would it?) Soon Charlie begins to see the ugly underside of all this plenty and gets caught up in the emotional maelstrom of involvement with this crowd.

I suppose I am damning this book with faint praise when I say it is perfectly competently written, but that seems to me the most accurate description of what this book is: a competent story, efficiently if ploddingly written, with only a few implausibilities (the Army? Really?). But in the final analysis it really doesn't seem to have much to say. We come to care only mildly for these folks and what they are going through; without emotional investment in their plight, though the book never really flags, it never excites, either, never challenges or thrills us.

I have also tired of the trials and tribulations of rich, white people. Yes, there are nods here and there in this book to the plight of those who aren't either of these things, but they are just that: nods rather than an actual exploration of what it means to be black or poor or (God help you) both in the Nashville of the late 20th and early 21st century. Perhaps I am just unfeeling (rich people, after all, grieve and fail and die, just like the rest of us), but probably not. Particularly in this moment of our country's history, it seems singularly tone deaf to publish a book about white privilege and expect us to sympathize with the privileged white people. Don't get me wrong, that's not the only reason I couldn't really relate to this book; it's just not that richly plotted and the conflicts raised are fairly pedestrian. But it certainly doesn't help that we have to climb that racial and class hill in order to care. (less)

Utopia Avenue
by David Mitchell

Rock band supernova (7/20/2020)

I want to go on record as being a David Mitchell fan. I believe that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, and Cloud Atlas are all brilliant books. So, when I was offered an advance copy of Utopia Avenue, I was thrilled and couldn't wait to read it. What …more a disappointment awaited me.

The basic plot is a bit of a cliche: we follow a rock band from their inception in the gleaming eye of a manager, who brings together four seemingly disparate talents into a group which, inevitably, becomes very successful. Herein lies the first problem I had with this novel: this process is, I'm sure, very moving and fascinating to someone directly involved, but to the reader it is all rather dull. How many different ways can you describe the bass player putting down a funky beat, the lead guitarist ripping off an amazing riff, and so on? Not many, I guarantee you.

The era involved is the late 60s, and the scene is rock in both Great Britain and the United States, so naturally famous names show up. Oddly, though, none of them are truly vibrant characters in this story, so their inclusion seems more like name-dropping than anything else. True, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, and Jerry Garcia have a few meaningful lines, but others, including John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, and a whole host of others, are merely there to preserve a bit of verisimilitude, but add nothing, which is a shame.

Still, Mitchell is a very talented writer and he has created extremely likeable characters here, so I was willing to go along with the novel to a point (though I was thinking it overlong and in need of editing). There are also a couple of subplots involving, respectively, homosexuality and psychosis (don't worry, these are not spoilers) that have some passing interest, though the supernatural involvement with the insanity plot seems a bit out of place here; still, not truly objectionable (and a neat tie-in to a previous Mitchell novel). So far, so good.

But let me not mince words. I hated the ending. Hated, hated, hated it. Have I made myself clear? Loathed. Detested. Abhorred. Despised. Abominated. Until the ending, I was willing to go along and think of this as a perfectly acceptable three-star read, which to me is a book worth your time, but not worth going out of your way to read. The fact that I could hate the ending as much as I do and still give this two stars is a testament to Mitchell's raw skill. How unfortunate that he chose an emotionally manipulative ending that does not match in any way with the arc of the story he established to that point. Oh, I am aware that he can do whatever he wishes with his characters, and he is welcome to do so, but as a reader I have every right to object, and I do. Give this a miss. (less)

Ruthie Fear: A Novel
by Maxim Loskutoff

Beauty marred by the grotesque (5/24/2020)

Advance reader copy. I appreciate the opportunity to review this book in advance of publication.

For three quarters of this book (except for one quibble I will mention below), I was enthralled by this novel, deeply moved by the characters who people it, in admiration of the …more author's ability to portray the reality of the lives in which they find themselves, and in awe of the quality of the writing.

Ruthie Fear is a girl who becomes a woman in the course of the novel, raised by her father in a teal trailer in the middle-of-nowhere Montana that is slowly transforming into a bedroom community for larger cities, as such cities are encroaching on the wild places around them all over the country. Their community is a poor one, and the wealthy who come to settle there (if only into their vacation homes for a few months a year) are deeply resented and despised. For the most part, Ruthie is no exception to the general run of those who have lived here their whole lives: stubborn, restless, angry, sad, struggling people who both love the land they live in and feel trapped by that love. At one point Ruthie tries to get away, but she has no tools for living anywhere but this little backwater town.

Violence and guns are a way of life to Ruthie, who grows up knowing how to shoot, with a father who loves to own guns and give them to his daughter as gifts, so that when she reaches adulthood she has no fewer than seven guns to her name. There are other forms of violence, too, of a more pedestrian kind; fistfights and threats, emotional manipulation and near-rape. For all this, Ruthie lives a fairly normal life, graduating high school, working in the local diner, trying to make a life for herself. Men enter and leave her life, and their presence or absence is the driving force behind much of what transpires in the book.

So far, so good. All of this is movingly told, with a poetic sense for the use of language and a fine ear for dialogue. (The one exception is the use of sentence fragments; though I understand the power of this technique, pulling the reader up short, forcing us to pay attention, Loskutoff resorts to fragments far too often for this to be effective. They begin to feel merely sloppy, displaying a lack of care, the casual use of a period where a comma or semicolon would have sufficed and not interrupted the flow).

But in the final quarter of the book, the allegory which has been lurking takes over the story, becoming the entirety of it. One could speculate on what is meant by what transpires, and I suppose to the author it had some great message to convey, but to me it seems mostly a way to shock our sensibilities, scold us for expecting a conventional ending to a lovely, sad story. I am sure our destructiveness as a species played a part in this calculated plot turn, and it's worth acknowledging our perfidy. But this ending strikes me as just grotesque, a writerly trick, which reads as a message that he can do whatever he wishes with his book. Well, we as readers can't but grant him this power. But to my way of thinking, what he has done is mar a dark and beautiful creation with something unnecessary and ugly. (less)

The City We Became
by N. K. Jemisin

Wild and wonderful (5/15/2020)

Well! Huh! What was that I just read?

Well, it was wonderful, for one thing. It was inventive, original, engaging, humorous, and compelling. The City We Became crackles from first word to last with an energy perhaps unique to N.K. Jemisin, a sort of take-no-prisoners …more

The Paris Hours: A Novel
by Alex George

A love letter to Paris and the magic of hope (2/11/2020)

Paris Hours is an elegiac meditation on a particular place and time, Paris in the years between the wars, when American expatriate authors and musicians roamed the streets and brilliant French composers noodled about in small apartments, playing melodies that would soon …more

Make Your Home Among Strangers
by Jennine Capó Crucet

The struggle of immigrant families (1/26/2020)

In October of last year, a group of students at Georgia Southern University burned copies of this book after Jennine Capo Crucet gave a talk there about, among other topics, white privilege. Though I had never heard of the book or its author, I determined that I was going …more to buy, read, and write about this book, no matter what. I also encouraged others I knew to do the same. It was not the first time I had purchased a book specifically to support an author, but it was the first where I had no idea of the subject matter, the quality of the writing, or even whether it was novel or non-fiction. I did not know what to expect.

Imagine my pleasure and surprise when Make Your Home Among Strangers turned out to be absolutely delightful, such a self-assured debut that it was hard for me to believe it was one. It turns out that Crucet had been an accomplished short story writer prior to taking on this novel. She has been awarded many prizes for her short story collection, How To Leave Hialeah. Still, I was amazed that a first novel could feel so well-crafted and satisfying. Among other things, Crucet has managed to walk that tightrope of moving the plot forward while remaining entirely true to her characters, and in particular to her protagonist. I understand the misguided temptation to attribute some of this surety to a degree of autobiography; still, it does seem from her author bio that this may not be far off the mark. But it hardly matters. She still had to pull off the feat of putting this all down on paper in a compelling, truthful manner that kept me turning page after page, eager to see what came next.

Lizet is the daughter of Cuban immigrants to the United States. She is the first in her family to aspire to college, and she chooses to accept admittance to a school in upstate New York, a place she had never been and a university atmosphere for which she is ill-prepared. Meanwhile, her family in Miami is having their own crises, her parents have, after many years of conflict, separated, her sister is raising a child on her own, and her mother is struggling to find purpose in her life amidst all this. How they each respond to these challenges is the core of the novel. My reading is that not a single word or deed is out of place or strikes a false note; a truly admirable feat with the welter of conflicting emotions all of this induces.

I strongly encourage everyone to read this novel, mostly on its own merits. But spiting those bigots at Georgia Southern is a nice side effect of reading such a superb novel. (less)

Olive, Again: A Novel
by Elizabeth Strout

A delightful curmudgeon (1/18/2020)

As with the first book, Olive Kitteridge, this is the story of a singular woman living her brief life on the coast of Maine, creating wreckage with her acerbic tongue and caustic judgments. She is deeply broken, our Olive, and not very likeable, and yet we love her and wish …more

Brown Girl Dreaming
by Jacqueline Woodson

You are loved (1/17/2020)

"Maybe the truth is somewhere in between
all that I'm told
and memory."

Oh, my, what to say about this beautiful book? Because of the beauty of its prose, any words I might choose will perforce be entirely inadequate to the task. Because of the heartfelt story it tells, any …more

Inland
by Téa Obreht

Strange and wondrous (1/15/2020)

I am not surprised to see that this strange and wondrous novel has generated a wide range of opinions, that it is found by some to be opaque or even pointless. As with Obreht's previous novel, The Tiger's Wife, there is a bit of magical realism to this book, whiffs of …more Gabriel García Márquez and Cormac McCarthy, particularly the latter in this novel of the American West. This is a fever dream of a book and it's no wonder that not everyone cozies up to it.

But for my money this is an expertly realized, fascinating read, an invocation of a time and place that resonates deeply, all the more so for its tinge of unreality. All of the characters are caught in a nightmare not (entirely) of their own making and are simply making the best they can of their hard lots in the hardscrabble year of 1893.

There are two parallel plots here, the first that of Lurie, an orphaned child who takes up with rough characters and runs as far as he can with them before encountering a train of camels, brought over from Asia by the United States army in the hope that they can do a better job of transporting goods across the American deserts than horses can. This is factual—I have read elsewhere about this effort, which actually seems pretty sensible (but didn't work out all that well). Lurie ingratiates himself with the camel herders and tries as best he can to hang on to the fragile thread of his life. The other plot line involves Nora, a strong, independent woman of the Arizona desert, trying to stay upright in a world that seems to be doing everything it can to destroy her and her family, especially the drought that is turning her farm and the surrounding community to ash and dust. Everything about their lives speaks of dissolution and decay, though Nora does everything she can to keep herself and her three boys afloat. Her husband has been gone for days, out negotiating for the water they so desperately need, and the situation has become dire.

Thirst is the thematic core of these stories. Lurie gathers water everywhere he goes in a canteen previously owned by his adoptive brother, and it whets but never slakes his thirst to know what is coming and what has been. Nora is perpetually dry, sacrificing what little water she has to her children and, eventually, the dressing of wounds.

But no description of plot or theme can scratch the surface of the beauty of this book, which is carried in the expansive prose Obreht employs. While The Tiger's Wife bore the signs of a first-time author, with its too-careful elucidation and somewhat stilted language, in Inland she has come into a mastery of her craft and never sets a foot wrong in climbing this particularly challenging terrain. This is not a perfect book (often motives are obscure and some of the action seems unlikely, even for the hallucinatory reality it lives in), but it is excellent. One must be willing to surrender, though, to the wonderful strangeness of the world evoked here, and this is not always easy. The reward is worth the effort and I strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys the authors I listed in the first paragraph. While not as accomplished as either of those masters, Téa Obreht is clearly a talent to watch and read. (less)

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