Ruthvika Rao's sweeping debut novel, The Fertile Earth, chronicles a tense and emotional Romeo-and-Juliet-esque saga that begins with a childhood infatuation and plays out over years of separation, hardships, miscommunication and joy. All this against the backdrop of ongoing family dramas and roiling political and social changes in India during the 1960s and seventies.

The lives of Vijaya, born into the powerful landowning Deshmukh family of Irumi, and Krishna, son of the widowed washerwoman who works in the Deshmukh house, are forever impacted by a reckless childhood adventure that leads to tragic results for them and their siblings, Vijaya's younger sister, Sree, and Krishna's older brother Ranga. Much in the wake of this event is cloaked in mystery and misinterpretation both for the fictional families involved and for the reader who must wait hundreds of pages to learn all the back story facts.

Vijaya is eager to leave home and is grudgingly allowed by her family to attend a college in Madras. Krishna, permitted a full education by Vijaya's uncle after singling him out as low caste but worthy, becomes a promising mathematics student in Hyderabad who must also navigate pressures to join a growing leftist political movement.

I enjoyed the author's rich descriptions of the story's cultural and natural worlds, though it seemed some passages went on for too long. She deftly depicts the Deshmukh family's immense wealth and power which is symbolized by the glittery "gadi," their palatial home on the hill overlooking contested ancestral lands. This vividly contrasts with the plight of the vetti, bonded servants treated like slaves, subjected to societal inequities and violence. The explosion of class warfare, causing a brutal reversal of fortune for the Deshmukhs, is the ultimate test for the future of Vijaya and Krishna. Will they end up together? It's the question that pushes the narrative forward.

Overall, I found The Fertile Earth to be a wonderful work of historical fiction, intricately plotted and researched. My only frustration in reading was that although Rao expertly sets up the situation and the main characters in the first chapters, the story unfolds so slowly that most of the motives underlying questionable actions and relationships among the principals are not revealed until late in the book. These mysteries, however, were part of what propelled me to read to the end!

THE DIVORCÉES, a novel by Rowan Beaird, invites us into the peculiar world of an up-scale "divorce ranch" in 1950s Reno, Nevada where women come to establish a six-week residency before filing for a quick and easy divorce. Lois Saunders arrives by train from Lake Forest Illinois to stay at the Golden Yarrow, one of the posher divorce ranches in this self-described "divorce capital of the world." Lois, 25, naïve and dependent on her father to pay for her stay, joins four other women, each from elsewhere, each seeking to escape a troubled marriage.

Along with a divorce lawyer, the ranch provides each guest with activities like swimming and horseback riding, introducing them to the surrounding desert landscape and raucous cowboy culture, which are artfully drawn by the author. Lois fights feelings of inferiority, a fear of not fitting in. From inside her head, we sense her discomfort, believing she's "not one of them." "Worry worms through her" when she learns that her soon-to-be ex-husband and her controlling father have been meeting to parse out her future. Through the experiences of Lois and the other women, we witness some of the legal and cultural inequities many married women endured in the 50s.

When an enigmatic new arrival shows up the tables tilt. Greer, free thinking and magnetic, encourages Lois and the others to indulge in the freewheeling world of gambling and excessive drinking. Vivid tableaux of the wannabe glamorous Harrah's casino are replete with divorcées and disreputable men on the prowl. Nightly, liquor flows like raging rapids and women never say no to another drink. Greer wields mysterious sway over them all, but she homes in on Lois, sensing she needs a push toward independence. Greer teaches her protégée to regard male casino patrons as convenient marks, good for a quick tryst, free drinks and pilfered poker chips.

Beaird challenges the reader to guess what Greer is up to. Why has she revealed so little about herself? Why does she befriend Lois, teaching her aggressive moves like how to spit in a man's face after knocking his drink from the bar?

A plan hatched near the climax of the novel is telegraphed in the prologue, but the reader must plow to the end to find out the "what, why and where" of Greer's scheme. Overall, The Divorcées is a romp loaded with fascinating details evoking a time and place you can verify with a simple google search. Great for a vacation read!

Carl Safina's Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe is a book I savored slowly as he recounts his rescue of an almost dead owlet from the forest floor near his home on Long Island, New York, and shares with readers the lessons he learned.

Safina is a renowned naturalist, author of many articles and nearly a dozen books, and recipient of numerous awards. With his planned travel for work canceled during the worst of the pandemic, he and his wife Patricia are able to devote long hours to raising and eventually releasing the tiny Eastern Screech Owl they call Alfie.

They become devoted "parents," providing safety and nutrition as Alfie matures. Much of the story centers on her careful release back into her natural environment as soon as she is grown and fully feathered. Months of human lockdown go by as Carl and Patricia watch their charge adjust to freedom. They hope she will survive and learn to do "owly things."

Among those things are the ability to hunt on her own, find "romance," and transfer her allegiance from her human family to one of her own kind. Happily, she mates with an owl Carl and Patricia name Plus One and they raise three fluffy owlets called The Hoo. It's a joy to follow the owls' family life--including tense moments--which Safina documents with detailed observations, photos, and sometimes humorous commentary.

Throughout the book, Safina, as writer and thinker, is concerned with the fraught relationship between humans and our planet. He toggles between the adventures of Alfie and his musings on the evolution of science, philosophy and world history. The result is an elegy to nature and our ideal relation to it, as illustrated by the author's interactions with an eight-inch owl, all of which occur within a "hundred-foot radius" of his house. The book also serves as a cautionary tale urging respect and preservation of the world around us.

I'd like to point out that praise for Alfie & Me has come from author Jennifer Ackerman whose newest book, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds (June 2023), is a bestseller. While Ackerman's broad approach describes her travels to research and report on the latest scientific discoveries relating to owls (a bird that notably includes two hundred and fifty species, living on every continent except Antarctica), Safina's book is an astonishing heartfelt close-to-home story about one specific instance of human to non-human connection. I highly recommend it.

Danielle Valentine's novel, "Delicate Condition," is a harrowing tale told in first person by Anna Alcott, an actor who, after 20 years, is finally getting attention for her role in an Oscar-bound indie film. At the same time, though, as her biological clock ticks on, she's desperate to get pregnant. As the story opens, after much stress and pain of multiple failed IVF treatments, she and her husband Dex are trying again.

When Anna becomes pregnant, mysterious sinister forces converge--some realistic to this reader, some tinged with magic and superstition. Strange occurrences involving her husband, friends, her doctors, people at the fertility clinic, and strangers who pop up and disappear spark her paranoia. Symbols and talismans threaten like dark messengers coming to warn her. Or is she imagining it all?

Valentine is skilled at raising tension, burying clues and misdirects. Psychological perceptions and physical changes make Anna feel like she's crazy yet she's almost sure she knows what she's seen and felt. Anna's journey toward motherhood is, according to the Author's Note, "intended to be hyperbolic," although the author says her symptoms are rooted in "real things that happen to women's bodies." And indeed, Anna's strange behaviors, her fears of pregnancy and giving birth are well drawn. She doesn't know who to trust.

Valentine intersperses random short chapters recounting horrendous birthing stories of fictional women from the 18th to the 21st centuries. I found this distracting, although the author made a good attempt at the end to provide a payoff for their inclusion.

As a reader I vacillated between believing Anna's perceptions and then suspecting she might be an unreliable narrator. I needed to know: was she going off the rails or was she a victim? This is one reason I raced to the end of this (little-bit-too-long) 410-page book.

Zig-Zag Boy is Tanya Frank's memoir about her heartbreaking journey through a decade of trauma after her nineteen-year-old son Zach experiences a sudden psychotic break. Right from the first terrifying chapter, I was gripped by her descriptions of her frantic search for answers to explain his bizarre, life-threatening symptoms. I was also amazed at her resilience as she navigated the over-burdened healthcare systems in Los Angeles, and her native England, through multiple diagnoses and failed treatments.

Frank's writing is specific, fluid, and emotional; you feel her anguish and frustration as she struggles to keep Zach alive, ever hopeful of finding a way for them both to live with the relentless uncertainty of his condition. Frank finds she must also tend to her own mental and physical health and keep her relationship with her wife intact.

Throughout years of dark moments, Frank seeks solace in the natural world. She reminisces about times she spent as a volunteer docent at an elephant seal sanctuary in Northern California. Ten years into Zach's illness, she returns there to watch the mother seals who have birthed their young as they prepare to send them out to sea alone. She worries about Zach and wonders if she can ever become "a woman who isn't solely consumed by looking after her son, trying to put him together again."

After years of heartbreaking obstacles, Frank wants to achieve balance. She cannot fix Zach, but she will make sure he's safe. And she will provide an opportunity for him to have at least some agency over himself. "Although I gave him a body," she says, "he has his own spirit. This is the lesson I must learn."