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 author is. In the opening pages of The Naming Song I thought that this would be yet another example of the genre. Thankfully, Berry adroitly avoids the trap and instead tells a compelling tale of a post-apocalyptic world in which the names of people and things have all disappeared. The named and the nameless are in conflict with one another, and while names are extremely useful things, they also confer a sort of ownership on those who do the naming which, in this universe, rips them from the nameless. It is also so that people who die do not truly die, but are made ghosts and enslaved. Dreams can become monsters, not all of whom are monstrous.

Our hero is unique because she does not have a name but works for the named, is, in fact, a courier delivering names to things. She also has a conscience and curiosity, which both lead her to make choices that are outside the bounds of what is acceptable and get her into deeper and deeper trouble. Along the way, her idea of the parameters of the world and how we each negotiate our way through it expands until she realizes that, while useful, names are also a form of theft, and that the namers (and the sayers, who determine the law of the land) do not always have the best interest of others at heart.

This is truly excellent story-telling and a compelling read from beginning to end. One suggestion: while I understand that names evolve throughout the story, it would be useful if the cast of characters listed at the beginning included all the names these characters have. It can become very confusing to recall what a certain character used to be called; it doesn't seem to me that it would detract much from the revelations within the story if we knew in advance the many names by which they are known.

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 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.

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 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.

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 racial crimes, our obsession with and irrational judgments around the color of skin.

In 1927, South Africa passed the Immorality Act, making it a crime for a white person to have sexual relations with a Black one, even within marriage; in addition, their children may be seized and sent away. Both of the parties could be fined or imprisoned, though of course the penalties were much more severe for the Black person involved. Alisa and Abram are caught in such a bind and must choose whether to flee. Their lands are already being surveyed by the local government authority for confiscation.

What makes this tragedy all the more difficult is Alisa's mental illness, a deep melancholy she cannot shake. In one of many magical choices in this novel, we are able to see Alisa's past through a series of entries in her journal, to see the vibrant young woman she was and how she came to be where and how she is.

Despite the dark subject material here, this is not a difficult book to read. While not exactly infused with hope, it is nonetheless a story of resilience and joy, especially in the person of Dido, Abram and Alisa's daughter. She is a spark of life in a bleak landscape and helps us to understand that we must live, and live well, no matter what the cost or barrier standing against us.

Infused throughout are stories and legends from Africa, emphasizing the richness and perception inherent in a culture the white world considered (and often still considers) primitive and ignorant. These, too, add a ray of hope, if only by reminding us that the world is eternal, even if we are mere embers in the great fire, quickly winking out by giving life to those who come after us.

Truly a beautiful and heartbreaking tale, Scatterlings is a truly essential read for our times.

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 that— but that it has the feel of a book written with all of his soul, as if it is this that had been yearning to get out of him since he began to write.

I read an advance reader copy of this book and the description on the cover of it says, "Stories," whereas the version on websites says "A Novel." This feel curiously accurate. Because it deals with the ups and downs, ins and outs, of a single family, though these are individual stories it is as if we have been given an impressionistic view of the whole through the brushstrokes of the parts; even if the picture may not be complete, we know what we have seen. Of course, a ready compromise is available for this naming conundrum; this would not be the first book to be called "a novel in stories." In the end it hardly matters, as we have immersed ourselves into the center of this loving, frustrating, religious, profane family and regret having to leave them when we are done. This is a community of people, enmeshed, supportive, resentful, petty, warm, and cold. But as is demonstrated time and again, no matter what animosity they may have between them, if a threat from outside the family shows itself, they will come together to vanquish it.

There are disagreements, there are religious differences, there are curses and miracles. But what binds the Izquierdo family—and this novel in stories—together is love, pure and simple. What a gift Ruben Degollado has given us.

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-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.

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 introspection. Death comes into it, of course, as does life—how we have lived ours, what it has meant, who we would leave behind. Even if our illness is not life-threatening (as Moss's is not), illness causes mortality to be close to the surface of our thoughts.

Because her particular illness is of her uterus, she also must contemplate what that means for her existence as a woman and the fact that she will not have biological children. (A side note: I do wonder quite often what causes us to feel such a compulsion to reproduce. Of course, I understand the biological imperative, but it seems to run so much deeper than that, as if our very meaning is tied up in our offspring. Particularly in a world as challenging as the one children born today are inheriting, one would think we would be a bit more hesitant, a bit more reflective).

Unfortunately, in the great sea of such memoirs, Moss really doesn't have much to say that is new or significant or poetic. She is good company and seems like a very nice person, but does that justify an entire book? In the rare moments when she allows herself to be, she can be laugh-out-loud funny (look in particular for the chapter titled "Questions for my Doctor"), but these moments don't come nearly often enough to make that a reason to read this book. Moss is a mildly neurotic person with a fairly minor illness which requires major surgery which takes quite a while to recover from. She has the privilege and status to make this all work. She has a loving and supportive family. She has memories of a beloved grandmother who died too soon.

All of this adds up to a sweet but, in the end, not very significant book that never really gives us any reason why it needed to be written. I suppose if this sort of thing is your idea of a good time, this is likely a fine addition to the canon, but it's hard to recommend it otherwise.

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, Splinter, to keep her company and assuage her grief and loneliness.

I must admit this set up caused me some concern. I could not see how Emily Spurr could fill up an entire 300 page book starting from this point. I need not have worried. As is often the case in the books I like most, the author sets out to explore a premise and lets it take her where it will, seemingly without any preconceived notion of the ultimate destination.

Rae's next door neighbor, Lettie, is a grumpy, old busybody and a pathological hoarder, living in a stinky, old house packed floor to rafters with trash and found objects. The most delightful aspect of this book is the way in which they come together and become friends. They both survive through the use of the barbed quip, for one thing, and this makes for some truly delightful dialogue. Lettie is clearly not great at adulting and Rae is doing everything in her power to be grown up. Their shared struggles form the emotional core of this book.

Overall, I found A Million Things to be most everything I look for in a good novel: emotionally complex, humorous, filled with pathos, with believable characters and a plot that does not take artificial turns imposed by the author, but allows the real people at its center to guide the action. This is an excellent read and, while the setup could have led somewhere gruesome, Spurr deftly navigates this territory with an ease and surety I would not have expected from a first novel.

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, 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 attitude toward the world she is writing which seems to say to the reader, "Keep up! Those left behind will not be rescued!"

Manny is a newcomer to New York City. But Manny was not his name a few minutes before he stepped off the subway in Grand Central. It was something else, but he's not quite sure what. Now, whether he likes it or not, he has been transformed into something entirely other. What that is will become clear quite early in the novel, but I would still rather not reveal what that is.

But he is not alone. New York is a big place, consisting of five boroughs, and all of them are hungering for rebirth into something bigger, something which represents what they are in their essence, worlds apart and yet joined irrevocably in one great whole.

All is not well in New York City, though. There is an Enemy which does not want to see the city thrive, change, grow, and grow strong. That strength is inimical to the Enemy's broader plan. Manny and his cohorts must face this challenge (with the help of a couple of friends who have some prior experience with a similar transformation). If they do not survive, much more than their lives are at stake.

And that is just the beginning. What makes Jemisin so consistently beguiling and compulsively readable is her ability to feel deeply into her characters and bring their fears, dreams, hopes, and existential exhaustion to the fore and into our hearts. It is a magic trick that amazes and gladdens me. May she write forever, or at least long enough to finish this trilogy! I desperately need to know what happens next....

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 become world-famous.

But one of the many charms of Paris Hours is that Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Maurice Ravel, and (in flashback) Marcel Proust do not dominate it but, rather, serve as foils for the tales of more ordinary people like you and me, leading ordinary lives, just trying to get by with our perfectly ordinary load of pain, joy, and sorrow.

The plot of the novel consists of four narrative strands, interweaving but, until the climactic scene, rarely intersecting. All four protagonists have been wounded, in vastly different ways, by the war, and struggle to make sense of their lives in that context. But struggle and pain are only the underlying themes and not the melody of this composition, Rather, it is love, courage, and kindness that prevail, with undertones of loneliness and regret. These are very human lives, lived with as much hope as they can muster.

It is tricky, of course, to write about Paris without falling into cliche or a certain amount of braggadocio about how familiar one is with its topography. While George neatly evades the former, in the early going he seems about to fall into the trap of the latter. That he never quite does is a tribute to his care and craft. But he does come perilously close to that precipice. Still, this is a quibble when considering a novel as accomplished and heartfelt as this one.

A bit of a warning: the four stories can be difficult to track in the beginning, and you may find yourself flipping back and forth quite a bit in order to follow them. But they soon become very distinct, and in any case the small amount of effort involved pays great dividends. Paris Hours is a beautiful book, filled with lives well-lived, sorrows carried nobly, and so much love--love for a place, a time, and the people who lived them.

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 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.

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 for her to succeed. This is the tightrope Elizabeth Strout has walked yet again in this second volume. How is it that such an unpleasant person can elicit such sympathy from us? I suspect the answer is the resonance we feel in response to her brokenness, how it chimes with our own. Though she is far more unskillful in her dealings with those around her than most of us, we have all had our moments of being the Olive in the room, the one who blurts out the ugly truth or the intolerant judgement, then wonders why we have become the pariahs.

It is rather odd to call this a novel (as it was the first book), because this really is a book of short stories interconnected by a single character, who sometimes is front and center, and other times barely even mentioned. Yet it becomes the story of a single life, much like a paint-by-numbers picture becomes comprehensible with the addition of each subsequent color, different shadings and hues of Olive become more evident with each passing chapter.

I particularly like her relationship to Jack Kennison, a person in whom she has met her match and who loves her despite herself, as did her late husband, Henry. But I also deeply appreciate Strout's expansion on Olive's connection to her son, Christopher, with whom she has both a deep bond and troubling animosity. She wishes to be loved by him, but seems incapable of being lovable with him. It is terribly heartbreaking, but also feels truthful and genuine.

A few quick notes: first of all, though this novel would stand alone, reading the first will give this one greater depth and meaning. Second, if you have not watched the adaptation of Olive Kitteridge with Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins (with Bill Murray as Jack Kennison), please do. They embody the characters so thoroughly and so well, it is difficult to imagine anyone else in those roles.

"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 comment I may have upon it will no doubt appear petty.

This is a memoir from the renowned author Jacqueline Woodson, written in prose poetry and a testament to her strong, loving family. Though she, like all of us, had her disappointments, Woodson has clearly been surrounded by love her whole life, and she makes this clear as still water in every page of Brown Girl Dreaming. Her portrait of her grandfather (with whom she had a special affinity) is especially affecting. He was a very special man and dear to her heart.

The language here is magical and lulling at once, a sweet flow of prose that carries us along in its flow with gentleness and only a very few moments that felt a bit forced, only noticeable because they are such aberrations. But these are barely a blip in the overall joyous flow.

"When there are many worlds, love can wrap itself
around you, say, Don't cry. Say, You are as good as anyone.
Say, Keep remembering me. And you know, even as the world explodes
around you—that you are loved..."

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 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.