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Reviews by Betsey V. (Austin, TX)

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The Dream Hotel: A Novel
by Laila Lalami

Surveillance and danger (1/6/2025)

I'll start off declaring that novels about dreams, dreams written in novels, manifesting in novels, and dreams engulfing novels (and typically written in italics) tend to bore me and cause me to skim. I'll criticize the writer for idly using dreams as metaphors, and …more subjecting the reader to eye-rolling symbolism. And "Dream" in the title? I nearly passed this one by. But it's Laila Lalami, and she's incapable of writing a bad book. So here I was, am vociferating, but in a good way.

Lalami killed it! In this, dreams are not used as a plot or character device. Dreams are monitored by a corporation that supplies the buyer with a voluntary implant to regulate their sleep cycle, and used to prosecute for future behaviors and potential retention in a facility. Shades of Minority Report, but thoroughly Lalami. She's good at writing a large cast of characters.

Sara lives with her husband and twin babies. Sleep disturbance in new motherhood—she has a job, too-- has made it impossible for her to stay on top of things in her waking life. Exhaustion has taken over. She agrees to an implant from a technology firm, and as we typically do, Sara scans the terms of service agreement rather than eyeballing the details. Shit happens, and she ends up being "retained," as they say—"not imprisoned" as they say, in a facility she can't leave freely until they decide to release her. Bad food, low water, strict rules that amplify feelings of confinement, and random petty violations that the not-jailers say retainees did, all ensure extended stays.

Profits for the facilities grow. And the reader is taken behind the scenes for a short but consequential chunk of pages. Various senior staff and talking heads appear and discuss achievements, ambitions, numbers, fault lines. I like that we can fill in some of the blanks ourselves.

Cruel guards and maximum monitoring with cameras, hearing devices, and personal devices are the norm. The State keeps records of our risk scores; above 500 and you're in trouble. Our algorithms determine our autonomy. If you have sleep problems and go to one of the contracted facilities, you put yourself inadvertently under closer scrutiny, and your deans come to their full attention—or, actually, their software's attention.

The tempo is impeccable, bar none. The mixture of interior thoughts and exterior action provide a pacey and chilling suspense story that will keep you madly turning the pages. There's never a dull moment. A hot friction between inmates and guards (and it's not lame) is clocked by the reader and had me trembling at times, almost panicked.

How Lalami does it, I don't know, but she's a flawless kneader of literary characters and theme with pulsating plot drama. These are the kinds of blockbuster books that are infrequent and desirous for readers that like to think more than they are fed. Lalami intuitively knows this, and writes compelling stories, not TV action-in-a-book. The encounters are realistic and never excessive or transactional.

The author explores humanity where one side has the power and the good guys have only their wits. They endure intense surveillance, nutritional deprivation, and utter vulnerability. The friends Sara makes in the facility become allies—except the ones that aren't. But nothing in this novel is clichéd or cut-out plot boiler. But boil it does!

If you like surveillance novels--stories of how technology has intruded on our lives, you will love this book for its technical smarts and emotional truth. Psychologically driven and far-reaching, The Dream Hotel is a futuristic nail-biter, but it feels like it is already here. It renders us at the mercy of things we can't control, moment by moment. Just the tools used at the retention facility are frightening.

What if every petty law we bend or break or arbitrary rule we ignore escalated into losing the privileges we take for granted? America is already headed toward a fascist government, so Lalami's story is a horrifying showcase of what we are facing in the present. The Dream Hotel is something that nightmares are made of!

"If only she could have something to eat or a glass of water, she would feel revived. Had she run a red light…neglected to pay for a parking violation…left the grocery store without scanning all her items? Had her phone pinged near a political protest or some kid of public disturbance?" There were also childhood tragedies and secrets in her family.

Laila Lalami is a confident and brilliant writer, and her narrative unfolds with effortless charisma. Yeah, Ms. Lalami has the 'ris. (less)

Leaving: A Novel
by Roxana Robinson

Love above it all (12/18/2023)

Just the word “leaving” triggers my thoughts of anxiety and isolation. Roxana Robinson delivers a captivating story of a “second-time around” couple at age sixty. It doesn’t matter that the description of their first romance (in college) was not too sexy. It’s sexier this …more time. It’s distinguished by the propulsion and voice, prose and velocity. I didn’t even notice several text problems that still need fixing until it was pointed out by another friend, such as the credibility of Warren and Sarah as young lovers. But we came away knowing that trust is a big issue for Sarah, and she couldn’t ultimately trust Warren to keep her safe back then.

Warren takes his romantic cues from opera, he’s a mad devotee of the art, and so it is no surprise that he ran into Sarah forty years later at the opera house. Both fall madly in passion. And that is what drives this story---the pitfalls of their romance, the reactions of family that must be considered after such a radical change in your life.

Problem: Warren is still married. Another problem: a grown adult daughter who disapproves. For me, LEAVING was a page-turning and heart-piercing family drama that unfolded in a tug of war with everyone's emotions. Roxana Robinson is such a hefty writer that I managed to step over the plot holes and some awkwardly pieced parts because she effectively lured me along. Despite missteps, this is one of those times that I can ignore them and go with my gut. Robinson gave the story a sensuous finesse despite the obvious blemishes, and I was all in with Warren and Sarah’s story. The author conveyed the notorious baggage that comes with your heart’s desires, and did it without dropping into cliches.

The difference between a young adult that doesn’t yet have children, then being supplanted by your children as the center of your life, was spot-on. You are never just yourself anymore after having kids. “And they take over your life eventually, their lives supersede yours. Because for a long time you think they’re yours…when they’re small you think you own them. …You think they partly are you.” But in the next paragraph both Sarah and Warren both observe that “they never thought that they were owned by their parents. They had always known that they had owned themselves.” At a young age I understood that concept, I could feel my ownership of self as a toddler. It becomes a significant feature of the story. It made me think of my daughter in a new way, also.

Dark at moments, LEAVING is a suspenseful domestic drama that deals with relationships, boundaries, betrayal, morality, and what we owe to others in our quest to fulfill our own desires. Sarah and Warren didn’t necessarily reach full relationship maturity as they grew older; if anything, it got more complicated. You’re still a fool for love, just—an older fool!

There were times that I felt Warren was nothing more than a spoiled adolescent. On the other hand, he was trying to follow an honor code, but that is one of his blind spots: he thought he was being principled, despite the obvious---he was never all that virtuous. And he was frightened of losing the love of his daughter. Or was Robinson demonstrating the selfishness of a man who wanted his cake and to eat it, too? You as reader can decide.

Was Sarah at fault, or to blame for any of this? It would make good discussion for readers to peel away the layers of psychological complexity to determine culpability. And is that the point? In the end, after Sarah has gone through some very traumatic family events and Warren struggles to get past himself, I think the story lands just where it should, with some answers and always more questions about the future. I love a good read that forces me to contemplate and examine elements of person and plot to understand how the narrative got where it did. This is a largely internal, nuanced text that allowed me to experience the tumult that made this second hookup messy and intense.

I tore through the pages, especially the last quarter of the story. Dangling on the edge of catastrophe, the characters’ humanity held me with searing intensity. I closed the book feeling both satisfied and hungry, falling in step with Sarah above the others, (I wanted to stay with her for a longer time). The cast lingered in my thoughts longer than the close of the book. Even now, I want to peek into their lives and see how everyone is adjusting.

In lesser hands, this story would have been torrid and melodramatic, but Robinson mined the characters with emotional acuity. By the end of the book, I felt I knew them, even the secondary ones. She also put a spell on me with the way she captured Bella, Sarah’s feisty and yet self-contained, elegant dog.

A deserving and tempestuous novel—4.5 rounded up. Thank you to Book Browse and Norton for sending me a copy for review. (less)

The Poet's House
by Jean Thompson

For the love of poetry (6/12/2022)

Jean Thompson has a talent for creating characters who visibly mirror ourselves and the people who help shape our lives. This talent is well on display in POET'S HOUSE, a narrative of people grappling with early, middle, and late life decisions. Poets/writers have their art …more that they hold up as their core passion, but within their hearts, Thompson demonstrates that we all share similar desires to make our lives meaningful.

Twenty-one-year-old Carla is a landscape artist stuck in moving forward with a career path. A community college dropout, she is very bright, intelligent, but she's wired differently. Reading comprehension is a challenge, because she doesn't process words well (likely a form of dyslexia). But one day, while landscaping a famous poet's house, she hears the poet, Viridian, recite a poem out loud, and bam—Carla is captivated. A whole new world has opened up for her, and Viridian, the lovely, seventy-ish poet, befriends and wants to help her.

Carla's love life generally seems centered, but her vague sense of the future periodically interferes, even with steadfast Aaron, her boyfriend. In the meantime, Carla is compelled deeper into the world of poetry and poets. Viridian is a superstar in that esoteric world, and her poet friends flock around her to support, cling, or just be in her company.

Viridian had a past lover, Mathias, a poet who died many years ago. Apparently, he burned what was left of his poems, but everyone thinks that Viridian has secreted them somewhere in her house, but nobody has ever been able to turn them up, and Viridian is mum. Even though she struggles financially, and the recovery of Mathias' lost poems would earn her a windfall, she won't budge. Her stubbornness is as enigmatic as her own past. She's a tenacious feminist who insists on her own principles and resources. And Carla admitted to her poetry crush that began with the first of Viridian's poems that touched her.

"I wanted to keep living this way, among people who talked about writing, sometimes frivolously, sometimes seriously, often both in the same conversation."

POET'S HOUSE is compassionate, exploring the struggles of lives, family, health, habits, and individuality. Strip the surface of our skin and feel the keenness below. Peel away the words we speak and write and know the heart and humanity from where they came. "You write poems because you want to take hold of an aspect of experience and examine it, push it a little further, find out why it speaks to you. You want to speak back at it."

Read and enjoy this comely story! (less)

The Latinist: A Novel
by Mark Prins

Over the top denouement (10/13/2021)

In the past year, I think Norton has given me some of my favorite books. This is the first Norton or World Editions novel I've read in a long time that didn't succeed for me. It is an expressly ambitious story for a debut novelist, and the author fell into some of the …more

Big Girl, Small Town
by Michelle Gallen

Not my cuppa (10/16/2020)

I have been particularly drawn to Irish authors such as Anne Enright and Sally Rooney, and I looked forward to Michelle Gallen's debut. She notably portrays a provincial Irish village, rendering her characters with painfully honest and detailed definition, complete with the …more local patois and ethos. The tension between Catholics and Protestants is fully on display, as the story takes place not long after the Troubles ended. Gallen is obviously talented and insightful, but I regretfully had to force myself to finish it. The author was purposely redundant to make a thematic point of a woman stuck in a static town with backward customs. Unfortunately for me, it backfired and became a series of Groundhog Days, page after implacable page, chapter after intractable chapter, with a plodding, punishing plot.

Majella, the pudgy 27 year-old protagonist, possesses dormant intelligence and questionable personal hygiene habits, but prefers a spotless environment. Her compulsive tics point to the autism spectrum, although it isn't specifically stated. She's worked at the local fish 'n chip shop for nine years, and occasionally has sex in the storeroom with her married co-worker. Her dad disappeared when she was a child, never to be found, and presumed dead by many. This trauma disturbs Majella's life, soils her outlook, and sustains her stagnation.

Majella supports her insufferable, somatic and alcoholic mother, who stays home to drink, smoke, and complain. Their house is decaying and their bond is declining. In her free time, Majella makes lists of what she likes—eating, cleaning, Dallas (the TV show), among other things, and what she doesn't like, such as noise, fashion, gossip, and sweating. There are subgroups of each, but it all boils down to not liking "Other People."

Every night, Majella returns home with fried food from work, microwaves it, and tucks herself in bed to watch old episodes of Dallas, or lies there in confounding displeasure, eating. Periodically, she intervenes in her mother's attention-seeking and self-destructive behaviors. Occasionally, Majella takes the hours long journey to visit her beloved granny, her only departure from the recycled days. We know from the opening pages that her granny was recently murdered, and the perp is still unknown. As the narrative alternates time periods, we learn just enough to stay restless.

"Majella didn't understand all this pseudo-secrecy, the stories people told. She liked things straight. But things weren't like that in Aghybogey. It was a town in which there was nowhere to hide, so people hid stuff in plain sight."

Despite the narrative confidence and unique voice of Majella, the daily repetition of circumstance and interactions fell flat for me. Although I acknowledge that the author designed the story to illustrate the quotidian life and unchanging mores of this fictional village in Northern Ireland (near the border of the Irish Republic), it failed to keep me engaged beyond the first few chapters. I powered through, hoping for an intriguing payoff. However, the finale was quickly dispatched and foreseeable.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm, I'll keep an eye out for Gallan's next novel. I appreciate what she achieved, but I'm the wrong audience for this book. She controlled her narrative and gave it the structure she intended, but it left me sluggish and listless. Gallan's talent is indisputable, however, and I'm optimistic about her future work. (less)

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
by Erik Larson

Good faction! (1/28/2020)

In this era of dysfunction in both the U.S. and Britain, Winston Churchill stands out as a beacon to move his country past fear into courage. Erik Larson masterfully delves into Churchill's psyche and reveals the real man: the political hero, the family man, the leader. …more

Paris Echo
by Sebastian Faulks

Slow paced, thematic, and fueled with intellectual energy (8/17/2018)

The City of Lights also has a dark history, and some of the effects of the past are illustrated within a fictional story in Faulks' latest novel. It takes place largely during the contemporary years (circa 2006) and during the Occupation of France, specifically Paris and …more the Vichy government, during WW II. At that time, when Germany was in power, the French government cooperated with the Nazis, killing German enemies and rounding up Jews for deportation. The French Resistance was a brave and subversive organization, especially as the native French were in danger of being slaughtered by their own people if caught working against the Axis powers.

There is also a murky past of Colonial Algeria, starting in the 19th century, which segued into the migrant movement of some Algerians to France. In this instance, instead of France being an auxiliary to another country (Germany), Algeria was an auxiliary to France under a variety of governmental systems, and bands of French-sanctioned Algerian groups, or Harkis, would kill their own people in submission to the French government. Eventually, there were uprisings of Muslim populations, fueled by the lack of autonomy, against the French people.

I only include these (very simplistic) pieces of history because much of it is not only background and setting to PARIS ECHO, but, especially in the case of the Occupation in Paris, comes alive in vivid portrayals through the two protagonists. Hannah, a thirty-one-year-old American postdoc historian, returns to Paris for a second time, having left ten years ago after a failed love affair with a Russian playwright. She's learned to subdue, even quell ideas of romance, in favor of immersing herself in history, a place she feels safely in control. But, when listening to 1998 recordings of Parisian women who lived in and witnessed the Occupation, she learns some horrifying information that threatens to undermine her emotional quiescence.

Tariq, a nineteen-year-old Moroccan college student from Tangier, fluent in French but deficient in history, decides to run off to Paris to experience adventure. He had a romantic idea of Paris from movies and pictures he'd seen, but discovered that, for a poor black man in Paris, living the dream could be a nightmare. He was hoping to dig up some information on his half-French mother, who was raised in Paris. She died when Tariq was ten, before he could learn much about her past. Tariq has a talent for talking to anyone, and making friends easily, which eventually led him to Hannah. He soon became a lodger in Hannah's apartment, and helps her with some tricky French translations in her research.

While Hannah lives a circumscribed life in Paris, Tariq falls in love with the Metro, and becomes an adventurer, after all, riding almost all the lines and getting off on the most untouristy stops. He gets a job working at a fast-chicken eatery, and the Muslim immigrants he works with and an old man he meets on the metro become his best teachers of Algerian history.

The narrative is slower paced than the satirical A WEEK IN DECEMBER, and the plot is generally thin. It's told with an intellectual vibrancy, and the Paris streets and metro lines become almost a character in itself. Even the chapter headings are the names of metro lines. The energy in the novel turns primarily to theme—of identity; the tragic complicity of human life; forbearance; the search for love; and that history requires us to both remember and imagine.

The ghosts of the past cross into the present and become Tariq's personal Rubicon, when a photograph of an enigmatic and beautiful woman from the Resistance becomes transcendent and alive for him now. Faulks plays with history on several levels, achieving the idea that the past belongs to everyone, and we must come to terms with our own past, in order to move forward into the future.

"I was bored…Who cares about history…? What's the point of 'remembering' stuff that happened before you were born? We weren't 'remembering' it, anyway. We hadn't been there—neither had our teachers, nor anyone else in the world—so we couldn't 'remember' it. What we were doing was 'imagining' it…And what was the point of that?" Tariq eventually confronts this in a most sublime way.

As for Hannah, she must confront the sublimation of her past and stop living in the past if she wanted to engage actively with her life. In many ways, Hannah and Tariq assist each other to evolve. It's a subtle and leisurely meander around Paris and history, one that winds around and occasionally forks, with a slow and heavy current and not a lot of noise. (less)

Shelter
by Jung Yun

Poignant look behind closed doors (12/19/2015)

The word "shelter" conjures images of safety and protection, as well as a place to live. Central to this novel is the idea of sanctuary in one's own family. As a child, you expect your parents to provide security and love. But what if your entire childhood was fraught with …more

Visitation Street
by Ivy Pochoda

Way overrated (7/12/2013)

I am familiar with the concept of an "urban opera," which is why I chose to read this book. Richard Price and Karin Fossum are masters at this genre. As was Lehane in MYSTIC RIVER and GONE BABY GONE. Like VISITATION STREET, urban opera often starts with a crime/police …more procedural as a trigger. Then, the narrative at hand observes the effect of the crime on a town, and its people. Often, the police procedural recedes somewhat as other forces--such as the psychology of the town's inhabitants and a rendering of the town itself as a character--begin to bloom. So far, so good, as VISITATION STREET promises to deliver a similar type of narrative.

Red Hook, a sketchy area of Brooklyn, is a town of struggling blue-collar workers, modest bodega owners, and also various losers. Beneath the surface is a racial and ethnic tension that is precariously kept at bay. One summer night, two white fifteen-year-old girls, Val and June, take a rubber raft out on the harbor to float under the moonlight. The next morning, Val is found with a head injury, but June has disappeared. This is the trigger that opens the story.

The rest of the novel observes and explores a select number of inhabitants that all have a tenuous connection to Val, although none of them are friends or family (well, the family connections stay rather superficial). June's disappearance is the vehicle for an exploration of Red Hook, as the town burgeons into a character, made up of many characters who are isolated from each other, but desperately trying to connect.

"A chorus of new voices...They are rough and eroded. They sound like the ache of the wind in a charred forest, the rattle of a can rolling down an empty street, the whisper of dust in a gutted building--hollow, noises unaccustomed to an audience. They suggest a loneliness worse than pain."

The prose is sometimes quite lovely, if rather flat. However, the construction/architecture of the story itself tried too hard without really having much lift-off. There is certainly a lot of potential and ambition here, but the threads that the author uses to connect her characters and events are inorganic.

The characterizations are insubstantial, except for the Lebanese bodega owner, who deserves his own novel. He was sharply drawn with fine nuances, and I was engaged with him as the community's epicenter of information. But much of the interaction and dialogue between characters are contrived. It is difficult to be specific without spoilers, but I will say that, rather than depicting authentic relationships, it reads as if chain-assembled. I felt that the author had a fixed idea of how she wanted this to play out, and forced her characters in place.

Pochoda over-explains in order to cement the weak network of individuals to each other. Whenever a character does something morally ambiguous, she subsequently goes into a breathy explanation instead of trusting the reader to comprehend. And any time a scene, event, or character steps into enigmatic territory, Pochoda sabotages the tension by giving the reader too much information directly afterwards.

Another problem I had was with the tone, which derailed the intended atmospherics of the town itself. I wanted to be haunted by the ghost metaphors, but they were too underdeveloped and overstated. And, when the author took it one step further, and onerously went beyond metaphor, I wanted to slam the book down in disgust. However, Pochoda's graceful writing made it possible for me to finish. I hope that her next book will have the ebullience and believability that, like June, were missing in this one. This is one of those rare novels that, given a strong director, could be a better movie than the book. (less)

Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art
by Christopher Moore

A case of the "blues." (2/15/2012)

Moore’s mystical, mordant comedy starts off with a bang—literally. Van Gogh shoots himself in a wheat field, and then walks a mile to seek medical attention. Why try to commit suicide and then ask for help? That is a mystery, one of several in this bawdy revisionist history …more

The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel
by Adam Johnson

A minefield of a fable, myth and realism combined (11/7/2011)

Adam Johnson writes with authority about the essentially unknown North Korean culture and civilization. Kim Jong Il's force-fed propaganda controls the people so consummately that their identities are squeezed from their minds and replaced with a state-sponsored life and …more perspective. The life of a North Korean is not the pursuit of happiness or self-actualization. It is solely to survive, like an insect or a rodent. To live, you must become a shell, an unquestionably loyal nationalist.

What Johnson realizes so well in his debut novel are the conflicts, confrontations, and abysses between the self that has been annihilated and the social structure that replaces the self. Every word you utter is weighed, and could be twisted as subversive. You are subjected to daily propaganda reports through loudspeakers connected to your house. People are traumatized from the cradle to the grave, and your individual thoughts are a threat to your security and safety. You are raised to be a complete subject of the state, and to wear the skin of trauma that is inflicted daily.

Jun Do is a survivor of famine and abandonment. His father ran an orphanage, and Jun Do was expected to impersonate an orphan from an early age. His strength, talents, and stamina lead him along an epic path. From his high seas and espionage adventures on a fishing vessel, where he develops his first chosen father-son emotional relationship, to the deprivations and torture of the prison mines, to the corrupt corridors of power, where his skill of impersonation becomes his sword and precarious shield, Jun Do's life literally morphs into a fabled one. He learns to act alone, and yet to connect with the hearts of others.

"Today, tomorrow...A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out," says the tragic, beautifully wounded actress, Sun Moon, who has made persona an art, and who once captured the hearts of all the citizens, including her husband, Commander Ga. Jun Do's transformations, internal and external, bring him squarely into the receptacles of Commander Ga, Sun Moon, and the "Dear Leader" himself.

This postmodern novel is told via stunning juxtapositions, between the controllers and subjects of a treacherous society and the inner will of the individual. The historical context is authentic, complex, layered, and detailed. Chapters alternate between Jun Do and a nameless interrogator, which progress to an operatic denouement. This isn't the kind of novel that grabs you immediately; there are many ambiguities and inchoate events that build gradually, stone by stone, erecting an explosive story that tunnels through the doom of a raw reality, to a bloodletting myth, and into the chambers of a sequestered heart. (less)

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