The God of the Woods
by Liz Moore
— mystery —
Description:
Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.
My review:
This is one of the best mystery novels I’ve read in ages. I devoured it. Everything in this novel clicked for me: the woodsy Adirondack setting, the family histories, the geology, the characters and their secrets and their motivations, the tension, the unraveling of the mystery. It’s so well done … Liz Moore tells a hell of a story.
I always have trouble writing reviews of novels I love, and I’m sorry this is so short. I read a library copy and halfway through tried to renew it so my wife could read it as well, but there were holds and I had to turn it in. A week later, stopping at the library to pick up another hold, there was a copy of The God of the Woods on the new books shelf and now Donna’s reading (and loving) it too.
The Martian Contingency (Lady Astronaut #4)
by Mary Robinette Kowal
— science fiction —
Description:
Years after a meteorite strike obliterated Washington, D.C.—triggering an extinction-level global warming event — Earth’s survivors have started an international effort to establish homes on space stations and the Moon. The next step — Mars.
My review:
From my review of The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut #1):
Pining for some good science fiction, I decided to read one of the 2019 Hugo Award finalists. The Calculating Stars surprised me in several ways. The science fiction is almost entirely fact-based, couched in an alternate-timeline world where space exploration … satellites, manned spaceflight, and flights to the moon … developed a few years earlier than in our timeline, spurred by the impact of a large meteorite off the eastern seaboard of the United States, an extinction event forcing mankind to consider the possibility of getting off the planet before it is no longer habitable.
The novel is also a social history, very closely based on our timeline’s history of resistance to racial and gender equality. Quick aside: one of the most interesting parts of the novel, to me, is Mary Robinette Kowal’s afterword, where she compares our actual history and progress with that of the world she built for this novel.
From my review of The Fated Sky (Lady Astronaut #2):
… as a primer for human factors that will affect astronauts and space voyagers in our timeline, the Lady Astronaut series seems sociologically and scientifically sound, and Mary Kowal, if you read her fascinating afterwords to the novels, shows that she’s done her research: everything she speculates about seems realistic, predictable, and probable.
From my review of The Relentless Moon (Lady Astronaut #3):
The action is riveting and the science is as good as it gets. As with the first two novels, the alternate timeline is so very close to our own I sometimes felt part of Mary Robinette Kowal’s fictional world, as if I’d awakened from a fitful sleep and realized we actually did get hit by a meteor and start going to space in the 1950s. As with the first two novels, social history and change is as important as space exploration, and once again the author’s afterword adds immeasurable value to the novel itself.
Surely someone on the production team of Apple TV’s fabulous series For All Mankind is a Lady Astronaut fan. It, as is Mary Robinette Kowal’s series of novels, is an alternate history focusing on human factors in space travel and life on the moon and Mars, as well as a careful, well-thought-out exploration of the social factors that, as in our own timeline, reflect current and historic prejudices that affect the participation of women and minorities.
So, how about The Martian Contingency (Lady Astronaut #4)? Happily it’s as good a read as the first three. Once again the focus is on human and social factors, but technical problems threatening the building of a permanent colony (er, habitation) on Mars play a central role as well. It’s a good story, with characters we know from previous novels in the series, building on events from those earlier novels.
I’m pessimistic about the possibility of humans living off-Earth other than for short periods. I’m skeptical (but hopeful) of our ability to build a future where men and women of all races can work together as equals. Novels like the Lady Astronaut series (and of course, those of The Expanse), make me want to believe.
Long Island Compromise
by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
— fiction/historical fiction —
Description:
Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.
My review:
A Franzenesque novel about a rich family. Every damn one of them is horrible.
I hate myself for the years I wasted drinking, and when I pick up a novel where a main character turns out to be a drunk or drug/gambling/whatever addict, I normally put it right back down. What life I have left is too short to wallow in what I found most contemptible in myself.
But this is a comic novel, and somehow I managed to keep reading through Beamer’s chapters. And then came Nathan, and then Jenny, neither an addict but contemptible in their own ways, and later yet Ruth and Carl. And the side characters … horrible people all! But funny! And there are more than enough plot twists and revelations to keep readers turning pages.
I suppose one of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s goals with this novel was to say something about Jews and the Jewish experience in America, but I guess I’ve read enough fiction about Jews and the Jewish experience in America that I didn’t register anything more profound than what I’ve already read in Philip Roth’s work. Rich people are rich people … gotta admit, that part of Taffy’s message resonated with me.
Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
by Cormac McCarthy
— fiction/historical fiction —
Description:
Blood Meridian is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
My review:
This sat in my to-read pile for a couple of years. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to it. The older I get, the more I shy away from literary grimness, which my limited exposure to Cormac McCarthy suggested I’d encounter here.
I live in Tucson, which, during the time the events in this novel unfold, was a Mexican outpost in northern Sonora. I’ve traveled south into the current state of Sonora and westward to Yuma and San Diego, some of the geography through which the Glanton Gang once rode, killing and pillaging. I remember, when first arriving in southern Arizona, hearing stories of how savage the Apaches once were … but never once hearing about Glanton and his crew, that is until I read this novel and realized it is based on actual history.
Bloody, grim history that will disturb your sleep. My intuition about what I’d find in Cormac McCarthy’s perhaps best-known novel was correct: literary grimness in spades.
As for the literary part: McCarthy writes the unnamed kid’s history with the Glanton Gang in a style we think of as mid-19th century western, very much the same style used by Charles Portis in True Grit, several years earlier. Laconic, short sentences describe violent interactions between humans; rich, poetic passages describe landscapes, sunrises, sunsets (the latter, several chapters in, began to seem like smoke and mirrors to me, but your mileage may differ).
The Judge, also based on a historical figure (Glanton’s partner in crime), is blown up into mythical proportions. Another Goodreads reviewer compared him to Moby Dick, and now I can’t get that image out of my head. Life as a member of the Glanton Gang was nasty, brutish, and short … unless you were the Judge, I guess.
Four stars for some kind of greatness, but by god this is grim stuff.
Battle Mountain (Joe Pickett #25)
by C.J. Box
— mystery/thriller —
Description:
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is back in this riveting new thriller from #1 New York Times bestseller C.J. Box.
My review:
I’m a fan of C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett novels, which are set in a mountainous, sparsely-populated corner of Wyoming and feature a fish & game warden who finds himself and his family threatened by bad men intent on raping the West. They’re great reads, engrossing and impossible to put down, and I’m devouring the series.
For an overview, I’ll repeat what I said about “Open Season,” the first novel in the series:
As much as I enjoy reading Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher stories, Jack is a superhero, a figure of fantasy. When Jack Reacher gets even, people die … but not before a righteous ass-kicking. While C.J. Box brings on Reacheresque tension and villainy, when it comes to his human and relatable hero Joe Pickett, it’s more a matter of luck. Joe prevails, a believable form of getting even. But don’t worry. Asses do get kicked, in satisfying ways. I really like this Pickett guy. He makes mistakes, and plenty of them. He worries about money. He trusts people he shouldn’t. He’s a regular Joe. I really like the depictions of Wyoming, a state I lived in as a teenager and remember fondly. Joe, at least in this first novel, has an almost-too-perfect family, but there are tensions, and I sense troubled teenage years ahead for his daughter Sheridan. Granted that everything in this novel is fiction, it feels real and true.
In “Battle Mountain,” Joe Pickett’s and his friend Nate Romanowski separately converge on an enemy from a previous novel who is amassing a strike force of angry veterans and anti-government activists to shoot up leading figures of the military-industrial complex gathered for an annual retreat at a Wyoming dude ranch. Governor Rulon makes another appearance, along with Nate’s new sidekick Geronimo Jones. Sheridan and Mary Beth play important roles. A new character, a seven-foot tall woman lawyer, will I expect become a love interest for Nate in future novels. Nate reveals a new connection with his Peregrine falcon and I’m struggling with it, since it threatens to turn this excellent adventure/suspense/mystery/thriller series into fantasy.
C.J. Box, who in previous novels has revealed, through the words and actions of his characters, a right-wing worldview, seems to back off in this novel, giving those views expression through the villains rather than the heroes. Nate and Geronimo, while sympathetic to some of the bad guys’ anarchist aims, stay true to their goal of stopping same.
If you read Battle Mountain in isolation from the preceding 24 novels, you will probably think there’s not a lot of character development in it, which is why I recommend starting with Open Season, the first novel, and following the series as a whole. There’s plenty of character development in those earlier novels.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda
— science fiction —
Description:
From one of Japan’s most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.
My review:
A nice novel of ideas about the future, and end, of humanity. It’s composed of interconnected stories, told from the points of view of androids and humans (more or less similar to humans of today, but curiously minus strong emotion) spaced generations, perhaps even geological ages, apart, woven together suprisingly well.
The penultimate story is told by a Great Mother, who summarizes and offers explanations for earlier developments readers may not have been able to figure out on their own, but, perhaps being true to her android self, she tells it in an emotionless and didactic manner. In the final story, another version of humanity is getting a toehold on the planet, as other versions had before. Oh, and by the way … what counts as human, anyway?
So I’ve mentioned emotion twice now, because that’s what’s missing in this novel. Hiromi talks about love and hate in abstract terms, and even introduces a character, one of the Watchers, who discovers he both loves and hates his mate and has a nervous breakdown, but you don’t feel it. It’s flattened out. Such are novels of ideas, I suppose.
This was fun to read (with the exception of the Great Mother’s summary, which I found myself skipping through), a nice distraction from the troubles of the day. We will survive Trump, it seems, and worse, but in some distant future die out anyway … or will we?
Impossible Creatures (Impossible Creatures #1)
by Katherine Rundell
— fantasy/middle grade —
Description:
Two kids race to save the world’s last magical place in the first book of a new fantasy series.
My review:
I submitted Impossible Creatures, along with a few other fantasy titles, for our book club’s January read and discussion, based on a review in The New Yorker praising the book. Once I read it I withdrew it. It wasn’t an appropriate choice for our club. Which is, after all, composed of adults, not children.
Children will no doubt love Rundell’s story, populated by unicorns, mermaids, garrulous horned squirrels, and tender-hearted berserkers. The action is non-stop and the series of increasingly-difficult hurdles set in Mal and Christopher’s way are easily overcome by, what else, magic. This adult reader, for one, sought in vain for nuance, world-building, and character development, and will approach future New Yorker reviews with skepticism.
Readers will be reminded of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the earlier and more juvenile installments that is, and will catch a faint whiff of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Impossible Creatures includes elements of both, but the story it tells is truncated and skimpy, more an outline than a worked-up tale. It’s a children’s book, and the rave reviews from adult readers and critics baffle me.
Book descriptions copied from Goodreads.