Review: Ill Will

Ill Will by Dan Chaon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw this book recommended on Don't Mind the Mess. While Chaon's previous book Await Your Reply didn't enchant me as much as it did many others, I decided to give this one a try. It was great. It was about a man named Dustin, who learns that his adopted older brother is getting released from prison, after being sentenced to life for killing their parents and aunt and uncle. The book talks about their relationship in childhood, as well as that of their cousins, but also spends a fair amount of time in the present, where Dustin gets engrossed in a current-day set of crimes involving college students. Also present are Dustin's sons, suffering their own dramas.

While this book was complex, moved across timelines, and had many characters, Chaon did a great job stitching it all together seamlessly. I was fascinated by the characters, and their hazy relationships with truth and reality. Dustin isn't an unreliable narrator per se, but he isn't completely sure of what he knows either. I really enjoyed the experience of reading this.

View all my reviews

Review: The Power

The Power by Naomi Alderman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was spectacular. I don't hesitate to call it our generation's The Handmaid's Tale. It's about a world, not otherwise unlike ours, where suddenly young women can discharge electric jolts from their palms. Suddenly, the power dynamic between men and women shifts remarkably. There are women who use this power for good, and others who use it for evil; as the world changes from this very primal shift in power, prophets and politicians rise from the ranks of women. The social commentary offered by both plot twists and the occassional tongue-and-cheek situation (reminiscent of Twitter's Man Who Has It All) makes this a perfect book for our time.

View all my reviews

Review: The Child

The Child by Fiona Barton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fun read. Not haute literature, to be sure, but a great mystery. When a young skeleton is found in a building's foundation, detectives, media, and a few specific women are immediately interested. While the remains' origins are quickly identified and the case closed, one journalist keeps digging, and ultimately finds a vastly different story about the remains. Ultimately, several women's lives are changed, and families are both brought together as well as destroyed. I really liked this book, and look forward to reading the author's other book this year.

View all my reviews

Review: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was highly recommended by some friends, and by Book of the Month Club, but I was disappointed by it. It was about a young journalist who gets hired by Evelyn Hugo, an Elizabeth-Taylor-esque character, to write the story of her life in mid-century Hollywood. Hugo marries seven times, although, as we learn, not always for love. Secrets about in this book, about relationships, fidelity, and identity. And ultimately Hugo has a few specific reasons for picking this young journalist in particular to do the work. While the plot kept me reading, and the major twists were worth it, overall the story was just a bit too over-the-top and the characters not well-developed enough. Fine beach read, probably.

View all my reviews

Review: Behold the Dreamers

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was truly an amazing book - I noticed it at the library and became completely engrossed in it. It is about a couple who immigrate illegally from Cameroon to New York. The husband finds work as a chauffeur for a partner at Lehman Brothers, and soon his wife is also working for the family. While the Cameroonian couple is worrying about their immigration status, their young son, and their monthly budget, the rich couple has their own concerns, First World as they might be, around their son, their marriage, and, ultimately, Lehman's collapse. This was a great story about parallel families, and about unintended consequences. Excellent.

View all my reviews

Review: The Grownup

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a novella/short story that I received from the Book of the Month Club as part of my welcome package. I liked it - read it in one gulp at my daughter's dance class. It was about a (somewhat fake) fortune-teller who befriends an affluent woman. The story is about the fortune-teller's increasingly complex relationship with the woman and her troubled step-son. For a short piece, it was great on character development and plot.

View all my reviews

Review: I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad

I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad by Souad Mekhennet
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed reading this memoir by Mekhennet that I first heard about on The Bustle. She is a German Muslim who becomes a well-respected journalist covering the Middle East for (among other publications) the Washington Post. Her stories about meeting leaders and sources from within Al-queda, ISIS, and other terror organizations are fascinating. She is both brave and honest in this book. I enjoyed learning about her personal conflicts and opportunities being Muslim, and I learned much more nuance about the current state of the Middle East than I had known. I also really appreciated reading this account from a non-American's point of view, which was definitely a different take than if she had been American. Highly recommended.

View all my reviews

Top Books of 2017

Hello readers!

This year I read 68 books – yes, 68.  I’ve learned how to read on the train during my commute, which involves some complex life hacks (like keeping my finger in the book when switching subway lines) and some reading glasses (yikes!), and it’s added about an hour of reading a day to my life. What a gift.

Here are my favorites. Each book is linked to my review, as well as to Amazon (“AMZ”):

Given the political climate and tragic resurgence of racism, sexism, classism, and every other “ism” there is, I read several books with the goal of staying angry, and better understanding what is going on. The best of these were by patriarchy-dismantling women, including Jessica Valenti’s Sex Object: A Memoir (AMZ), Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me (AMZ), and Roxanne Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (AMZ). Charles Blow’s account of his life growing up poor and closeted in rural Louisiana, and his triumphant reclaiming of his story, was excellent: Fire Shut Up in My Bones (AMZ). I also enjoyed Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (AMZ), a compilation of fiction, essays, and poetry about the state of our country.

In case this presidency does end in apocalypse, zombie-themed or not, I am prepared, having read The Girl with All the Gifts (AMZ) (zombies, but also human connection), Seveneves (AMZ) (saga of humanity set in outer space), and American War (AMZ) (a near-future where the North and South go to war over energy). They were three excellent post-apocolyptical stories, coincidentally (?) all with female protagonists.

I read some other less political non-fiction too.  Without a Map (AMZ) was a beautiful memoir by a women raised in a religious family who gives up a baby for adoption. I finally got to Eat, Pray, Love (AMZ), which I don’t know why I resisted for so long – if you’re the other person who has not read it, go for it. Lab Girl (AMZ)was a tough memoir about a young scientist. I discovered Jenny Rosenstrach and her memoir/cookbook Dinner: A Love Story (AMZ) about family meals was lovely (and realistic). And on the worst days this year, I turned to Anne Lamott, most notably her Grace (Eventually) (AMZ) essays, whose reflections on George Bush seem both quaint and relevant.

The fiction I read was across a wide variety of topics and themes. In March, I joined the Book of the Month Club, and now I eagerly await the 1^st of each month, when the new selections come out. Many of these wonderful books came from there.

Some of my favorite fiction this year was about families and relationships. The Unseen World (AMZ) was probably my favorite, set in Boston, about a young woman who unravels her father’s life story after he becomes ill.  All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (AMZ) (Book of the Month Club’s best book of 2016) was both sweet and challenging, while Boy, Snow, Bird (AMZ) was a clever retelling of a fairy tale with a racial twist. 

The Nix (AMZ) purported to be about a young man who beings to investigate his mother’s anti-Vietnam revolutionary past, but was really more of a lovely exploration of characters and relationships. Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley (AMZ) explored a special father-daughter relationship, and its complex history.

The Blinds (AMZ) was a fun ride, which I’m waiting to see adapted into a mini-series, about a town where criminals and witnesses live with their memories wiped out, and Dark Matter (AMZ) was a modern, fast-paced adaptation of the age-old multi-verse theme. Lots of people read A Man Called Ove (AMZ) this year, and I too fell for his misanthropic antics. And I also enjoyed J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy (AMZ), a major drama in a small-town setting.

I also enjoyed some historical fiction. Isabel Allende’s seminal The House of the Spirits (AMZ) captivated me with its three-generation saga of a family with just enough magical realism. I couldn’t put The Underground Railroad (AMZ) down, rooting for the protagonist so strongly. I finally got around to reading The Glass Castle author Jeannette Walls’ Half Broke Horses (AMZ), technically fiction, but very much based on the author’s family history in the wild west of the early 20^th century.

Finally, I delighted in The Women in the Castle (AMZ), about the relationships formed among the women whose husbands were involved in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Hitler, as well as Kindred (AMZ), a beautiful story about a woman who time-travels to a plantation during slavery, and her relationship with a young boy there. It’s not nearly as weird as it sounds. It’s more Piercy than Gabaldon.

Well, that’s it for this year. Happy 2018, and as Neil Gaiman says, “I hope you read some fine books.”  If you do, tell me about them.

Sheryl

PS: To see all the books I read this year, you can visit my blog or find me on Goodreads. I cleaned up my “want to read” list, then the end-of-year booklists came out again so there goes that, but you can see what may be up next on Goodreads too.