Review: The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This memoir was beautiful. It followed Wamariya as she and her sister flee civil war in Rwanda, survive several refugee camps throughout Africa, and eventually make their way to the United States.

What I most liked about this is that embarrassingly, the majority of my knowledge of the civil war in Rwanda was based on the movie Hotel Rwanda. This was a great education on what happened after - how did the people who escaped make their way, what kind of difficulties did they have, how did resettlement feel to people, what did it do to relationships among refugees?

Wamariya was generous in sharing a wide swath of her experience - from the pain and disappointment, to the people who helped her, to the complex relationship she had with her sister, and even the dark side of appearing on Oprah. Truly a lovely, honest, and wonderful memoir.

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Review: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yes yes yes. I adored this book. I had tried to read it years ago, and didn't get very far, but glad that I read Chabon's wife's recent book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, which prompted me to try this again. The story follows two cousins, Clay, raised in the United States, and Kavalier, a magician-in-training who flees Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. They become fast friends, and partners in creating a universe of comic book characters. The book follows decades of their lives, loves, and business together.

I loved everything about this book - but most of all the storyline. I really enjoyed the depiction of the comic book industry of the 1950's and '60s, Kavalier's magic and escapism, and the love story that runs through the book. I also appreciated the comic-book-like characters and situations sprinkled throughout the book.

Can't wait to read another book by Chabon.

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Review: The Fishermen

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this book out when I was stranded in Toronto and sought refuge in a bookstore. :) It was ok. The story followed four brothers in Nigeria who are growing up. When they run into the town madman during a disallowed visit to go fishing, he prophesies the death of the eldest. This prophesy sets in motion a complex set of familial decisions and its own madness. The writing was good, and I appreciate how well the author painted the setting and surroundings. However, I found the story to move too slowly for my taste, and take some predictable turns. I almost loved it, but in fact did not.

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Review: Home Fire

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was definitely one of the best books I've ready lately. It was about Pakistani Muslim three siblings who (as adults) are separated for the first time. One arrives in the US for college, one remains in London, and the third, the only boy, is suddenly missing.

The story unfolds with the sister in the United States running into a former neighbor, and as they become close, she worries that their political differences will stand between them. He and his family become inextricably linked with her family over time, though not in the ways that present themselves initially. I thought the characters were great, the plot was wonderfully complex, and the writing was excellent.

As a side note, the plot follows that of Antigone - which I had no memory of from 10th grade English class. Still a great read.


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Review: Alternate Side

Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I usually love Quindlen's books - Object Lessons is one of my all-time favorites. But this just didn't hit the mark for me. It was about a tight-knit neighborhood on a dead end street in Manhattan. The neighborhood had the usual squabbles over parking, personalities, and annual parties. When there is an accident involving the neighborhood's friendly handyman, suddenly fractures in marriages, racial tensions, and complications in friendships arise. While the story was good, her writing - usually ethereal - wasn't as good as usual.

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Review: Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This seemed to be an "it" book recently, so I choose it from Book of the Month when it came up. I really liked it - much more than her last book. It followed the intertwined lives of two families in a neighborhood in Shaker Heights, Illinois. While the neighborhood is planned, and orderly, and standardized, the introduction of a new set of neighbors throws everything out of whack. When one of the town's most upstanding and invested families hires a vagabond single mom as their housekeeper, the families become interconnected in several ways, none of which anyone expected.

I really liked the writing in this book, and I appreciated that Ng developed so many characters, and well. I also liked that several different mother-daughter relationships were contrasted - in a nuclear family, a single-mom family, an adoptive family, an estranged family, and a few other configurations. Really great read.

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Review: Stay with Me

Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book, set in Nigeria. The story follows a young married couple who can't conceive. While they are content with their lives as such, societal and familial pressure force them to seek out other ways to have a child, most notably, through polygamy, common in their society.

Understandably, adding a second wife to their marriage is complicated, and other betrayals and lies follow. The two main characters are both sympathetic, and well-developed. And the book's final third is both devastating and relieving. The writing style was unique, and really drew me in.

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Review: We Are Never Meeting In Real Life

We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I went into this book blindly, based just on a review from Roxane Gay and a blurb from Lindy West. I found it to be harsh and had a really hard time with how much the author seemed to loathe herself. I related to some of her rants and feelings, but found some of them unrealistic.

Then, about five essays in, I realized it was actually a book of humor essays. Doh! That enabled me to enjoy the rest of the book much more - laugh at her critiques and cringe-worthy antics, and appreciate her use of humor as social commentary. I'd definitely read something else by her, and I'd probably appreciate it more, knowing it was humor all the way through. Her deft use of humor to attack racism, body-shaming, chronic illness, and sexuality makes her quite a force in modern social critique.

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Review: The Floating World

The Floating World by C. Morgan Babst
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was recommended on The Bustle, and I really liked it. It was about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As the city falls apart after the storm, so too does the family this book follows. One adult daughter goes missing, and the other arrives from New York to help out, but finds herself confused by her grandfather's dementia and her parents estrangement, while the parents' marriage is at its breaking point. It was hard to read parts of this book - they were quite sad and tragic - but I also think it important to remember. I had watched Treme on HBO years ago, but this was a fresh look at one of the worst humanitarian crises in the United States' recent history.

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Review: Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't know much about Trevor Noah. I catch clips of his show on YouTube or Rolling Stone occasionally, but I'm not a regular fan. However, this book was still pretty interesting. Noah was born to a black mom and a white dad in South Africa during Apartheid. This gave him and his mother (who raised him) a strange status in South Africa, which followed him throughout his life there. I enjoyed reading about his antics as a young kid, his mother's iconoclast and determined personality, and Noah's rise from CD bootlegger to party DJ to comedian. Also notable was his depiction of Apartheid, which I was previously familiar with mostly from reading Long Walk to Freedom and My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience.

My beef with this book, as it is with many memoirs, is one of editing. Both the voice and development of his narrative could have been better presented.

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Review: The People We Hate at the Wedding

The People We Hate at the Wedding by Grant Ginder
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was completely mediocre. I loved the title, but the rest of the story was just not that compelling. It was about a woman who is getting married, and invites her two half-siblings to the wedding. They always perceived her as prissy and privileged, and dread the wedding. Her sister is involved with a married man, and her brother lives with his self-involved boyfriend, so they resent her current happiness as well. From there, the plot takes no surprising turns, and the characters fit into predictable molds. I wish I had liked it more.

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Review: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Found this book on the New York Times notable list, but it was hard to miss - it seems to be a publisher's darling with great publicity. With good reason - this was a devastating story. It was about a black family in Mississippi - while the mother is addicted to drugs (and to her incarcerated (white) husband), her adolescent son takes good care of his younger sister and their grandparents look after both of them. The bulk of the book takes place on a road trip the mother takes the kids on to retrieve her husband from prison, though there are flashbacks to each of their stories, and some other plotlines woven in.

This was just a beautiful novel - just the right length, alternating voices, and excellent, just excellent, description of relationships. I found some parts hard to read because of their tenderness and how broken some of the relationships were, but that was just a sign of its poignancy and its rich description.

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Review: The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. It was listed on a BuzzFeed list, and I'm glad I chose it. It follows the story of a woman who miraculously survives a plague that kills most women and children in the world. She fights her way through the post-apocalyptic world, surviving on canned goods, good decisions, and luck. Eventually she connects with other people and begins to figure out what the "new normal" is. It reminded me most of Station Eleven.

This book had some beautiful descriptions of human relationships, and some shattering depictions of a society that has lost its morality.

Overall a great book. Looking forward to the sequel.

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Review: Gone to Soldiers

Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This. Book. Was. Amazing. Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time was one of my favorite reads a few years back, so I had made a mental note to read another book by her. This far exceeded my expectations - it was a sweeping story of 10 different people and their lives during WWII, reminiscent in its scope of Exodus. The storylines in this book ranged from people in the French Resistance to others in concentration camps to others who are soldiers in the Pacific to others who are living in the United States. Their lives intersect in both obvious and unexpected way; this book is a classic saga not to be missed.

This ought to be a miniseries....

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Review: The Twelve-Mile Straight

The Twelve-Mile Straight by Eleanor Henderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was great - I love when that happens with a book I just find at the library, rather one that is recommended to me. This was about a young woman who gives birth to two babies in Georgia in the 1930's, one black and one white. After accusing a black field hand of rape, he is lynched and she and her family are thrown into the middle of the aftermath. The book tells both the history of many of the characters and their families, as well as what happens to them once the babies' parentage is discovered.

I am surprised this book wasn't heralded more. It was well-written, with developed characters who had intricate back stories, a great depiction of time and place, and a compelling plot.

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