Review: The Female Persuasion

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Loved this one! It is a novel that follows a young woman who meets a prominent feminist while in college. The older woman eventually takes the younger under her wing, and this changes the course of both of their lives. I loved the characters, the story, and most of all, Wolitzer's ability to depict feelings as solid, tangible, tactical things. This was a great read, and one I couldn't wait to get back into each night.

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Review: Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I love love loved Weir's The Martian book, and had high hopes for this. It was good, but not nearly as good as that one. The story followed a young woman who lives in a community on the (now colonized) moon. She is somewhat of an outlaw, smuggling in contraband and doing odd jobs for anyone who will pay. When she is approached to perform an even greater crime, she can't resist but soon finds herself in a world of trouble.

The best part of this book was the action - it read quickly and was fun to see what happened next. However, the biggest issue with this book was the character development. It was obviously a man writing a woman in the first person, and he was not familiar with how a woman would think/act/want. Fatal flaw.

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Review: The Lost Family

The Lost Family by Jenna Blum
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just learned that Blum lives in Boston, when I saw that she was speaking at our local library. I thought Those who Save Us was one of the best books I've ever read, and I was interested in reading another by her. It did not disappoint.

The story follows a young man, who comes to the U.S. escaping WWII, where he has lost his wife and twin daughters. When he meets a woman in the restaurant he runs (named Masha, for his first wife), he struggles with whether to live in the past, or to try and form a relationship with her. Told from different points of view, this book explored generational pain, and how the hope of recovery is slim, but strong.

Lovely.

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Review: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Heard about this book on NPR, and this was one of those titles that languished on my to-read list for over a year. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it, because the book was really, really good. It was about a set of childhood friends from rural Mississippi whose paths cross again as adults. One of them has become the town constable, while the other is ostracized from his neighbors, after he is accused of a crime and never cleared of it. When another crime occurs, and he becomes the most likely suspect. The writing was excellent, as was the character development. And I never would have figured out the ending!

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Review: I Will Not Fear: My Story of a Lifetime of Building Faith Under Fire

I Will Not Fear: My Story of a Lifetime of Building Faith Under Fire by Melba Pattillo Beals
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

You'd have to be a monster/racist to dislike a memoir by one of the Little Rock Nine - the students who integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas school system under the watch of the National Guard. And I was touched by Beals' story - I hadn't known many of the details of the situation, in fact, I believe I had an image from an 8th grade text book of a little girl entering the school as the entirety of my knowledge of it.

That said, it was disorienting to me how much Beals spoke about God and faith as the reason for her overcoming so much adversity. I kept wanting to shake her and say - YOU did that, God didn't. But I guess that's the thing about faith. It's not like I don't read faith-based authors regularly (see Anne Lamott, Jen Hatmaker, etc), but this was different. I admire Beals, of course, and I also wonder what it is like to have that style of faith.

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Review: Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival

Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival by Jeffrey Gettleman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw this book at the MIT bookstore and it piqued my interest. It's about a young reporter who decides to focus on east Africa, a volatile and scary part of the world. At the same time, he falls in love with a woman, and spends years trying to balance both desires with each other. The book was very well-written and fascinating - I particularly liked the descriptions of his time in Africa. That said, I found him as a human to be very selfish and childish. His expectations of his girlfriend were ridiculous, and unreasonable. It made me like the book less, although that's not a comment on how it was written or the flow of the book.

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Review: The Flight Attendant

The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a pretty good, quick read. It's about an alcoholic flight attendant who wakes up in a hotel room in Dubai next to a man who is dead, covered in blood. She creeps out of the room, and begins lying - to her crewmates, to the police, and to everyone - and hopes to evade being connected to the murder. Naturally, that doesn't happen, and she finds herself swept up into the investigation. She was a sympathetic character and the plot moved quickly, but it wasn't a book I think I'll remember.

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Review: The Motherhood Affidavits: A Memoir

The Motherhood Affidavits: A Memoir by Laura Jean Baker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was a tough one to review. I have all the respect in the world for the author's writing style and honesty in her memoir. That aside, her life choices were difficult to stomach.

Baker and her husband live in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. She is a professor and he is a lawyer. She suffers from depression, but discovers that the oxytocin that comes from being pregnant and breastfeeding seems to treat her mental illness. She decides (her husband more reluctantly) to continue having children far past what the couple can handle economically and mentally.

Interwoven with their story of economic distress, marital difficulties, and children - lots of children - are stories of the law firm that her husband runs. Patronized mostly by people living on the fringe and involved in the ever-worsening drug problems that plague the Midwest, his firm struggles to break even, let alone to support their growing family.

This story was frustrating, but as a memoir, it stands strong.

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Review: Fruit of the Drunken Tree

Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was spectacular. It takes place in Bogota, Colombia. The daughter of an affluent family strikes up an unlikely (but predictable) friendship with a young maid who comes to work in her home. The story alternates between their two points of view during the great political unrest of Bogota in the 1990's. It's devastating at times, as the girls don't understand the significance of many of the choices they make, and because there is a sense of determinism based on their classes that pervades the book. That said, it is a beautifully written book.

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Review: Priestdaddy: A Memoir

Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I kept seeing this one reviewed and finally picked it up. It is about a woman who grows up with a father who is a Catholic priest - I'll let you learn how that happened, but it was not nearly as scandalous as it could have been. If her childhood was unusual (which it was), her adulthood allows her to relive it, as she and her husband move back in with her parents after an economic setback. Told very humorously, and like all good memoirists, honestly, this book kept my attention.

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Review: An Ocean of Minutes

An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a really inventive book. It is about a couple who is separated after a major flu epidemic, when the husband contracts the flu and the wife agrees to time travel forward to fund his getting the antidote. Naturally, her travel goes awry, and she lands in a dystopic future, unable to contact him. Reminiscent of The Heart Goes Last and Station Eleven, ultimately this was a love story of sorts.

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Review: Pachinko

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book on the recommendation of a synagogue friend. It was fascinating, with great characters and plotting. It was about several generations of Koreans during the Japanese annexation of Korea. The Koreans are left desolate and are ostracized; this family turns to several different avenues to survive.

I enjoyed getting to know more about that period of history. But most of all, I enjoyed getting to know the characters - and the family secrets that followed them.

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Review: Educated

Educated by Tara Westover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was great! I read it after seeing it on the Rooster list. Similar to The Glass Castle, it was a memoir about a woman who grew up under circumstances that we would consider negligent. However, what I liked most about this book was how Westover depicted her life in a way that, until she begins to break away from her (separatist, home-schooling, abusive) family, seems at worst odd. There are untreated injuries, siblings who run away, and canned goods stocked for Armageddon. Then as Westover comes to terms with her childhood, as a reader, I was more able to see how her upbringing was abusive and negligent, not quaint and odd.

Ultimately, Westover seeks education, and education wins. This was a great read.

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Review: The Rooster Bar

The Rooster Bar by John Grisham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

John Grisham's books are always a fun read. This one followed three friends graduating from a for-profit scammy law school with no real prospects for employment. They get together and figure out how to make money ... untraditionally. I thought the character development really stood out in this book - it was really interesting to learn about each character's back story and how they came to attend this law school. Then, how those backgrounds led each of them to have the skills necessary to pull off their plan.

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Review: The Half Brother

The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

WOW. This was quite an epic. Recommended by my Norwegian friend Stig, this book possessed me for months. It was about three generations of a family living in Oslo during and after WWII. Translated from the original Norwegian, it was written very subtly, with moments sometimes not hitting me until I was a few pages past the scene. The character development was really good, and the narrative as a whole was ... epic. Perhaps my only hesitation in a stronger recommendation was the length - I definitely got lost at points in the book, willing it to get to the next chapter.

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