Dear Edward - Ann Napolitano

When I was in undergrad and had recently changed my major from chemistry to English, I took a creative writing class where a guest speaker read a short story of her about a plane crash. It was 2002 and she noted she'd probably never get the story published given the events of 9/11. I thought about this a lot when I picked up this book for the first time. There are young adults now who were not alive on 9/11 and perhaps this type of story doesn't feel as jarring for them. But there was something about this story that was deeply sad and unsettling for me.

But that's not to say that the book wasn't well written or worth reading. It was. But wading through individual trauma through the lens of national trauma of 9/11 was uncomfortable.

Dear Edward tells the story of a plane crash. 12 yo Edward Adler and his family are moving from New York City to Los Angeles where his mother is taking on a job writing for a TV show and his father is moving to a new university to be a professor after losing his bid for tenure. Along the way they meet several other passengers going through their own minor dramas.

And then the plane crashes. And Edward is the only survivor. To say that his life is completely changed is a drastic understatement. The PTSD alone is immense. Survivor's guilt. Orphan. He goes to live with his aunt and uncle who could never have kids of their own. But he's not ready to be folded into a family. And all this makes sense. Edward's reaction to everything is detailed and nothing seems out of the question.

The book alternates between Edward's life after the crash, and the hours and minutes leading up to the crash itself. This led to some confusion on my part since I was listening to the audio book and it interrupted the flow of the story somewhat. The actual events in the cockpit were lifted from an actual crash and that somehow makes the entire thing terrifying. Eventually Edward starts to process his trauma and one of the things that helps him is finding a trove of letters written to him by family members of those on the plane. Corresponding with these people feels cathartic for him. And in a way, it's cathartic for the reader as well.

4/5 Stars. 

Home - Toni Morrison

When it comes to picking an author for Women's History Month, it just makes sense to spend some time with Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. She's phenomenal. Her prose is smooth and if you're not careful will lull you into an odd sense of peace to only be broken by the truths she brings from the characters she brings to life. 

This short Novella follows brother and sister Frank and Cee Money. Frank has returned from the Korean War with wounds unseen. Having lost his two best friends, one who died right in his arms, Frank is haunted by the things he saw and the things he did during the war. What we would now call PTSD has led him to drink himself into oblivion. He seems to have found sanctuary and peace with Lily out in the Pacific Northwest. But when he receives a letter that his sister Cee "be dead" he knows he has to hurry to save her. 

Crossing the country has a black man in the 1950s is not easy and Frank is quickly waylaid into a mental institution. His escape and eventual arrival in Atlanta, Georgia is a master class as only Toni Morrison can present in the large and small cruelties of living in Jim Crow, segregated and overtly racist America. 

In the meantime, we're told that Cee left home as soon as she could, accompanied by a young man who professed love, but really had his eye on her father's car. Abandoned in Atlanta, Cee is determined to make her own life rather than return to the abusive taunts of her step-grandmother. Cee knows she needs a better job to make ends meet, so she applied to be a doctors assistant at a suburban home-office of Dr. Beau. Only, well Dr. Beau shows a little to much interest in his new assistant's anatomy and too little interest in her status as a human being. So this is how Cee becomes ill, only it's never really detailed, it doesn't need to be. One can google medical experiments of black women and find enough historical details to choke the joy from you for the day. 

This book is as much about Cee as it is about Frank, and their mutual healing after trauma. It's a shame that the brief descriptions offered mention Cee not at all, since her journey is just as moving. 

In such a short time, Toni Morrison paints a vivid and dense picture of redemptive sibling and self loves.

4/5 Stars. 

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging - Sebastian Junger

If Junger did exhaustive research in preparation for Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, it doesn't really show in the text. I liked the premise, and when he started to delve into facts and figures the book felt grounded, but then it drifted into anecdotes which seemed to be given as much weight by the author as the empirical evidence. And that would be fine if this was a straightforward memoir, but instead, Tribe operates as an uncomfortable mix of memoir and topical thesis that never feels quite confident in its own message.

Listen, I agree, today's culture seems to be lacking in connection. Look no further than the things people are willing to say to each other behind the relative anonymity of internet comment sections. And smaller tribes. tribes on the brink of survival seem to form more cohesive units. But that type of intensity is necessarily temporary. Why does America seem to have more than its fair share of PTSD diagnoses? Junger suggests it's the contrast between home life, the lack of cohesive communities, and a little bit of fraud that can account for this. But again, where this information comes from and whether it's empirical evidence or Junger's opinion isn't really clear (maybe it's spelled out in the notes section at the end, but by that point, I just didn't care). 

Some of the details in the story rang true for me. When I returned from deployment, I remember feeling anxious and disconnected. Over time it faded, as Junger states is normal. I also found certain statements particulary interesting: 

"Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker."

American Indians, proportionally, provide more soldiers to America’s wars than any other demographic group in the country.

roughly half of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have applied for permanent PTSD disability. Since only 10 percent of our armed forces experience actual combat, the majority of vets claiming to suffer from PTSD seem to have been affected by something other than direct exposure to danger.

It was better when it was really bad 

Interestingly, when I visited St. Petersburg in 2004, standing in red square next to a Burbury store in which I could afford nothing, I asked my tour guide how life had changed for him after the fall of communism. "I liked it better before," he said. "You had nothing, but everyone had nothing." Perhaps there was a shared sense of community through shared hardship.

Anyway, this was thought-provoking and interesting. But it just missed the mark for me.

3/5 Stars. 

The Book of Harlan - Bernice McFadden

It's February and for Black History Month, I wanted to read something from an African American author and also something about Black History. The Book of Harlan is written by Bernice McFadden, an award winning African American author of nine critically acclaimed novels. The average Goodreads score on this book was 4.1 which is pretty fantastic. 

So let's start with what's working in this book. McFadden's prose is well done and the first 1/4 of the book detailing Harlan's parents, Sam and Emma Elliott, who meet in Macon, Georgia and then after becoming pregnant with Harlan (much to the displeasure of Emma's preacher father), move around the country looking for the right fit, while the grandparents bring up Harlan. Finally, in Harlan's fourth year, Sam and Emma return to Macon for Harlan, having found their niche in 1920s Harlem. The pacing and the writing in this section of the book was the best part about the entire book. Even the parts that followed about Harlan's childhood and early adulthood in Harlem, playing in jazz bands and travelling the country was well done. And then, well then stuff started to get weird.

So about the midpoint of the book, when, in 1940, Harlan goes to Paris to play the jazz clubs there, unkowningly having fathered twin sons in Brooklyn, the suspense of the book started to ratchet up. When Harlan and his bandmate Lizard are picked up after curfew during the Nazi occupation of Paris, they are swept off to Buchenwald. Here I thought the book was going to settle in, and really delve into what it meant to be a black American in a German concentration camp. So I was completely surprised when this only took up a little more than two chapters. Much of this section of the book was Lizard's back story, which came a little too late as we'd already been introduced to Lizard for several chapters and well, then like many characters in this book, we never see him again. And although what happens to Lizard is terrible, he's in a concentration camp, you can probably figure it out, and it's supposed to be incredibly damaging to Harlan, there's something that is missing in the elements to give it a great emotional weight. 

When Harlan returns to his parent's home, he's completely broken and suffering from PTSD for several years, until he isn't and all of a sudden is out womanizing again. He moves to New Jersey with his parents, plays in some clubs, then all of a sudden his parents are killed in a car accident and he's once again devastated. He takes a job in Brooklyn as a superintendant of a building. Great, I thought, he's going to end up meeting his children finally, since the book spent a significant portion of time on the mother of his children and her family, but no. Instead of his children, Harlan finds Ilse Koch, the notorious wife of a Nazi administrator of Buchenwald who took sadistic pleasure in torturing prisoners in her husband's camp. Ilse Koch has taken refuge in the United States, disguised as recluse Andrew Mailer. (Except Ilse Koch in reality was tried twice for war crimes in Germany and committed suicide in prison in 1967 at the age of 60). 

Harlan, upon finding Ilse, strangles her to death and then turns himself into the police. Conveniently, the police detective who takes his statement has a wife who was also a prisoner at Buchenwald so he takes Harlan out the back door and sets him free, giving him all the money in his wallet and telling Harlan to make a new life somewhere. Harland decides to go to Macon, and then the book ends. YES! It ends there! 

So about what kind of fell flat for me: the book takes on too much. There are too many characters who show up to ground the story into factual time and place, but their factual stories get distorted by the narrative into untrue endings (Ilse Koch). 

There are also too many characters who are included, described in detail, only to be never seen again. The fact that we never know what happens to Harlan's twin sons was kind of a big gaping hole in the narrative. Yes, okay Harlan never met them, so if you take the story from only Harlan's perspective, then he didn't know what happened to them either, BUT in that vein, he never knew they existed in the first place, and he certainly didn't know anything about the family of the woman he slept with to make those children in the first place, but we had loads of details about those individuals in the story. It's almost as if they ceased to exist after the interesting portions of their own narratives were used up. 

The dialogue at times worked against the story. McFadden can get into a good rhythm of prose wherein the story flows well and the plot is driven forward. When dialogue is used for this purpose it has less effect and comes out awkwardly. 

Lastly, the scope of time taken on in this book was too great. Less time was spent on really interesting or complicated issues than were probably warranted given their weight and importance in the life of the characters. 

Basically I thought the first half of the book was pretty good and the book would have rated higher if the second half would have included mostly Buchenwald with a bit of the later life wrapped up at the end. The murder of Ilse Koch in the final chapters seemed an effort to create a dazzling ending where one wasn't really needed. This is a man who survived four years in a concentration camp, that struggle, and the changes it made in him, and how it redefines how we look at victims of the Holocaust should have been enough. That it wasn't is somehow telling on how this book fell short.

2/5 Stars.

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt

This is a book for readers. Correction, this is a gift for readers. For those who love escaping in the pages, and find themselves caring deeply about the characters who are revealed within them. This is a gift. A big, heart thumping, book so real you can feel it gift. 

That The Goldfinch won a Pulitzer Prize is not a surprise to me. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. It's a finely crafted, gracefully written, surprisingly accessible piece of masterwork fiction. I have a suspicion it may just be the best book I'll read this year. 

The story follows Theo Decker, a young teen whose mother is killed in a horrible terrorist attack. In the midst of the attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Theo escapes the grisly scene with a copy of Fabritius' The Goldfinch (you can read more about the painting here). A 1654 masterpiece whose story and description were lost with time, as Fabritius himself, and much of his other works were destroyed in a fire at his studio.

As a reader, we know only what Theo knows. We are shown the world through his eyes, and Tartt does a magnificent job telling us only what we need to know. She doesn't over explain, she doesn't extrapolate. We can think outside Theo's sphere, but not because the author herself has made any attempt to add in a narrator's interpretation. So there are some details of events in the book that seem so limited, but in a way, perfectly true to the story and the world created through Theo.

Theo is a flawed character, and I loved him the better for it. I never felt he was out of opportunities to make his life better, to overcome his trauma and the short shrift he was given in the life department. And Theo himself is aware of all this as well. It's like sharing in on a good friend's shame, and loving him despite all of it. 

There are so many twists in Theo's life, but Tartt knows just when to cut ahead in time and save us some of the banal sorrow that would have drug the piece down into tedious pace.

5/5 Stars.