The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin

I read this in two days. Why? Because James Baldwin is so compelling. Because he has such a wonderful eye for nuance. Baldwin and I have had wildly different life experiences. He grew up in Harlem and was there during the Harlem Riot of 1943 on his 19th birthday. But his words really spoke to me, plainly and beautifully about his experience and his hopes. 

The Fire Next Time is a collection of two essays originally published in The New Yorker. The first is a letter written to Baldwin's nephew that explores race in America and how his nephew might experience it. He cautions his nephew away from anger and into a love of self and blackness. An embrace of the Black is Beautiful aspect. 

The second essay digs into Baldwin's experience of Christianity and the racist misuse of the gospel. Baldwin spent time as a teenage preacher and the experience led him to turn away from religion altogether. Having seen the inside of the pulpit, he likened it to seeing behind the curtain of a theater and thus being disenchanted with the entire show. One cannot ignore the intersection of race and sexuality and its effect on Baldwin's experience. 

The Fire Next Time later became an influence for Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me and having now read both, I can see the influence there. While it is a snapshot in time of Baldwin's experience, The Fire Next Time is also timeless in its themes. 

4/5 Stars. 

The Girl with the Louding Voice - Abi Daré

How do you rate a book that emotionally wrecks you with the pain caused to the main character? How can I say that I enjoyed it when Adunni is so harmed? Perhaps its Adunni's spirit, which takes so many hits but cannot be crushed or denied. That she gets up again and again and is determined to find a way to make her life better.

I am no longer surprised at the cruelty humans inflict on other humans. Our capacity to cause pain is unbounded. In The Girl with the Louding Voice, we can see how the various characters are driven to pain or compassion. How the cruelties inflicted upon them can cause irreparable harm that they then inflict on others. We can also see how the kindness of just one person can change the trajectory of another's life.

Adunni is the only daughter of her mother and father. With an older and younger brother, and living in a small Nigerian village, Adunni's mother is aware of how vitally important it is for Adunni to go to school and leave the village. She wants a better life for Adunni than she has had for herself. She sells street food in order to feed her family. Money wasted on drink by her husband. When her mother dies, Adunni is unprotected and falls victim to her family's poverty. Her husband is forced to sell her into marriage, at 15, to an older man with two wives already. Due to some tragic circumstances (yes more tragic than forced child marriage) - Adunni runs away and finds her way to Lagos, where she is sold to a family to work as a house servant.

The man who brings her to Lagos collects her pay every month and never visits. She is for all purposes, enslaved to this family. The wife of the house beats her and starves her. The father has an eye for her that is far from fatherly. And by chance she meets a neighbor who may prove her only way out. If the neighbor only has the courage to step forward and do something.

I think the portrayal of the neighbor was really honest. We all can look away from things that we don't want to get involved in. We can all suspect people who are asking for help may not have the best motives. But the neighbor here takes a chance and it literally saves Adunni's life. May we have the wisdom to see these opportunities when they come.

4/5 Stars. 

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character - Paul Tough

It's telling that I'm struggling to write the review of this book I finished nine days ago, but I'm not sure what to say. It's good news that your IQ and "book smarts" aren't the only keys to success. In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough chronicles several programs aimed at assisting youth make it out of tough situations, and none of that is just tutoring. A lot of it is instilling certain character traits that will allow kids to rise above their situations and go on to live better lives. But the anecdotal presentation of the evidence left me feeling a little skeptical. 

We've been struggling with this a bit with our own kids. Our third grader continually says he's just "dumb at reading" after having a couple bad grades. But we're pushing him to have a growth mind set. The belief that hard work and determination can improve your situation. For anyone looking to work on this aspect I'd recommend the Big Life Journal.

It was interesting to read about the different programs being tried in Chicago. Obviously there is no easy answer to helping the kids in Chicago Public Schools succeed. Many programs have come and gone and graduation rates, teen pregnancy, and violence against and among students remain. But there are so many people trying to work on the problem. The number of shootings in Chicago may get the headlines, but the people working on the ground, in the neighborhoods never get any press. If it bleeds, it leads. Unfortunately.

So much of parenting is trying, and then failing like you're getting it right. So I was fairly surprised to read in How Children Succeed that I am, in fact, doing some things right. Trying to instill grit into my children will take a balancing act of trying to provide nurturing support, but also letting them fail, and reminding them that character counts along the way. 

3/5 Stars. 

Blended - Sharon Draper

This book ended up on my daughter's shelf. She's still a bit too young to get into this (there are no pictures) but in a couple years, she'll likely be able to read this on her own. The prose is fairly simplistic and the themes are complicated but accessible.

There are two major tween drama themes running through Blended. 1) Isabella's parents get divorced. It's traumatic for her. She doesn't feel truly at home in either house, and 2) Isabella's dad is black and her mom is white and being mixed race she gets a lot of comments from strangers that are hurtful. I felt the author dealt with these subjects well. She gets into a bit of nuance as Isabella learns to stand up for herself and her split identities.

The book does, however, spend a ridiculous amount of time on mundane details that don't add a lot to the story. Each chapter has a detailed explanation of what Isabella is having for breakfast. There are plot lines that seem to go nowhere. At one point, Isabella and her black friend are shopping at the mall and visit an upscale formal wear store where they are followed and then told to leave by the private security guard. This episode was well described and later when Isabella returned to the mall with her soon to be stepmother to pick out wedding attire, I thought this might come up again to close the loop but it did not.

And I'd be remiss not to mention that during the final 20 pages of the book there is a very traumatic episode that occurs that is really not explored at all except to be summarily disposed of in an effort to move the book to closure. It's hard not to compare this book with The Hate U Give, which is just a really masterful story told through the lens of Starr Carter. But of course, that book is intended for a more mature audience and this one is geared toward the middle school crowd.

For all its shortcomings, this is probably a very accessible book for a tween reader.

3/5 Stars.

The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman

First things first, you should know I love Neil Gaiman. I like the way his mind works and the worlds he creates. Although my eight year old received this for Christmas, I read it before him. Devoured it in a few days. This is what Gaiman does. He creates a world you want to inhabit. Even though it is usually creepy and discomforting, it is undeniably addictive.

In the Graveyard book, a man has come to kill a family, but he underestimated the curious nature of the toddler living in the house, who escapes without knowledge of the carnage and wanders into a nearby graveyard. The ghosts in the graveyard (a game I used to play as a child) come to find the child and are visited by the ghosts of the child's parents, who beg the graveyard inhabitants to protect their child. They agree and give him the run of the graveyard. He is taken under the protection of a mysterious figure named Silas, who, although his parents are two kindly old ghosts, it is Silas who provides most of the boys education.

Together, Silas and the ghosts keep the boy fed, entertained, and most importantly safe from the person or persons invested in killing him, who continue to look for him even after his escape to the graveyard. Along the way, the boy - whose name is Nobody Owens - meets fascinating people from the graveyard and learns to fade into the background and remain unseen.

As children do, he begins to question his mentors and venture out to discover what happened to him and why. This leads to a Gaiman style show down and Nobody shows why what he's learned in the graveyard is the best education he could have received.

Things that don't appear to be connected at first all matter and become connected with time. Bittersweet goodbyes and all that are wrapped up into this beautifully crafted book. What a gift for children to get to encounter Gaiman's creativity in such an accessible novel.

5/5 Stars. 

Down Among the Sticks and Bones - Seanan McGuire

 

I just love these little Wayward Children stories. Down Among the Sticks and Bones follows the backstory of twins Jacqueline and Jillian as they find a doorway to the Moors. Children of cold distant parents, Jacq and Jill each find their way in the Moors. Jacq becomes the apprentice to Dr. Bleak. Jill becomes the child in training to The Master, a vampire who both protects and feeds off the local village.

The Moors is a hard place but both Jacq and Jill seem to find their place. Except that Jill is under the tutelage of a jealous narcissistic vampire and she's already terribly insecure. Their parents had assigned roles for them to play as children and they were not allowed to deviate. So when the Master assigns Jill her role she plays it to a T, all while basking in his supposed love. We all know from Every Heart A Doorway where this entire thing ends up, but it was still very shocking to see the twins before they ended up at the Home for Wayward Children. Little surprise their parents placed them there after their return from the Moors.

For such short books, these stories are bursting with detail and imagery. I'm already teeing up the next one to listen to.

5/5 Stars

The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

Stella and Desiree are twins who grow up in Mallard, Louisiana where the lightness of your skin is prized above all else. When the girls leave as teens, they shock the town who see nothing wrong with the place they live.

The book begins with Desiree returning to town with her dark child in tow. What has become of Stella we don't know but it is eventually teased out over the course of the book. Desiree rebelled against Mallard by going to DC eventually and working for the FBI as a fingerprint examiner. She married a dark man and had a dark child. But when the man ended up being violent and abusive she went back to Mallard. Preferring to live a smaller life of safety even if it meant returning to Mallard. Desiree puts no value on the lightness of her skin. And she guides her daughter through the difficulty of living in that environment.

We then find out that Stella left New Orleans without telling her sister. Passing as white and living under a cloud of shame. She can never fully relax, can never be herself truly as she knows the cost to her life if anyone were to find out her secret. She makes a life for herself and then eventually, through her daughter, finds some way to pursue the studies and qualities of herself that she has suppressed for so long. There is so much narrative tension created through all the Stella chapters. Brit Bennett does a remarkable job stretching that out for the reader.

The book then moves on to Stella and Desiree's daughters. The two could not be more different but as they learn about each other it makes them explore the ways they are similar and what their lives have meant. This book is beautifully written. Even the minor male characters are so well drawn by the pages I can see them in my mind.

The Vanishing Half is a joy to read, even as it tackles some very deep family rifts and personal traumas.

5/5 Stars. 

The Dutch House - Ann Patchett

I loved this book. I love Ann Patchett. I love siblings. This was a definite five star read for me. Danny and his sister Maeve grow up in an architectural gem of a house in suburban Philadelphia - The Dutch House. The house was purchased by their father Cyril, a real estate prospector who built a thriving business. Their mother hated the house. Hated the opulence that was associated with the house. She felt out of place and not useful to the world shut up in the house. So she leaves. And the children are bereft. Maeve is diagnosed with diabetes - a dangerous disease in the late 60s.

Everything develops a new rhythm after their mother leaves until their father begins dating a woman named Andrea. When their father eventually married Andrea, Maeve has gone off to college and two little girls move into her room. Danny is aghast at the way Andrea is obsessed with the house. He wants nothing to do with her, and she with him. But when their father dies unexpectedly, Danny finds himself at Andrea's mercy. And she has none. She kicks this 16 year old boy out on his own to fend for himself.

Luckily the love between Danny and Maeve is the strongest in the whole book and she is there for Danny. She's always been his mother figure and she remains so. Their love is also tied up in their shared childhood trauma and the vengeance they feed between themselves. The hate they have for Andrea is almost a tertiary character in the book.

I love the nuance Patchett drives into Danny and Maeve's relationship. I love the way she teases out the characters and their motivations, the ripples their childhood creates through their life. It's so well done.

5/5 Stars

Beneath the Sugar Sky - Seanan McGuire

I really enjoy these Wayward Children books. This is my fourth in the series but definitely not my last. While the others have been prequels to the first book (Every Heart a Doorway you can read that review here), Beneath the Sugar Sky occurs after the events in the first book.

Jack and Jill have returned to The Moors following Jill's violent spree and Nancy has moved on to her own door to the Halls of the Dead. Cade has taken up Lundy's old tasks of running and managing the school as Eleanor grows older and more distracted. New girl Cora has arrived, fresh from a land where she was a mermaid. Cora has made one friend in her time at Eleanor West's and is out in the turtle pond with Nadia, who came from a land where she was a drowned girl among the turtles.

Their sojourn is interrupted by a girl falling from the sky. This girl introduces herself as Rini, a girl who has come from Confection to find her mother, Sumi. Whoops. Sumi died way back in book one. But Rini is insistent on finding her because the Queen of Cakes has returned to Confection and their whole world is in upheaval. How could Sumi, a teenager who died before marrying her true love, the candy corn farmer and fulfilling her destiny of defeating the Queen of cakes, have a daughter you ask? Well because Seanan McGuire is a genius and the lands of nonsense where a prophecy has been made don't give two hoots about whether someone is actually there to fulfill said prophecy.

Cora and Nadia get Cade and Christopher and they have to travel to a couple different worlds to get all the parts of Sumi back together again. This culminates with a showdown against the Queen of Cakes and a real revealing of the land of Confection and what it all means. I love how each of these books really explore different worlds. Book one really focused on Nancy and the Halls of the Dead, but we get to revisit it here and see the world more fully fleshed out. Book two took us to The Moors and we got to see just how Jack and Jill came to be. This book explores Confection, and the fourth, which I already read out of order, explores Lundy's time in the Goblin Market.

Each book explores so much about these hidden worlds where children who have need of it, are given exactly the world they need, that understands them. Cora is no different. She's visually overweight although she's an amazing athlete and swimmer. She goes to a world where her swimming is the most important thing about her and no one is constantly judging her outward appearance. In each book, McGuire really tackles some aspect of children that are overlooked or shamed and makes them into the unique aspect that makes that child feel at home.

Wouldn't we all be better off if we could make children feel welcome and essential in the world in which they already live?

4/5 Stars. 

Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire

I really fell in love with the Wayward Children series when I picked up a "prequel" giving the backstory of Katherine Lundy in In an Absent Dream (you can read that review here). I hadn't realized it was a part of a series until halfway through but a prequel is a decent way to start a series anyway.

In Every Heart a Doorway, we are first introduced to The Home for Wayward Children and its headmistress, Eleanor West. It seems some children are special. Disappearing through doorways and down wells and into other lands and other realities where the rules are different. Sometimes there are no rules. In Lundy's case, she had gone to the Goblin Market, a place of high logic and wickedness. It seems every world that children fall into go into one of four cardinal directions - nonsense, logic, wickedness, and virtue, as they are explained to Nancy on her first day at the Home.

While In an Absent Dream was a very specific journey into the land of the Goblin Market, Every Heart a Doorway introduces many different worlds through their former inhabitants. Those former inhabitants now reside at the Home, mostly waiting, wishing to return to the worlds from which they were expelled. Having lived in a reality particularly crafted for their personalities, existing in our world, the normal existence is painful.

Lundy is a teacher there, trying to help the children cope with the reality that most of them will not be going back. Nancy refuses to believe this. She has come from the Halls of the Dead and wants very much to return. "Be sure" all the doors tell their travelers and Nancy's was no exception. But how can you be sure when you go only the one time? How can you be sure when you don't know what is lying beyond the door? The Lord of the Dead wants Nancy to be sure. So she heads home where her parents are aghast at her black clothes and bleached hair. They pack her off to the Home with a suitcase full of clothing that would make a flamingo blush.

But once she arrives at the Home, she is quickly shunned by the other students except her new roommate Sumi, Sumi's friend Cade, and the odd twins Jack and Jill. And this would be fine to bide her time while she waits for the Lord of the Dead to send another door, but... Sumi is murdered. Then another girl, and another girl. So this doesn't seem like it's going to work out very well.

So this is part fantasy and part mystery and all just very very good. Because at its core, the Wayward Children series takes those things about us that as teenagers or younger we had such a hard time defining and living with, identifying them as special and then making those traits work somewhere else where we get to really be ourselves. It shouldn't be a surprise that LGBT themes are prevalent in the books or that the characters come from diverse backgrounds. It makes the series really great. There's so much richness in the language and the visuals of the created worlds. Seanan McGuire is a treasure.

4/5 Stars. 

Clean Getaway - Nic Stone

Scoob's grandma has a secret. Well she actually has a lot of them. Family secrets play a big part in this middle reader book about a road trip between a grandson and his grandma. Suspended from school for fighting and computer hacking, Scoob (William) is ready to get out from under his dad's disapproving looks and into his grandma's newly purchased RV.

Grandma soon tells Scoob that she's trying to recreate a trip she took in 1968 with his grandfather. A trip from Atlanta to Juarez, Mexico which was complicated by the fact that Scoob's grandmother is white and his grandfather was black. With the use of The Green Book - a travel companion for blacks trying to travel in the deep south - Scoob's grandparents made it most of the way but had to turn back. His grandmother is now determined to see the trip to its end, so long as Scoob's father doesn't get in the way and insist they come home. And when Grandma starts to get funny about tossing her phone, well, Scoob starts to get suspicious that there is more to Grandma than meets the eye.

The book was a great reminder that middle readers are starting to see their elders as full humans. They start to realize flaws in the grown ups around them. It's such a confusing and disorienting time in the life of an adolescent. Most children grow up and figure out a way to forgive their parents and elders for being flawed humans. Some can never let that go. It was great to see Scoob struggle with this issue. It was also a good way to build on the history of racism for kids who may be familiar through earlier picture books and other readings. The reader gets to watch Scoob create links between the racism his grandparents experienced and his own. 

4/5 Stars. 

In An Absent Dream - Seanan McGuire

As I was looking for Own Voices writers to read for Pride month, Seanan McGuire's name came up and I thought I'd never heard of her. But turns out a couple of years ago, I devoured her Feed series (you can read my review for Feed here and Deadline here). A post-apocalyptic zombie series written under a pen name, Mira Grant. I had no idea. But since the writing in that series was so solid, I was willing to bet the same would be true for something written under her true name. And I was right. In an Absent Dream is well written. It's captivating.

While this is technically book #4 in the series, it is supposedly a prequel so I felt reading it first would be fine. I hope that's true. I suppose I'll find out when I read book #1 in the series, because I am definitely going to read more of these.

In IAD, 8 year old Katherine Lundy is friendless and lonely as the eldest daughter of the school principal. While not bullied outright, Katherine is shunned and escapes into a world of books. That is until she is walking home from school and winds up in front of a tree with a door. "Be sure" a sign above the door says. And while Katherine certainly can't be sure when she doesn't know what is behind the door, she steps through anyway into a hallway where the artwork on the walls provides the rules of the world she has just entered.

During this initial trip she is befriended by a girl with odd colored eyes named Moon, and an older woman known only as The Archivist. Since names have power, Katherine is known only as Lundy. She isn't the first Lundy to visit The Goblin Market, she's told. And in this way we learn that her father has had his own encounter there. While the Goblin Market is richly described and utterly fascinating, McGuire hides several action sequences from the reader. Depositing Lundy out of the Goblin Market and back home with just a mention of a battle against the wasp queen during which Mockery, another girl we never meet in real time, has been killed.

Lundy returns to the market at age 10 and the tension builds as she further learns the rules of the market under which she is to live. Lundy has a choice to make at age 18, to choose the market or forever be banished. She incurs debts within The Market, which insists its citizens pay "fair value" for everything they obtain. Those who fail to pay fair value slowly turn into birds unless their debts are paid off. It's a complicated system, but one that is so deftly explained by McGuire that its richness is enhanced by its mystery.

Will Lundy return and stay at the Goblin Market? That's a spoiler I do not want to give up because I did not see the ending coming at all in this one and it was not what I was expecting. I'm hoping some of the details of what happens after IAD is covered in the other books since it was a prequel. Will Lundy appear in any of the future books? I certainly hope so.

4/5 Stars. 

The Immortalists - Chloe Benjamin

The Immortalists is a book that ends up on a lot of Pride month reading lists because one of the four main characters is gay. It's been on my kindle for a while and I've been meaning to read it for a while. It is not, however, Own Voices, which is one of the goals I had for reading books during Pride. So I missed the mark on this for my own goals. But that's not to say that I don't think The Immortalists is a worthy read.

I think I've said before that I love sibling books. I love exploration of the sibling relationship. I have only one sister, so larger sibling groups are a mystery to me. The Immortalists explores four siblings from New York who visit a fortune teller to learn their future. Eldest Varya, Daniel, Klara and youngest Simon are all given the dates of their deaths. We get limited views of the each sibling but learn that Simon is told he will die "very young" and Klara at 31, Daniel in his 40s and Varya at 88. The book then spends 1/4 of its pages with each sibling.

Simon is first and his journey is heartbreaking as he rushes to fit as much life as he can prior to the early death predicted in his youth. I ripped through this section of the book. I loved Simon very much and his young and tragic life were particularly compelling. The knowledge of the dates of their deaths compel the characters in odd and fascinating ways.

Are they doomed to the dates they were given? Or does the knowledge of the date create a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is a question that is played with and explored in the story without actually giving a real answer. Benjamin lets her readers reach their own conclusions. The Immortalists is part character dissection and part psychological exploration. It tells the story of the four siblings without resorting to odd narrative devices like The Last Romantics (you can read that review here). The characters are compelling and the book is well written. 

4/5 Stars. 

The Last Romantics - Tara Conklin

I really enjoyed portions of The Last Romantics. In the end, it felt a little bit too long, but I really did enjoy this story of four siblings making their way through a world in which their father dies young and their mother, unable to handle the strain of living as a widow responsible for the lives of four children, who shuts down and puts a "pause" on their mothering. I love sibling stories. Sibling relationships contain so many multitudes of depth and understanding.

I only have one sister. And our relationship has lasted through rivalry, separation, and now a close bond of friendship, mutual admiration and respect, and shared lifestyles. It's sometimes hard for me to imagine having similar experiences with two additional people.

Renee, Caroline, Joe, and Fiona are each individually shaped by their experiences during "the pause" and it carries them into adulthood in varied ways. Never able to fully unload their baggage, they go through periods of self denial. Joe perhaps the worst, because he has been coddled and protected from his choices until he also dies an early death, which leaves each of the sisters grieving in their own destructive ways.

The story is told in flashbacks with Fiona giving an author talk at some point over the age of 100. I didn't quite understand the need for this narrative voice as I found it a distraction that teetered on the edge of unbelievability. Will modern medicine improve our lives and outcomes, extending out life spans to well past 100? Perhaps, but the contemplation of this question added nothing to the story except a hint at the secret hiding in the middle.

On the whole, this was a well crafted novel about the complicated relationships between siblings, needlessly complicated by a contemplated future in which we experience extended lifespans and unnamed security crises.

3/5 Stars. 

Beautiful on the Outside - Adam Rippon

Adam Rippon is a national treasure who must be protected and celebrated.

Lighthearted, witty and exceedingly fun, in Beautiful on the Outside, Rippon uses his trademark humor to tell the story of his introduction to skating and the trials and sacrifices made by his family to turn him into an Olympic medalist.

In the book he answers some questions, such as why did I see his sweet mug EVERYWHERE during the Olympics (he didn't say no to any media requests) and what he tells his Tinder dates (advertising). In any case, Adam pushed himself hard and strove for success. Underneath all the cheekiness, he's actually a very driven athlete who just happens to have a killer smile. When he was broke and eating free gym apples, Adam made a choice to keep pursuing skating and became an elite athlete on his own terms. This included coming out as homosexual when he decided he was ready and it helped propel him to live authentically and as his best self for the Olympic Games.

I stayed up late last night watching his Dancing with the Stars Routines and he has such a beautiful grace in his movements. I'm glad he's saying yes to so many amazing opportunities because I love his sense of humor and the way he seems to never have met a stranger. If you've read the book, you'll understand how much I laughed during one DWTS exchange he had with the judges in which the guest judge asked him about this amazing red and black suit he wore for a number, and Adam quipped back that he took the suit from the Judge's dressing room before the show.

I'm so happy Hachette Books picked me to send this lovely book to.

4/5 Stars. 

A Woman is No Man - Etaf Rum

This book.

Cycles and cycles of cultural violence. Generational violence.

From Fareeda, to Isra, to Deya. What does it take to break a cycle? What does it mean to break a cycle?

And so many things are broken in this novel. Hearts and bodies and minds.

Etaf Rum absolutely slays in A Woman is No Man. She gives voice to the stifling and suffocating effect of generational and cultural expectations.

Told through varying points of view first from Isra, then her daughter Deya and finally from Deya's paternal grandmother Fareeda, we see how an original violence experienced by Fareeda, expelled from her home and homeland in Palestine, learns to live under the harshest of conditions. Tragedy leads her to dig into the cultural belief that daughters are a burden and sons are to be celebrated.

In devaluing the worth of daughters and women, Fareeda sets the conditions for her son Adam to be brutally cruel to his new wife, Isra. When Isra and Adam are dead, Deya must grow up under Fareeda's rule, constantly being reminded that as a girl, she has little worth.

This book is about Deya finding her voice and reclaiming her worth. The cost is heavy to break the cycle of violence in her family. But if not Deya, then who? Deya's struggle comes from someone within the culture (not from a whiteness-centered point of view), straining against the restraints of expectation. Underneath is an abiding love which causes her to consider all the ramifications of seeking her own path.

A Woman is No Man leaves a lot of questions unanswered - gives characters grace they may not deserve, but is up to the reader to decide to what extent it is given. It is perfectly drawn and perfectly imprecise. A real heartbreaker of a book.

4/5 Stars.

The Lying Game - Ruth Ware

There are five rules in the Lying Game:

1: Tell a Lie - looks like there is a big lie lurking at the center of this book. Like every Ware novel, this secret is teased out over the course of backflashes as we learn how the four main characters, Isa, Thea, Kate and Fatima get to know each other at an English boarding school in the town of Salten where they make up this silly game which makes everyone hate them.

2: Stick to Your Story - they're pretty good at this one since it's 17 years later and only a dog and the unstoppable reach of water has uncovered the secret they thought they buried in the marsh.

3: Don't Get Caught - Pretty clear someone is going to get caught here so when Kate sends a text simply saying "I need You", the other three drop everything to be at their side. Their cover story of attending a reunion at a school that Fatima and Isa attended for less than a year and never graduated from is just weird, but I chalked this up to never having attended boarding school myself.

4: Never Lie to Each Other - whoops, well what do you expect for rules set down by 15 year olds who haven't spoken to each other in years but somehow remain the best of friends. This rule gets broken a lot, and mostly within the first few chapters.

5: Know When to Stop Lying - this rule had me yelling at my dashboard listening to the audio. A lot of things could have been cleared up if the characters had stopped lying to each other (see Rule 4), partway through the book.

Other points:
- Ware knows how to draw up a spooky scene. Kate is still living in the ramshackle tide mill her father owned during their school years. It's falling apart and slowly sinking into the sea. But Kate, who has become an artist like her father, has refused to leave and has lived a life near the poverty line as a result.

ruthware.com Setting for the Lying Game

- The men in this book take a backseat to the female characters, but they are the biggest proponents of plot. Kate's father Ambrose draws pictures of the girls. Kate's brother Luc is the subject of Isa's teenage crush and when he shows up partway through the book, yells at Isa, who is holding a baby and seems sinister until, poof, off goes his shirt and all is forgiven. (Yeah I REALLY didn't understand what was happening here). And then there is Owen, Isa's partner who seems like a pretty decent guy, until Isa starts yelling at him and lying to him about... whatever, it's not important and she easily could have smoothed things over with him at any point in the book.
- All this baby does is breastfeed and nap. And Isa is obsessed with the baby until, whoops, (view spoiler)
- And (view spoiler)

So this book ended up a little uneven for me. But it was MUCH better than Woman in Cabin 10. Isa is a stronger character and is a good narrator even if she is a little slow-witted sometimes. And the big reveal of the secret is perplexing because the choices were sort of idiotic. But not a bad read and I liked the narration by Imogene Church.

3/5 Stars. 

Before We Were Yours - Lisa Wingate

This was a tough book to get through. I really dislike reading about cruelty to children. And I really dislike real people who are cruel to children. And so here's this book. It made me feel so many things. 

Before We Were Yours starts off in a Baltimore hospital where a Congressman's daughter has just suffered a stillborn birth but doesn't know it yet. Her desperate family want to fix it. Someone makes a call to Memphis. 

In present day, Avery Stafford is altering her life as a prosecutor to come back to South Carolina and hit the campaign trail with her ailing Senator father whose staff is looking for an heir apparent to his Senate seat. Avery is uncomfortable with the whole thing. Hers is a high stakes family, run mostly by her aggressive mother, Honeybee. In the background is a grandmother who's dementia has led to a nursing home placement. On a visit to a different nursing home, Avery meets May Crandall, who mistakes Avery for someone else. See, there's this blond curly hair thing that seems to be passed down from Grandma Judy.

So we whip back to the past, to a stormy night on the Mississippi river, when Queenie, aboard her shantyboat home, the Arcadia, is having a terrible time birthing twins. When all hope is lost and Briny must take Queenie to the hospital, the other five children, Rill, Camellia, Lark, Fern and Gabion, are left on the boat with a family friend to await their parent's return. 

Unfortunately, this is 1939 in Memphis and there is a real life demon, Georgia Tann, walking around, snatching children from poor families and selling them to rich ones to make herself wealthy. She snatches up the children and places into a boarding home for the Tennessee Children's Home Society. And there, well there is where all the bad things happen and I really just don't like thinking about it so you'll have to take my word for it that it's very very bad. 

What all this has to do with Avery and Grandma Judy you can probably guess but it all unravels over time. As Avery learns the truth about Grandma Judy, she discovers some things about herself as well. And while there are some sweet moments in the book, they are mostly bittersweet because although this is a work of fiction, it's based on real stories of things that happened to real children under the charge of Georgia Tann. That Georgia Tann got to grow old and die of cancer is monumentally unfair. That my Tennessee government had a chance to make life better for these children, but failed is also unfair. 

So go out, help a child, volunteer your time and talent to organizations that make life better for orphans and kids in foster care. And also, if you like crying, you can read this book.

4.5/5 Stars. 

Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng

Who doesn't love to hate on a character now and then. In Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng gives us a whole family of characters to hate on. 

When Mia and Pearl move to Shaker Heights, Ohio, Mia promises her 15 year old daughter that for once, they will stay put. Mia, who is an artist constantly moving where her inspiration takes her, knows this kind of stability will be a gift to her daughter, who has attended more alma maters than is probably advised.

Mia rents an upstairs unit from the Richardson family - a perfectly situated family of four children (two boys and two girls) with a lawyer father and journalist mother. Elena may have at one time aspired to more than a local beat at a tier three paper, but she never went for it. Now she's content to believe her opinions and her beliefs are the best. She's managed to raise three exceptionally selfish children, and treats the youngest pretty horribly. Now I'm not saying I don't have my moments when we're late leaving the house and my child is crying about how her/his seat belt won't buckle and somehow it's my fault and they hate me, that I don't react in a way that is less than motherly, but c'mon Elena Richardson, your daughter is still a CHILD. Phew. 

So anyway, Mia is a pretty level headed person although she's got some secrets, but she genuinely feels for people. And Pearl starts to hang out more with the Richardsons, finding a kindred spirit in the younger boy, Moody, and finding a smoking hot smoldering spirit for the older brother, Tripp, who, let's face it, has had too much of his life be easy to be anything other than slightly less than an asshole. The older daughter, Lexie, is also incredibly selfish although there is a hint of that starting to change. And Moody, who we may have some sympathy for, ends up being kind of an asshole too. Which leaves the youngest daughter, Izzie, who, constantly berated and unloved by her own mother, has a bunch of issues and is seriously just looking for someone (Mia) to love her. Sad.

And all that would be fine if Elena Richardson didn't have a friend so focused on having a baby that she would railroad the child's biological mother in her quest for custody. Because she does, and that brings out everyone's thoughts and feelings on the subject. When it turns out Mia doesn't agree with Elena, Elena goes through some pretty sneaky and unethical shit to get dirt on Mia. 

I wasn't a huge fan of the ending only because I wanted Elena Richardson to really get hers but alas, this book is probably more like real life where Karma is a bitch, but not always egalitarian. Celeste does some really great work with white privilege, white saviorism, and class distinctions that work really well in the book. I enjoyed it and her writing.

4/5 Stars

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

As I sat here, thinking about how to convey my feelings and heartbreak over reading The Bluest Eye, my phone notification tells me that Toni Morrison, Novel Laureate and Pulitizer Prize winner has died at age 88. Her long life was a gift to literature and to arts. That her death comes after two days of media coverage surrounding back to back mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton makes a kind of literary sense in that Toni Morrison was ever a critic of our culture and the often banal cruelty inflicted on minorities, women, and children. 

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison set out to detail and chronicle the destruction of innocence in the literal break down of Pecola, a twelve year old girl who, by the end of the novel, has suffered cruelties minor and grievous resulting in her complete psychotic break. And the language Morrison uses to describe this degradation, its smooth flow and lyrical beauty can make you forget that you are reading something abjectly terrible. And it is, abjectly terrible, and difficult to read, and yet, Morrison pulls no punches. She wants you to be aware of the ways in which humans are capable of destroying other humans. 

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.” 
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

When you pick up a Toni Morrison novel you better be ready for your heart to break in ways you didn't know existed. That the Bluest Eye was the first such novel in a series of ever sharpening craft, that she was actually disappointed in later years at her inability to create a more seamless piece of art, is a testament to the growth and skill she acquired as she toiled at this work. 

And Morrison was ever sure of herself and the place in the literary universe where her novels lived. I once saw a interview an Australian morning show did with her where the journalist asked Toni if she would ever consider writing books about white characters. Toni looked this woman dead in the eye for an uncomfortable amount of silence for TV purposes and asked if the journalist had any idea how racist such a question was? 

That such a voice has left the literary world is no question a loss, but we can be grateful for the body of work she leaves behind.

4/5 Stars.