Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

I know! A two-fer day! I actually finished these on the same day but was super lazy about writing the reviews.

Homegoing was a gut-wrenching story of love and loss over generations. Effie and Essie are half-sisters, born several years and hundreds of miles apart in Ghana. Effie, the beautiful daughter of a powerful Fanti village man is married off to a British white slave trader after her step-mother cuts off her opportunity to marry the village chief. Essie, is equally beautiful and lives in an Ashanti village and after she takes pity on the slave girl working in her home - delivering a message to the girl's father - the village is raided and Essie is sold into slavery, right under the very feet of her sister.

We then follow the varying lines of their decedents. Effie to Quay to James to Abena to Akua to Yaw to Marjorie in Ghana. Essie to Ness to Kojo to H to Willie to Sonny to Marcus in America. These varying generations have their own struggles and heartbreaks. The American line of descendants is perhaps the hardest to bear because their struggles are not their own as slavery dominates the early generations and cripples the later.

The story explores what is possibly passed down from our ancestors and how do our lineages inform and lead us to who we will be.

Incredibly well written and extremely powerful, I am so glad to have read this book.

4/5 Stars.

The Senator's Wife - Sue Miller

Listen, Sue Miller is a master craftsman when it comes to character development and setting the stage for how her characters got to be the way they are. The Senator's Wife is no exception. But there was something that didn't click throughout the story for me that culminated in an ending that made me abruptly squeamish and awkward. I didn't want to keep reading, but there were only 10 pages left.

The Senator's Wife is about a newly married 30-something Meri, who moves into a duplex next to Delia, the wife of former Senator Tom Naughton. Senator Naughton was apparently a big deal in the 60s and 70s. A bootstrap kind of politician who was liberal in the mold of John Kennedy - in more ways than one. Turns out the esteemed gentleman from Connecticut has a problem with keeping his hands off women.

Delia attempts to navigate an unconventional relationship with Tom, whom she still loves and Meri attempts to navigate an pregnancy which leaves her body feeling alien and unknown to her. Are these women supposed to be friends? Will they be able to develop a good relationship? It's all very hard to do across a generational divide. Meri is looking to be mothered, and Delia has already done all that. So she's nice, but very cold too. I just didn't really get this part. Their stories alone were interesting and eventually intertwined to give us the story's climax, but otherwise these two women together just did not work for me. Ultimately earning this tale a 3-star rating.

3 Stars.

A Man Called Ove - Fredrick Backman

A Man Called Ove is a thoroughly entertaining of a lonely curmudgeon who is really actually a good person. The writing is humorous and swift. There is a lot of detail but it doesn't bog the story down unnecessarily. This is a story of big sweeping themes about love and loss, friendship and family, told through small details about one individual person. 

The story starts with Ove attempting to buy an iPad and slowly through the story in various back flashes and limited description from other characters, we get to see what has brought Ove to be the person he is, and why he is so desperately unhappy. 

I liked this book so much that I went home after finishing it and stayed up way too late watching the Swedish language version of the film (apparently a Tom Hanks version is in the works but no real facts on that yet) and I cried even though I knew EXACTLY what was going to happen. The movie doesn't have some of the lightness of the book, but it's extremely well done. Highly recommend.

4.5/5 Stars. 

A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick was ahead of his time when he penned A Scanner Darkly. Published in 1977, it is a gritty dystopian story of undercover narcotics informant Bob Arctor who lives in a house with other substance abusers. The world is divided between dopers and straights and never the two intermix. The straights have been taught that the dopers are mindless fiends for the drugs - substance D.

When Arctor puts on a "scramble suit" causing him to appear as a faceless nameless blur, he takes on the persona of Fred, a narcotics agent charged, ironically with the surveillance of Bob Arctor, who seems to be making a play to become a heavy drug dealer. Because Arctor must consumer substance D in order to maintain his cover, the damage done to his brain causes him to suffer a rift in his reality, where eventually he no longer recognizes that Fred and Bob Arctor are one in the same. It's brilliantly painful, and slowly wrought as Dick's writing makes smaller and smaller moves to make us aware of the breakdown. 

At once a condemnation of the damage done by drugs, without condemnation of the users, Dick's story came from a deeply personal place, evident by the epilogue in which he lists the names of several people who died or became disabled due to their drug use. The novel also serves as an early condemnation of the war on drugs, which criminalized small dealers, but created an industry that required the addicts in order to operate. 

I can only imagine this was difficult to write. There were times when the story moved frustratingly slow, but mostly it was a pleasure to read. 

4/5 Stars. 

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit - Michael Finkel

Well here goes another review about a book about which I'm not sure how to feel. On the one hand, I like the journalistic straight-forward delivery of The Stranger in the Woods. The book tries to avoid stating a belief one way or the other in the morality of Christopher Knight and what he did surviving in the woods for 27 years on his own. And it presents views of those who both admire and despise him. 

The story is about Christopher Knight. A Maine man who walks away from society and carves out a camp for himself in the Maine woods, close to a cottage community from whom he steals in order to survive. Is he a parasite on this community? Yes. But was his attempt to live alone the most simple life he could muster admirable? Maybe. Hard to say and it probably depends on what traits in other humans you admire. 

And all of this conflict is fine and should exist in a book like this. The part I didn't enjoy was near the end, where the author becomes more of a character in the story and less an observer. It had the intrusive questionable ethics feeling of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Christopher Knight walked away into the woods and stayed there for 27 years, never even lighting a fire in the dead of winter in order to be alone and unobserved. I admit it's fascinating, but clearly this is how this man lived and would have continued to want to live had he not been caught in the midst of a burglary. 

So when a journalist continually visits the man in jail and goes to visit even after the man has told the journalist that his deepest desire is to be left alone, where should the line be drawn? When does the quest for the story steamroll over the man's privacy? He did not inject himself into the public limelight, indeed he did the opposite. I can feel the author's own struggle with this question in the last chapters, but ultimately it just left a bad feeling for me. Like I, in reading this book, have participated and assisted in the intrusion into a deeply private person's life. 

Towards the end of the book, Knight tells the author that he can write whatever he wants, "after [Knight] is gone." But since he hasn't died, I would suspect that the publishing of this book is exceptionally painful to him and his family.

3/5 Stars. 

Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

Wow. What a painful and powerful story. Their Eyes Were Watching God is about a naive but strong willed teenager, Janie Crawford who bows to her grandmother's influence and marries a man decades her senior. A former slave, her grandmother had visions and hopes for Janie that were different from Janie's own. And a loveless marriage makes Janie ache for those things she wants for herself. 

In order to find happiness she runs off with another man who promises her more freedom, only to find out that this man's definition of freedom is not her own. It is only as a wealthy but still young and beautiful widow that Janie meets Tea Cake, a young gambler who gives her a taste of the life she really wants. Their love story is simple and complicated at the same time. With great love comes great tragedy, and Hurston hits the notes perfectly.

Years ahead of its time in themes of feminism, self-discovery, and self-determination for women, Janie is a force, an unforgettable heroine in the midst of lesser models.

4.5/5 Stars. 

Galveston - Nic Pizzolatto

Galveston was a good start for a new writer. The pace moved well. The writing, for the most part, was smooth and well structured. 

In essence, the story is about Roy Cady, a strong man for a New Orleans criminal organization run by Stan Ptiko. Stan's new girlfriend had a prior fling with Roy and it appears that Stan is not about to let that go. Right after Roy gets some bad news about a terminal illness, Stan asks him to go do a job, but to go "unarmed." Hmmm.... Roy gets suspicious and doesn't listen. Which is good because it turns out to be a setup. In the process of rescuing himself he also rescues a teenage prostitute.

The two head off to Galveston where Roy wrestles with his prognosis, a drinking problem, and a desire to do something good with the days that are left to him. Both he and Rocky, the prostitute are broken people, trying to figure out how to live life on the straight and narrow when neither have had any experience at it. 

So the elements of a good story are all there, and it was in the end, fulfilling to watch these two broken people be broken, but try very desperately to get something, anything right in their lives. Some scenes stretched credulity and some of the flashback writing style led to a lot of confusion. Some elements of the characters and some plot points didn't make sense. All in all this was a solid book, but lacked some finer tuning which would have made it really good.

3/5 Stars.