Lions - Bonnie Nadzam

At some point in Lions, the residents of the town refer to it as a "living ghost town" and the description is hauntingly perfect. In fact, lots of things about this book are hauntingly perfect.

When a mysterious stranger and his dog walk into town, they have the fortune of meeting probably the kindest, most unassuming, three people to ever walk the dusty roads of Colorado. Georgiana and John Walker, and their son, Gordon, feed, clothe and give money to the man so that he can make it through another day or two. Unfortunately, the man takes the money and charity (not the same thing) and goes to the local watering hole where he meets other citizens of the town less likely to be friendly to a stranger. Small towns, small minds kind of thing. A fight ensues and the man ends up in the local jail for the night and his dog... well, a dog on its own in a strange town and dark roads...

And after the encounter, the town, which was already teetering on the brink of extinction, gets tipped over the edge into a downward spiral. And just as Gordon Walker's life is about to change and he's about to go off to college with his girlfriend Leigh, his father dies and Gordon enters a spiral of his own.

It's a jarring time in someone's life to lose a parent (I know only from watching others go through it - I'm blessed to still have both of mine). And Gordon seems to suffer more than most. On top of the normal grief is a way of life and a town that John Walker was not prepared to leave. And his son is tied to that way of life in a way that others may be free. John would take days at a time away from his welding work to travel north to where the Colorado roads become gravel and unpaved. What he did up there was a town mystery and source of gossip. And, it's a question that's never really answered in the book which adds to the entire feeling the book evokes.

It's so rare that a place serves as an extra character in a book, but Lions is certainly a main character here. It's really well done. I was uncomfortable with Gordon and his quietness as I think I was meant to be.

4/5 Stars. 

This Will Only Hurt a Little - Busy Phillips

Right about the time I was wrapping up high school, I fell pretty hard for a brown haired boy and was so frustrated by the girl who wouldn't notice him for fear of ruining a friendship. Of course I'm talking about Pacey Witter and Dawson's Creek (Team Pacey, don't @ me). But then I went to college and so did Joey Potter and that's when I first saw Busy Phillips. I wasn't a huge fan of the character of Audrey. The writers and show runners so obviously wanted to place someone in juxtaposition to Katie Holmes' character and they went a lot overboard with Audrey in the process.

So I lost the thread on Busy Phillips for a while until she was gearing up to have a late night show on E! called Busy Tonight. Finally, said the feminist inside me. A late night show hosted by a woman. This is so great. Hmm 10 p.m. said practical sleepy me. And while I followed both the show and Busy Phillips on social media (instagram), I didn't stay up to watch any episodes. And inevitably the show was cancelled and I'm mega-bummed but also can only really blame myself.

Busy's book has been on my to-read pile for a while but it took some time to get around to it as the urgency of connecting the book with the show became lost. So, having no other knowledge of her career, I dug into this (audio) and really enjoyed it. Busy is honest AF about her life and irreverent of the system within which she works for her profession. Hollywood is about as rough and misogynist as I imagined. I really connected with her journey through balancing motherhood and work, and her loneliness following the birth of her first daughter. Being a new mother can be terribly isolating and society does not prepare men to become dads and shoulder ANY of the load. Men who have managed to figure out how to do this are going above the norm and this should change.

Busy on her show. At the end of the night she drank a margarita in her nightgown. 

I'm glad women like Busy exist to demand to take up space and give voice to some of the pitfalls women when we're trying to be polite. I'm only sad Busy's show was cancelled before she got a chance to have Glennon Doyle on. But, at least I can rewatch the Kristen Bell episode whenever I want to really live my best TV life. 

4/5 Stars. 

Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered - Karen Kilgariff & Georgia Hardstark

I enjoy podcasts although I prefer audiobooks so I don't stay up to date on many. I'm familiar with the My Favorite Murder podcast mostly through other readers I follow on the bookish side of Instagram - what those of us with book accounts like to call "Bookstagram" - although I'm not an avid listener myself. I find it hard to listen with any regularity to podcasts in general unless I'm commuting to work and I'm really in the mood. Part of it must be that there are just so many different pods to listen to. And if they update their content regularly, which is good for their avid listeners I guess? I just get overwhelmed by anything I've missed.

But when it comes to the who and why behind murder, especially serial murder, I'm intrigued. What makes people so depraved? Why do people do these things to others? Back when my husband and I were both still travelling for work (what I wouldn't give for a king size Hilton bed about now) and I had the time, I torched my way through Mindhunters and various other Netflix murderer shows.

I don't know what I was expecting from Stay Sexy and Don't Get Murdered. But a joint memoir about the podcast creators was not it. Not to say I didn't enjoy hearing about Karen and Georgia and their upbringings. They were very honest about their lives and their addictions - where they had succeeded and where they had gone wrong. Sometimes reading a memoir is interesting because you find out that people who have had some success also have some of the same underlying issues and insecurities as you. And that's helpful. I really liked reading the chapter on Fucking Politeness, because I definitely have had some trouble with that of my own and I want to make sure I don't pass down to my own daughter a bad and dangerous people pleasing habit.

So this was a decent book but I definitely was expecting more murder.

3/5 Stars. 

The Language of Spells - Garret Weyr

The Language of Spells starts out a bit slow for its target demographic. While I really liked the description of dragons and why Grisha is special, or not, it took a while to build to the actual premise of the book - namely, Grisha's meeting a young girl named Maggie, who is about to change both their lives. Maggie doesn't show up for several more chapters and her absence is felt by a dragging plot line that involves Grisha being turned into a teapot for almost a century.

Once Maggie and Grisha meet up, the story turns into one of friendship and trust, with a slight sinister undercurrent of something rotten in the city of Vienna when it comes to the control and handling of dragons. I also liked the descriptions of magic and the "rules" for either seeing the dragons or not seeing them depending on one's openness to magic.

This book belongs to my 8 year old and I knew he was struggling to get through the first couple slow chapters so I asked him to borrow it and returned it to him with a note thanking him for letting me borrow his book. I got a very sweet note in return and a promise to talk about the book with me when he was finished. It's the simplest way I know to encourage reading. Both my kids love being read to and reading stories together is a really important part of our evening, but getting them to also be independent readers is important to me because one day, I want them to choose to pick up a book.

A book like this one with complex themes of love and sacrifice, choices made by a child protagonist is just the ticket to getting some of those discussions started, I just have to get him over the initial hump of a couple slow chapters.

3/5 Stars.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End - Atul Gawande

My grandmother just turned 90 and lives on her own in the house where my mother was raised. She's lived there alone since her mother died at the age of 97, a year after my grandfather died of a massive heart attack leaving my grandmother a widow caring for her aging mother. At each step, my family has tried talk to my grandmother about her needs and moving into a facility with more activities and more people. She's very social. Up until this stupid pandemic struck, she was making crafts for the church bizarre and making tea sandwiches for the church coffee hour.

She's done amazingly well on her own, for a woman who had a heart attack ten years ago while visiting our family in Ohio. Since then she's watched her diet and makes her medical appointments through a car service for seniors. She takes trips to the grocery store or the mall. Sometimes calling a cab and sometimes taking the service. She hasn't driven since my grandfather's Chrysler needed a major repair decades ago. At each turn she's clung fiercely to her independence in a way that made little sense to us.

But now. Well now I've read this book and I feel terrible about the wasted energy of trying to convince a woman who raised two children and cared for her ailing mother and has made her limited income work for decades on her own, on the street she knows that I somehow known better what will make her life fulfilling. It would be one thing if she was complaining - or somehow making it known that her life was not satisfying to her. But she's not. She's shown, again and again, what it is she wants these years to look like for her, and the trade offs she's willing to make to have that independence in her life. So should we instead be looking at what ways in which we can make these goals of hers more achievable? Should we be aiming to help her live her best life now? Yes of course. Those are easy answers.

Being Mortal asks hard questions. The first half of the books looks at the way we treat infirmity and old age. And urges us to discuss what life looks like for our loved ones as they enter those sunset years. And really, what does life look like for ourselves? What things are essential to our being and self-actualization? It's so important to have these conversations and realize in the moment that we may be making choices based on our own preferences for our loved ones rather than what they would choose for themselves.

The second half of the book focuses on terminal illness and the limits of medicine. To what end do we continue to push our bodies past the point of diminishing returns? In the treatment of unconquerable illness, medicine will push us to choose the next thing and the next, often convincing us, against evidence, that there is always going to be a next thing. So when the final moments come, we are unprepared and the emotional toll on loved ones is enormous. Hospice services can enter the gap and make those last moments more bearable and better prepare us for their arrival. But of course no one is good at talking about these last moments. Doctors do not possess a natural ability to guide people in their end of life choices, unless they are trained and work at it.

I sometimes think awareness of an issue helps us take a step back from it and realize when we are in a situation that can sometimes be emotionally overwhelming. "Oh," we can think, "this is just like that book I read about making choices at the end of life." And maybe, hopefully, we can be better prepared to meet the next thing, even if it is the last thing. 

5/5 Stars.

Ploughshares Fall 2019 - Edited by Ladette Randolph

It's fitting that I'm trying to write this review of the Fall 2019 edition of Ploughshares when the Winter 2020 is sitting on my TBR right now and today Spring 2020 arrived in the mail. I'm way behind with no hope of catching up on my book goals this year. This global pandemic thing has made it really hard for me to concentrate on reading - which is one reason why I enjoyed the Fall 2019 edition so much. The stories were on the longer side, but they also were short enough that I didn't get away from it completely and shut down.

This collection had so many gems, but let me start by saying the nonfiction essays in this one were really really good.  First, Danielle Spencer's Drifting Out to Infinity was about math essentially. I am an English major who does well with short columns of small numbers so most of the concepts discussed were really beyond me, even the one the author claimed simplified a very complicated concept about prime numbers. But the thing I liked the most about it was the imagination it sparked in me and the desire to know more. I googled. I even insisted my husband watch a movie with me, The Man Who Knew Infinity, based on the mention in the story. So yeah, when a nonfiction piece does this, it's well done.

To that end, Tracy Daugherty's fiction story, So Much Straw, also led me down a path reading into Thomas Merton, who I'd only heard of in passing (and I'm Catholic). Pope Francis once mentioned Merton as an American approaching sainthood. So I've added Merton's memoir to my reading list.

This is really the mark of good short stories. They may be short, but the worlds they open up and the imagination they invoke are limitless.

I should also mention Kiley Reid, who's new novel, Such a Fun Age is getting rave reviews, wrote an excellent story in this collection about a teacher assigning a student a history lesson regarding George Washington's Teeth and the teacher's own history becomes through an association with the student's mother.

Really so many stories were good in this collection on a humorous track, including Ian Stansel's The Calleri, which is more complicated than can be briefly explained but was darkly humorous. And Nancy Mays, The Pfeffermans about a middle class family concerned for their mother who through a close call medically develops an imaginary friend. And finally, Takbum Gyel's, Notes on the Pekingese about an office dog with a strong sense of ambition. Yep, you read that right.

Where else can such a collection exist? No where. That's why Ploughshares remains such a valued investment for me.

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.