The Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Work has been keeping my very busy these last couple of weeks.  I’m grappling with questions about my future and my job, all while trying to stay on top of myriad deadlines.  In the midst of all of that, my book reviewing and blogging have fallen behind a little, so to make myself feel a bit better, here’s a mini review of a new collection of short stories.

Heads of the Colored People is a debut that simply blew me away, particularly the titular story, which is a true powerhouse (with a nod to Eudora Welty). Subtitled “Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology,” it plays with the fourth wall, turns readerly expectations upside down, makes you laugh, and then utterly guts you. I mean, seriously sucker punches you.

I picked up this collection of stories because of the provocative title and stayed for the sheer writerly talent contained within.  Thompson-Spires’ narrative voice is so distinct, so self-assured, that it defies belief that this is her first book.  Edgy but always accessible, she’s a new literary talent to be reckoned with. Put this book on the shelf with Junot Diaz and Roxane Gay, where it will be in good company. Seriously. Just buy this book.

Heads of the Colored People went on sale in the US yesterday, published by Atria, a division of Simon & Schuster.  I read an advance reading copy provided at my request by the publisher. My coworker and I liked this book so much that we made it a selection for my store’s signed First Editions Club, and I am very much looking forward to meeting Nafissa Thompson-Spires in person at the end of this month.

Last Month in Review: March 2018

Image found here.

March was full of so many good books, two of which I actually got around to reviewing already. Out of the nine books, two were nonfiction, one was a re-read, one was an audio, two were graphic novels, and three were by authors of color. I really liked or loved each of them, too, so all the winning for me!

1. Illegal by Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin, illustrated by Giovanni Rigano. This book was a useful reminder that I should read more graphic novels.  This one follows a young boy named Ebo in his desperate quest to leave Ghana, cross the Sahara, and make his way to Europe to keep his family together and make a better life. It’s an incredible read. Review here.

2. The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. This debut novel follows a quartet of classical musicians from their years in graduate school through adulthood, children, relationships, etc.  It’s a very good book, and one of the few books I can think of that explores the importance of work relationships and non-romantic intimacies when people’s livelihoods are intertwined. The music writing is pretty incredible, to boot.

3. Things That Make White People Uncomfortable by Michael Bennett. This is one of the two nonfiction books I read this month and the other review I happened to have written.  I had no idea who Michael Bennett was when I picked this book up to read, but it turns out that he’s a professional football player who is also an activist, and he has some pretty terrific things to say.

4. Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple.  I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I read a book that was already published, but I was in a bit of a book slump and not interested in anything I’d brought home from work to read, so I grabbed this one from the shelf.  I liked it.  It has the same wry, bordering on dark, humor that marked Where’d You Go, Bernadette, and the same kind of brilliant and neurotic protagonist, too.

5. America for Beginners by Leah Franqui.  Another debut novel, and this was the right book at the right time for me.  Featuring the widow Mrs. Sengupta from Kolkata takes a trip to the US, where she is accompanied by Ronnie Munshi, her tour guide guide, and Rebecca, her companion (for modesty’s sake). These three unlikely pilgrims make their way across the US, but Mrs. Sengupta has a hidden agenda: to find and meet the partner of her gay son, whom her husband disowned. I love road trip stories, and this one had so many rewarding moments.

6. The Wrong Heaven by Amy Bonnaffons.  This is another debut, this time a story collection that feels like it’s the love child between Kevin Wilson and Kelly Link.  Each story is dark, leading either to a dark & twisted or dark & titillating conclusion. Lee Boudreaux edited this one, and she’s my favorite editor in the industry.  I will blindly read anything she had a hand in, and a ridiculously high percentage of the time I will come away better for having encountered her books.

7. Sisters by Raina Telgemeier. I can’t remember the last time I read two graphic novels in one month, but the one arrived damaged at my bookstore -- too damaged to sell -- so I was able to take it home to read for free.  So much fun, so much truth about sibling and family dynamics! I had read and loved Telgemeier’s Drama and I’m not sure why I never got around to this one until now.  Good stuff here.

8. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. I am a bonafide fiction girl from way back, but this collection of essays just may be my favorite book by Ann Patchette.  This is maybe my third (fourth) time reading this book and this time I was listening to the audio.  Patchett reads the book herself, so hearing her voice in the car on my daily commute made me feel like I was in the company of a friend.  This book is incredibly useful and insightful if one wants to be a better writer, but I actually think it is just as useful and insightful if one wants to be a better human being. 

9. The Secrets Between Us by Thrity Umrigar.  I had the great pleasure of having dinner with Thrity and a couple dozen booksellers last week, courtesy of Harper Collins.  This is the sequel, of sorts, to The Space Between Us, which I had read years ago and enjoyed, but this book, after getting off to a somewhat slow start, became a book that I really loved. The politics of gender, class, and sexuality converge in this heartfelt tale of women and the hardships and indignities they’ve had to survive in 20th and 21st century India.

And just because I happened to have found old photos, here are pictures of Parnassus, the beautiful bookstore in Nashville that Ann Patchett co-owns with the marvelous Karen Hayes.  Wouldn’t it be great to revisit your childhood and find a place for kids that is as magical as the children’s space at this bookstore, complete with a child-sized entrance that requires passing through the pillars of the Parthenon?

Book Review: Only Child

Rhiannon Navin’s debut novel, Only Child, broke my heart.  I read an advance reading copy of it in November 2017, but the book didn’t publish until February 6, 2018. It takes as its subject the wake of a school shooting, following one family through their grief, loss, anger, and inability to cope with the enormity of their feelings. While the author seemed to use circumstances from the Sandy Hook shooting as a jumping off point for exploring the emotional aftermath, this book immediately took on new immediacy when the Parkland, FL, school shooting took place less than one week after it was published. 

Zach Taylor is the young narrator of our book, and he’s in first grade when his teacher rounds up his class to hide in the cloakroom. POP POP POP. He doesn’t understand what is happening, but he’s scared every time he hears POP POP POP. Once the police arrive, things get really chaotic for young Zach and his classmates; they’re herded out of the school to a small church to wait for their families, but now the police officers are yelling at them, barking orders for them not to turn around and look at anything, and in general making the situation even scarier. 

When Zach learns that his older brother Andy died in the shooting, his first thought is one of relief.  You see, Andy was always loud and mean to Zach, so Zach thinks that finally he can be happy, that family meals will be peaceful, that mommy and daddy won’t yell at each other so much either, now that Andy’s uncontrollable mood swings won’t be disrupting the family. He’s still trying to process the happy potential of being an only child while his parents fall apart, clearly incapable of taking care of Zach in the face of their overwhelming grief. 

Once Zach finally does grasp what it will actually mean to be an only child, the reader’s heart breaks all over again for him.  He doesn’t have the language skills or emotional intelligence to understand the feelings of guilt to which his family abandons him; his mother has been hospitalized for hysteria and his father is so incapacitated that he barely notices that Zach is in desperate need of attention. Even Zach’s grandmother, who comes to stay with them, doesn’t know how to be there for Zach, so he tries to cope in his own limited way: he builds a hideout in Andy’s closet, draws pictures, and models his behavior on what he imagines his heroes Jack and Annie from The Magic Treehouse series would do. 

While there were times when reading this book last fall that I felt the author was verging on being emotionally manipulative, in retrospect I don’t see it that way at all.  Like the young narrator of Emma Donoghue’s amazing novel, Room, the author uses a childish perspective to great effect, casting light on the emotional horrors of a situation without ever being graphic. One could argue that the limited perspective is even more successful for building readerly empathy, as we are required to fill in more blanks on our own with what Zach leaves unsaid and unobserved. 

It’s difficult to imagine that a book depicting a school shooting and the effects it has on both family and community can end with hope or forgiveness; Navin doesn’t push the envelope that far, but she lays the groundwork for redemption and understanding, which is more realistic, and she lets a little child lead them. Navin’s accomplishment in creating Zach as narrator stands shoulder to shoulder with Room, as I mentioned before, and with the narrator from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, creating an indelible voice poised perfectly to direct the story, allowing the reader to see life from a distinctly different perspective. I recommend this book highly.

Last Month in Review: February 2018

For being such a short month, I got a good bit of reading done, and I’m maybe 10-30 pages away from finishing two other books I started in February. Did I consider fudging on those and including them here? Absolutely. But I was able to refrain and they will show up for next month’s stats instead. 

In reverse chronological order, then, here’s what I finished:

1. Hamilton: The Revolution. Dayum. I was slow to come to this musical, but that just makes me a fool. It’s just utterly brilliant, and I’ve been listening to the soundtrack while reading the book.  I have basically zero background in hip-hop, but that doesn’t matter one bit when it comes to how much I love and appreciate what Lin-Manuel Miranda has accomplished here.  I’ve rarely been as convinced of someone’s genius as I am with this guy.  

2. The Wicked King by Holly Black.  This is the sequel to The Cruel Prince, which came out in January, but this book won’t pub until January 2019. Holly’s books regularly make my year end best-of lists, and this likely will keep in line with that. Here she’s accomplished the improbable: she has written a sequel that is even better than the first book of the series. I pick up Holly’s books to read when I want an escape, since her world building is utterly immersive, but then I remember how sharp an eye she has for the politics that transcend the human realm and therefore how much reading her books can inform my current world.

3. Black Panther: World of Wakanda. This was the first comic I’ve read in years, certainly in my adult life.  Review here. 

4. A Stone for Sascha by Aaron Becker.  This book won’t be out until May, but since our store will be doing his book launch, we had access to the complete F&Gs.  This book is, in a word, gorgeous.  Becker’s illustrations are lush and thoughtful, full of layers that the reader can unpeel a bit more with each encounter.  Like his Journey trilogy, this book is also wordless, but oh! What stories the imagination can weave in the face of images like these. 

5. Florida by Lauren Groff.  This collection of short stories is just stunning.  I’ve read Groff’s novels before and have long considered her a master of language (you can see my review of Arcadia here), but this book also brings a powerful self-awareness to bear, particularly in the recurring character of The Mother.  The state of Florida is itself a sort of character here, too, its sights, sounds, and oppressive humidity lending flavor to the narrative. This book will pub in June, and I hope to get around to reviewing it. 

6. Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires is another story collection from a debut author.  The first story, from the which the book takes its title, is a real powerhouse. Subtitled "Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology," it plays with the fourth wall and and turns readerly expectations upside-down. While not all of the stories are as strong as the first one (frankly, I think that would be nigh-impossible, it's just SO DAMN GOOD), the collection taken as a whole is an important contribution to the narrative of race in America.

7. Last but not least, I finished the audio book of Code Girls by Liza Munday early in the month, and many of the stories she shares here have stuck with me since.  You can read my full review here.






How about y'all?  Was February a good reading month for you?  What did you love?  

Book Review: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

I first read Tayari Jones when she published Silver Sparrow a few years ago, where she grabbed me from the very first line (which you can read about here).  Thus it took very little persuading when the good folks at Algonquin emailed to ask me to take a gander at Tayari’s new novel, An American Marriage. While its opening line is compelling enough (“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who leave home, and those who don’t.”), it’s the characters here who kept me reading feverishly into the night.

Meet Celestial and Roy, a young couple on the verge of having it all, who hail from very different backgrounds. Celestial is the beloved daughter of an upper middle class family outside of Atlanta, gifted with every privilege that love, money, and social capital can provide; Roy, on the other hand, is the adopted son of a hardscrabble father and mother piecing jobs together to keep enough food on the table and shoes on their feet in their Louisiana hamlet: “There was nothing extra. If my childhood were a sandwich, there would be no meat hanging off the bread. We had what we needed and nothing more.”

Their relationship is electrifying and intense, and they’re the vanguard of the New South, poised to set Atlanta on fire, driven by love and ambition in equal measure, when the unthinkable happens: a little over one year into their marriage, a white woman accuses Roy of breaking into her hotel room and raping her. Despite Celeste’s testimony that she was with her husband all night, the many character witnesses brought forth, and  the expensive attorney that Celeste’s family is able to pay for, the jury convicts Roy, sending him to prison for twelve years:

The judge paused and demanded that Roy bear this news on his feet. He stood again and cried, not like a baby, but in the way that only a grown man can cry, from the bottom of his feet up through his torso and finally through his mouth. When a man cries like that you know it’s all the tears that he was never allowed to shed, from Little League disappointment to teenage heartbreak, all the way to whatever injured his spirits just last year (p. 40).

The narrative chapters alternate mostly between Roy and Celestial’s points of view, and in the beginning they’re largely epistolary, told in letters back and forth after Roy is incarcerated. Eventually other characters take on the storytelling burden, including Andre, Celestial’s childhood best friend and one of Roy’s former classmates at Spelman. While the book never loses its focus as an indictment of the system that imprisons black men at a terribly disproportionate rate compared to white men, the heart of this novel is the relationships that unfold: Roy’s and Celestial’s, of course, but also Celestial and her family, Roy and his family, Celestial and Andre, Andre and Roy, Celestial and her work, Roy and his cellmate...the various permutations go on.

This is a novel that examines love and loyalty and what it means to be family, scrutinizing the smallest details from multiple points of view. The writing is terrific, and I think that Tayari Jones makes particularly good use of metaphor throughout, and what’s more, she constantly shows generosity and sympathy to her entire cast of characters. It broke my heart more than once, and I think it will break yours, too. This book is not just going to loom large among books published this winter, it is going to be big.  BIG.

NB: This book will be published by Algonquin on February 6, 2018, but I recommend you put it in your reading queue now. 

Book (P)Review: Anatomy of a Miracle by Jonathan Miles

Happy New Year, everybody! I’m not much into setting resolutions for myself these days.  Or rather, the whole “New Year, New You” mentality doesn’t hold much appeal for me, but I like the idea of being open to change and growth. The year 2017 brought a lot of changes into my life, including putting myself on the job market, and one of the most difficult personal challenges for me this year was bouncing back after each interview that culminated in some variation of, “You’re pretty nifty, Runner Up Candidate.” It’s been quite a while since I failed at something so important to me, but lately I’ve been ruminating on failure and what it can mean. While it’s true that I failed to secure an offer for the three positions I interviewed for last year, I learned something about myself with each one.  I got better with each interview, and I was lucky enough to get substantive feedback from two of the hiring managers to better place myself when the next opportunity comes along -- one of whom has even offered to help me look out for other, better suited positions. So with that in mind, what I’d like for 2018 is this: to remember that while failure is an important part of growth, it does not define me, or my worth. I also want to practice more kindness, both to myself and to others. And since I remember a time in the not-too-distant past where I actually enjoyed writing about my twin passions of books and travel, I thought it might be interesting getting back to that in 2018, too.

It turns out that it’s been quite some time since my last book review, which I posted in June 2016 about Homegoing, the best novel I read that year. Eighteen months almost to the day. Please forgive my rustiness here as I ease back into the world of book reviews.

The first book I completed this year is Jonathan Miles’ Anatomy of a Miracle.  His work wasn’t new to me, as I had started both of his previous novels, Dear American Airlines and Want Not, but hadn’t finished either one (less a criticism of them than simply being an occupational hazard).  This one I picked up at the urging of my sales rep, but I hadn’t read very far before I was hooked: this guy nailed -- I mean, absolutely nailed -- the south Mississippi setting.

Call it homesickness or nostalgia on my part, but I was extremely happy to revisit the Mississippi gulf coast of my youth in these pages, seeing through the eyes of Cameron Harris, a complicated young man whose life has been marked by tragedy: abandoned by his father, losing his best friend, the death of his mother, Hurricane Katrina and subsequently losing his home. As if that weren’t bad enough, he enlists in the army, gets sent to Afghanistan, and has the misfortune of getting a little too close to an old Soviet landmine. When Cameron returns to the US, it’s in a wheelchair.  His sister Tanya, as much parent to him as sibling, gives up everything to care for her paraplegic brother.

Four years later, strange things are afoot at their neighborhood convenience store, when Cameron’s nausea doubles him over in his chair and he leans forward to relieve it. The thing is, there is only so far he can lean forward without falling, and he somehow manages to get his feet underneath himself and stands up in the parking lot of the Biz-E-Bee. Nobody can explain it -- not Cameron or Tanya, not the medical community.

As you can imagine, the Harris home quickly becomes the epicenter of a multi-ring circus. In this most religious of red states, everybody wants to claim a piece of Cameron’s miracle, whether it’s the Republican party wanting Cameron (and by extension, God, of course) on their ticket or a pre-Vatican-II Catholic priest who uses Cameron for his own multi-layered agenda. TV interviews, social media prayer circles, pilgrims to the Biz-E-Bee, and a reality tv/mockumentary crew all descend on the scene, and the whole time Cameron and Tanya are just trying to get on with their lives, wanting to know the whys and wherefores of Cameron’s miracle.

While Anatomy is told in a journalistic fashion that strongly reminded me of the brilliant nonfiction book Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink, in both style and scope, what interested me most was the characters, both major and minor: Cameron and Tanya, absolutely; but I also loved the Vietnamese couple who own the convenience store, the devil’s advocate attorney working for the Vatican (literally the advocatus diaboli) , the sergeant under whom Cameron served in the army, and the VA doctor handling Cameron’s case. Mostly, I loved the subtle indictment of people who choose the superficial over substance and the way Miles calls attention to bigotry of all stripes, but above all, I loved the way the author limns each character with the myriad contradictions that comprise this human experience. Beyond that, the writing is just terrific -- it’s not lush, but it’s precise and incredibly evocative in a way that perfectly serves the wide-lens, third person, journalistic POV.

Hogarth, a division of Penguin Random House, will publish this book in March, and I predict that this is the book that will make Jonathan Miles a household name, at least among those households with avid readers of literary fiction. I read an advance review copy provided by the publisher. 

Best Books of 2017

via GIPHY

I read so much good stuff in 2017.  SO MUCH. I wouldn’t say that my reading mojo is completely back from my pre-divorce days-- I’m not going to hit 100 books read for the year, after all.  But I’ll probably finish somewhere in the 80s, and that’s not shabby.

To say that I haven’t blogged much this year would be to indulge in careless understatement. It hasn’t seemed as urgent to me, what with the political scene and human rights fiascos everywhere I turn. (It’s been much easier to lose myself in watching The Office, or The Crown, or The Wire.)

The thing is, though, most of my favorite books this year speak to the horrifying things that have left me feeling, if not precisely hopeless, then at least hopeless-adjacent; yet each book made me feel a little bit better after finishing it. Thus I’m summoning up what energy I have on a Saturday in December to pay tribute to these books, and if you have ever worked retail during the holidays, then you will know how much this is a labor of love.

First, the stats: I completed 79 books this year. Here’s how they break down. Numbers may add up a bit wonkily because many books qualify for multiple categories.

Fiction: 67
Nonfiction: 12
Female authors: 59
Male authors: 20
Audio: 8
Re-Reads: 13
Books for Young Readers: 19
Diversity challenge: 22
Books in translation: 3
Fan fiction: 4
Short story collections: 2

Curiously, three writers count for almost half of the reading I did by male authors this year: David Sedaris, Bill Bryson, and Frederick Backmann (who incidentally was the author of all three books I read in translation). I had rather more re-reads in 2017, as I often turn to my lifetime favorites of Harry Potter or any of the various Anne of Green Gables novels when in need of a comfort read, and I will not include any of those for my top ten list.

Thus, my top books of the year, in chronological order of my reading them, are:

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Definitely the most important novel published this fall, possibly the most important novel published this year.  I was lucky enough to read an early copy of this in the spring and ever since then I’ve been telling everybody who will listen to read it.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid would be the other novel published this year that could vie for most important of 2017.  Where Jesmyn Ward’s prose is searing, Mohsin Hamid’s is taut. They’re both nearly perfect. I remain disappointed that this book did not win the Booker prize this year.

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire lured me in with descriptions of the part of Massachusetts I currently called home, only to quickly take on greater import on a more global scale. She is compassionate and generous with her characters, who grapple with politics, family, immigration, and fundamentalism.

Local writer Holly Black’s The Cruel Prince is one of only two YA books on my list this year. I pick up Holly’s books to read when I want an escape, since her world building is utterly immersive, but then I remember how sharp an eye she has for politics that transcend the human realm and how much reading her books can inform my current world.

Wiley Cash is one the most gracious authors I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, and The Last Ballad brings all of his storytelling powers to bear. Here he plays with the intersection of workers right with the racism and sexism of the era, bringing the story of real-life Ella Mae Wiggins to modern readers.

The author of the Orange-prize winning Song of Achilles returns to the classics with Circe, spanning the centuries-long life of the eponymous witch-goddess who was not content to play by the laws of the Olympians. I debated including it here simply because it will not publish until April 2018, but I liked it too much to exclude it.

Angie Thomas’s debut novel is the other YA book on my list, and it’s probably the most important book published in the world of young adult literature for 2017.  Powerful and emotional, and likely more effective in putting a human face on the Black Lives Matter movement than any work of nonfiction could be. 

Technically it was not published this year, but I was slow to pick up Amor Towles’ towering work of humanism because I had not been enamored of his previous novel, Rules of Civility. More the fool, me. It did flag for me around the 3/4 mark, but overall this meaty novel was immensely satisfying.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably the most important voice on the topic of race today, and in this collection of essays, one written for each year president Obama was in office, he probes the political underbelly in the US in clear and persuasive prose.

Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir is the second piece of nonfiction to make my list this year, despite its technical pub date for spring of 2018.  Each of her seventeen brushes with death is the jumping off point for an essay that examines life. Her writing is luminous and soul-searching, whether she’s recounting her childhood or reflecting on adulthood. 

Best Books of 2016

Uh-oh. I think that ship has sailed.

What a wondrous year of books we’ve had! I think I’ve finally reached some kind of reading equilibrium, which is a relief after my nadir of reading in 2015.  I’m back to an average of a little over one book per week, which I think is a rate I’ll be able to sustain.

One of the upsides of reading fewer books on average is being more particular about what I do finish. I’ve been paying attention to things like diversity and books in translation for several years, but this is the first year where they’ve been a pretty good percentage of my overall reading. Here are my stats for 2016, followed by my favorite books that I’ve read this year, some of which won’t be published until 2017.  Percentages add up to more than 100% percent because books can fall into multiple categories.

Total books completed: 64
Books by men: 27 (42%)
Books by women: 37 (58%)
Books by non-binary gender: one (that I know of)

Fiction: 55 (86%)
Nonfiction: 9 (14%)

Short Stories: 3 (5%)
Fan fiction (novel length): 4 (6%)
For YA or middle grade: 7 (11%)
In translation: 6 (9%)
Re-reads: 8 (13%)
Diversify-Your-Life: 19 (30%)
(by which I mean books written by and/or featuring main characters of color, or on the LGBTQ spectrum, or otherwise featuring characters with under-representation in literature)

The best book by far that I read this year was Homegoing.  It’s one of the few books that I have written a full length review of here in recent times. The writing is good, but the structure and craft here are among the best I’ve ever seen. The fact that this is Yaa Gyasi’s first novel is astonishing.  

The others, in chronological order of when I read them, are:

Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter. This novel in verse begins with the death of a wife and mother, told through the eyes of her surviving husband, her two sons, and, unexpectedly, a Crow. Crow, one part trickster god, one part guardian, and wholly unpredictable, descends upon this fractured family to watch over them in their grief and guide them back to the land of the living. Some of Porter’s phrases and descriptions startled me with their clarity and undid me with their simple and unexpected poignancy.

Alice & Oliver by Charles Bock. I didn’t think I needed another book about cancer, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Alice and Oliver are the perfect young New York couple with a newborn baby…until Alice collapses over Thanksgiving dinner. This is the saga of their lives, in all of their messy, devastating glory, as they do battle with cancer, treatments, and the byzantine bylaws of health insurance in our country.  The writing is fresh, unexpected, and so unflinchingly honest that I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was based on the author’s own experiences. This book broke my heart on several levels, but there is so much humanity at its core that I fell in love with it, too.  

The Sport of Kings by C E Morgan. Geography of place combines with the ongoing legacy of slavery and racism to create a powerful, sweeping saga. Thoroughbred racing and breeding have irrevocably shaped the lives of the Forge clan, scions of Lexington, KY, but they have had an even greater impact on the lives of Allmon Shaughnessy and Rueben Bedford Walker III, two of the Forges’ employees. They all pin their hopes on Hellsmouth, the filly destined for greatness, but at what cost? Morgan’s ambitious novel is great in its reach, and the sheer lyricism of her prose will have you underlining text on every page. This book is magnificent, and while it is not perfect, it comes pretty close to achieving the status of a Great American Novel.

Mischling by Affinity Konar. It’s difficult to imagine a more horrific subject for a novel than the sadistic experiments Dr.Mengele performed on twins in Auschwitz, but debut author Konar manages to craft something magnificent from such dark origins. Pearl and Stasha tell their stories in alternating chapters, each twin doing her utmost to protect her sister in the camp, their shared history almostenough to create their belief in a shared future on the other side. Konar’s language is so fresh and inventive, even occasionally playful, that it creates a powerful and shocking juxtaposition against the narrative. This author is going places, and after reading this book, I will want to be along for the ride. Every. Single. Time.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  This was an audio book that I purchased for the specific purpose of driving home from Portland, ME one weekend.  It was the perfect length.  I figured that I would like this book and find it both moving and anger-inducing, and I was spot-on about that.  But what I wasn’t expecting about this book was the sheer lyricism of the prose.  Really beautifully written. The author reads it himself. I highly recommend this one.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett.  This is a quiet novel, especially compared to Bel Canto or State of Wonder.  It opens on a fateful day in LA -- a community comes together for a christening, but their lives are forever changed when the husband of one family falls in love with the wife of another. We see the parents and the children across the years and the consequences and emotional fallout wrought by that first infidelity.  Very good.  Patchett often sneaks up on the reader with her writing and insights.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.  It would take a major literary player like Colson Whitehead to reinterpret the Underground Railroad in such a literal way and get away with it.  This latest Oprah honoree takes a staple of the slave narrative and creates metafiction with it. Following the lives of Cora and Caesar, two runaway slaves whose stories constantly intertwine, Whitehead never shies away from the terrible realities of slavery while creating a story that is at once hopeful and honest. Elegant and readable, this is a rare novel that has garnered as much literary acclaim as it has reader enthusiasm.

You Will Not Have My Hate by Antoine Leiris. This slender tome began as a social media viral sensation. Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, one husband and father wrote an open letter to the authors of those attacks, stating time and again that they would not have his hate, despite the fact that he lost his wife and the mother of their infant son. This memoir closely follows the hours after the attack, chronicling his thoughts and emotions for the next several days through the funeral for his wife. Though brief, this is a powerful meditation on grief and resilience and the importance of building a legacy of forgiveness for his son.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid.  Gosh, I don’t have a blurb or review for this one yet, which is terrible because it’s really, really good.  This is the first book on my Best Of 2016 list that actually won’t be published until this year. March, to be exact. Hamid is a terrific writer who takes on topical subjects in his novels.  This one is a curious look at refugees, following Nadia and Saeed from an unnamed Middle Eastern country through a series of waysides until they settle again, more or less permanently, in a place not far from what is now San Francisco. This novel explores civil unrest and societal change, and it presents the way refugees move from one location to another with magical realism, but the overall effect and statement is an all-too-real realism. 

American War by Omar El Akkad. Alas, the same applies here.  I’ve nothing prepared for this one, either, and it will be published in April of this year. Debut novel that explores a post apocalyptic setting in 21st century America where certain Southern states have seceded over the use of gasoline. A young girl whose family is scattered and destroyed in a refugee camp becomes a trained assassin for a rebel resistance movement. Decades later, her nephew (through whom the story is told in retrospect) only begins to understand his aunt’s legacy and his family’s burden of history.

Moonglow by Michael Chabon. Chabon’s latest novel drapes loosely over a non-fiction structural conceit in a very meta way – where the narrator is a character named Michael Chabon who sits at his grandfather’s deathbed and records all of his stories. Spanning most of the 20^th century, and bookended with world wars and rocketry,  this novel’s warm, rueful tone, its flirtation with the allure of science fiction, and its ultimate themes of conflict, love, madness, and loss across generations all combine to showcase Chabon at the top of his form.  Top that off with the prose, which is as luminous as this title might suggest, and you’ve got one helluva read.

Book Review: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

This book is marvelous.  It’s likely to be the best book I’ll read all year, or in years to come. Mostly I just want to sit here and heap it with accolades, but that probably isn’t as helpful to potential readers as an actual book review would be.

The short version: I am truly floored by the talent of this new young writer. Gyasi (pronounced like “Jessie”) follows the parallel lineages of two half-sisters through several generations, beginning in 18th century Ghana at the height of the slave trade. Effia marries a European slave trader while Esi is abducted from her village and sold, and each generation of their descendants carries the family narrative forward in separate chapters, each of which can almost be read as a discrete short story in its own right. The ending brings the novel full circle and is satisfying in the extreme. This book is hauntingly beautiful and it made my heart ache again and again.

The longer version: Homegoing is a book of meticulous, dare I say superlative, craft. The narrative is relentlessly propulsive, and yet Gyasi has pared down a story that is truly epic in scope to a mere 300 pages. It is a book that explores the terrible and ongoing repercussions of enslaving a race, but which does so with an open heart and an eye toward a future where persons, and a people, might yet be made whole. It is the work of a writer at the top of her game, so the fact that Gyasi is a debut novelist not yet turned 30 is all the more astonishing. It is a story of always seeking the missing part, of looking for home in the next place each character ventures, whether it’s of their own volition or not.

If I had dogeared every page where Gyasi’s words resonated with me, I’d have every other page turned down, but here is a passage that were deeply meaningful, and which, I think, give an excellent idea of the urgency behind much of the book and what the writer is capable of:

Originally he [Marcus, six generations removed from Esi] wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his Great-Grandpa H’s life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great Grandpa H’s story without also talking about his Grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he’d have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He’d have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father’s heroin addiction  -- the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the 60s, wouldn’t he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the 80s? And if he wrote about crack, he’d be inevitably be writing, too, about the “war on drugs.” And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he’d be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he’d gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he’d get so angry that he’d slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University, and then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they’d think they knew something about him, and it would be same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was (289-290).

Do you see what she just did there? Do you?

Effia’s descendants, still in Ghana, are as lost as Esi’s are in America, and though never saying it outright, Gyasi implies that the effects of slavery -- the abduction, selling, and general obliteration of personhood of a race over generations -- still vibrate in the mitochondrial level of our DNA. Borne back ceaselessly into the past, indeed.

This book is going to be an important book -- important in the way that Toni Morrison’s Beloved has become important -- and it is certainly the hallmark of an uncommon literary talent. I almost always scoff when I hear that Unknown Author X has been paid bazillions of dollars for Debut Book Y, but in this case, Homegoing is worth every penny that Knopf has paid for it. And possibly then some.

If you’re going to read one work of literary fiction this year, it should be this one. I’m not sure that I can say anything else.

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book provided at my request from the publisher. Its US publication date is tomorrow, June 7, and I’m tickled that I’ll get a chance to meet the author next week when she signs at my store on June 15. 

Last Month in Review: May 2016

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My reading concentration is slowly improving, so I’m a-gonna talk about the books I read last month as a  prelude to writing an actual book review.  Some of these books were amazing.  In chronological order, here’s what I read:

Mischling by Affinity Konar. Holy shit, y’all.  This is some serious stuff. Here’s the succinct blurb that I gave the publisher, else I’d just be rambling up in here tonight: It’s difficult to imagine a more horrific subject for a novel than the sadistic experiments Dr.Mengele performed on twins in Auschwitz, but debut author Konar manages to craft something magnificent from such dark origins. Pearl and Stasha tell their stories in alternating chapters, each twin doing her utmost to protect her sister in the camp, their shared history almost enough to create their belief in a shared future on the other side. Konar’s language is so fresh and inventive, even occasionally playful, that it creates a powerful and shocking juxtaposition against the narrative. This author is going places, and after reading this book, I will want to be along for the ride. Every. Single. Time. 

The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson.  This was charming.  Did you read and love her previous book, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand? If so, you would probably like this.  Did you love the first two seasons of Downton Abbey, right before and then during The Great War? Then you’d probably like.  It’s a small English village, a woman who has been scandalously hired to teach Latin to school boys, and all of the insulated gender and class restrictions of that age. This is not one of those life-changing-but-exhausting-to-read books. This is a book you’ll want to read when you want to escape a little without putting your mind entirely on vacation.

Redemption Road by John Hart.  This was an audio book I listened to, narrated by Scott Shepherd.  Pretty good.  I don’t read thrillers, by and large, but the publisher sent an advance listening copy to the store, so I nabbed it. Maybe it’s because I’m required to listen at a slower pace than I would read if I had a physical book in front of me, but there were several plot "twists" in this book that I saw coming from pretty early on. There were a few moments where listening to this book creeped me out, but I doubt anybody who regularly reads thrillers would feel that way.  I felt the ending was a bit too pat, and to me the serial killer identity was pretty obvious from the early chapters, but the writing is really solid and Hart brilliantly evokes certain parts of North Carolina with his prose.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.  This was an audio book that I purchased for the specific purpose of driving home from Portland, ME one weekend.  It was the perfect length.  I figured that I would like this book and find it both moving and anger-inducing, and I was spot-on about that.  But what I wasn’t expecting about this book was the sheer lyricism of the prose.  Really beautifully written. The author reads it himself. I highly recommend this one.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett.  This is a quiet novel, especially compared to Bel Canto or State of Wonder.  It opens on a fateful day in LA -- a community comes together for a christening, but their lives are forever changed when the husband of one family falls in love with the wife of another. We see the parents and the children across the years and the consequences and emotional fallout wrought by that first infidelity.  Very good.  Patchett often sneaks up on the reader with her writing and insights.


The Best Revenge and The Best Revenge: Time of the Basilisk by Arsinoe de Blassenville.  This is a pairing of Harry Potter fan fictions, the first of which is novel length and the second of which is a novella. They begin with the “What if Snape was the first wizard Harry interacted with?” trope and they end with events from the canon book two, but in reality, all of the action takes place within Harry’s first year.  Because of his relationship with Lily Evans Potter, Snape becomes Harry’s wizarding proxy and things turn out very, very differently. I love these stories -- they’re well written and well paced, and they show sides of both Hufflepuff and Slytherin that Rowling herself was unable to show due to the Harry filter.

Not a terrible showing. I don’t know how many pages the fanfics would be, but Goodreads tells me that my page count for all of the other items comes to 1,753 pages. Except where noted, all of the books I read were advance reading copies provided by the publisher, often at my request.

How ‘bout y’all?  What books were you most excited about reading in May?