The Wrong Kind of Woman by Sarah McCraw Crow

Sarah McCraw Crow‘s debut novel, The Wrong Kind of Woman is set in New Hampshire, where we both live (Yes, I know her; no she didn’t ask me for a review). It’s set in the early 1970’s on a fictional college campus that, as McCraw Crow notes in her acknowledgements, “bears some resemblance to Dartmouth College before coeducation.” In the opening pages, Oliver Desmarais dies hanging Christmas lights, leaving Virginia, his widow, and Rebecca, his thirteen year old daughter. Much of the book concerns how Virginia and Rebecca each deal with Oliver’s death and their new lives. Virginia copes with the fact that she gave up her own academic life when she got married and became a mother and decides to revisit her unfinished doctoral thesis over a decade later. Rebecca tries to deal with missing her dad, feeling embarrassed by her mom, and navigating early adolescence.

There is another thread in the book about Sam Waxman, a junior at the college, who is struggling to figure out where he belongs on campus, in his family, and in the world, and what he wants to do with his life. He’s a math major taking a course in a new field — computer science — learning to program and listening to lectures that predict there will be computers in every office before long. He falls for an activist who wants to involve him in plans he’s not comfortable with, but he wants to impress her, so he struggles to find a way to help.

I think what impresses me most about this book is that the characters are very believable. They are imperfect people who sometimes worry too much about what other people think, or what the best way forward might be. They stumble. Sometimes they realize they’ve done the wrong thing and try to make amends. Virginia realizes she misjudged the small group of women professors on campus because she had taken her late husband’s view rather than forming her own, for example.

I also enjoyed how McCraw Crow captured the time not just in better known historical references like the Vietnam War and protest movements, but also in things like the back to the land movement, the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (which produced Our Bodies, Ourselves), frosted lipstick, and pop and jazz references. Virginia’s idea for taking her dissertation in a new direction by writing about Sarah Miriam Peale is another interesting aspect of the plot — it makes sense that a woman with an emerging sense of the women’s liberation movement and her possible role in it would choose to elevate a lesser known female member of a famous art family.

An entertaining novel about people trying to change with the times and with their changing lives. Book clubs will enjoy it — not too long, solid writing, and lots of interesting relationships to discuss.

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Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford

On a whim, I checked one of my public library’s eBook apps on the day Kelli Jo Ford‘s debut novel, Crooked Hallelujah, was released last week and lucked into checking it out the same day. Ford tells the stories of Granny, her daughter Lula, granddaughter Janice and great granddaughter Reney, four Cherokee women living in Oklahoma (Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation herself). The stories range from the 1970s to a time in the 2000s that isn’t specified but seems to be in the future.

Granny’s son, Janice’s Uncle Thorpe, is a preacher in a Holiness church, a Pentecostal denomination where people speak in tongues, and Lula, after her husband leaves her with three little girls, embraces church life wholeheartedly. She raises the girls to wear “modest” clothes for the Lord; Justine is the youngest, and she rebels against the long skirts, preferring bell bottoms that she hides from her mother. She’s just a kid, trying her best to live in the world and navigate her family’s world as well, and then suddenly she’s sixteen and a single mom, working in factories and trying to provide a better life for Reney than she had.

There is a sense of loss throughout the book, not least because all four women have broken marriages and violence is everywhere — between men and women, mothers and daughters, and in the harsh elements of the dry Oklahoma and Texas settings, where fires and tornados are regular threats. As the stories unfold, we learn more about the trauma that winds through the generations.

Beyond violence loss of culture, language, and tradition are part of the pattern as well. Like other books I’ve read recently, Crooked Hallelujah is also about the systemic racism in our country, and how people live through it. Granny grew up in boarding schools, sent away to unlearn her native culture, but she is the only one who speaks Cherokee well. Justine at one point is cleaning out the junk at Lula’s house and imagines the boxes of language tapes warping in the heat in her own house in Texas. Reney asks her mother, after she moves away to Oregon, about their family history, about being Cherokee. Readers don’t really learn what Justine tells her. Like Reney, we get snippets.

Speaking of snippets, this is described as a novel in stories, but mostly reads like a novel. But there is one story that didn’t seem to me to fit — Then Sings My Soul. It appears more or less in the middle of the book and although Justine is mentioned, it isn’t about any of the women who are the book’s main characters. In fact the characters who feature in this story don’t come up again. It’s also a brutal story, almost unbelievably so. I’m still not sure exactly why it is there.

Perhaps it belongs somehow because it’s a story about love and identity and belonging and the way family makes us who we are. The rest of the book is definitely about those things. In one chapter towards the end of the book, Justine is driving back to Texas after a visit home to Oklahoma where Lula, in her eighties, is ailing. As she drives, she thinks,

“For a long time I thought harmony was just people using air and vibrations at the same time. I thought that once the singing stopped it might as well have never even started. But when the heavy hospital doors close behind me, there is a ringing in my chest like a song. When I close the door to my truck and later when I cross the state line, I can still feel the voices. They carry me home.”

I don’t want to give away too much, but this scene — a daughter driving away, but feeling her family is still with her somehow — is repeated throughout the book. It’s a book about sorrow that is deep in the characters’ beings, even when they are happy. I’m glad I read it.

 

 

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The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

Abi Daré grew up in Nigeria and lives in the UK. Her debut novel, The Girl With the Louding Voice,  is about a fourteen year old, Adunni, who is sold to an older man as a third wife after her mother dies, when her father drinks away what money they have and cannot pay the rent. She is heartbroken to have to leave her younger brother, but her best friend tries to tell her being a wife will be wonderful.

It’s not. Her husband repeatedly rapes her and his senior wife hates her. But his middle wife is kind and does her best to protect Adunni, giving her an herbal concoction that she says will keep her from having a child. Adunni is trying to make the best of her life but everything changes in an instant when a tragedy befalls the middle wife and Adunni is terrified of being blamed. She sees no alternative but to run.

And that’s where I thought the book would take a more positive turn (I had read reviews that noted this was a humane and uplifting book). I expected that when Adunni left her village, she would find modern Nigeria and get a job and begin to understand that life could be different. However, first she ends up being taken to work as a housemaid for a mean, vain woman who neither feeds her adequately nor pays her, and worse, beats her and tells Adunni and everyone else within earshot, every chance she gets, that Adunni is illiterate and worthless.

While this is a book mainly about the perils of a patriarchy, it’s important to note that Adunni must overcome the perils of working for an entitled rich woman as well. Yes, we eventually learn that Adunni’s boss, Big Mama, is herself a victim of abuse. Daré clearly wants to illuminate the vicious cycle abuse creates. But there are other vacuous and selfish rich people in the book, so I think there is some social critique going on as well.

Anyway, Adunni works hard, and befriends the others working in the house, who can’t help but like this good natured girl. When her employer, Big Madam, hosts a party for other women, Adunni experiences another life changing moment. While there is a great deal of brutality in this book, a series of kind, humane acts by strangers eventually helps Adunni help herself out of despair. Daré is unsparing in describing the horrors of modern slavery, but she also sees a spark of hope in humanity.

Adunni is smart and determined and draws on the memory of her mother, who was determined to provide an education for her. She vows she’ll get that education and eventually be a teacher, for other girls whose families don’t think they need schooling. Adunni notes, “you must do good for other peoples, even if you are not well, even if the whole world around you is not well.” That resonated with me right now.

While I thought the end was a little bit predictable, that’s understandable in a debut. And honestly, I’ll take a slightly predictable but uplifting ending over brutal art right now.

 

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We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

NoViolet Bulawayo grew up in Zimbabwe, where her 2013 debut novel, We Need New Names, opens. Darling, a ten year old girl, spends her days with a small group of friends, stealing guavas in wealthy neighborhoods, playing games in the dust of Paradise, the collection of shacks where their families started over after their middle class neighborhood was bulldozed. Darling can remember their previous life, when her parents had jobs, and she went to school. It’s the early 2000’s; the children play “Find bin Laden,” and one character who dies in political unrest has a sign on his grave that lists his date of death as 2008. The story follows Darling for a few years, from Paradise, where her grandmother turns to God as interpreted by a preacher named Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro, to Michigan, where her mother’s twin sister, Aunt Fostalina, lives.

I chose this book from a display at my library of books with yellow covers, one of the categories in our summer reading program’s book bingo. I usually like novels about places I haven’t been and lives I haven’t experienced.  Although it’s fiction, this book is firmly rooted in reality, and for a privileged white reader, it’s pretty uncomfortable. People from NGOs and the BBC watch and photograph Darling and her friends and their families, as if they are an exotic species. Americans are clueless and judgmental about African countries and cultures. And of course, our immigration system denies people the new life they hope for; even as various people feel sorry for what’s happening in Zimbabwe, the African immigrants in the book work menial jobs, regardless of how educated they are. They can’t go home, because without official resident status they won’t be allowed to come back to their homes and work — and their American born children. The way Bulawayo portrayed whites caused me to feel as if I didn’t really even deserve to be reading Darlings’s story.

Although reading about the poverty, violence, and pain of Darling’s early childhood is tough — she has a friend her age whose grandfather rapes and impregnates her, her own father returns from South Africa, where he went to try and find work, when he is in the final stages of AIDS, Darling and her friends watch a group of young black men smash up a wealthy white couple’s home — the despair she feels in America is worse. Her family in Zimbabwe pressures her to tell her aunt they need money for a satellite dish; they are living in a nice house now, that Aunt Fostalina has purchased by working two jobs and getting herself into credit card debt. Darling has begun working two low wage jobs herself. Towards the end of the book, she tries to Skype with her mother and the only person home seems to be her old friend Chipo, who named her baby after Darling, but who scorns her now, telling her Zimbabwe is not her country because she left.

Of course, Darling didn’t choose, her mother and aunt decided she would go to America, and in America, adults — either those she knows or those who created the laws and cultural norms that influence her young life — decide much of what she does. The ending is a flashback to a painful memory seared in Darling’s mind, from her early days in Paradise. This has the effect of illustrating what a circle of futility Darling’s life has been to this point. She thinks she has not been at home since the time when her family was stable and safe. She is not home in the place that was meant to offer a new beginning. She can’t go back to the home she left, where her heart seems to remain.

Bulawayo conveys all that longing and unfulfilled promise and the geopolitical and cultural mess the adults in Darling’s world have unthinkingly unleashed upon her generation. She writes Darling’s voice as a small girl and then as a young adolescent and finally as the book ends, as a young woman. Darling, like many children, often thinks figuratively, as in this passage describing mourners at a political activist’s funeral, who had only recently been praying after the election: “They were awesome to see, and when they were in full form, their noise lit Fambeki like a burning bush, songs and chants and sermons and prayers rising to the heavens before tumbling down the mountain like rocks, mauling whoever happened to pass by. And when afterwards no change came, the voices of the worshipers folded like a butterfly’s wings, and the worshippers trickled down Fambeki like broken bones and dragged themselves away, but now they are back like God didn’t even ignore them that time.” A book I’m glad I read for the same reason I exercise — I know it’s good for me, even when it’s hard.

 

 

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Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

I’d heard good things about this debut novel about a young couple from Cameroon living in New York, trying to become Americans, around the time the Great Recession starts. I like books that offer a perspective different from my everyday life, so I gave it a try.

It was an entertaining read. The main characters, Jende and Neni, are working hard, trying to reach their American dream. Jende came first, working and living in a cheap apartment with several other people in order to save enough money to bring Neni and their son, Liomi, to New York. Neni gets a student visa and enters community college, hoping to become a pharmacist. She works, too, as a health aide. Jende gets a job through his cousin, working as chauffeur to a Lehman Brothers executive, Clark, and his family.

But Jende’s visa has run out and his application for asylum doesn’t seem to be going well. The novel deals with how this family decides what to do — stay in New York illegally, continuing to struggle and try to avoid any potential legal issues, or return to Cameroon. Meanwhile Clark’s family, wealthy beyond Jende’s and Neni’s imaginations, suffers a number of “first world problems” which only get worse as the financial crisis begins.

This juxtaposition between Jende and Clark and their fates and families is interesting reading. Mbue allows her characters to be flawed and conflicted — no one in this book has a smooth path or impeccable morals. The story got bogged down a few times, maybe to reflect the slow, imperfect progress of the immigration system? The ending was a little bit of a letdown, but again, this may be more art than accident, because there is no clear end of the story for the characters, only more change.

Mbue writes very well, and Behold the Dreamers kept me reading. Worth an evening or two of your time, if only to imagine what life is like for someone whose life is very different than your own.

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The Nix by Nathan Hill

I’d heard so many rave reviews of this book that I was both curious and skeptical. But I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading it and it didn’t disappoint. The Nix is a debut novel, which makes it’s complexity and success even more of a wonder. If you’ve followed this blog you know my highest praise consists of one of three things: that a book uses no extra words, that it is a well-told story, and that it says something “Big T” True that makes me think, to paraphrase Paul Harding, “I’ve always known that to be true but I’ve never heard it said it quite the same way.”  The Nix hit the sweet spot on all three of those criteria.

It’s a wild story. Samuel is a college professor although his heart’s not in it, and he escapes into Elfscape, a game much like World of Warcraft. He is escaping his increasingly unsatisfying job, but also trying to forget the book he is years overdue on; his mother, Faye, who abandoned him and his father; and his first and only love, a famous violinist. He hasn’t seen Faye since he was 11, but one day he realizes that she is the “Packer Attacker” on the news — an older woman who has thrown gravel at a gun-toting Presidential candidate in Chicago. What he hears on the news is that she was a sixties radical arrested during the 1968 Chicago protests, but this doesn’t line up with what he thinks he knows about her. Then he hears from his editor/publisher that he’s about to be sued for never writing a book he received an advance for.

Samuel sees an out– he’ll write a tell all book, an estranged son’s view of his mother’s story. He just has to learn what her story is, first. The novel unfolds around this quest, supported by very well-drawn characters who illuminate both Samuel’s and Faye’s childhoods. Through their dual coming of age stories, and the lives theirs are tangled up with, Hill spins a story that isn’t just about Samuel and Faye and their family and friends, but about growing up, choosing a path, leaving a mark in the world, being with others. In other words, he writes about the experience of being human in a world of impermanence and finding reality among the shadows. Particularly the shadows of the stories families tell.

Towards the end of the book, reflecting on what one of his Elfscape friends told him, “that the people in your life are either enemies, obstacles, puzzles, or traps,” Samuel thinks “. . . you cannot endure this world alone . . . and if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar. This is more work, of course, than believing they are enemies. Understanding is always harder than plain hatred. But it expands your life. You will feel less alone.”

I loved this book, for the three reasons I mentioned above, for the way it weaves social history and culture and folklore together with the story of people and their relationships with one another, and for the lovely writing. Also for the humor, a pleasant surprise in a book about large and serious themes. Hill is willing to see a little bit of brilliance in both poetry and MMOs, political protest and advertising. He sees the humans behind inhumane things, the complications and impurities of anything so sprawling as a “movement,” and he is fair to it all. Even the deplorably manipulative student who has Samuel fired gets some grudging credit — she is a creature of our culture, and she’s good at what she does, in her way.

If you’re looking for a book that will keep you entertained and also make you think, and will take more than a couple of nights to read, you can’t go wrong with The Nix.

 

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The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss in The Mindful Reader Column

This week, a fellow librarian’s debut novel in The Mindful Reader Column.

Here’s the beginning:

“Concord resident Max Wirestone‘s debut novel, The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss, is a “geek” mystery.  As library director in New Durham, he noticed many geeks (devoted, possibly even immersive fans of gaming, the internet, comics, and/or related topics) also liked mysteries. So he decided to write a book for both geeks and mystery lovers. I don’t know if Wirestone invented the geek mystery sub-genre, but I can say The Unfortunate Decisions of Dahlia Moss is unlike anything else I’ve ever read.”

Read the rest here.

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Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

The 1980’s references in Carol Rifka Brunt‘s debut novel, Tell The Wolves I’m Home, are thick and resonant. A Holly Hobby wallpaper border. Gunne Sax dresses. “99 Luftballoons,” “Ghostbusters,” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” on the diner jukebox. Suzanne Vega on Saturday Night Live.Those skinny black rubber bracelets we wore by the dozens. Ryan White. Reagan’s speech on AIDS. Kids playing D&D after school.

I was nineteen in late 1986 when this book opens. The teenaged sisters at the center of the story, June and Greta, are a little younger, but their world felt oh-so-familiar to me. Even the woods June hangs out in behind her school were similar to woods I went to behind my own neighborhood school.

But if this setting isn’t familiar to you, don’t worry. Rifka Brunt gives readers meaty details on every page. The smell of the stew in the crock pot, the scent of June’s uncle on his wool coat and of Greta’s Jean Nate, the howling June hears in the woods, a jar of guitar picks, a neon orange lighter, Greta singing, Toby’s hacking cough and his “thick and gurgly” breathing.

Tell the Wolves I’m Home evokes these specific kids of sights and smells and sounds, making it possible to enter the story sensually. But it also evokes such primal and universal feelings and experiences that I couldn’t help also being very emotionally drawn in. Siblings changing as teens and and not really understanding what’s happening. Trying to figure out one’s place in both the miniature world of one’s family and the larger world. Experiencing a death in the family for the first time. Learning about your parents as people, and as younger versions of themselves.

Without giving too much away, here’s the gist of the story. June is a quirky kid, into medieval history, mad about Mozart’s Requiem, feeling like a misfit as her childhood world gives way and her old friends, including Greta, seem to grow up and away from her. She has a rich inner life, imagining herself in other times and places. Her Uncle Finn is the only person she feels really understands her.

When the novel opens Finn is dying of AIDS. He’s also painting a portrait of June and Greta. Not long after he dies June finds out Finn has had a partner, living in the apartment she visited every week, for nine years and she never knew anything about him. This man, Toby, contacts her and begins to share things he says Finn wanted her to have. Among them, a note asking her to look after Toby.

As June starts to unravel the things her family has hidden from her, she’s also negotiating her tricky relationship with her sister, who is at turns cruel and tender. Rifka Brunt really nails that adolescent weirdness of sometimes forgetting yourself with your siblings and parents, allowing yourself to be the kid you often still feel like, and then catching that happening and trying to be the separate young adult you also often feel like.

June is a fantastic character who manages to be a unique and fully drawn person and also a symbol of adolescence in all its glorious mess. Greta, Finn, and Toby are fully themselves even though they are the satellites to June’s star, and even Ben, a minor but occasionally important character, makes an impression as a full person. I thought June and Greta’s parents — especially their mother, whose role in June’s new understanding of family dynamics is key — were somewhat less fully formed.

But overall I found Tell the Wolves I’m Home to be a very satisfying and enjoyable read. If you like your novels character-driven and full of redemption and growth, this is for you. It’s beautifully evocative, the dialogue felt true, and the writing is real, for lack of a better word. This is the second book I’ve read lately with a very interesting, strong teen girl setting the quarrelsome or misguided adults straight —Where’d You Go, Bernadette being the other. If this is a trend, I like it.

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