The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

I remember reading Meg Wolitzer way back when.....I think the first one I read was Friends for Life written in 1994!  Then I loved her book, The Interestings, written about 10 years ago.
I heard a lot about this book this year. It's gotten a lot of press because of the MeToo Movement, but she started writing it WAY before the scandals of the past year.
It's really smart and funny and insightful.  This is a blurb from the NPR book app:

How are you supposed to live in a world where so many people hate women? When Greer Kadetsky is groped at a frat party her freshman year, that is the question she begins to ask, and which animates Meg Wolitzer's wonderful novel. The characters in it ultimately answer these questions in different ways, but they all come to at least one conclusion: You have to do something, even if it's just, as one character says, managing to "live your life and be yourself with all your values intact."

When you read it, you wonder if Faith is fashioned after one of our feminist "icons?"  It's not important though. What the book says IS important!

Educated by Tara Westover

I heard Tara Westover interviewed on the NY Times Book Review podcast and knew I had to read the book.  It was a powerful and gripping interview - and a powerful and gripping and VERY disturbing book.  I am glad I read it, in spite of the fact that this TRUE story was so upsetting. I can't quite say uplifting in the end, even though Tara is a PhD from Cambridge.  I think she is still haunted by her past and always will be. But her escape is established by the end of the book and it seems likely that she will survive and thrive but with scars for life (physical ones, too.)
What a book!

The Witch Elm by Tana French

Tana French is becoming a favorite!  Loved her first book and now I love her newest, too.  This one is from the point of view of a male....interesting for her.

Anyway, like the other book (In the Woods) of hers that I read (and like all of her books I hear), this is a psychological thriller.  The story line is important, but more important is the character study.

You get to know the main character, Toby,  over time and his pesona evolves over the course of the book. Really interesting how she does this.  Here's what one reviewer said so succinctly:  

...but it is really a deeply subtle book about privilege: how clueless, apparently decent guys can float through life unaware of the injustices around them, sometimes even ones they have committed.

I think I need to read more Tana French books!

A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza

I love this quote from a Washington Post review of this book because it captures the essence of why I loved reading this:  

...this is a novel about how families create their own history and mythology — and how those assumptions about the past haunt their relations with each other.

There is so much going on in this family, and between the different family members. I just loved the characters....and in the end, the father, who is not so sympathetic earlier in the book, reveals himself to be a much different person than he tries to project to the world.

More from this review:

Part of what makes Mirza’s novel captivating is her ability to shift among perspectives so gracefully. We feel the panic of Amar’s parents as they struggle to find some effective balance between discipline and indulgence. And we feel the torment of Amar’s conviction that he doesn’t belong, that he’s not right, that he doesn’t deserve the blessing of salvation and, finally, that he’s not a Muslim. Yet the real agony, which Mirza plumbs with such heartbreaking sympathy, is Amar’s incurable longing for the balm of belief and the embrace of his devout parents.
In prose of quiet beauty and measured restraint, Mirza traces those twined strands of yearning and sorrow that faith involves. She writes with a mercy that encompasses all things. If the demands of Islam make Rafiq behave cruelly toward his only son, those same demands eventually inspire a confession of affection that is among the most poignant things I have ever read. Each time I stole away into this novel, it felt like a privilege to dwell among these people, to fall back under the gentle light of Mirza’s words. 

Highly recommended!

Re-Read: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I just joined a book club at the invitation of a work friend. She and I always talk about books and she invited me to join her lovely group.  Even though I had read this book just a year ago, I picked it up again because I realized that I recalled so little about it. I did recall that I liked it, however.

Oh my God! It disturbed me that I remembered so little as I started it again. It's a fabulous book but I must have just skimmed through it because the details were really unfamiliar to me.

What a great story and how much I learned about Koreans and Japanese and the intense animosity the Japanese have for Koreans.

I highly recommend this book for its characterization, historical perspective and engaging storyline.

In the Woods by Tana French

I know I started this book at some point in the past and for the life of me....can't figure out how I put it down.  Because I know I did not finish it. 

I was listening to a NYTimes Book Review Podcast and this book came up in the discussion so I checked it out of the Library (digital) and really enjoyed it. The writing is so smart, the psychological depiction of the characters spot on and the story line is great, too!

From Westchester Library Website:

The debut novel of an astonishing voice in psychological suspense.  As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours. Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past. Richly atmospheric, stunning in its complexity, and utterly convincing and surprising to the end.

Going to read more of her books now.

Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott

I never read anything by Megan Abbott but have been reading about her and her books for some time. I liked this page-turner.  I am going to try some other books by Abbott.
Here is a synopsis:

Kit Owens harbored only modest ambitions for herself when the mysterious Diane Fleming appeared in her high school chemistry class. But Diane's academic brilliance lit a fire in Kit, and the two developed an unlikely friendship... until Diane shared a secret that changed everything between them. More than a decade later, Kit thinks she's put Diane behind her forever, and she's begun to fulfill the scientific dreams Diane awakened in her. But the past comes roaring back when she discovers that Diane is her competition for a position both women covet: taking part in groundbreaking new research led by their idol. Soon enough, the two former friends find themselves locked in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse that threatens to destroy them.

The Perfect Mother by Aimee Molloy

This book came to my attention on Kirkus, I think, as a great summer read. 

I did enjoy it and read it quickly.  The story revolves around a group of new moms living in Brooklyn and the camaraderie they enjoy as part of the May Mothers.  While it is in essence, a psychological thriller and whodunit, it explores the feelings and insecurities of this group of very different young women and the way they deal with early motherhood.
Here is a review from Booklist Review:

Molloy's fiction debut features the May Mothers, a mommy group made up of Brooklynites who gave birth in the same month. One mother, Winnie, seems to always be on the outskirts of the group. She's quite reserved, so the more gregarious mothers have to push her to join them in a Mom's Night Out at a local bar. She frets momentarily over leaving her three-month-old son, Midas, but aggressive Nell sets her up with a new babysitter, so Winnie decides it will be fine to let her hair down for one night. When Midas is kidnapped the babysitter fell asleep all hell breaks loose, and every mama is under suspicion. As the investigation gets underway, it seems that every member of the group has some pretty big secrets to hide. Why did Nell delete the video-monitor app from Winnie's phone earlier that night? Who is the token male (literally nicknamed Token) in the mommy group? Readers who can't get enough of suburban suspense along the lines of Liane Moriarty and B. A. Paris will want to give this a try.-

A View of the Empire at Sunset by Caryl Phillips

I never read anything by Caryl Phillips before, but have heard of him and had "the Lost Child" on my Want to Read list for a long time. This book, his newest, is a fictional biography of the author Jean Rhys (who I knew little about.)
A very good story and interesting character!  I totally enjoyed this novel.  And want to know how much is based on fact and how much is fiction. I think more of the former, from what I have now read about Rhys.

Read this from the NPR review:

Caryl Phillips' latest novel, based on the troubled life of the writer Jean Rhys, is a lush exploration of the costs of colonialism, the limited possibilities for non-conformist women, and egregious power imbalances between genders and races. Rhys' life — she was born in the British colony of Dominica in 1890 and sent to school in England at 16 — is a fitting canvas for Phillips' perennial themes of displacement, alienation and muddled identity.
It's easy to understand why Phillips — who was born in St. Kitts, grew up in Leeds, studied at Oxford, teaches at Yale, and lives in New York — is drawn to Rhys, an intriguingly complex, self-destructive individual who spent most of her life in England but felt at home nowhere. A View of the Empire at Sunset is not the first evidence of Rhys' impact on Phillips: His last novel, The Lost Child, painted a nightmarish early childhood for Heathcliff as part of a haunting take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights — much as Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, her extraordinary response to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, imagined a powerful back-story for Rochester's first wife, the madwoman in the attic.

Phillips' view of the empire at sunset is not a pretty one. Social and racial stratifications and resentments cloud the atmosphere. It's no meteorological accident that it is always raining in this novel — and that his characters are rarely equipped with umbrellas. His depiction of chilly, damp England is bleaker and less sympathetic than his view of Rhys; Gwen announces harshly to her second husband, an Englishman, during one of their many quarrels, "Unlike you I have no faith in the civilizing power of the English."
Rhys' travails are painful and increasingly exacerbated by her bad behavior. She's derided for her accent in drama school, trudges through cheap seaside towns as a traveling chorus girl, and is repeatedly forsaken by the wealthy lovers who pay her rent until she becomes too difficult. Her marriages bring scarcely more comfort.
Yet there's beauty aplenty in Phillips' supple, often sensuous prose. Views from train windows of mist-shrouded farmland provide a pronounced contrast with the humid, blazing heat of Dominica, yet both express far more than climate. One example: Phillips' heroine, on her first morning back in Dominica, perches on a rocky outcrop above the harbor, "where she intended to station herself so that, in an hour or two, as the listless waves continued to lap, she might witness the full glory of the sun rising over her now empty world."

My Brilliant Friend by Elene Ferrante (Audio Book Narrated by Hillary Huber)

I recently heard that the audio book version of this novel was fabulous, so since I had just given the book to my friend, I wanted to "read" it again. I listened and enjoyed it even more than when I read it. What a fantastic narrator Hillary Huber is! I found myself wanting to rewind and play passages over; she did them so well.

I wanted to move right on to the next in the series, but it seems that it is not available as an audio book from the Library. I am going to get it on Audible.

The Girl in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

I had never read anything by this very popular and respected author, so I gave this a shot. It was a great read: compelling, a "can't put it down" kinds of suspense novel. But the funny thing is, now that I am done with it (and I finished it a week or so ago), I can't remember the ending!  Not sure if that says something about ME or about the BOOK.
Probably about me.....
Sad.

Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao

I read this book in two days....it was so compelling, but disturbing.

Girls aren't gone from the publishing industry. The latest book with "girl" in the title is Girls Burn Brighter  by the Indian-born writer Shobha Rao, whose debut novel tells the story of two teenage Indian girls whose friendship helps them overcome the men who try to destroy them.

When the story begins, Poornima’s mother has just died and her father, who treats her as chattel, is desperate to marry the 16-year-old off. After he hires a teenage girl named Savitha to help with his weaving business, the two girls form an instant attachment.

Then something terrible happens to Savitha. When an equally terrible restitution is proposed, she runs away, leaving Poornima at the mercy of her cruel father, who once admitted to the village matchmaker that he almost let her drown as a toddler because, after all, “she’s just a girl.”

Savitha flees to the city, where she winds up enslaved to human traffickers who subject her to unimaginable horrors. Poornima’s father forces her into a loveless match with a man whose family treats her even worse than he did. When the marriage becomes intolerable, she runs away, too, determined to find her lost soulmate.

I don't want to give away anything else, but I will say that I really thought this was a good book. A little high on drama and you had to stretch the imagination a bit, but it is important to read this novel.

That Kind of Mother by Rumaan Alam

I had heard this reviewed on the All the Books podcast and immediately requested from the Library.  I was not disappointed. The book tells the story of a young mother, Rebecca Stone, a poet, who struggles with her newborn at the beginning (who doesn't?) and hires the La Leche League coach from the hospital to be her nanny. They develop a great relationship, at least to Rebecca, and she comes to depend on Priscilla for much more than just help with the baby, Jacob.  Priscilla is the mother of a young woman (Priscilla gave birth to her at 17) and has experience that Rebecca lacks.  Oh, and Priscilla is black.
Priscilla comes one day and announces that she is pregnant. This is when Rebecca realizes that there are aspects of Priscilla's life she has no clue about, although she tries. Priscilla dies in childbirth and Rebecca and her husband adopt the baby, even though Andrew does have a "sister" much older than him, Cheryl. SHE has just given birth to a little girl, Ivy.

There is a lot going on here, and it's interesting to see how Rebecca develops as a character in the book.  Exploring themes of race, privilege, and family, Alam's second novel will leave you thinking about it long after finishing.

Alternate Side by Anna Quindlen

This was a very quiet but poignant book. I am not sure why I feel it was "quiet" because some very disruptive and even violent events took place but the books moves at a quiet, slow pace and pretty much tells a story of what it's like to live in the UWS of Manhattan with a group of friends who are similar and yet very different. It is a story of have and have-nots and of race issues in the city. And the story of a marriage slowly falling apart - more like two people just drifting apart.
I can't recall a book that Anna Quindlen wrote that I didn't like, and this is no exception.
Kirkus doesn't agree with me. They say it's not on par with her other books, but I say, it's just a little different for her,

The vagaries of parking in New York City figure prominently in Quindlen’s ninth novel, which begins with a moment of parking karma: Charlie Nolan has just scored a permanent spot in the small outdoor lot on his Upper West Side block. Charlie, an investment banker, and his wife, Nora, who runs a jewelry museum, live in a town house surrounded by other town houses owned by affluent types much like themselves; the only blight on the block is a single-room-occupancy building. The Nolans have been married for almost 25 years—not unhappily, not quite serenely—and are parents of college-age twins. Nothing much happens in the first 100 pages or so, but the author’s amusing digressions—on dogs, rats, parking tickets, housing prices, and other city obsessions—keep things moving. Then a violent act shatters the calm on the Nolans’ block: Hot-tempered Jack Fisk, partner in a white-shoe law firm, takes a golf club to mild-mannered Ricky Ramos, the neighborhood handyman, who’s had the temerity to block the entrance to the parking lot with his van. And simmering issues of race and class boil over. (Earlier, when Nora visits Ricky at his home in the Bronx—getting lost, of course, on the way—there’s a whiff of Bonfire of the Vanities.) The golf-club incident also has consequences for the Nolan family. The title of the book, it turns out, doesn’t just refer to parking. Quindlen’s sendup of entitled Manhattanites is fun but familiar. And though the author has been justly praised for her richly imagined female characters, Nora can seem more a type than a full-bodied woman.
There’s insight here—about the precariousness of even the most stable-seeming marriages—and some charm, but the novel is not on a par with Quindlen’s best.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

This is a "hot" book right now and it started out strong, but as time went on, I found myself losing interest.  I did finish it but it was not a satisfying ending. Maybe I didn't "get it."
 From Kirkus

The book revolves around the question, "Would you want to know when your life was going to end?"
A psychic on the Lower East Side tells four children the dates they will die. Only time will tell if her predictions are accurate.
“Perhaps nothing would have happened were it not the pit of summer, with a month and a half of humid boredom behind them and a month and a half ahead….[T]his year—the summer of 1969—it seems something is happening to everyone but them.” Varya is 13, Daniel, 11, Klara, 9, and Simon, 7, the day they visit the woman on Hester Street who is said to know the future. She sees each of the siblings alone, telling each the exact date of his or her death; at first, the reader hears only Varya’s, which is far in the future. The next four sections focus on each of the siblings in turn, continuing through 2010. Simon runs off to San Francisco and becomes a dancer at a gay club called Purp; when one of his many sex partners is described as an Australian flight attendant, we, too, can predict his future. Klara, who tags along with Simon to the West Coast, studies magic and eventually takes her act to Las Vegas; she marries her stage partner and has a child. Daniel becomes a doctor in the military; Varya, a scientist doing longevity experiments with primates. Speaking of longevity experiments with primates, the book’s hypothesis about the fortuneteller’s death dates is inexplicably credulous, though suggestions of a self-fulfilling prophecy muddy the waters a bit. In any case, the siblings are an unhappy bunch, saddled not only with this unwelcome knowledge of the future but with alcoholism, depression, OCD, possible bipolar disease, and many regrets; misunderstandings and grudges divide them from each other. Various minor characters—a cop; spouses, lovers, and offspring; the fortuneteller herself—weave through the plot in a contrived way.

Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

This was such a delightful read - I thoroughly enjoyed it. The beginning really reels you in with humor and pathos and a crazy cast of characters.  Here is what Kirkus says:

In her debut novel, the author of the charming short story collection Single, Carefree, Mellow (2015) matures into new (equally beguiling) terrain, exploring marriage, fidelity, friendship, and parenting.
It’s easy to see why Graham, one-half of the New York City couple at the center of Heiny’s first novel, is enthralled by his wife of 12 years, Audra. While Graham, a medical-venture specialist at a venture capitalist firm, is steady, stable, and fond of “routine and order,” Audra, a freelance graphic designer 15 years his junior, is an unrestrained force of good nature. Audra’s vivacity offers a stark contrast to Graham’s emotionally cool first wife, Elspeth, with whom the couple reconnects. Audra draws all manner of friends and random strangers into her orbit with her chatty sociability and almost unwavering cheer. She cannot make it through a trip to the grocery store without running into a million people she knows (Graham says it’s like shopping with “a visiting dignity”) and bonding big-time with the checkout guy, is constantly inviting people (a woman she barely knows from her book group whose husband has been unfaithful; their building’s afternoon doorman, for a reason Graham cannot recall) to move into their den or eat at their table. Audra is forever on the phone, helping out with PTA activities at the school attended by their 10-year-old son, Matthew, who has Asperger’s and is some kind of origami prodigy, or chatting with her best friend, Lorelei. Like Graham, the reader may be deeply enchanted with, if also somewhat mystified by, Audra. She’s a wonderful character, as are many of those assembled around her, and the series of minor challenges she and Graham face (potential infidelities, possible pregnancy, challenging play dates, and other parental concerns)—she pluckily; he sheepishly—make for reading as delicious as the meals Graham is forever called into service to cook for whomever Audra happens to have invited by that night. To quibble, the episodic, somewhat attenuated plot lacks a degree of urgency and loses a bit of steam midway through, but it regains its footing by the end. And to spend 300-plus pages with Heiny’s wry voice and colorful cast of characters is to love them, truly.
An amusingly engaging take on long-term marriage with a lovably loopy character at its center.

The Lying Game by Ruth Ware

This author gets a lot of press and accolades so I tried this one. Started off good but I really thought it was predictable and not that suspenseful. I am not even sure I finished it! That's how much I cared about "Who Did It?"

🌟 The Sisters Chase by Sarah Healy

Loved this book! Read what Kirkus says

An absorbing story of two sisters on the road.
When their mother dies in a car accident, the Chase sisters, 18-year-old Mary and 4-year-old Hannah (affectionately called Bunny), are on their own. Their connection is intense, “the line where one ended and the other began a malleable, gossamer thing,” but what Mary knows about the identities of the girls’ fathers she does not share. They leave their home and the motel their mother ran on the southeast coast to find lives elsewhere, slowly but surely trailing a kind of fate to the opposite coast. On the road, they have to cobble together funds, shelter, and food. Mary is smart, strong-willed, beautiful, and fiercely protective of Hannah. She knows how to use these powers to manipulate the men she encounters. The first of these is her second cousin’s husband, whom she blackmails for $10,000—a desperate but lifesaving move with major consequences. They rarely stay anywhere for longer than a few days until a significant stop in Rhode Island. Eventually, the choice of this location becomes clear: it’s the hometown of a boy who passed through their motel when Mary was 14, a boy with whom she is still in love. When the past catches up to them and they are forced to leave Rhode Island, it is with extreme devastation that they have to get back on the road toward their final destination: California, where Mary will work the night shift at a famous old hotel and Hannah will begin school. The fate that brought them there ultimately brings them face to face with their fathers. The story unfolds over the course of 13 years and feels throughout like one of providence. Healy (House of Wonder, 2014, etc.) takes every opportunity to surprise her reader as Mary and Hannah grow up and into themselves.
The sisters' relationship—and their resilience—makes this novel powerful when it might otherwise have been prosaic.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Fantastic Book! That's all I can say. READ IT!

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

I started off really engaged with the book and its disturbing theme:  a mother murders her own daughter.  We want to figure out why, what happened, what would cause a mother to do such a horrific act.
So, I kept reading, trying to make sense of it. But I never really did make sense of it. The book got great reviews, but I am sorry that I spent so much time on it. The writing was good, but after a while....I just wanted some answers.  Answers that never came. At least not for me.
I read a review from SFGate which really helped me understand why this book is so beautiful (at least for the reviewer) and I recognize what is special about this book.

“Idaho’s” brilliance is in its ability to not to tie up the threads of narrative, and still be consummately rewarding. The novel reminds us that some things we just cannot know in life — but we can imagine them, we can feel them and, perhaps, that can be enough to heal us. And to do that, Ruskovich reminds us, we need only have “hearts whole enough to know they can break.”

I guess after just having read Eleanor Oliphant, this was a bit too upsetting. I need something uplifting now.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I really enjoyed this book even though it's not a happy story.  The writing is very smart and the author is so good at capturing the character and personality of this quirky young woman. Her take on the "common" things of life is so well articulated; she has had a very "uncommon" life so her perspective on life is very interesting.
Quick Take from Book of the Month Club:  "This is a warm account of one woman’s fight to let go of old hurts and insecurities and make room for self-acceptance and friends."
Kirkus Review:

A very funny novel about the survivor of a childhood trauma.
At 29, Eleanor Oliphant has built an utterly solitary life that almost works. During the week, she toils in an office—don’t inquire further; in almost eight years no one has—and from Friday to Monday she makes the time go by with pizza and booze. Enlivening this spare existence is a constant inner monologue that is cranky, hilarious, deadpan, and irresistible. Eleanor Oliphant has something to say about everything. Riding the train, she comments on the automated announcements: “I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon.” Eleanor herself might as well be from Ulan Bator—she’s never had a manicure or a haircut, worn high heels, had anyone visit her apartment, or even had a friend. After a mysterious event in her childhood that left half her face badly scarred, she was raised in foster care, spent her college years in an abusive relationship, and is now, as the title states, perfectly fine. Her extreme social awkwardness has made her the butt of nasty jokes among her colleagues, which don’t seem to bother her much, though one notices she is stockpiling painkillers and becoming increasingly obsessed with an unrealistic crush on a local musician. Eleanor’s life begins to change when Raymond, a goofy guy from the IT department, takes her for a potential friend, not a freak of nature. As if he were luring a feral animal from its hiding place with a bit of cheese, he gradually brings Eleanor out of her shell. Then it turns out that shell was serving a purpose.
Honeyman’s endearing debut is part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story.

In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende

From the Washington Post: 

The title comes from a line by Camus, who knew something about the oscillations of joy and sadness himself: “In the midst of winter,” he wrote, “I finally found there was within me an invincible summer.” That’s an inspiring sentiment, a hopeful promise to those in darkness and a truism for anyone who has emerged from it stronger. But the challenge for a novelist is how to convey that gospel without trivializing life’s horrors or falsifying the possibilities of happiness.

Really captures the heart of this story, which I really enjoyed so much!  This is a book about unlocking grief and it does it so well. Each of the three characters has its own grief and they are vastly different characters, but all richly developed in the book through their stories that are told over a short period of time, within the context of this "caper." The caper being getting rid of a dead body; sounds crazy but it's all pretty believable when you read this fabulous book!

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

This was a good book....I must say that I was a little flabbergasted by the abrupt ending, however. When I think about it, though, I am not sure how else it could have ended.
Egan is a great writer - but this is the first of hers that I have read.  This book has a lot of everything: history, noir, suspense, good characterizations, feminist slant.  Try it! Here's what Kirkus says:

...she brings those qualities to a portrait of New York City during the Depression and World War II. We meet 12-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanying her adored father, Eddie, to the Manhattan Beach home of suave mobster Dexter Styles. Just scraping by “in the dregs of 1934,” Eddie is lobbying Styles for a job; he’s sick of acting as bagman for a crooked union official, and he badly needs money to buy a wheelchair for his severely disabled younger daughter, Lydia. Having rapidly set up these situations fraught with conflict, Egan flashes forward several years: Anna is 19 and working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the sole support of Lydia and their mother since Eddie disappeared five years earlier. Adult Anna is feisty enough to elbow her way into a job as the yard’s first female diver and reckless enough, after she runs into him at one of his nightclubs, to fall into a one-night stand with Dexter, who initially doesn’t realize whose daughter she is. Disastrous consequences ensue for them both but only after Egan has expertly intertwined three narratives to show us what happened to Eddie while drawing us into Anna’s and Dexter’s complicated longings and aspirations. The Atlantic and Indian oceans play significant roles in a novel saturated by the sense of water as a vehicle of destiny and a symbol of continuity (epigraph by Melville, naturally). A fatal outcome for one appealing protagonist is balanced by Shakespearean reconciliation and renewal for others in a tender, haunting conclusion.
Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying: apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

This is a very timely and "important" work. Also very disturbing, but with beautifullly written passages and descriptions....of some pretty brutal truths about life in America. From Library Website

An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi's past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power--and limitations--of family bonds.

Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. He doesn't lack in fathers to study, chief among them his Black grandfather, Pop. But there are other men who complicate his understanding: his absent White father, Michael, who is being released from prison; his absent White grandfather, Big Joseph, who won't acknowledge his existence; and the memories of his dead uncle, Given, who died as a teenager.

His mother, Leonie, is an inconsistent presence in his and his toddler sister's lives. She is an imperfect mother in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is Black and her children's father is White. She wants to be a better mother but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. Simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high, Leonie is embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances.

When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another thirteen-year-old boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love.

Rich with Ward's distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an unforgettable family story.