Once again Louise Erdrich writes about her Native American heritage, this time focusing on the life of her grandfather.  Thomas Wazhushk is a night watchman, a farmer and an active member of the Chippewa Council in North Dakota.  When the people who live and work on The Turtle Mountain Reservation learn that a Mormon congressman has introduced a bill that will terminate their land and their identity, they know they must fight this bill.  Interwoven into Thomas’s tale, Erdrich tells the story of Patrice Paranteau.  Patrice is also a Chippewa.  She works at the factory where Thomas is a night watchman and is the sole support for her mother and younger brother.  Patrice has an older sister who has disappeared, so she has to take time off work, travel to Minneapolis and search for her.

The Night Watchman is very good.  It illustrates a small slice of American history with well-defined, complex characters.  However, I did feel it ended abruptly, and all the loose ends were tied together too quickly.

 

Deacon King Kong aka Sportcoat is an alcoholic widower in his early 70’s.  He and a number of other characters with colorful nicknames live in The Cause Houses, a housing project in Brooklyn.  One day in 1969, Sportcoat shoots Deems, a young drug dealer who had a promising future in professional baseball.  Although there were a number of witnesses, Sportcoat remains free.  While he eludes the police and the drug dealers who are after him, we meet his friends, enemies, church members as well as his deceased wife Hettie.

I thoroughly enjoyed Deacon King Kong!  Yes, it has a lot of characters with funny names, and yes, there is more than one story line, but James McBride’s use of language and his amusing and heart-warming characters make the work totally worthwhile.

 

Like other McCann books, Apeirogon (defined as a shape with a countably infinite number of sides) is a flowing blend of fiction and reality.  Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan are real men.  Bassam is Palestinian and Rami is Israeli.  Both men are sons, fathers and husbands and each has lost a daughter.  Abir, Bassam’s daughter, is murdered on her way to school by an Israeli soldier.  Smadar, Rami’s daughter is murdered by a suicide bomber.  Despite the grief and anger these fathers feel, they join The Parent Circle, an organization that believes peace between Israel and Palestine can only be achieved through connections, empathy and understanding.  Bassam and Rami’s frienship is the framework of this exceptional thought-provoking novel.

Apeirogon is one of those rare works that can change your way of thinking-it did mine.  It is also packed full of interesting anecdotes, little known facts and heartfelt experiences.  A must read for anyone who wants to broaden his/her understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and view it from a personal level.

Seventeen year old Nafir leads a boring, unpopular life.  One day while working at her after school job in an ice cream parlor, she waits upon a mean, belittling male customer.  To get away from his nastiness, Nafir runs screaming from the parlor into the adjacent alley.  People hear her, run to help her and assume the man was attempting to rape her.  Nafir has never had so much positive attention.  She enjoys it as well as the sympathy she receives from strangers, so she doesn’t let on that no attempted assault ever occurred.  However, a young man whose bedroom window faces the alley is aware of what really happened.

In many ways The Liarshares characteristics with Gundar-Goshen’s earlier novel, Waking Lions.  Both begin with a wrongdoing and demonstrate how it causes other immoral acts.  The Liar was a good read, but I did not enjoy it as much as Waking Lions.

Part family saga and part historical fiction, Isabel Allende’s latest work of fiction is the story of Victor Dalmau, his friends and his family.  The novel begins in 1938 in Catalonia, Spain.  Victor, although not yet a doctor, is working at an overcrowded understaffed hospital.   When Franco takes over the country, Victor must leave Spain for France where he meets up with Roser who is pregnant with his deceased brother’s child.  As the Germans take over France, Victor and Roser marry, so they can leave together on a boat to Chile.  Victor and Roser’s life of peril does not end in Chile.  They experience the cruel dictatorship of Pinochet, and escape to Venezuela.

I like interesting works of fiction where I learn something.  I know very little about South American politics, but I learned much about Chile’s fairly recent history from reading A Long Petal of the Sea.  I was disappointed in Allende’s last novel, In the Midst of Winter, but this one is a winner.

The novel opens with Lydia and her eight year old son, Luca, hiding in the shower stall of his grandmother’s home in Acapulco while sixteen members of their family are murdered by the local cartel.  From that moment until the final pages of American Dirt, the two are on the run from this cartel, hoping to reach el norte( The United States) safely.  Their journey is at times horrifying, often dangerous, but Lydia and Luca also meet some warm, caring people along the way.

American Dirt is a timely page turner.  Cummins has written on an important topic with sympathetic characters and a well-planned plot.  I can’t imagine anyone NOT finding American Dirt a worthwhile read.

 

Delia Daley and David Strom meet on Easter day 1939.  They are at the Washington Mall to hear Marion Anderson sing in front of The Lincoln Memorial.  David is a physicist and a professor at Columbia U.  He is Jewish, has recently escaped Nazi Germany and has heard nothing about the rest of his family.  Delia is black, a singer with a beautiful voice, and the daughter of a dedicated, very intelligent doctor.  They marry, naively believing they can navigate the troubles they will encounter.  They have three children-Jonah, Joseph and Ruth, and while music is important to all three children, that is where their similarities end.

If you appreciated The Overstory, you will want to read In the Time of Our Singing.  Written by Powers fifteen years before The Overstory, it is just as profound, long, difficult, inspiring and rewarding.

Alix Chamberlain has employed Emira Tucker to babysit  her two year old daughter three days a week.  Alix is thirty something, Caucasian,has started a successful company and just snagged a book deal with Harper Collins.  Emira is Black, a college graduate with no money who is not sure what she wants to do with her life.  When Emira is falsely accused by a security guard of kidnapping Alix’s daughter, she meets Kelley Copeland who tries to help her with this difficult situation.  Coincidentally, Kelley dated and broke up with Alix when they were in high school together.

Yes, when I began reading Such a Fun Age, I thought it was going to be a soap opera-like novel with obvious racial problems.  However, the more I read and thought about Kiley Reid’s debut novel, the more I realized it is a complex work with a number of timely issues.

Mickey and Kacey Fitzgerald are sisters who grew up together but that is where the similarity ends.  Mickey is a policewoman in Philadelphia raising a young son; Kacey is an addict who has been living on the streets for years.  When Mickey discovers a woman murdered on her beat, she has the shocking feeling that her sister might be the next victim.  While Mickey searches the crime-ridden neighborhoods of Philadelphia for her younger sister to alert her,  her mind keeps going back to the past and how Kacey played a major role in it.

Long Bright River is a good read.  Moore vividly portrays the seamy areas of Philadelphia, and she creates a page turner where the reader wants to discover the killer and what happens to Kacey.  Long Bright River would be a fine choice to take on a long plane ride.

It is the summer of 1932 and Odie O’Banion,  the novel’s narrator, is an orphan living at The Lincoln Indian Training School in Minnesota with his brother Albert.  The institution is a horrible place ruled by Thelma Brickman, the Black Witch.  When Odie commits a terrible crime, he is forced to leave the school, and for a variety of reasons, he takes with him his brother, a mute Native American named Mose, and Emmy, a precocious six year old.  As the four vagabonds travel down the Gilead River in a canoe, they experience danger, adventure and a look at how many Americans lived during The Great Depression.  This Tender Land is a tale about survival, freedom and what constitutes a family.

I enjoyed this novel and was eager to find out what happened to the four vagabonds.  This Tender Land is a good read but in the end, there is nothing to think about or discuss.