Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid – Book

From a Google Image Search – ABC News

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid is a novel that has several themes. It begins in the 1950’s in America, but it mainly takes place in the 1980s. Joan Goodwin grew up loving the stars in the sky. She watched when Americans first walked on the moon in 1969. As a grownup she earns degrees in astronomy and is teaching at a college, but she dreams of going to space. When the space-shuttle-years begin an era of multiple space launches and flights, Joan, in a hopeful moment, fills out an application for NASA. The space program is hiring women for the first time. Since Joan is an expert in the field of astronomy, since she knows the constellations, knows the myths by which the ancients delineated them, and can steer by the stars, she is hired by NASA.

The people she meets at NASA become her co-workers and her social cohort. Eventually they learn to accept each other’s eccentricities, and they bond, some better than others. Everyone wants to be included in a shuttle mission and there is some competition and even some backstabbing. Joan’s calm demeanor and social common sense are important assets at NASA.

Joan’s sister, Barbara, is a hot mess. She got pregnant too young, and she is a reluctant single mother to Frances. Barbara’s selfish lifestyle keeps Joan involved in Frances’s live and they grow close. Frances can rely on Joan. She visits her at her NASA apartment often. Circumstances arise that make Joan escalate her involvement in Frances’s life.

Joan, who has never been in love before, falls in love with fellow astronaut, Vanessa Ford. It’s a relationship they must hide because it isn’t accepted anywhere, but especially not at NASA. It’s a love story that shouldn’t make any reader uncomfortable.

I recently read Orbital by Samantha Harvey which took me to the space station. It gave me a detailed view of a place I will never go, but that I value as a place that today’s risk-takers go to support tomorrow’s space adventures. However, Reid’s book, Atomosphere is peopled with emotional connections, human interactions, and historical realities that are more important than the mere technology of space flight, and more universal. These human interactions enrich the experience of NASA but do not put you right in space as Orbital does. Both are fine books about human space adventures, but offer different experiences. I enjoyed reading both books. You might also enjoy this pair of space odysseys.

We live in times when women’s rights are once more in question. LGBTQ+ folks just won the right to love who they love in the 21st century. Now those rights are in danger of being overturned by conservatives and evangelicals. Since Atmosphere takes place when women were just being accepted as astronauts, NASA expects women to match their exacting moral standards which are not like women’s rights outside the program. Women in the program feel that they must outperform their male counterparts. There are parallels here with Bonnie Garmus’ book, Lessons in Chemistry. Sadly the rights of women are once again being targeted, giving this book currency in 2025.

Source Code by Bill Gates – Book

From a Google Image Search – Gates Notes

Bill Gates’ memoir of his early years, Source Code, is readable and interesting. For all you nerds who are kicking yourself in the slats (a saying from my dad) for not tinkering in your garage or your basement until you came up with a multimillion-dollar product, that is not the path that took Bill Gates to his enormous fortune. While it is true that Gates did not finish college, he was lucky to have parents who, although they at first tried to rein him in and polish him up, eventually learned that he needed space, not supervision and they were able to adjust their parenting tactics. They sent their son to a school that catered to high IQ kids.

Until the point that Gates was enrolled in Lakeside Academy, he never felt that he belonged, and other children did not accept him. He had learned to be the class clown which won him some popularity, but did not challenge his true talents. Who knows, perhaps if he had continued in public school, he would have been a stand-up comic rather than a computer geek. Lakeside had access to a very early computer, which had to be connected to a main frame computer outside of the school grounds. Companies often agreed to put these monsters in schools where professors, teachers, and students could take advantage of them. An added advantage of this arrangement was the innovations that come out of young minds.

This first computer, a PDP-10 was great for writing reports, but it didn’t do anything fun. Memory which consisted of paper cards or tapes and was kludgy, messy, and offered little security. Gates set out with some friends to write BASIC programs that tweaked this behemoth. There was no such thing as a personal computer.

Bill Gates and friends read about a set you could buy to build your own computer, from a company called Altair. The computer had no keyboard, no monitor, and very little memory. But lots of nerdy folks wanted to build one. Bill Gates, et al, wrote code to beef up the little Altair computer so it could actually be used for tasks and rudimentary games. As more and more companies saw that computers were going to be good for both work and play, that they would make money, other companies produced personal computers. Gates worked with a company called MITS and wrote a BASIC code that was making that company more profitable (for a while). MITS entangled the Gates group of guys into signing away their rights to their “source code”. Before his crew could sell any more code as software, they had to go to court to win back the rights to their own source code. Fortunately Bill’s dad was a lawyer.

Eventually Gates and his friend Paul Allen formed the company Microsoft. Bill did not do most of the coding, although for a while these friends and others who drifted in and out of the group spent time coding nonstop for many days and nights, sleeping on floors in computer rooms, to meet deadlines for coding products. Gates, in later days, worked the business side of Micro-soft which became Microsoft.

Bill Gates’ parents were not wealthy, but they were not poor either. His dad was a lawyer, and his mother eventually headed the United Way in Seattle, Washington. Gates was a reader. He also joined the Boy Scouts and became a hiker, a climber of smaller mountains, and he grew to love the outdoors. His family rented a cabin at place called Cheerio and eventually built a summer home there, shared by his whole family. He was fortunate that his parents came to understand his learning style and sent him to a progressive school.

Although he did drop out of Harvard before his junior year, he had so many chances to work on rare computer systems, to learn coding, and to do so in an age when computer nerds wanted to get computers to do more (especially in gaming). Gates has two sisters, Kristi and Libby. They were a close and supportive family. Some computer developers may have had to tinker in the garage or the basement, but this is not true for Bill Gates. Quite a while ago I read a biography about Warren Buffet, The Snowball: Warren Buffet and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. Although Buffet was not a computer guy, his early life is very similar to Bill Gates’ early years. Alas, neither book offers a clear path to financial greatness unless you are cut from the same cloth as these guys. Gates is working on another memoir which begins where this one leaves off.

The Secret Life of Sunflowers by Marta Molnar – Book

From a Google Image Search – Wrote a Book

In this cold, dark winter, The Secret Life of Sunflowers by Marta Molnar called to me because sunflowers are so sunny and all I could see from my windows was white snow and gray skies. I did not immediately associate sunflowers with Vincent van Gogh because they had become a symbol of Ukraine, a nation defending itself against invasion. But this is a story about Theo van Gogh’s wife Johanna Velar, married name Johanna van Gogh-Bonger born in 1862. It is also the story of Emsley, with the author flashing back and forth between Emsley’s fictional modern life and Johanna’s real 19th century life.

Emsley’s life is changing in ways she seemingly has no control over. Her beloved and flamboyant grandmother, Violet has died. Emsley’s business, an auction house in LA which auctions donations from Hollywood celebrities to raise money for politics is in trouble. Her boyfriend and business partner Trey switched his affections to her friend (and roommate) Diya and the three of them have been living uncomfortably together. Violet lives in New York City and after the funeral Emsley has to stay in NYC to clear out Violet’s brownstone. While sorting through Violet’s life as a NY bon vivant, Emsley finds a small green book and some papers written in Dutch.

As Emsley tries to unravel her business difficulties and mourn the loss of her beloved grandmother, she reads through what appears to be the diary of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, wife of Theo van Gogh. Both Theo and Vincent die, and Jo is left with all of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings and no income.

How both women cope with the disastrous events in their lives should inspire women living through life’s setbacks to hope that through their own choices they can reboot their lives. Both women struggle to succeed in the face of opposition and must find ways to support themselves. Although it wasn’t the sunny infusion I expected, I have my own ambitions, and I am a woman, so it did set me back on a productive path that the winter blues had interrupted.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney – Book

From a Google Image Search – Chicago Review of Books

Sally Rooney wrote Intermezzo, a story of two brothers, the Kubek brothers. An intermezzo is an intermission. We meet the younger Kubek brother first. Ivan is in his twenties, and he considers himself socially awkward. All his previous encounters have not gone well. He would become filled with anxiety and unable to approach social situations with an acceptable level of poise. He used his alone time, and it was considerable, to become an expert chess player. When he goes to a small town to play some chess against amateur players, he meets a beautiful 36-year-old woman, and he becomes involved with her. She does not find him the least bit awkward.

Peter is Ivan’s brother. He’s 35 and dating the 20-something Naomi. Peter is also involved with Sylvia, who he intended to marry. She was in a terrible accident, and although he still loves her, she can’t be there for Peter as a wife because she lives with constant pain.

Ivan and Peter recently lost their father and have not yet dealt with the pain of their loss. Their parents were divorced when Ivan was quite young, and the boys lived with their father. Since Peter is so much older than Ivan, he soon went off to college. There is that dynamic of who did Dad love best. Losing their father throws them temporarily off balance. Does the title refer to the time spent adjusting to this major change in their lives?

Rooney add in some Wittgenstein, a physicist I find quite abstract (pg. 399). Schrödinger’s box makes an appearance. Conversations between Sylvia, a professor, and Peter were too esoteric for me, a reflection, I imagine, of their level of intellectual sophistication, and a contrast to Naomi, who is needy, pretty, good company and surprisingly wise for someone so young but no intellectual. I usually like brain puzzles to unravel but this time I will have to go back over that part of the book to see if it is worth trying to grasp what these two characters are saying, or if the author is just showing off her erudition. (Sally Rooney wouldn’t do that.)

“Something about fascism he says, and they go on walking, talking about fascist aesthetics and the modernist movement. Neoclassicism, obsessive fixation on ethnic difference, thematics of decadence, bodily strength and weakness. Purity or death. Pound, Eliot. And on the other hand, Woolf, Joyce. Usefulness and specificity of fascism as a political typology in the present day. Aesthetic nullity of contemporary political movements in general. Related to, or just coterminous with, the almost instantaneous corporate capture of emergent visual styles. Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. The freedom of that, or not. The necessity of an ecological aesthetics, or not. We need an erotics of environmentalism.” (pg. 393)

Since the story takes place in Dublin and small towns nearby, the odd sentence structure may reflect local dialect. Sentences often seem to be written backwards to avoid the use of conjunctions. Is this a Rooney thing or an Irish thing. I do not know. I found it interesting but not annoying.

“Terribly childish wish he feels once in his life to do as he’s told.” (pg. 410)

Sally Rooney gives us characters who seem like real people we could meet and know. Ivan and Margaret, Peter, Sylvia, and Naomi could be friends of ours. How they deal with traumas in their lives, how they deal with nontraditional relationships, how they come of age, regardless of their age in years; these are the interactions that hold our interest. If the ending seems a bit too happy, I don’t mind.

The Queen’s Fool by Philippa Gregory – Book

From a Google Image Search – Flickr – (C)KIM BECKER

A friend gave me the book The Queen’s Fool by Philippa Gregory for Christmas. I had read several Philippa Gregory books, but not this one. Gregory writes period fiction, usually about English history, especially royalty. These books are very readable and immersive. In The Queen’s Fool Gregory focuses on the short reign of Edward, too young to be king and too ill to rule for long and the sisters who followed him on the throne of England.

Many readers know this story well because two half-sisters were waiting to be queen. Mary was first in line. Mary was the daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine Parr. He divorced her mother to marry Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was the child of this marriage. Although she was declared illegitimate when Anne Boleyn was executed, she was later declared legitimate.

Mary was not the queen most of the English people wanted. Henry, her father left the Catholic church (and the authority of the Pope) when he wanted a divorce, and the church would not grant it. England was turned upside down as Henry closed the monasteries, took the riches that had been amassed, and executed formerly powerful church officials. He eventually founded the Church of England which was closer to Protestantism. Mary was a devout Catholic who, once she became queen, turned England upside down again by restoring the Catholic church and punishing prominent Protestants. Subjects who wanted to stay alive had to return to behaving like loyal Catholics. Mary’s half-sister was not old enough when Edward died to be queen, but she was a Protestant who had no fixed ideas about God or the Church.

The Queen’s Fool, threading her way through all this religious upheaval, was Jewish, a religion that was unwelcome in almost every nation at the time. Jews had to pretend to be Protestants when that was expedient and Catholics when nations were loyal to the Pope. Hannah became the queen’s fool because she had the “sight.” If you remember your history of Mary and Elizabeth, then you remember that Lord Robert Dudley and Elizabeth were an item for a while. Hannah Green once saw Robert Dudley in the street and behind him she saw the angel Uriel. Dudley was the one who recommended her to be a fool for the Tudors. Lord Dudley’s protection kept Hannah alive through many tense moments.

Reading books about royalty is a guilty pleasure that I don’t often indulge anymore but I was happy to enjoy this book. Adding the Jewish faith into this mix, at this time when religions were matters of life and death, was a new twist. Hannah lived with her mother and father in Spain until her mother was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. Hannah and her father kept moving around Europe trying to find somewhere they could live in safety. It was dangerous for Hannah to be involved with the Catholic reign of Mary.

The Jewish people have been hunted throughout history until they found safety in America and Israel, but they realize that this safety could be ephemeral once again. We all live with some religious uncertainties in the twenty-first century, but no people have been as consistently hounded as those of the Jewish religion. Exploring a historical moment we have explored in other books, as seen through the lens of religious turmoil and of one Jewish girl at the mercy of fate, kept me reading and reminded me of how fraught the Jewish diaspora has been for believers in the Jewish faith. Gregory took a timeless story we are familiar with and added another layer.

This book may be out of print.

Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway-Book

From a Google Image Search – Washington Examiner

Spies make for what is often edge-of-the-seat reading. Spy novels often offer references to obscure historical activities that may not have been universally covered by the media and which may have only been uncovered long after the actual events. John le Carré has long been considered the master of spy stories involving classic spy craft methods which may not work as well in our age of high tech. This may be why so many books about spying refer to WWII and its aftermath in the Cold War and the times when a wall divided East and West Berlin. The end of wars often leaves loose ends which reveal themselves much later. Now spying usually happens on a grand scale, as portrayed by events like China’s recent hacking of the US Treasury Department, and classic up-close and personal spying is out of fashion.

John le Carré has passed the torch to Nick Harkaway, his son. In Karla’s Choice Harkaway takes us to the Circus in London with all the quirky characters who help keep the world safe from the forces which oppose democracies. Harkaway also gives us George Smiley, called back from retirement to unravel a situation involving death and a man who is on the run. Smiley may lose his wife over this one.

Harkaway does a good job of capturing le Carré’s style, and the novel takes us back to post-war days. We tune into events happening behind the Iron Curtain as the runner, Róka, who left London leaving a dead man behind, is a Hungarian national with connections to Communism. The backstory of Róka is perhaps a bit too complicated. I found myself tuning some of it out. Harkaway’s inclusion of Szusanna, Roka’s secretary, lent complications to the operation which added value. Szusanna gave us a reason to stay interested enough to get to the real focus of this tale, Karla. Karla is an agent of Russia and has a reputation for being both brutal and ruthless. Smiley offers Karla a choice. Will he take it? Has the Circus lost some of its effectiveness since the end of the war? This is a good legacy book, but not a great one. It may not be due to the author’s skills as a writer but rather to all the ways the world of spying has changed. Still, we are lured on to solve the mystery of Róka.

Jackson Brodie Mysteries by Kate Atkinson

From a Google Image Search – Kenyan Library – not all these books are in the series and not all the titles in the series are present

It is Kate Atkinson’s fault that I haven’t been able to do my housework. It’s her fault that my sleep schedule has been upended. I’m not resentful. Bingeing on a great series of books can be just as satisfying as bingeing on those made-for-TV series. More even. Kate Atkinson has written a series of six mystery books featuring the semi-enlightened, always striving for full enlightenment, Jackson Brodie. Her plots are unique and offer some interesting variety. Brodie’s personal friends and family members stay with us throughout the series once they make an appearance. The thread that holds the series together is Atkinson’s passion to raise awareness of the vulnerability of girls and woman in a world where many men embrace male dominance or outright exploitation of women.

The women in this series are shot, stabbed, beaten, kidnapped, and used. There are also strong women who may have once been downtrodden but will no longer tolerate abuse. Jackson Brodie often falls in love with these women and occasionally marries them. Don’t be frustrated if it takes a while for Brodie to appear. All the threads come together in astonishing and very satisfying ways, except for when Jackson thinks he might have stumbled upon the best relationship of all.

In order, Atkinson offers us 1. Case histories, 2. One Good Turn, 3. When Will There Be Good News, 4. Started Early Took My Dog, 5. Big Sky, 6. Death at the Sign of the Rook.

Case Histories: Victor meets Rosemary – “Women seemed to him to be in possession of all kinds of undesirable properties, chiefly madness, but also a multiplicity of physical drawbacks–blood, sex, children–which were unsettling and other. Yet something in him yearned to be surrounded by the kind of activity and warmth so missing in his own childhood, which was how, before he even knew what had happened, like opening the door to the wrong room, he was taking tea in a cottage in rural Norfolk while Rosemary shyly displayed a (rather cheap) diamond-chip engagement ring to her parents.” (p. 23) You can probably guess that this doesn’t end well.

One Good Turn: An incident of road rage involving a timid mystery author escalates due to mistaken identity to reveal a Russian sex trafficking ring hiding behind a maid service. Jackson is married to Julia, an actress he met under sad circumstances, although Julia doesn’t do sad. Atkinson gets to have fun giving us the fantasies of our sensitive mystery author. Jackson is in Scotland with Julia, so he is having a tough time navigating his way through the arts festival that is making for crowds everywhere. As he explores one tourist site, he comes across a beautiful dead woman who drowned but when he tries to pull her back to land, she disappears. He reports the incident, but the police have a hard time believing him. Chaos ensues and Jackson ends up bruised, battered, briefly jailed, and almost killed.

When Will There Be Good News: Gabrielle, Joanna, younger daughter Jessica, and baby Joseph are violently attacked while walking home along a country lane. Joanna is the only survivor. We meet Joanna again, all grown up, now Dr. Hunter, with a feckless husband and child of her own. Reggie (Regina) Chase is Dr. Hunter’s mother’s helper and babysitter. When Dr. Hunter and her baby are kidnapped, it is Jackson Brodie to the rescue.

Started Early Took My Dog: Clearly the Jackson Brodie mysteries are not happening in America. We are in Great Britain in this series of books. What happens to women in America is just as bad though. This we know. Jackson is in Leeds now but we, the reader, are briefly in 1975. We meet Tracy Waterhouse of the police force. Years later, near retirement, on impulse Tracy pays a wayward mom, probably a hooker, and probably on drugs to sell her the child the mom is dragging through the mall, berating the child as they go. Back at the beginning of her career (in 1975) she talks to her partner. “Tracy Waterhouse pressed her thumb on the doorbell and kept it there. Glanced down at her ugly police-issue regulation black lace-ups and wriggled her toes inside her ugly police-issue regulation black tights. Her big toe had gone right through the hole in the tights now and a ladder was climbing up toward one of her big footballer’s knees. ‘It’ll be some old bloke who’s been lying here for weeks,’ she said. “I bloody hate them.”

“I hate train jumpers.”

“Dead kiddies.”

“Yeah. They’re the worst,” Arkwright agreed. Dead children were trumps, every time.” (p.5)

It will be a long time and many side trips before Jackson catches up with Tracy Waterhouse.

Big Sky: Jackson is renting a place by the sea, but as they say, death takes no holidays. Jackson learned he had fathered a son with Julia, who tried to hide the child’s paternity. Nathan, the son, is staying with his dad, Jackson, but he is a teenager and not a happy one. We have crooked cops and ex-cops, money laundering, comics and drag queens. Eventually we have Reggie Chase and Jackson working reluctantly together to solve the mystery of a woman killed by a golf club. The crooked cops are all members of an elite golf club, and they are acting dodgy. The sky may be big and the view beautiful, but humans (especially men) are still up to no good.

Death at the Sign of the Rook: This mystery proceeds like a classic Agatha Christie mystery with all the possible murderers trapped together in a nearly bankrupt estate where they are holding a murder mystery weekend during an unexpected raging snowstorm. What brutal body injuries will Jackson suffer this time. What horrific things will or won’t happen to the women in the story.

You should read these, but just remember they are almost impossible to put down once you start. Kate Atkinson’s point about the vulnerability of women and girls is a good reminder that regardless of how accomplished and powerful women get they still need to take care. She reminds us that we need to work on creating societies where women are not victims.

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud – Book

From a Google Image Search – NPR

Claire Messud’s book This Strange Eventful History tells the fictionalized life of her extended family. Not quite a memoir, it resembles an Ancestry test result, fleshed out with familial and historical details, that resurrects the essences of a family’s life. Gaston and Lucienne live in Algeria, a colony of France which promises residents that they are French citizens, equal in every way to Frenchmen. As the Nazi’s are beginning their occupation of France, Gaston, a civil servant climbing the ranks, thinks about volunteering for the French navy. He ends up going to Beirut where his bosses direct him, which is not into the French navy. His family, living in France at the time, leaves France to return to Algeria. There are two young children in the fleeing family of Gaston and Lucienne; François and Denise. When the war ends, the Cassar family is still living in Algeria. Messud describes Gaston’s decision and his relationship with his wife in her elegant prose:

“Back and forth, Gaston had argued all possible permutations in his head in the forty-eight hours since hearing the broadcast. He’d considered the choice before him while walking, while packing, while lunching with Cotigny, though he didn’t speak of it to his adjunct. He wished above all that he could speak to Lucienne; in the night he spoke aloud to her untouched pillow, as if she lay beside him, though it smelled only of laundering. How could he know what to do without knowing her mind? He thought of them as joined by an invisible thread, always united, one heart in two bodies. The two halves of Plato’s Symposium, who had found each other and their life’s purpose.” (p. 58)

In possession of her grandfather’s notes (all 1000 pages), Messud offers us views of a man’s life and his inner thoughts as he moves from the public sector back to the private sector and becomes as successful as he will become. Then we follow his son François to school in America and to his life with his wife, Barbara. Denise’s life is portrayed just as believably. The Cassar family expands as family members age and have children.

Messud describes a time after WWII when Algeria wins its independence from France and the family has to leave the country they know best to return to France. Many countries gave or were forced to give independence to their colonies in the twentieth century. Gaston’s upheaval was experienced by plenty of others and led us all to many discussions about the colonizing motivations of our forebears. Despite our negative judgements, if we go to space, I think we will be colonizers once again.

Although this book may be considered too literary for some readers, Messud creates for us the various places where these characters reside and immerses us in lives that we can comprehend but which are most likely dissimilar to our own lives. It reminded me of the biography of Winston Churchill, although without the degree of historical significance of Churchill. Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts shows us Churchill living through some of the same historical eras as the Cassars, and similarly takes us to geographic locations we may never have visited with much discussion of Britain’s colonies.

Now I will apologize in advance for expressing maudlin thoughts, but I am at an age where my demise could be imminent. Messud not only covers the lives of these family members; she also covers their deaths. She doesn’t dwell on biological details, just on the way a full life dwindles and becomes circumscribed as we age, or if we have a fatal illness. We die alone, she does not pull her punches about this, but our deaths do affect those who love us. The details of the care we receive as life leaves us (or we leave it) may not resemble those enjoyed by the Cassar’s who lived in different times and who did not have to worry about financial matters, but still Messud has us contemplating the possible details of our own dying moments. I appreciated time spent with Claire Messud’s family, fictionalized or real. Good stuff. In fact, Messud’s book is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 2024.

All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby – Book

From a Google Image Search – LitStack

Listening to All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby comes with the bonus of the reader’s accents, all Southern dialects that vary according to which character is speaking. The accents all share similarities since one reader is speaking but it works and adds flavor to the story. I am listening to books again temporarily because I saved up credits from before my cataract surgery when I couldn’t read print books easily. After briefly subscribing to Audible + I ended up with 6 credits to spend – a dream scenario for a reader.

Charon County (Virginia) has been associated for decades with dark deeds and evil events, perhaps a negative karmic gift that resulted from the mythical reference it was saddled with, and because it was founded in bloodshed against indigenous people, “sown with generations of tears.” “The South doesn’t change” says the author.

Titus is, by some miracle, the first black sheriff of Charon County. Dressing for his day is described with ritualistic echoes of warriors preparing for battle. It’s a good thing Titus is prepared because this is no ordinary day in Charon County. Just as he finishes dressing with his bulletproof vest underneath and his gun belt strapped to his waist, his radio squawks and the news is that there is a school shooting in progress at the high school.

Although mass shootings are right out of the headlines of the moment, it turns out that only one person has been killed. This was a targeted hit. The shooter is a local guy, Latrell (hard to get spelling right from listening to a book). He has killed a very popular teacher of 9th grade geography who has a reputation for going out of his way to help needy students, Mr. Spearman. Why? Titus had hoped to find out by questioning Latrell, but Latrell committed suicide.

What follows is an investigation that uncovers some grisly, hateful, and secretive actions that will weigh heavily on this town for many years to come. These activities do not speak kindly of the darkest bits of human nature, but the author addresses legitimate concerns about real world events. However, this is a mystery novel and not a book that attempts to sort out the human dilemma.

While not for the squeamish, readers will read on to find out the identity of a man who wears a wolf mask to commit heinous acts that act out his deep psychological pain. Titus, an ex-FBI agent, has a warm relationship with his father Albert and his brother Marquis. He has a current girlfriend (Darlene) and an ex-girlfriend (Kelly). These are the core characters showing us a sheriff who is well-adjusted, dedicated to justice, and a bit clueless when it comes to women. Good characters make good books better. If you like mysteries this one is well worth reading.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange-Book

From a Google Image Search – MPR News

Tommy Orange continues the story of the Red Feather and Bear Shield offspring from his book There There in his new novel Wandering Stars. We have already learned of the Trail of Tears from history class (maybe). We are removed in time from these sorrowful events, but we still bear the shame of our ancestors’ cruelties. Jude Star’s story opens the novel as the most distant traceable ancestor of the children in this story.

We are reminded that wars are always cruel and colonial wars are even crueler because they will always erase or reduce the powers of one party or the other. Jude Star ends up in a prison-castle in Florida from which he eventually escapes. Jude and Hannah Star’s son Charles Star and Opal Bear Shield have a daughter, Victoria Bear Shield. From one partner Victoria gives us Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, and from another partner Victoria gives up Jacquie Red Feather, the grandmother of the four children in the Red Feather clan who are being cared for by Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield who is not their grandmother but who shares a mother with Jacquie.

Orvil, our focal character, has recovered from being shot by a terrorist. This happened the first time he went to a Native American celebration where he danced in public. Of course, even when you physically recover from a near-death experience, your spirit may not heal. It could take time, or it could be psychologically fatal.

Jude Star is the name chosen for Orvil’s ancestor when he is imprisoned in Florida and attempts are made to force former member of tribes to “assimilate” and forget their traditional lifestyles and beliefs. The Star men are wanderers who cannot find their place in an America captured by white folks, white folks who cannot see a way to live beside the people they fought with over this land.

Opal, who now heads Orvil’s family, has changed the fate of the Star offspring. She has purchased a house in Oakdale, California where Orvil, Loother, and Lony can find some stability as a created family. The grandmother Jacquie lives nearby and helps when she can. Opal pays tuition to send Orvil to a good school. The family is about to learn that stability is always in danger from outside forces over which they have little control. Orvil needs pain meds. He is on opioids for pain but when they are no longer prescribed, he must find other sources. He is addicted. This leads the whole fragile little family down a sad path that makes it hard to believe that even the best of intentions can turn some lives around.

Things turn out better than you might ever think, but the family loses its nascent cohesiveness. Colonialism has consequences and Tommy Orange wants us to know that.

Tommy Orange’s books have a historical and cultural significance quite apart from their literary bona fides. They are authentic expressions of a person and a people trying to preserve their culture whose values were expressed by the way they lived lightly on the earth and by rich spiritual traditions. Placed alongside the materialism and power struggles of a culture that is so antithetical to the lived beliefs of America’s indigenous people the contrasts and challenges are clearly exposed in Orange’s novels. Here is a young voice we don’t often hear from illuminating the torn souls of a proud people or set of people with much to offer, especially the way to live lightly on the earth part.