First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston was chosen by Reese Witherspoon for her book club. Since it seemed that it might involve some creative plotting and offer entertainment, two things on my reading radar, I added it to my iPad Kindle app. It’s not great literary fiction, but it succeeded in satisfying my desire for a dessert course.
There is no sense in naming our main character since she has many names. When she finds herself at a young age having to support her mother who is dying and herself, when she has to pay all the household and medical expenses, she becomes a jewel thief. She finds a job that allows her to meet women who come shopping wearing their valuable jewelry. She learns to separate the gems from their settings as the settings make the jewels too recognizable. She is caught, but not by the police. A very scary man she never meets in person exploits her fear of exposure and pays her very well to use her skills for his purposes.
What happens when she falls in love with her assigned target forces her to face the unsavory side of her current situation and the fears that keep her tied to this blackmailer posing as a benefactor. Can she beat him at his own game? Can she learn his identity? Although her attraction to the man she is being paid to target motivates her, the last straw is when her dream of one day returning to her real identity is destroyed and all seems hopeless. She makes use of all she has learned to turn the tables. The first lie wins! The story is both creative and entertaining. The reader wins!
Sometimes taking a break from reading about weighty subjects is good for the brain. We might return to a genre that has given us pleasure in the past, in a novel that flies by, the passing of time forgotten. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros promised to be just such a novel. It has been given a new genre classification, romantic fantasy. There are dragons, family intrigue, magic, power struggles, and love happening at a military college training kids to become soldiers to defend the kingdom. Some at the college are training to be infantry, some to be riders bonded to a dragon, some to be scribes to keep the books that record the history of Navarre, and some to be Healers.
Violet Sorrengail is the newest cadet to walk the Parapet to gain entry to this school that is headed by her estranged mother. Violet has a weak joint disease and was trained by her father to be a scribe, but she decides to become a rider, despite the challenges her fragile body presents. Violet surprises everyone, especially the wingleader, Xaden Riorson who would like to see her fail but is drawn to her by a powerful sexual attraction. Violet, although not training as a Scribe, realizes that something is wrong with the Basgiath College archives. Books are missing. Parts of the histories of Navarre have been lost or locked away. And the wards that guard Navarre’s borders are weakening or falling.
It takes a while to put together a group of true friends when you are in a new school. There is a lot of social power jockeying and close friendships emerge along with personal enemies. The power of friendship and love to align the forces of good against the forces of evil is part of any good fantasy world and the Empyrean is no exception. It is these friendships, sexual attractions, and love relationships that bond us to the characters in a fantasy, even the dragons, and it is the animosities, the evil plots that inspire us to read further to see what unfolds. We always hope that good will win, that our heroes will grow and add to their talents. Until George R. R. Martin this outcome was predictable. Not so much now.
This book is part of a projected series of fantasy books known as the Empyrean Series. Iron Flame is the second book in the series, but the last three books have not yet been written. If you like Nora Roberts and hot sex you may like Fourth Wing.
With all the weight of world events and the serious issues on our minds it was my pleasure to spend some time in Gaborone, Botswana with Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi at the #1 Ladies Detective Agency. This is a long series of books about the simplest, the sweetest, and sometimes the bitterest things we encounter in our lives. These life lessons are learned under blue skies and in the shade of acacia trees with plenty of breaks for a cup of tea, preferably red bush tea. From a Far Away and Lovely Country was written by the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith who lived in Botswana and never lost his love for this little nation. He depicts it as struggling to be modern without losing the values of the land and those who raised cattle on it.
Mma (Precious) Ramotswe set up her detective agency almost by accident. Then Mma Makutsi of the big eyeglasses and peculiar ways became the secretary (who scored 97% on her final exam at secretarial school). Mma Makutsi has promoted herself into a role as another detective in the agency and now Charlie, apprentice to J.B.L. Matekoni (mechanic and husband of Precious Ramotswe) is taking his first try at taking on an investigation on his own.
Two cases need solutions when we visit Gaborone this time. Julia Cotterell has arrived from America, newly widowed, looking for distant relatives in Mochudi where Mma Ramotswe grew up. Then when Mma Ramotswe visits her friend Mma Potokwane who runs the orphanage a new house mother, Mma Ikobeng, talks about a new club in Gaborone which is advertising that it is a place for single’s to meet, but it appears that the men who pay to belong to the club are married and just pretending to be single.
This is all happening on Mma Ramotswe’s birthday, which her beloved husband seems to have forgotten. And then there is the incident of the red dress. Most of the cases that Precious takes on are family problems, or minor crimes or misbehaviors. She is very wise and never lets praise go to her head. She solves cases in human ways, without a need for weapons or action scenes.
Mma Ramotswe is with Julia looking down on the village where she spent her childhood. “They stood in silence, each lost in the sort of thoughts that come to us when we look upon a place we love or are ready to love. Then the sound of cattle bells drifted from below, and Julia turned and looked at Mma Ramotswe and said in wonderment, “There are bells Mma.” And Mma Ramotswe smiled and pointed towards the place where, far beneath them, cattle moved between the acacia trees. It was a sound that all those raised in Botswana had imprinted upon their hearts: the anthem of the land, the notes of the country. And it reminded her of her father and all that he meant to her.” (pg. 140)
These little books contain plenty of homespun philosophy that is necessary in such a complex world as ours. “Experience had taught her that there were many people who seemed to be searching for something that they could never find–who might not even know what they were looking for. That, she thought, was because so many of us felt that there must be an answer to the questions we all asked at one point or another–what was the purpose of our lives and why was there so much suffering?–and if we looked hard enough we would find the key to that search, although understandable, was one that was more or less destined to fail, and inevitably we were disappointed. The way to deal with the sorrow of the world, Mma Ramotswe thought, was not to think you would ever necessarily understand why the world was the way it was. Rather you should list the things you felt were good, and work towards bringing those into the lives of others. That would keep you busy enough, because there was always-always-room for more kindness and love (and tea) in our lives, none of which needed any explanation.” (pg. 140)
I keep reading this series of books because I know they will offer me a dose of kindness, refresh me, and send me back out into the real world where kindness is much harder to find. You will find that kindness is still around if you dish out a bit of kindness yourself. Alexander McCall Smith’s version of Botswana is a lovely place to find myself every time I visit.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is a pandemic book of sorts. Lara and Joe Nelson own a farm, rows of cherry trees, some plum trees, some pear trees. The cherries are the money makers. Sweet cherries must be hand-picked. The tarter cherries for pies and cooking can be shaken from the trees onto tarps and they can be frozen.
The pandemic has made it difficult for their usual pickers to arrive. Lara and Joe’s three daughters, all grown but not yet married, come home to ride out the pandemic and to help pick the cherries. When Lara’s daughters find out that she dated Peter Duke, a famous and handsome movie star, Emily, Maisie, and Nell enliven a tedious repetitive task by prying the story of their mom and Peter Duke out of their reticent mother.
Once upon a time a local presentation of the play Our Town finds Lara and her friend registering local actors for the upcoming production in their New Hampshire town where Lara’s mother and father live. Our Town is a big deal in New Hampshire. If you have read the play, you know why. If you haven’t read it, you should. After a failure to find an “Emily” to play that important role, Lara ends up trying out. Turns out she is a natural. Her Emily is so well done that she is invited to go to Hollywood to test for a movie. Lara feels a connection to the Emily character but is she a great actress she wonders. After she wins the part in the movie playing another Emily-style character the film is shelved for several years. Lara is packed off to play Emily in Our Town again, this time in a professional summer theater in Tom Lake, Michigan.
Lara’s daughters, picking cherries and prodding their mother to get to the part where she meets Peter, find that they are finally there. But they want more, they want details. Because these daughters did not come home to tend to their mom on her deathbed (as in some novels and movies), this is a far lighter novel with only a few tragic elements. It’s basically a book that would make a great Nora Ephron movie. Do we have a new Nora Ephron? If Ephron was a product of her times, then we may never have another Nora Ephron, nor another Ann Patchett.
The challenges of being an independent farmer are braided through the other elements in the book and the specter of all those cherries which represent the farm’s income rotting on the trees with no one to pick them is a pressure as intense as our desire to hear about Lara and Duke and why Lara is a farmer’s wife rather than a movie star. Readers also get an interesting peek into what it’s like to work in a summer theater.
Tom Lake was a good read, but it’s also a trip to more carefree, innocent days even though it is during the COVID pandemic. Perhaps people envy America these days in the 21st century because some people still get to live such a life. How much longer? How many of us? Although it is a new novel it already feels nostalgic. The orderliness of a well-run farm, the lines of heavily laden cherry trees under blue, blue skies. You might enjoy spending some time in a place that seems so fragile so in danger of disappearing altogether. I borrowed this book from my local library.
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize. That would be enough reason to read it, but the dystopian nature, reflecting America’s possible descent into authoritarianism, makes it essential reading. Eilish and Larry Stack are having a perfectly ordinary night with their children (except the oldest boy who like most teens does not always get home on time). Bailey and Molly are in front of the TV and Ben is breast-feeding, as the author muses on behalf of Eilish,
“The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window looking out into the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whisper. Tired now, the day almost behind her, all that still has to be done before bed and the children settled in the living room, this feeling of rest for a moment by the glass. Watching the darkening garden and the wish to be at one with the darkness, to step outside and lie down with the fallen leaves and let the night pass over.
But the knocking… ” (pg. 6) (Paul Lynch’s writing would drive Grammarly crazy which doesn’t make it wrong.)
This proves to be one of the last ordinary nights the Stack family ever has. Who is at the door? The police, but not the ordinary police, these are the police of the new order, the order that is making up rules against every aspect of the state in which the people have lived for decades, perhaps centuries.
What do these people want, these people who were once neighbors, fellow citizens but are now, somehow, the police who can come to anyone’s door and make them disappear? It seems that they want nothing except power over you and your family. As Eilish struggles on her own, once her husband is rounded up and his fate becomes a mystery, she at least still has a job. Soon her job too falls afoul of whatever it is the new government will tolerate and she loses her grasp on the equanimity that routine offers. Everyone tells her to leave but she can’t imagine leaving while her husband is still being held, while her oldest son is off fighting with the revolutionaries against the new government which sees all citizens as enemies. Why? There appears to be no why, but just a quest for absolute power. These new leaders seem to offer nothing to citizens. Eilish’s sister wants her to come to Canada, but she wants to wait it out, believing it to be a temporary upheaval.
This is a disturbing book that we still ought to read since our senses tell us that this is something that could happen in America right now. Who would know better than Ireland (where this is set) what can happen in a divided nation? What would you do if the stormtroopers, no matter how polite they seem and how officially they are dressed, were to start appearing at doors across America warning you about mysterious transgressions that you were accused of committing? What would you do if family members were taken into custody and never returned? Suppose no information about their whereabouts was forthcoming? Would you leave America? Where would you go? You would have to be quick about it before the rules got too stringent and security measures forced you to find illegal ways to travel. It’s chilling to read about it, but it would be far more chilling to live it. A very timely book and a warning to all of us.
In Absolution by Alice McDermott, we travel back to the days when America was first getting involved in the war in Vietnam, perhaps hoping to solve the issues between north and south with diplomacy while using private corporations to get South Vietnam ready for war. The story is told through the vivid memories of a woman who was only just married to her husband Peter at 23-years-old when he is sent to Vietnam as a consulting engineer. Tricia goes with him. She describes her aspiration at that time was “to be a helpmeet for my husband.” Her father told her on her wedding day to “be the jewel in his crown.” She doesn’t exaggerate. This is the way daughters were raised at that time. Like Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice who had five daughters to find husbands for, my mother had six daughters to marry off. I was once presented to the pots and pans salesman as a potential bride. I confess that I disappointed my mom.
This is a story of another time, of the time many wish we could recapture, although not necessarily the part where we venture into Vietnam. Tricia describes her days as an endless round of cocktail parties bringing together men (and their families) from the military, the government, and corporations. Women, being helpmeets for their husbands, spent hours wearing gauzy cocktail dresses over iron-clad undergarments at garden parties in humid, hot discomfort, attempting to look cool and pretty. She begins her story by telling what a typical day was like. Wives would bathe in the morning, staying in their bath until noon. Then they would do their nails, send out little witty notes to other wives, burn joss sticks to perfume the heat. After that they would apply face powder, rouge, lipstick, pin dress shields in the chosen cocktail dress, don undergarments and stockings, add shoes, and spray some perfume. Tricia says that she would be “faint with heat in my column of clothes.”
Obviously, Absolution is not a book about the Vietnam War. It offers a peek into something we never thought to wonder about. What was daily life like for the wives of the men who were trying to make peace while preparing for war. America tends to turn the foreign countries where it spends time into spaces that resemble America as much as possible. Except for their servants and shopping in the marketplaces these wives saw little of what life was like for the Vietnamese. Tricia describes the Vietnamese women who passed them by as “girls we passed on the streets…were like pale leaves stirring in the humid stillness, sun-struck indications of some unseen breeze, cool, weightless, beautiful.” Alice McDermott is a good writer.
Charlene, who befriends Tricia, is a mother of three and “a seasoned corporate spouse.” She practices the small charities that she would have pursued if she was still in America, taking baskets of small gifts into hospitals for example. She comes up with the idea to dress Barbie dolls in Vietnamese attire and she sells them to help her buy the supplies for her baskets or she gives them as gifts sometimes. Tricia, although shy, is easily persuaded to help the beautiful and confident Charlene with this and other activities. Tricia is having a crisis of her own as she attempts to be the perfect helpmeet and partner by making a family, having a child. She has a series of miscarriages that make her feel guilty, damaged, and which undermine her own confidence.
It’s a little gem of a book that too many might dismiss as a “girl book.” The way the author immerses us in the mores of the 1950s and 60s, the evocation of a world and a time most of us have never experienced makes this novel well worth a read. Some key scenes have been left out of this review to make them fresh when you encounter them for the first time. While it would have perhaps had more universal appeal if we also followed the husbands as they lived out their days, there is no way for most of these women from these times to have any intimate knowledge about that.
“But how I wished that there existed someone to whom I could say I was sorry.” says Tricia in the Epilogue, quoting Graham Greene from The Quiet American.
While The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport by Samit Basu is not great literature, this novel epitomizes the discussions of AI that dominated 2023. It also does that thing that sci-fi does so well. It offers commentary on modern and future society and politics.
Shantiport is a once-prominent city with a port that was busy and thriving. It is now a backwater decaying city that has internal problems which keep it in existential danger of dying out completely.
We wonder how we will ever become home to multicultural societies which should be easy for us because we are all humans. Shantiport wants to become a multicultural oasis which seamlessly protects the rights of both humans and bots. The bots seem to exhibit the same propensities as humans for violence, elitism, and tribalism. In this case the Tiger clan is warring against the Monkey clan.
The bot characters are well done and are as appealing, at least those who are main characters, as the human main characters. In fact, we find that those main characters, both bot and human, are a family unit as in brothers/sisters/ancestors. When the “jinn” is recovered from where it was hidden (Aladdin of legend) the one who holds the jinn gets three wishes. If your goal is to restore Shantiport to its former glory and make it a truly multicultural city what would your three wishes be? Be careful, it’s a very tricky jinn.
The same difficulties apply if you are trying to profit personally and don’t really care about the fate of Shantiport. This may not be literary fiction, but it is fun, and inspires thoughts about our own present and future dilemmas.
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron is a sort of spy story, but it’s not James Bond. No loveable Moneypenny or Q here. No clever devices that look ordinary but have magical abilities to save an agent in dire straits. In fact, half of the characters are not even spies, but their story begins when the Berlin Wall falls and an actual spy comes out of the East and meets a grieving wealthy man who lost his sister and who knows what happened to her and who did it. Who is Max and why is he being chased down the Green Lanes as the book begins by people who seem intent on killing him?
You will have to spend some time in the Regent Park Office in London where a group has been set up to find what kinds of unethical business the hired hands in the spy business have been up to. The committee’s remit is called Monochrome, which perfectly describes how Griselda Fleet and Malcolm feel about being assigned to this investigation. Both thought they were headed up the ladder to plum assignments and both are unhappy and worried to have been shunted sideways. They did not even have access to documents from Regent’s Park where actual scandals might have been expected to lurk. If you happened to read any bits from David Foster Wallace’s unfinished book, The Pale King, which takes place in the IRS, then you feel right at home in the home office.
Don’t get too bored because you are going to have all the action you can handle in Berlin (the spook’s zoo). They are a depraved bunch who have seen it all and are jaded and deep in the aftereffects of WWII. Myles has been embedded in East Berlin and has experienced the peak moments of postwar Soviet spying, the dossiers, the imagined crimes, the real crimes, the Stassi, the paranoia, the tattling, and the terrible repercussions of the tattling. Into this foreign office enters Allison, a young intelligent innocent who had expected to work at a desk and now finds herself pretending to complete assigned paperwork. At the same time, she does the real work assigned her which is to spy out what is going on in Berlin. However, the crux of this matter is personal, not professional. So, not about true spying at all, although it feels exactly the same. It’s about people, people who will surprise you. I can’t tell you; it’s a spy story, sort of.
Clearly wars do not end when treaties are signed, when spoils are divided, when horrendous war crimes are turned up, when revenge is planned and eventually taken. Names change, years pass, people age and disguise themselves and become unrecognizable. Justice gets done but not in a court. First Desk proves to be not all talk and no action. The author knows how to set a scene. Don’t you just love a good spy story. This one is very good while you are reading and great after contemplation. Don’t just move on to your next book until you have sat with this one for a bit.
You know the story. Boy meets girl. Girl and boy spend time together, grow up together. It’s a love story – no, not Romeo and Juliet, not that kind of love story, It’s complicated.
In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Sam Mazur and Sadie Green meet at a hospital. Sam has already experienced two traumas that would mess up anyone’s mind. Sadie has a family member in the hospital so has a fair bit of trauma in her life also. Her sister had cancer, but it has responded to treatment and Alice is there for more routine reasons. Sadie is getting ready for her Bat Mitzvah. Sam is tuned into his own grief. He lost his mother in a car accident and crushed a foot in the same car accident. Sam and his mother had moved from New York City to Los Angeles after a bizarre accident in that city seemed like a warning of danger. Moving obviously didn’t work. Sadie only spends time with Sam reluctantly at first, but they become close friends for a while. When Sam learns that Sadie is counting her time with him as community service for her Bat Mitzvah he is hurt and angry. They lead separate lives until Sam runs into Sadie at a train station.
What Sam and Sadie have in common is gaming. Sam’s Korean grandfather owns a pizza shop with a Donkey Kong machine he hoped would attract customers. Sam had permission to play as much as he wished. Since Sadie kept getting kicked out of her sister’s hospital room, Sam and Sadie played computer games, passing Sam’s laptop back and forth.
This may not be a conventional love story and it is not, despite the title, a literary novel. It is however a great gamer story and there is love and betrayal, and anger, and possibly undeserved blame. There are relationships, there is the passage of time, and there is more trauma.
My own gaming experiences are limited to the maligned “shooters” which Sadie and Sam find unartistic and antisocial. The games I played were Pac Man, Snood, and Space Invaders, shooters all. Sadie’s favorite game was Oregon Trail. In college she had as her professor Dov, a young Israeli game designer who had created and successfully marketed a popular game.
Sadie and Sam eventually create a game called Ichigo – a game with a child lost at sea who must be rescued. The game has beautiful graphics and becomes iconic. Sam’s college roommate Marx Wantanabe, is a wealthy guy with amazing social skills. Marx provides upfront money and resources for Sadie and Sam while they code and look for an engine that will drive the graphic results Sadie pictures in her mind. Marx and Sadie share a love of art and literature, especially Asian art and Shakespeare. These gamers are all very young, they drop out of college for a semester to create Ichigo. By the time they are out of their twenties, they are financially successful which seems to affect their lives very little. Love and friendship are far more difficult to maneuver through though.
You can enjoy this novel as a story. The characters are immersive. Or you can enjoy this book as a blueprint to reach gamer stardom. It’s a coming-of-age-story with a twist. It’s also a success story. I am still waiting for eye surgery, so I am still reading on Audible which I am getting used to. It doesn’t put me to sleep anymore. Although I am too old to be the intended audience for this book, I still enjoyed it. We all have a bit of the entrepreneur in us along with a taste for romance. For me the relationships seemed more like they were mapped out by a game creator than offering the personal involvement with love that readers can sometimes experience. There was always a distance between even the characters who did get intimately involved. Not my favorite book ever, but I looked forward to listening each time I got the chance.
I hesitate to write about The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride because so many readers already have done so, but I do like to obsessively keep track of the books I read. Besides, there are things to say. I know, that’s what Julia Roberts said in Notting Hill. Now you all know that I have watched that movie too many times.
McBride’s tale takes place in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1936. The fact that his points, and there are points, intersect with where we are now in the twenty-first century is both surprising and rather shameful. James McBride is a musician and a writer of fiction, a rare crossover. He won a National Book Award in 2013 for his novel, The Good Lord Bird.
We are not surprised that Jews and Black folks were American scapegoats in 1936. Hitler had just begun his awful politics in Europe and many Jewish people, perhaps already aware that they were about to be persecuted once again, left Europe to settle in America. Black folks have been persecuted continuously in America. As the tale begins some work on the Pottstown water system turns up a mezuzah and a human skeleton at the bottom of a hole where there is a connection to the local water reservoir. The rest of the story tells us how the mezuzah and the body got there.
Moshe had wandered down to Pottstown from New York City. He was a Jew who loved to party. He opened a theater, invited Klezmer musicians, and sold tickets to people to come in and dance. He became well-known to other agents who also booked musicians, and he had a brother, Isaac, who ran a very successful theater operation in Philadelphia.
Moshe also owned the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. He married Chona, a beautiful woman who was not considered marriageable because she had a disability. Chona loved the other people who were their neighbors on Chicken Hill, even though they were black folks. They were her customers at the grocery store which she ran after her marriage to Moshe. Many of the Jews from Chicken Hill had moved to town, but Chona refused to leave Chicken Hill or to close the grocery story. She knew that human warmth and loyalty were worth more than social climbing. Her customers loved her and were protective of her.
In 1936 in America, people who were immigrants themselves from all over Europe looked down on Jews and considered Black folks a threat. These were the times when Germans chanted “Jews will not replace us.” We heard this refrain recently in America in Charlottesville when Trump was President #45. It was given a more general scope when some chanted “You will not replace us.” The only Americans indigenous to this continent are not European immigrants and yet the chant of “blood and soil” was also transplanted from Europe as if there are Americans who can authentically lay claim to being the “real” Americans (hint: they mean white Christian Americans).
If you read Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste, or Matthew Desmond’s books, Eviction, and Poverty by America, these authors speak of their belief that countries tend to need scapegoat groups, untouchables so to speak, for reasons such as holding onto power and hoarding money. Jewish and Black folks are our scapegoats in America, although not necessarily for the same reasons. They are easy to target because they stand out, one based on religion and the other based on skin color. These groups cannot easily hide or blend in with white or Christian Americans. Many of us are disgusted by this tendency, yet we see that these biases are kept alive by stereotypes, propaganda, and conspiracy theories. This prejudice ties those early Hitler years to present-day attitudes that persist in America. In contrast to the supportive relationship between Jewish and black people in McBride’s book, there are attempts made in this century to divide these two groups, to make Jews targets of hate and to turn black folks into people to be feared.
Chona often needs to see a doctor because she has seizures. The only doctor in Pottstown is white and he is a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Everyone knows this because he also has a limp. Dr. Roberts went to school with Chona, and he has always desired her. In a key moment, Dr. Roberts sexually abuses Chona as she lies unconscious from a seizure in the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Dodo is the nickname of a child rendered deaf from a stove that blew up in his home before he became homeless. Chona and Moshe have taken Dodo in, and Dodo sees what Dr. Roberts does to Chona. Soon he finds himself committed to a local institution for homeless, deranged, and disabled people. Dodo is a black child. Nate, his wife Addy, and the entire black community of Chicken Hill are touched when Moshe and Chona take on this good child.
Thus begins a chain of events that comes to a head on the day of the Memorial Day parade. Besides the plans for rescuing Dodo, another problem is addressed on this same day. It is related to the question, “Why is there a bullfrog in the mikvah?” The rescue of Dodo from the clutches of a monstrous man called Son of Man and the institution at Pennfield, and the explanation for how the mezuzah and a dead body got in the hole with the town’s water pipes depends on events that happen on this same chaotic Memorial Day occasion. It’s a great story that also highlights how little we have learned about our common situation as humans on this earth. Social commentary and social justice occur all in one fell swoop of the pen of James McBride. We should heed the lessons this tale teaches us with humor and also with its descriptions of shameful human behavior. You may end up saying along with Dodo, “Thank you, Monkey Pants.” I listened on Audible and since this book is full of dialects it was a pleasure.
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 