Literature

It’s been a long time since I posted any book reviews. It’s not because I stopped reading, but I’ve had other things on my mind. So, as the year comes to an end, here are some of the books I really liked during 2023.

This is Marra’s second novel – his first was more than 10 years ago, but it was worth the wait.

It’s 1941, Artie Feldman is founder and CEO of the titular studio – a producer of B movies that keep the country’s screens filled when the finer products of Hollywood are unavailable. It’s a tough business and the studio is facing a number of problems. The Senate is investigating whether Artie’s studio, among others, is trying to goad the country into war, the Production Code Administration is constantly cutting scenes from Artie’s movies because they might ‘offend the people’s sensibilities’ and Artie’s brother, the finance guy, is angling to take over the studio.

Artie is the kind of guy we’ve met before – he is concerned that his bald spot is growing and he keeps a row of toupees on display in his office. He has never met a bad idea he doesn’t love.

Artie’s principal defender and the feisty central character of this complicated novel is his deputy producer, Maria Lagana. She’s a 28-year-old Italian American with “the talents of a general, diplomat, hostage negotiator and hairdresser.” She has a special knack, Marra explains, “for smuggling subtext past the border guards of decorum at the Production Code Administration.” When Artie tells Maria she can have a producer’s credit if she gets their latest film past the censors, she takes the challenge.

Maria is a hard worker and clever but she feels a sense of guilt for her relative comfort at the studio while others struggle both in Hollywood and abroad. What feels at first like a charming flashback to Maria’s youth in Rome is, in fact, an explanation for her abiding sense of guilt. As a strident teenager, she acted rashly to protect her father in a way that accidentally led to his arrest under the fascist reign. While Maria escapes to the United States, her dad remains behind and becomes embroiled in a convoluted murder plot that ricochets through several lives.

When Marra switches back to the United States, that frightening vision of Italian fascism serves as both contrast and caution. As the country enters the war, Mercury Pictures joins the effort to convince Americans of the purity of their cause and the villainy of their enemies. But, of course, many of those propaganda films are written, directed, produced and even performed by the very kinds of people that the U.S. government is busy demonizing.

When Artie decides to make, against the strident denunciation of the Motion Picture Board, “Devil’s Bargain” , the story of a German filmmaker who agrees to make propaganda movies in exchange for financing his masterpiece, begins as another one of Mercury’s middling movies but ends, after the film’s literally riotous reception on Dec. 6, 1941, with Artie suddenly looking prescient. Those isolationist senators who thought the studios were goading the nation toward war? Now they want Artie’s help making more “patriotic” pictures like “Devil’s Bargain.” The interpretation of art, it turns on a dime.

The book is filled with funny and interesting characters and Marra’s incisive writing brings out their personalities, quirks and weaknesses. I laughed out loud more than once reading the book. You might too.

This is a book you should read carefully. It is a kind of mystery with clues hidden everywhere. Much of the action — lovers’ trysts in abandoned buildings, covert wartime operations, transportation of contraband goods and illegally imported greyhound racing dogs — takes place not just in the metaphorical darkness of unreliable memory and deliberate deception, but in a “wet, pitch-black universe” occasionally illuminated by the guiding glow of what was known as a “bomber’s moon.”

Ondaatje sets up his novel with its very first line: “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” The narrator, Nathaniel Williams, is 14, his sister Rachel almost 16. Their first disillusionment comes when they discover, months after their mother’s departure, that she isn’t where she said she was going. Warlight is Nathaniel’s attempt, some 15 years later, to figure out where his parents did go, and why he and his sister were left in the dark.

They are left in the care of a burly, eccentric man they call the Moth, who is host to a motley, ever changing crew of visitors to their own old London home. A central figure is the Darter, a man engaged in evidently nefarious activities, usually by night, whom Nathaniel adopts as a father figure. The Darter is involved in the illicit import of greyhounds at a time when greyhound racing was apparently unregulated; more crucially, he later takes Nathaniel and his girlfriend, Agnes, on secretive nighttime missions, making contraband deliveries by boat up the Thames.

The novel is filled with nicknames, aliases, and disguises. Nathaniel’s mother, Rose, calls her children Stitch and Wren. She’s known on the airwaves by her code name, Viola — the object of a furious manhunt that also threatens her family. Nathaniel refers to his first girlfriend as Agnes Street, after the location of the empty rental property where they first meet for sex. Real names and identities are lost in the shuffle, as are both Nathaniel’s original family and the eccentric, makeshift one he cobbles together by circumstances.

“The past … never remains in the past.” That is the signature theme of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, which juggles time in much the same way that memory does, interlacing the war years of the 1940s with their immediate aftermath and then jumping forward a decade or so, only to dart back to the war again. At the outset, Ondaatje’s narrator, Nathaniel, is 14; by the last page he is in his late 20s.

As the novel progresses, Ondaatje reveals more little tidbits to us and we realize that some of what we thought was insignificant when we first read it, is really an important part of the story. People, and stories, are elusive and evasive. from those figures of Nathaniel’s and Rachel’s teenage years to Marsh Felon, the man with whom Rose has been in an ambiguous relationship all her life, and, of course, to Rose herself. We first meet Felon when, as the youngest member of a family of thatchers, he falls off the roof of Rose’s parents’ house in Suffolk when she is just 8, a story she tells her children that doesn’t seem significant until, very far along, we meet him again with a shock of recognition. This is one of several instances when the novel mirrors Nathaniel’s observation that “you return to that earlier time armed with the present.” Some previous incident or reference is clarified much later; you understand why that was important, why that person or that event mattered.

This is an amazing novel, full of detail and wonderful characters. Read it…and read carefully – you will enjoy it.

This is a novel about a young woman named Kathy H., and her friendships with two schoolmates, Ruth and Tommy. The triangle is a standard one: Kathy is attracted to Tommy; Tommy gets involved with Ruth, who is also Kathy’s best friend; Ruth knows that Tommy is really in love with Kathy; Kathy gets Tommy in the end, although they both realize that it is too late, and that they have missed their best years. Their lives are short; they know that they are doomed. So the small betrayal leaves an enormous wound.

That sounds simple and is a common theme but it ignores the terrible premise of the book which is only slowly revealed. Since it’s the nature of Ishiguro narrators to postpone a full reckoning of their place in the world, all we know in the early going is that we don’t quite know what’s going on.

We have inklings. The novel’s 31-year-old narrator, Kathy H., announces on the first page that she has worked for more than 11 years as a “carer.” The people she assists in her line of work are “donors” at a recovery center, in pain and doped up on drugs. Logic suggests that bodily organs are involved. But gently decent Kathy is our host on this journey, and instead of surveying her life in the present (that would be “England, late 1990’s,” according to an introductory note) she likes to let her mind wander back to the years she spent with her two closest friends, Ruth and Tommy, at boarding school -a fabled, bucolic place in the countryside with the Dickens-parody name of Hailsham.

Kathy and her classmates were taught to think of themselves as supremely lucky for having gone to Hailsham. It was the best, the most privileged of schools. Still, we can hear off notes. The place was run by “guardians,” who come across like nuns devoted to a faith other than religion. Both maternally protective and weirdly distant, these women prevented students from leaving the campus, and had them screened each week by a doctor. And they kept the kids busy with art projects that seemed freighted with meaning, as if a child’s creative output might hold a clue to her fate.

Slowly, we’re led to see that she and her classmates are clones, reared in isolation at a special school, pampered and sheltered and encouraged to feel like children for as long as possible but trained for a mean postgraduate destiny. It’s a shocking setup.

Ishiguro is trying, quite successfully, to show us what is human about us even in the most horrible situations – how we love and laugh and enjoy life all the while heading to an unavoidable, early end. We root for Kathy — which is not quite the same thing as identifying with her. For, authentic as her emotions may be, by definition she’s personality-challenged. At times uncomfortably, for a work that aims to give us a distilled and persevering human essence, we can sense the controlling care with which Ishiguro invents and organizes her memories. Yet if the novel feels a bit too distant to move us to outright heartbreak, it delivers images of odd beauty and a mounting existential distress that hangs around long after we read it.

We all know the story of Odysseus. It’s been told, at length, by poets, novelists and filmmakers. The Trojan war lasted ten years and his travels/adventures on the way home lasted another ten. We know a bit less about his wife, Penelope who we him as a teenager and bore him one son, Telemachus, just before Odysseus’ departure. She remained faithful to Odysseus the entire time, fending off hundreds of suitors through a variety of cunning tricks, one of which is to pretend to be weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s elderly father Laertes and claiming that she will choose a suitor when she has finished. Every night for three years, she undoes part of the shroud, until Melantho, a slave, discovers her chicanery and reveals it to the suitors.

This novel is one of a number of recent retellings of Greek myths from a female perspective. Penelope is Queen of Ithaca, but she is not really the ruler of the island. Nor is her son, Telemachus, the ruler while his mother still lives. Ithaca is an island of women, young boys and old men; all the eligible men having sailed to Troy in pursuit of Helen alongside Odysseus.

When pirates begin to attack the island, Penelope must act in order to protect her husband’s birthright and his people, but what can she do as a woman, when to be a powerful woman in Greece is to make yourself a target? There is clever plotting at the heart of this book which is fitting given that Penelope and Odysseus were known for their wits.

The book, interestingly, is narrated by Hera, Goddess of marriage, women and family, and the protector of women during childbirth. According to myth, she is defined by her jealous and vengeful nature in dealing with those who offend her. Within this novel, the author really taps into that, and we are treated with a narrator who tells us the story with a heavy amount of sarcasm and a good deal of irony, which honestly, was entirely amusing and on point. It’s a fun story and I enjoyed it.

It’s worth noting that Claire North is a pen name for Catherine Webb who also writes under the name Kate Griffin.

Yes, another retelling of Greek mythology, this one by Costanza Casati, from a different point of view, this one about Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon and half-sister of Helen. She is best known for known for murdering her husband, King Agamemnon, after he returned home from the Trojan War.

But wait, there’s much more to the story. Clytemnestra had her reasons. First, Agamemnon murdered her husband and infant son so that he could have her. Years later, he kills his and Clytemnestra’s daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice to turn the winds in the Greek army’s favor. Finally, he brings home from Troy his captive and lover, Cassandra. All of this is, of course, condoned by the other men of Greece including Clytemnestra’s childhood friend, Odysseus. Let’s take a look at her story.

When we meet Clytemnestra, she is a young princess of Sparta; a hunter and fighter who is close to her family, especially to her sister, Helen, the famed beauty who later flees for Troy.  

Growing up, the princesses of Sparta train in wrestling, spear-throwing and sword-fighting, and are relatively able to do as they please. Their mother rules alongside their father – or at least appears to. “It is hard to find a man who is really strong. Strong enough not to desire to be stronger than you,” she tells Clytemnestra.  

On her deathbed, Clytemnestra’s grandmother tells Clytemnestra and Helen that their family is a “dynasty of queens” and that “you girls will be remembered longer than your brothers”.

For this, she says, they’ll need “ambition, courage, distrust”. If her message is cryptic in that moment, it becomes increasingly clear as the two princesses grow older and face one betrayal after another.  

After all, ancient Greece is a man’s world. Yes, young Spartan women are trained to be strong. But the reason is so they can “bear healthy children”, Clytemnestra says. If their lower positioning in the social hierarchy is not apparent at first, it becomes abundantly clear when Theseus, the king of Athens, kidnaps and rapes Helen. Her siblings are furious and want revenge, but her father will hear none of it – “Theseus is a hero and he does what heroes do.”

After the murder of her first husband and their baby son, Clytemnestra transforms her heartbreak into steel. When she is raped by Agamemnon and forced to become his wife, she decides she will be a leader in her own right.  In one memorable scene, when a group of merchants question her authority, Clytemnestra punches their ringleader so hard that he loses consciousness.

When Agamemnon returns to the palace after the Trojan War, with his concubine, the Trojan princess Cassandra, in tow and being greeted by his wife, entered the palace for a banquet while Cassandra remained in the chariot. Clytemnestra waited until he was in the bath, and then entangled him in a cloth net and stabbed him. Trapped in the web, Agamemnon could neither escape nor resist his murderer.

Meanwhile, Cassandra saw a vision of herself and Agamemnon being murdered. Her attempts to elicit help failed (she had been cursed by Apollo that no one would believe her prophecies). She realized she was fated to die, and resolutely walked into the palace to receive her death.

Years later, Clytemnestra’s son Orestes, accompanied by her daughter Electra, track down Clytemnestra and kill her in revenge for their father. Life was tough in ancient Greece.

I enjoyed this novel. I had a rather classical education which included a lot of Greek and Roman myths and history and that may explain why I’m drawn to these stories.

This is an amazing book, an autobiography unlike any you have ever read; you might call it a collective autobiography of a generation. The book spans the timeframe from the author’s birth in 1940 up to 2006, and moves from her working-class upbringing in Normandy to her years teaching French literature in a lycée, living in the Parisian suburb of Cergy, raising two sons and eventually divorcing. But it is not a straightforward autobiography; rather it is told in a choral “we”, which sometimes shifts into the third person, so the author appears as “she”. This is as close in as it gets.

Throughout “The Years,” Ernaux traces the collapse of Catholic prudishness as it’s attacked by secularism, the pill, the legalization of abortion and the women’s movement. While as a teenager she was terrified of losing her virginity before marriage, in late adolescence her unmarried sons begin to sleep with their girlfriends at their mother’s apartment.

She marvels at how quickly people have learned to use the mobile phone, computer, iPod and GPS — and she is unable to imagine the devices we’ll be using in 10 years’ time. People must keep up, acquire the latest gadgets; to fall behind would be to accept aging and dying. She remarks on how goods can freely circulate, unlike refugees, who are “turned away at the borders.” She knows that possessions can’t make people happy, but also acknowledges the popular belief that this “was no reason to abandon things.” She talks about how the consumerist economy has enveloped us all with ‘so many types of yogurt that you could eat a different one every day for a year and not have them all’.

“It will be a slippery narrative,” she writes, “composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.” It is comprised of her own memories, of historical events, of scraps of popular culture, slang, notes on the subtle transformations of the culture. We encounter the war in Algeria, Sartre and De Beauvoir, Edith Piaf’s “Les Amants d’un Jour” (which “gave us goosebumps”), fondue bourguignonne, Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur, May 1968, the pro-abortion rights manifesto of the 343 salopes, nuclear threat, the explosion of consumerism, unemployment, immigration, the advance of technology. Ernaux captures the ineffable passage of time, which she layers like “palimpsests”, in order to express the “lived dimension of history” and, perhaps more crucially, to “give form to her future absence”.

She laces the book with photos of herself and others at various stages in life and she fills the book with interesting and amazing anecdotes and reminded me, at least, of many things in my own past that I had forgotten. This is a great book and you should read it.

I know all of you have been waiting breathlessly to learn what new books I’ve been reading and which I recommend. You may rejoice, because that day has come!

We’ve been waiting a long time – 48 years – for this third novel from this Nobel Prize winning writer. I, along with many of us, was fascinated by his 2006 memoir, ‘You Must Set Forth at Dawn’ which chronicled his exile from his home country of Nigeria and subsequent adventures. As a political activist, the 87-year-old Nobel Prize winner has never stopped intervening in our public conversation, whether to defend freedom of expression, condemn religious fundamentalism or destroy his American green card after the election of Donald Trump. Now he produces this great giant of a novel full of amazing characters, a complicated plot and lots of satire.

“Chronicles” is many things at once: a caustic political satire, a murder mystery, a conspiracy story and a deeply felt lament for the spirit of a nation. The plot — convoluted, obscure at times, often tying itself in too many knots — turns on the aptly named Human Resources, a sinister online business that sells human body parts for private use in rituals and superstitions. As often happens in satire, the outrageousness of the fictional premise comes from its proximity to the truth: The belief that human organs have magical properties, leading to business success and political power, has been known to lead to ritual murders in Nigeria, and Soyinka even quotes a real-life national headline verbatim in the text: “Thirteen-Member Ritualist Gang Broken Up.”

Duyole Pitan-Payne, an engineer and bon vivant, and a surgeon named Kighare Menka — whose “ancient” friendship is the most moving story line in the novel. As young students in England, they and two other Nigerians formed the “Gong of Four,” a kind of tongue-in-cheek secret society complete with code language and a common dream: to return to Nigeria and try to give something back to their country — or, in their own words, “Get back and make a difference!” It was an abstract mission, but it took a more concrete shape in Menka’s project to build a hospital in his small, underprivileged hometown. Decades later, one member of the group has disappeared without a trace, another has been in prison for money laundering, and Duyole is leaving the country for New York as a representative to the United Nations.

Dr. Kighare Menka is an award-winning surgeon, famous for his work with mutilated victims of the Boko Haram militant group. There is a moment where Menka suspects the attack on his friend and Pitan-Payne’s family’s subsequent, adamant refusal to follow Nigerian funeral customs may be related.

Menka knows there is a black market for human body parts — an underground business gruesomely known as Human Resources — that seems to be connected to the country’s most visible leaders. It’s a lucrative business that thrives on the people’s cultural belief system that human organs have properties to aid in charms used to gain success and power, or bring about an enemy’s downfall. All superstition — but powerful enough to birth such a business venture.

Menka comments on how fortunate his friend Duyole is, not having to see these images anymore in America. Although “they have their equivalents over there,” Menka says. “Ask the Black population.” Duyole disagrees: “Not like this. Occasionally, yes, there does erupt a Rodney King scenario. Or a fascistic spree of ‘I can’t breathe.’ America is a product of slave culture, prosperity as the reward for racist cruelty. This is different. This, let me confess, reaches into … a word I would rather avoid but can’t — soul. It challenges the collective notion of soul. Something is broken. Beyond race. Outside color or history. Something has cracked. Can’t be put back together.”

It seems to me that it’s a profoundly pessimistic novel. Those of us who have worked in Africa have always tried to keep a sense of optimism – there’s so much potential. But stories like this expose the reality of corruption and violence that sometimes seem to undo everything we have gained.

We all come from ancestors whose lives, suffering, accomplishments, work and hopes have enabled us to live the lives we lead. In Sahota’s book we see how the narrator, living in the current period, slowly discovers the lives of his ancestors and the discovery helps him to face his own life.

The occasional narrator of Sahota’s third novel, China Room, is also alienated and isolated, though his response is to turn his violent unhappiness inward; at 18, he is in the throes of heroin addiction. His account of a summer spent in rural Punjab is interspersed with the more substantial third-person story of a young woman in 1929, whom we later learn was his great-grandmother.

The narrator takes up an opportunity to combat his addiction by visiting an uncle in Punjab before he starts at a London university; he goes armed only with whisky and a selection of books “all by or about people who had already taken their leave”.

But it is the story of Mehar, a 16-year-old bride who finds herself living in the “china room” – a cramped, hitherto seldom used building on a farm, its nickname derived from the willow-pattern plates that adorn it, which once formed part of a dowry – that looms largest in the novel.

Mehar, just 16 years old and promised to the family as a small child, must leave her beloved brother, never to see him again, when she marries one of the brothers. She proves a compelling character — precociously aware of her suffocating circumstances and helplessness. As Sahota describes, Mehar is “used to this life, to this small world of hers.”

Yet Mehar still grasps at the miserly offerings of joy around her. She enjoys the affection she shares with her new “sisters” and notes the simple beauty of her rural surroundings — how the moon “on the ground glimmers brokenly like a shoal of ghostly fish.” She is curious, wise, and courageous, and I found myself as besotted with her as are the two brothers who vie for her affection.

Though married to the oldest brother, Mehar falls in love with one of the younger ones, originally matched to her but switched at the last minute. This central conflict upends the family and reverberates three generations forward when the drug-addled narrator arrives at the village.

It is a dramatically hushed novel, unlike Sahota’s second, the Booker-shortlisted exploration of illegal immigration The Year of the Runaways, which teemed with voices and activity. Here, events are glanced at, elaborated in fragments and elliptically, the reader left to draw a line leading from the earlier story to the life that the narrator has lived in the north of England, complete with its painful incidents of exclusion, racism both covert and explicit.

The novel also includes insight into the origins of the addict’s misery and crafts a subtle parallel between it and Mehar’s life. The addict recalls the way his own parents shouldered the burden and daily assaults of immigrant life in a small, racist town in England. At one point, he asks, “Why had they come here, to this broken white town? Had things really been so bad?”

Like many of us immigrant children, he feels protective of his parents but helpless. And that helplessness foments his drug-fueled self-destruction.

The final pages of China Room feel like a slow punch in the chest. And Sahota includes an uncaptioned photograph at the end of the book — an old woman holding a baby, which I later learned is the author’s great-grandmother carrying him as an infant. He provides no further explanation, and none is necessary.

This is the first novel in English by the poet Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai and I find it amazing and wonderful. Like many others I’ve read many novels about Vietnam mostly written by Americans and by Vietnamese refugees in America. This is the first that tells some of the story from a North Vietnamese perspective.

“The Mountains Sing” unfolds a narrative of 20th-century Vietnam — encompassing the land reforms of the ’50s as well as several turbulent decades before and after — through multiple generations of tenacious women in a single family. It begins in 2012, with Guava at an altar, invoking her grandmother, Dieu Lan, and remembering her own coming-of-age during the Vietnam War and its aftermath as her grandmother’s ward. Embedded within and alternating with these reminiscences are Dieu Lan’s flashbacks, in the form of the stories about her life that she tells her granddaughter.

It is a violent and heart-rending story including dispossession, colonization, foreign occupation and civil war. Some of the history is still largely unspoken within Vietnam. Around the middle of the book, Dieu Lan explains why she hasn’t before revealed that her husband and brother were murdered and her eldest son torn from her during the ruling regime’s land reform two decades earlier: “We’re forbidden to talk about events that relate to past mistakes or the wrongdoing of those in power, for they give themselves the right to rewrite history,” she tells her granddaughter, nicknamed Guava. “But you’re old enough to know that history will write itself in people’s memories, and as long as those memories live on, we can have faith that we can do better.”

Que Mai writes a lot about the land. The land is where Dieu Lan loses her father, decapitated by invading Japanese soldiers along the national highway. The land is where she loses her mother during the great famine of 1945, as the pair claw their way through a jungle in search of food. They find a cornfield, only to be confronted by its owner, who shackles Dieu Lan and beats her mother to death. It’s hard not to feel for Dieu Lan and her children, with their burdens (trauma from a battlefield rape; lost limbs; a baby born dead and deformed as a result of Agent Orange poisoning) and their alienation (their relationships strained by divided political loyalties). Just as Que Mai tells this taboo history askance, she devises oblique ways for her characters to navigate the unspeakable events that divide them: They communicate indirectly, through deathbed letters and diaries read surreptitiously. Forgiveness and reconciliation — within families, among Vietnamese and with foreign enemies — are recurring themes.

Guava reads a Vietnamese translation of Little House in the Big Woods and starts to understand America a bit more and sees herself in Laura Ingalls and sees some humanity in America despite the bombs and Agent Orange. At the same time, beauty does not exempt a culture from its inhumanity; at one point, Diệu Lan observes that an elegant haiku about a frog by the Japanese poet Basho could not save the Vietnamese from the brutality of their Japanese occupiers.

This is a wonderful book with a great romantic subplot and I urge you to read it. It’s a bit long but you will not regret the effort.

This book is so different from the ones before it but I still loved it. Anna North’s new novel, ‘Outlawed’ stirs up the typical western novel with a provocative blend of alt-history and feminist consciousness. The result is a thrilling tale eerily familiar but utterly transformed.

‘Outlawed’ is a Reese’s Book Club Pick, Instant NYT Bestseller, Belletrist Book Club Pick, Library Reads Selection, Amazon Editors’ Choice and a Washington Post Best of the Year selection. I liked it too!!

Imagine late 19th-century America, though not quite the Old West we know. In this version of our past, the Great Flu of the 1830s killed 90 percent of the U.S. population, snuffing out the Industrial Revolution and the federal government. A decimated nation was in no mood for Civil War; the few Black survivors of the plague escaped slavery on their own. And now, some 60 years later, the people remaining in the Dakotas have built a patriarchal Christian society centered on fertility.

In “Outlawed,” marriages are celebrated for their fecundity, and mothers of lots of children enjoy considerable social power. But with medical science stuck in its earliest stages, wives bear the full blame for infertility. Although popular opinion is in flux between biology and magic, miscarriages are widely believed to be the work of witches. And as in old Salem, that fear brings down hellish punishments on women who are difficult, smart or barren.

The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada’s life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows.

Even on the run, Ada devotes herself to dispelling the religious explanations of infertility and learning the forbidden secrets of gynecological medicine. She’s particularly skeptical of the conflation of misogyny, racism and quackery that is quickly becoming vogue across the country. Though she has only erratic access to scientific literature — and what exists is infected with speculation and superstition — she’s fearless and determined. “So I began my criminal career,” she confesses, “with a leaky pen instead of a pistol and books instead of silver for my reward.” Ada has heard tales of criminal men shooting their way across the Badlands, but the real outlaws in this society are women who are unwilling or unable to be mothers. Knowing this, Ada keeps running — pursued by a sheriff who will never give up.

She joins up with the notorious Hole in the Wall Gang, a band of outlaws led by a preacher-turned-robber known to all as the Kid. Charismatic, grandiose, and mercurial, the Kid is determined to create a safe haven for outcast women.

But to make this dream a reality, the Gang hatches a treacherous plan that may get them all killed. And Ada must decide whether she’s willing to risk her life for the possibility of a new kind of future for them all.

MORE TO COME!

I’m not yet caught up, but I’ll have another books post as soon as I can!