I recently finished reading Matrix by Lauren Groff. I loved it and immediately went out and reserved a couple of other books by the same author. Others liked it as well; it was a finalist for the National Book Award, named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, NPR, The Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, Esquire, Vulture, Marie Claire, Vox, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more!
Loosely based on the life of the 12th century poet, Marie de France, Matrix is an inspiring novel that truly demonstrates the power women wield, regardless of the era. It has sisterhood, love, war, sex — and many graphic deaths, all entangled in a once-forgotten abbey in the English countryside.
The year is 1158. As a “bastardess sibling of the crown,” the orphaned Marie de France is, alas, no glittering jewel to set in a queen’s gilded court. “Three heads too tall,” a “great clumsy lunk” with a “giant bony body,” Groff’s Marie is frankly unmarriageable: too ugly and unwieldy a burden to place on any man. On the other hand, she is educated and, having been left to fend for herself since the age of 12, when her mother died, knows how to run an estate — and how different is that from a nunnery? As it happens, Eleanor has just such a place on her hands, a “dark and strange and piteous place, a place to inspire fear.”
Reluctant at first to assume her role as prioress to pious old women, 17-year-old Marie attempts to reverse her banishment by writing an extensive ode to Queen Eleanor in an attempt to win her favor and be asked back to court. (This is Groff’s only nod to the poet’s real life in the novel.) But Marie’s writing days are quickly replaced with a spiritual devotion to the women who she comes to care for.
Marie’s answer to her exile from court is to remain devoted to a vision that excludes both Adam and the serpent. Her decades-long care for and control of the women fate places in her hands will only harden her resolve to disobey what Eleanor presents as the basic ground rule between the sexes: the “laws of submission” that place women at the mercy of men.
Marie gradually transforms this collection of starving and sickly women into a powerful abbey hidden in an Arthurian forest.
She arrives as a child and grows into a formidable woman, with urges, desires, and issues like any other woman. Guided by visions she claims are from God, given to her to protect the women under her care, she also stirs trouble — because a woman like her should not have power.
Groff often conflates Marie’s desire for power with her desire to keep her charges safe: She publicly challenges political laws, social structures, and ecclesiastical mores, seemingly for her personal enjoyment and prosperity. Outside the abbey walls, crusades and political stratagems occupy her mind.
There are moments where we witness the growth of a woman in a religious institution and everything is sacred — at least for a moment. Then in quick succession, Groff reminds us that yes, these are women of God, but sometimes they’re just earthly women. Her allusions to female pleasure — such as masturbation and oral sex — are done as stealthily as her allusions to heinous actions such as rape, almost like a whisper that you might miss if you’re not paying attention. But there are instances where allusions are not enough, and she is graphic, leaving little to the imagination when discussing death and sickness.
It’s a wonderful story and Groff is not just a skilled writer, but an amazing one. It’s not a long book – about 250 pages in hardback and, once you get into it, you will be immersed. Go read this book, you will enjoy it.
I know that all of you are anxious to see my list of The Best Books I’ve Read in 2021. Some of you have been unable to sleep and, of course, all the publishers have been after me to know which of their books can carry my coveted ‘BEST’ seal on the cover. So, in no particular order (drum roll), here they are!!
I LOVED this book. All of you should read it.
This is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s. They have waited long enough for their turn . . .
This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of them all . . .
In the middle of the night, a woman wakes to find her beloved city engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over. Troy has fallen.
From the Trojan women whose fates now lie in the hands of the Greeks, to the Amazon princess who fought Achilles on their behalf, to Penelope awaiting the return of Odysseus, to the three goddesses whose feud started it all, these are the stories of the women whose lives, loves, and rivalries were forever altered by this long and tragic war.
A woman’s epic, powerfully imbued with new life, A Thousand Ships puts the women, girls and goddesses at the center of the Western world’s great tale ever told.
This an amazing and wonderfully told story; magical is a good word for Edugyan. Read it!
Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human.
But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, they must abandon everything and flee together. Over the course of their travels, what brings Wash and Christopher together will tear them apart, propelling Wash ever farther across the globe in search of his true self. Spanning the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, London to Morocco, Washington Black is a story of self-invention and betrayal, of love and redemption, and of a world destroyed and made whole again.
This was a fun book to read; life is not all about car chases and spies; sometimes people surprise us.
We are in an elegant hôtel particulier in the center of Paris. Renée, the building’s concierge, is short, ugly, and plump. She has bunions on her feet. She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood. But Renée has a secret: she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With biting humor she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants—her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth.
Then there’s Paloma, a super-smart twelve-year-old and the youngest daughter of the Josses, who live on the fifth floor. Talented, precocious, and startlingly lucid, she has come to terms with life’s seeming futility and has decided to end her own on the day of her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.
Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma’s trust and to see through Renée’s timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.
Ha! Queenie was amazing and fun.
Queenie Jenkins is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places…including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth.
As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her.
This book wasn’t what I expected when I first opened it, but I became entranced and was sorry but satisfied when I came to the end. It won the Man Booker prize so I guess I’m not alone.
This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes’s oeuvre.
This is not my usual fare; it’s a snarky and funny rom-com, but I enjoyed it.
Melody Joo is thrilled to land her dream job as a video game producer, but her new position comes with challenges: an insufferable CEO; sexist male coworkers; and an infuriating—yet distractingly handsome—intern, Nolan MacKenzie, aka “the guy who got hired because his uncle is the boss.”
Just when Melody thinks she’s made the worst career move of her life, her luck changes. While joking with a friend, she creates a mobile game that has male strippers fighting for survival in a post-apocalyptic world. Suddenly Melody’s “joke” is her studio’s most high-profile project—and Melody’s running the show.
When Nolan is assigned to Melody’s team, she’s sure he’ll be useless. But as they grow closer, she realizes he’s smart and sexy, which makes Melody want to forget he’s her intern. As their attraction deepens, she knows it’s time to pump the brakes, even with her Korean parents breathing down her neck to hurry up and find a man.
With her project about to launch, Melody suddenly faces a slew of complications, including a devastating trolling scandal. Could the man she’s falling hard for help her play the game to win—in work and in love?
This book is so well-written and so easy to read that I fell in love with it.
In 1580’s England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this “exceptional historical novel” (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family’s land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.
McBride is a marvelous writer and this story shows him at the height of his craft. Loaded with funny and amazing characters and some great tales, this is a book I really enjoyed.
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.
The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride’s funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird. In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.
As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.
Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as The Good Lord Bird and as emotionally honest as The Color of Water. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us.
This is just a great story and well written.
Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I’m a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that. Here is the second thing: that young woman they pulled from the Arabian shore, her hair tangled with mangrove—my husband didn’t kill her, not the way they say he did.
1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by her Oklahoma grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, Gin never believed that someone like Mason, a handsome college boy, the pride of Shawnee, would look her way. And nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin’s life has become the stuff of fairy tales. She buys her first swimsuit, she pierces her ears, and Mason gives her a glittering diamond ring. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, washed up on the shores of the Persian Gulf, Gin’s world closes in around her, and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found. Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp peddlers, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans—a luminous portrait of life in the desert. Award-winning author Kim Barnes weaves a mesmerizing, richly imagined tale of Americans out of their depth in Saudi Arabia, a marriage in peril, and one woman’s quest for the truth, no matter what it might cost her.
I really loved The Sympathizer (if you haven’t read it, stop what you’re doing and read it now), so I thought I’d read this follow-up and I enjoyed it. Nguyen writes from a different perspective that’s worth understanding.
The long-awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies worldwide, The Committed follows the man of two minds as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.
Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail.
Both highly suspenseful and existential, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.
This was a great read that really takes the reader around the world. I liked it a lot and there is a bit of a surprise at the ending. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, so I can’t be the only one who liked it.
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There—after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes—Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.
A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian’s disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian’s own story, as the two women’s fates—and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times—collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.
That’s it! There were many others but I think I liked these the best. So tell me what did you read this year and what did you like? I really want to know.
I haven’t been posting about the books I have been reading but I’ll try and catch up here.
This is an interesting book about the unsuccessful slave revolt on the island of Jamaica, the events that led up to it and the aftermath that led to the abolition of slavery in the British empire.
Jamaica in the 18th century was a lucrative colony that produced much of the sugar that fed the British sweet tooth and fed enormous amounts of money into the British empire enabling, in many ways, the expansion of that empire. The sugar was produced in plantations that ringed the island (notably not in the interior mountains) and that were owned by fabulously wealthy planters most of whom lived in England. The sugar itself was grown and harvested by slaves mostly imported from Africa. The slaves outnumbered the white population by a factor of ten to one and order was maintained by a poorly trained militia and a single regiment of English soldiers.
Early 19th century England was undergoing rapid change with new technologies such as the railway, photography, telegraphy, and steam, and with an emerging middle class demanding political representation. There were changes in Jamaica too as Baptist missionaries arrived to try to bring Christianity to the slave population and raise their consciousness. A few of the slaves were ordained as Baptist ministers and assisted in bringing their form of Christianity to the slave population.
One of these was Samuael Sharpe. Sharpe’s personal charisma, combined with the social advantage of literacy, placed him in a leadership role among his people; trusted by his masters, he had some freedom of movement, which helped facilitate the events of Christmas 1831.
Sharpe’s access to information via his literacy led his followers to believe his claims that they had been set free by the king but that their masters were denying them their freedom. He organized what was to be a strike by the slaves under which they would not work until they were paid.
The strike took place over the Christmas period in 1831 and his hope for a nonviolent uprising quickly devolved into violence as plantations were burnt and guerrilla tactics ensued. It took five weeks to put down the rebellion and reprisals were swift. The rebellion caught the attention of abolitionist crusaders in England, though, and was used as ammunition in their attempt to reform parliament and push through legislation to end slavery in the British empire in 1833.
It’s an interesting book with a lot of detail. I think it’s about twice as long as it needs to be, though and reads sometimes like a scholarly text. If you have interest in Jamaica or the fight to end slavery, though, it’s worth a read.
Shadow Tag is a departure for Erdrich from the multi-generational stories of revenge set on North Dakota’s reservations. That isn’t to say it’s devoid of the Native American themes that permeate her many previous books. Both Irene and her husband, Gil, are of Indian heritage. Raised by a white mother, Gil clings to his paternal “mishmash of Klamath and Cree and landless Montana Chippewa.” Irene also grew up with a single mother, in her case a political activist who “dragged her to everything Ojibwe.”
Shadow Tag is a narrowly focused domestic tragedy, a linear narrative about a Minneapolis family on the verge of implosion in 2007. Erdrich’s portrait of this warped, obsessive relationship raises broader issues about art, privacy and identity.
Irene’s struggle to free herself from Gil results in various cat-and-mouse power plays. One of the more intriguing — and chilling — iterations of shadow tag starts when Irene discovers that Gil has been reading her diary. She starts a separate diary which she keeps in a safe deposit box and uses the diary that she knows Gil has been reading to manipulate his insecurities. She does this by planting supposedly confessional entries about the “real” fathers of their three children and vague suggestions that Gil might be right in suspecting her of having an affair.
Gil’s transgressions, it turns out, go way beyond compromising Irene’s privacy with his iconic series of invasive, often pornographic portraits of her that have brought him fame and fortune. Aggressive and controlling, he tries to make up for his outbursts of violence with lavish gifts. Irene, perpetually drunk on wine, is no better at protecting their children than herself. But the more she pulls away, the more Gil clings.
Erdrich captures not just Irene’s misery and the children’s lasting trauma but the often beguiling texture of domesticity — dinner, dishes, homework, bedtime. These hints of domesticity come among increasing levels of psychological breakdown. The end is a tragic combination of hate and love and a revelation about the narrator who describes it all.
I really like most of Erdrich’s books, but it took me a while to get into this one because it’s so different from what I expected. As with her other books, it’s very well written and a good read. I enjoyed it.
How Beautiful We Were, by Imbolo by Mbue, is deservedly listed as one of New York Time’s Ten Best Books of 2021. I really enjoyed it and I recommend it to all of you. It is a bit long, but is well-written and propulsive.
In October of 1980, in the fictional African village of Kosawa, representatives of an American oil company called Pexton have come to meet with the locals, whose children are dying. Nearby, the company’s oil pipelines and drilling sites have left the fields fallow and the water poisoned. The residents of Kosawa want the company gone and the land restored to what it was before Pexton showed up, decades ago. The company’s representatives say they’re doing everything they can, though their audience knows it’s a lie — Pexton has the support of the village head as well as the country’s dictator and, with it, impunity. Nothing will be done. But just as the meeting concludes, Konga, the village madman, bursts in. He’s got another idea: Until they get what they want, the villagers should hold Pexton’s men as prisoners.
Now you might expect this to be a story of a heroic fight between the virtuous, downtrodden natives and the heartless, moneygrubbing corporation but it’s not like that. There’s very little violence. Instead there’s a rather nuanced exploration of neocolonialism, the varying self-interests of those who might help or claim to help and the first, faltering steps of democracy.
Not long after the villagers of Kosawa kidnap Pexton’s representatives, a group of national soldiers show up asking questions about their whereabouts. It’s one of the narrative’s first — and least violent — confrontations between the state and the village, and an introduction to the myriad ways in which Kosawa’s residents must scheme in order to avoid the wrath of a government that would think nothing of wiping them out altogether. In the months and years that follow, the villagers try everything they can think of to get the oil company off their land. They meet with an American journalist, hoping that an article might change public (i.e., Western) sentiment in their favor; they travel to the capital to plead with the national government; they consider taking up arms; the work with an NGO that claims to want to help them.
The central moral and philosophical conflict of this novel boils down to one between those willing to trust Pexton to do what’s right, those who want to solicit the support of well-meaning American activists and those who see no difference between the two. “Someday, when you’re old, you’ll see that the ones who came to kill us and the ones who’ll run to save us are the same,” Konga says. “No matter their pretenses, they all arrive here believing they have the power to take from us or give to us whatever will satisfy their endless wants.”
The novel is kaleidoscopic in design, but one girl, Thula, becomes perhaps the closest thing to a protagonist. Early on, we see through her eyes, and the eyes of The Children (her age-mates, afforded their own chapters as a group), the impact of Pexton’s activities on the village. Thula’s younger brother, Juba, falls deathly ill. For a period, he even dies before being resuscitated by the village twins: a medium and a medicine man. Bursting with righteous fury, Thula and Juba’s father Malabo confronts the chief, Woja Beki. Then, with a group of young men, Malabo heads to Bézam, the capital, to demand answers and restitution — never to return.
This could be another story of the downtrodden Africans and their exploitation, but Mbue, avoids that trap. Some of the novel’s most thrilling sections are those that follow Thula as she fights to depose the dictator whose complicity has eviscerated her home. She and her age-mates, now grown, some of them with families of their own, reveal to the reader what it can look like to be a part of your country’s birth pangs. From so many angles, the beginning of African democracy can look like a stillbirth or miscarriage, but Mbue affords us a view from the inside where so many smaller miracles are at work, so many characters trying to find their own way to bring about a just government, the intricate, magnificent machinery operating in service to the ultimate miracle of a nation’s nativity.
I really enjoyed this book and I hope you will read it. Mbue is a gifted writer crafts a huge story with lots of pieces. It is profoundly affecting to watch the surviving children who were present for the first meeting with Pexton grow older over the decades, until they become parents and then grandparents, relating stories about what the village used to be. Give it a shot.
Rizzio is the retelling of the story of the murder of David Rizzio, private secretary to Mary Queen of Scots on March 9, 1566. It’s a story told over three days and it’s got plenty of action and momentum. There are a few brief nods to the recent past and immediate future, but for the most part context is jettisoned in favor of action. Mina brings a contemporary feel to the story with a kind of modern language which still manages to feel authentic.
She gets into the psychology of the murder, too. The murder takes place in the queen’s castle and home and the murderers, uncertain of exactly what they want to achieve, stay there. Essentially a prisoner in her own palace, following the brutal mass-stabbing of Rizzio by Lord Ruthven’s gang of Protestant nobles, Mary must persuade her husband, Lord Darnley, who was in on the plot at the start but now wonders if he is being edged out of it, that he is in as much danger as she is. At the same time, she must constantly try to second-guess the intentions of her unwelcome house guests, to look for chinks in their collective armor, and to get a sense of just how far they are prepared to go in order to get what they want.
It’s a quick read and well-written. It’s intended to be start of a series in which Scottish writers will re-imagine well-known stories of Scottish history. I look forward to reading some others.
I’ve been remiss in my book reviews. Here are three that I finished reading over the past few weeks – all a bit different.
I read The Singles Game by Lauren Weisberger because I sort of liked the movie version of
The Devil Wears Prada. It’s not my kind of novel but I think it would be enjoyable for those who like a quick, sexy, romantic romp.
After a devastating injury at Wimbledon, tennis pro Charlotte “Charlie” Silver knows she needs a major change if she wants to take her career to the next level. Known for her squeaky-clean and always-polite image, Charlie doesn’t argue when the Wimbledon officials deem her sneakers in violation of their strict uniform standards. At the last minute, she’s forced to scramble and play one of the biggest matches of her life in someone else’s shoes, resulting in a fall that injures both her wrist and her Achilles tendon. As she heals, she knows she’ll have to fire her good friend and sweetheart of a coach, Marcy, and sets her sights on Todd Feltner, a tough men’s coach known for his brash attitude and cultivation of champions.
Todd not only overhauls Charlie’s training and fitness regimen, barking at her if she even glances at a cup of coffee or a simple carbohydrate, but he makes over her image as well. Gone is good-girl Charlie with her bright outfits and ribbon woven through her cheery braid. After all, did she really work her whole life to settle for being “the twenty-third best female tennis player on earth”? s she post-injury? Feltner will use that to gain PR sympathy. Is she too winsome? Feltner will dress her in an all-black athletic costume with a tiara to make her the Warrior Princess. Is she tangled in the sheets with smoking-hot tennis star, Marco Vallejo? Feltner will make them even hotter together.
After Charlotte “Charlie” Silver wipes out atWimbledon, things look bad for the 24-year-old, hard-charging American. She has to recover from a broken wrist and an Achilles tear. But just as she’s finishing rehab, she receives a call from Todd Feltner, famed coach of tennis champions. He has never taken on a female client before, and despite his horrendously rude behavior, Charlie believes that his hard-hitting tactics will help ratchet up her racket strategy.
Is she post-injury? Feltner will use that to gain PR sympathy. Is she too winsome? Feltner will dress her in an all-black athletic costume with a tiara to make her the Warrior Princess. Is she tangled in the sheets with smoking-hot tennis star, Marco Vallejo? Feltner will make them even hotter together.
Soon Charlie starts winning — toss, lob, SLAM! Her dreams are coming true, and with Marco on a similar regime, she has a sexy partner available whenever she needs him. Her stylist for on-court getups starts putting together her off-court outfits, and they’re any princess’s dream, right down to the Louboutins custom-hacked for Charlie’s tennis-player tendons.
She realizes too late that she has ceased asking loved ones about their lives because she’s so caught up in her own. She finds out that in making Marco no promises, he makes none either. And finally, her newfound arrogance forces her to commit an almost-fatal career mistake.
As in The Devil Wears Prada, it’s not failure that changes things, but success. This is kind of fun and a very quick read. I realize it’s almost winter, but this is a great summer beach read. Give it a shot if you like this kind of book.
I read Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch because it looked like a fun novel about the expat life in Africa – Namibia to be exact. I enjoyed it. Crouch does a pretty good – for the most part – send-up of expat life and a pretty good job of describing Nambia – at least the parts the foreigners see.
The story pretty much revolves around Amanda and Persephone who are ‘trailing spouses’ as the spouses of more or less official expats are called, and Mila Shilongo – a Namibian who is the wife of the transport minister in the Namibian government.
Amanda has come to Namibia with her husband, Mark, an unlikely Fulbright scholar studying a subject, the German genocide of the Nama people in the early 1900s, of which he is so clearly ignorant that a reader suspects a ruse — rightly. As it turns out, Mark has unfinished emotional business in Namibia, where he served briefly in the Peace Corps 20 years earlier.
Mark has secrets, as do most of the unworthy, incompetent husbands and cavalierly racist women who populate “Embassy Wife,” Katie Crouch’s sharply observed satire of the white-savior complex and the poisonous legacy of colonialism. The white characters lie to one another and themselves. They insist that their privileges are rights.
Much of the novel revolves around another “trailer,” as the spouses of official-ish expats are called: Persephone, whose purportedly sexy husband, Adam, is a legal counsel for the U.S. Embassy, making Persephone “an—no, the—Embassy Wife.” This in turn makes her a font of knowledge, gossip and opinion about diplomatic etiquette, style and intrigue, which is sometimes interesting, often amusing and occasionally cringe-inducing.
And then there’s Mila Shilongo, wife of the minister of transportation, who appears to Amanda like this: “This goddess was half a foot taller than either her or Persephone; every limb seemed to stream from her body, graceful as water. Her skin was dark, polished, and poreless; her face, a masterpiece of planes and curves, centered by long-lashed eyes the color of maple syrup.”
Mila’s daughter, nine-year old Taimi becomes friends with Amanda’s daughter, Meg as they both attend the International School which most expat children as well as children of high-ranking Nambians also attend.
Like many idle wives before her, Amanda wants to do something to “make a difference.” Yet her fantasies, like those of many white foreigners intent on “helping” Africans, are fatally misaligned with those of the people they dream of helping. (With some derision, another embassy wife observes that Namibians “want to do things their way.”)
Hijinks ensue, and schemes within schemes — including a rhino-saving project that somehow involves Persephone babysitting a rhino overnight; a sub-rosa jewel-trading venture; and some silly CIA business. With a lot of overlap, it’s hard to say what’s comical and what’s in earnest.
The descriptions of Namibia are spot on and the book pokes considerable fun at our former President. While the descriptions of Namibia are good, it’s clear that Crouch has little idea what actually goes on at an embassy.
I enjoyed the book; parts of it are quite funny and Crouch wraps it all up in a nice package. Give it a try – I think most of you would enjoy it.
I really enjoyed Weiden’s first novel – Winter Counts and apparently many others did too. The book was an Anthony Award winner for best first novel, Thriller Award winner for best first novel, Edgar Award Nominee for best first novel and a ‘Best Book of 2020’ by NPR, Publisher’s Weekly, Literary Journal and many others.
Weiden’s flawed hero – Virgil Wounded Horse – is a vigilante enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Because the local reservation police lack the authority to prosecute felonies and because the Federal Government chooses not to prosecute many reservation crimes, folks hire Virgil to exact some form of justice. “It was open season for raping any Native woman, so long as the rape occurred on Indian land.” Virgil especially likes beating up men who hurt women and children. “I never felt so alive as when I was administering some righteousness.”
The Rosebud Indian Reservation is some 200 miles south of Mount Rushmore and there is only one scene there but it captures some of the contradiction and ambivalence that Virgil feels. Virgil observes tourists in the Black Hills and thinks “few of these people knew they were traveling on sacred ground, lands that had been promised by treaty to the Lakota people forever but were stolen after gold was discovered in the 1860s. Adding insult to injury, Mount Rushmore had been carved out of the holy mountain previously known as Six Grandfathers as a giant screw-you to the Lakotas.” Later, Virgil, who’s been called “half-breed” and “halfie,” thinks, “What did I care about some rocks and valleys?”
The betrayal of Native Americans and the issue of native identity are the backbone of this passionately told tale that hits the sweet spot between crime fiction and social novel. Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, spent time on the Rosebud Reservation growing up and writes with raw honesty about life there.
Virgil’s vigilantism helps him forget the markings on his winter counts – the kind of calendar system used by the Lakota. His winter counts mark sad reminders of the loss of his parents and the death of his beloved sister in a head-on collision. Virgil is now the legal guardian of his 14-year-old nephew, Nathan, whose future Virgil obsesses about.
When Nathan is arrested for selling drugs (a set-up) Virgil goes all in to save his nephew and stop the selling of drugs on the reservation. The feds persuade Nathan to participate in a sting operation which naturally goes sideways and Virgil has to get back in touch with his native identity. He also uncovers the theft of tribal money that involves the father of his girl-friend, Marie Short Bear.
History, betrayal and heartbreak are out front in this novel, but it’s also an action-packed tale bursting with criminals, pursuits, fights and standoffs. It’s sure to please the most seasoned thriller fans. Weiden applies all the standard crime novel tropes, but compelling characters and the reservation setting make everything fresh.
Weiden leavens the dark elements with humor and snark. When Virgil’s friend Tommy talks about a lawsuit that could return vast lands to the Lakotas, he asks Tommy where all the White people will go. “The Lakota government will set up reservations for the wasicus, give ’em commodity foods and open boarding schools for the little kids,” Tommy says. “. . . I almost busted a gut! Taste of their own medicine!”
I really enjoyed this book. If you at all like thrillers and have any interest in Native American culture, give it a try. it’s a fast read and very well written.
I recently finished reading Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead. It’s a wonderful novel and I really enjoyed it. It was a New York Times best seller and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s the story of Marian Graves, a woman maneuvering her way between tradition and prejudice to get what she wants. It’s an expansive story that covers more than a century and the whole world.
It’s also packed with action and excitement. As Lynn Steger Strong says in her NYT review:
Within the first 60 pages of Maggie Shipstead’s “Great Circle,” there are two plane crashes, the beginning of a Hollywood rendition of a plane crash and a sunken ship. There’s childhood abuse, adultery and a presumed postpartum suicide. There’s an orphaned 2-year-old and a father sent to Sing Sing as a result of his choice to save his infant twins from the aforementioned sinking ship. There is also a brush with death inside a car that’s rusting in the middle of a rushing stream.
The amazing thing is that Shipstead keeps this up; there are no dull pages. It’s the story of two women (and lots of other people). One, Marian Graves, one of the infant twins. She is sent with her brother to live with her uncle in Missoula Montana where she lives an idyllic existence until, at age 12, she witnesses some barnstorming aviators who captivate her and she determines that she is going to be a pilot and fly. The other is Hadley Baxter, the recently shamed and fired star of a “Twilight”-esque series of movies, who is set to play Marian onscreen. In one of my favorite details, the film is based in part on a journal found floating in its own life preserver in the Arctic, years after Marian’s plane was lost as she attempted to longitudinally circumnavigate the globe.
Hadley’s sections are told in the first person, Marian’s in the third person. The other major character is Marian’s brother Jamie who develops an intense love for the natural world. He is a sensitive, vegetarian, animal loving painter whose life intersects with Marian and her various lovers from time to time. There are dozens of other characters and they all add interest and depth to the book.
Marian pesters the pilots at the local airfield and delivers moonshine to make some money that she tries to save up for flying lessons. She has to use all the money, though, to bail out her alcoholic gambling uncle. A local bootlegger, though, pays for her lessons and she eventually marries him despite her doubts. their relationship is oppressive and turns violent, prompting her to escape to Alaska, where she joins an all-women’s contingent of pilots during World War II. She will find love there, and it will be more dangerous and risky than the flights. There will also be immense loss.
It’s a culturally rich book which takes advantage of its length to explore the changing attitudes of the 20th century. There’s plenty of discussion of other famous aviators and the momentous events which lead to wars. But Shipstead is particularly interested in the way attitudes about gender shape women’s expectations, desires and careers. Marian utterly rejects the gallant respect for her femininity, which she knows is just a pretty way of keeping her tethered and hooded like a tame falcon. To the alarm of almost everyone who claims to care for her, Marian’s dexterity in the air is matched by her fluid sexual identity.
It’s a long and complex novel. Some readers complained about the length (about 600 pages in the hardback edition), but I really think the story and all the characters are worth the length (Shipstead claims that she whittled it down from a thousand pages). I really enjoyed it and I think you will too. Give it a try. I’m going to go find some of Shipstead’s other works.
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