Author: Brief Book Reviews

Available September 12th, 2017

From Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You, comes Little Fires Everywhere, a beautifully rendered novel about family, identity, art, friendship, and the fire-spark of love.

Set in upscale Shaker Heights, Ohio, the story revolves around the Richardson family and their renters, single mother/free spirit artist Mia and her daughter Pearl. Friendships are formed between these two families, loyalties are tested, and secrets are revealed with life-changing consequences.

Throughout, I was struck by Ng’s excellent ability to get inside her characters’ heads. All different, each character feels true and distinct, emotionally complex without being contrived. Ng’s characters grapple with issues of belonging and betrayal, with what makes a “good” or “bad” or “worthy” parent. We witness the desperate acts of parents attempting to hold on to their children, and family dynamics pulled taut by fear, expectations, and deep affection, and the evidence that sometimes family isn’t the one we’re born into but the one we choose.

Zinzi Clemmons’ novel What We Lose is one of the most talked about books of the season, “the debut novel of the year,” according to Vogue. Some books live up to the hype and some don’t. What We Lose doesn’t, but it is the work of a promising young writer.

What We Lose is the story of Thandi, an African-American woman who is processing the death of her mother. Clemmons intersperses Thandi’s experiences of new love with that of her grief, creating parallel narratives of blossoming emotion and debilitating sadness. Woven throughout are themes of racial and cultural identity, desire, and the complexity of relationships. The strongest parts of the story are the passages describing the aftermath of death, the pain of absence and the ache of loss.

Alain de Botton is the master of inserting graphs and visual elements into the text flow of his books. In What We Lose Clemmons does the same, working in a few images and graphs into her narrative but not with the same success; the visuals are too few to be meaningful and don’t seem necessary to the story.

Available August 29th, 2017

This book stole my heart, broke it, and stitched it back together.

It’s the story of Turtle Alveston, a 14-year-old girl more at home roaming the sea-swept Mendocino coast with her gun slung over her shoulder than in a classroom. More at home outdoors than in the remote, ramshackle house she shares with her misogynistic and dangerously abusive father. It’s the story of an all-consuming tangled mess of love and violence, of growing up, of survival. It’s brutal and beautiful and brave, and completely riveting.

Tallent’s writing carries and surrounds you, immerses you in Turtle’s world so intensely that you can’t pull away even when it punches you in the gut. You can’t, and you don’t want to. The story demands you bear witness to Turtle’s suffering, to her desire to be loved, to her struggle to break free.

An absolutely stunning debut. Read it.

Trigger warning: rape

After finishing Elizabeth Strout’s beautiful collection of interwoven stories, Anything is Possible, I couldn’t wait to read My Name is Lucy Barton. Strout’s Lucy Barton appears in a few of the stories in Anything is Possible; her life is talked about, touched upon, speculated over.

My Name is Lucy Barton is told from her perspective. Sick in the hospital after an operation, Lucy unravels the trajectory of her life for the reader: the extreme poverty of her youth, her escape from a small town in Illinois, her move to New York City, her path to motherhood, and success as a writer. When Lucy’s mother, a cold and distant woman, flies to Lucy’s sickbed to be with her, memories and old insecurities surface.

Strout is a writer of masterful, elegant prose, and there’s a complexity to her characters that never feels forced or contrived. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, though the narrative felt slightly unbalanced. As Lucy attempts to reconcile her past and present selves, important threads of her story, particularly that of her marriage and children, and her life as a writer, are told with certain carelessness and ultimately feel underdeveloped.