BANYAN MOON – Thao Thai

“He’s polish without substance, and I’ve hitched my wagon to nothing but a handful of glitter.”

“The living must trespass on the dead; everything left behind a gift, an inheritance, no matter how unintentional.”

Thao Thai’s debut Banyan Moon (Mariner Books 2023) is a heart hug of a family saga. From the 1960s Vietnam to present day swamplands of Florida, the novel gives us three strong-willed and fiercely independent women – Minh, her daughter Hurong, and Hurong’s daughter, Ann. Their love for each other is barbed, stinging themselves and those who dare get too close, but they are furiously loyal even if uncertain on how to hold each other without it hurting. The novel is a raw look at the hardships and realities of motherhood – the disconnection and attempts to reconnect – the generational trauma carried like whispered secrets in their blood.

Ann’s picture-perfect world far away from the chaos of her childhood home has started to tarnish, and she is faced with choices that will impact not only her, but her unborn child. With those choices still lingering, she receives the call that her beloved grandmother has died. The death and her grief allow her to hit pause on her relationship with Noah and the pregnancy – she goes home.

Hurong has always been jealous of Minh’s relationship with Ann. Ann received the best parts of Minh, and Minh received Ann’s love and loyalty; Hurong always felt like an outsider. But now Minh’s gone, and whatever glue she may have used to hold Hurong and Ann together, however fragile it was, is now gone. As adults, can they mend a decades old hurt?

Minh floats in and out of the novel, as an imposing grandmother, a shy teenager in love, a fierce woman who will do what it takes to get her children passage to America, an angry mother, keeper of secrets, a ghost trying to mend an inherited hurt.

While reading, I found myself reminded repeatedly of Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magical – the comparison gave the novel a familiar scent, but the taste was salt on citrus. A more recent comparison would be The Fortunes of Jaded Women, but where that novelfailed, Banyan Moon, with its similar themes, soared.

Read this novel.

THE MEMORY OF ANIMALS – Claire Fuller

“This is grief, Neffy… It is awful and terrible, and it will never truly leave, but you will learn to live with it, and you have to let me help you.”

I didn’t anticipate having a pandemic book framed by a woman’s teetering-into-inappropriate relationship with an octopus as one of my top reads of the year – but here we are.  Color me surprised. I picked Claire Fuller’s The Memory of Animals (Tin House 2023) as my Aardvark selection because of the cover, and because I wanted to add it to my literary science fiction catalog. (But it was mostly the cover.)  It’s my most surprising read of the year. What follows will include spoilers.  That’s the only warning I’m going to give.

Last chance.           

Marine biologist Neffy has volunteered to be part of the first human trial of a vaccine for a virus that is decimating the world.  Fuller wrote at least a portion of the novel while in lockdown, and much of that particularly early Covid fear glimmers in the pages. And while the pandemic is a constant throughout the novel and more than just a plot device, it’s not the heart of the novel or the main plot.  This is a novel about memories, about family and love and choices and responsibilities to those we seek to love, to tame, to own.

The bulk of the novel takes place over a little more than two weeks.  Neffy is sequestered from the other volunteers and well taken care of. She’s given the vaccine and then given the virus that no one has survived. Neffy becomes extremely ill.  Someone is putting food and water in the room, but she realizes something isn’t right.  When she wakes, another volunteer is in her room.  He explains that the trial stopped following her reaction and all the staff fled along with some of the volunteers. There’s no internet, no cell service, and the electricity is only thanks to the generator. And they’re running out of food.  With this virus-stricken and ghost town of a world as the backdrop, Neffy will be forced to make choices that impact not only herself but the survival of the other volunteers who did not receive the vaccine.

Neffy fills her days with writing letters to a wild-caught octopus she’d once cared for during its captivity – the octopus she released into the wild, was terminated for, and the reason she volunteered; she needed the money to pay the debt to the aquarium for the cost of the animal.  Between these letters and the memory walking she does through a device developed by another volunteer called the Revisit, we meet Neffy not as the 27-year-old who volunteers, but as all the parts, the jagged and raw ones and the happy ones, that define her.  Her memories show her continued guilt and grief over her beloved Baba.  Neffy’s father died, and she couldn’t save him.  He became sick before the virus.  She volunteered to give him a kidney but learned she had only one. There were then discussions regarding using her womb to grow a kidney, an experimental procedure, but her father dies before she tells him she’s agreed to do it.  Her grief and guilt tinges everything she does. 

While the virus, memories of her father, and her relationships with marine life might seem disjointed to some, I found the novel snuggly held within the powerful and fragile arms of an octopus – the arms that feel, and taste and regrow.  How Fuller weaves Neffy’s story is brilliant, and Neffy – the heartbroken girl who couldn’t save her father, and who maybe saved or maybe killed an octopus, finds the courage to save herself and quite possibly the world.

The novel jumps forward a couple of years before ending on year 54 following Neffy’s receipt of the vaccine.  It ends with hope.  And jazz.  And memories.

Read this novel.

VANISHING MAPS – Cristina García

“Names were destiny, I said. So, why pick one with a history of suffering?”

“Our pasts were littered with heartbreak’s debris. Were our fates a family curse? Or were we lucky to have known passion at all?”

In 1992, Cristina García’s debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban, was published.  The novel focused primarily on the del Pino women – Celia, Lourdes, Felicia, and Pilar and their fractured borders within a volatile Cuba – and it provided a crash course in the Cuban revolution while also translating any non-English words. It was a very polite novel for its readers, despite covering very harsh realities. Over 30 years and several novels later, García returns to the del Pino family with Vanishing Maps (Knopf 2023). The novel globe trots from Havana to the States, to Berlin, and to Moscow.  This time, it’s a sink or swim approach for the reader – smatterings of Spanish, German and Russian are not translated, and the scars of the Revolution are loudly present but the impact and resulting diaspora are not really explained.  I like the firm, chin up and steely eyes approach of the novel – the one that says, “you should know these things already.”  I would recommend reading Dreaming in Cuban first to get a better understanding of these women, their scars, and the paths they choose.

Dreaming in Cuban opens with Celia scanning the ocean for adversaries. Twenty years have passed since we last saw this family, and Vanishing Maps opens with Celia’s grandson, Ivanito, performing as La Ivanita to her adoring fans in Berlin.  It’s a different world, but much remains the same. Celia is still a staunch supporter of the Revolution and El Lider. Lourdes, now living in Miami, has involved herself in politics; involving herself in the matter of a young Cuban boy whose custody battle is modeled after that of Elián González. Pilar is in her 40s and a mom, but she’s still as angry and punk as she’d been in her youth – it’s just redirected; she’s still trying to find where she belongs.

The heart of this novel, however, is with Ivanito. As a young boy, Ivanito was whisked away from Cuba against Celia’s wishes – Cuba was going to eat him whole or his mother was going to kill him – she’d already tried once.  His mother’s ghost is now haunting him, trying to convince him to join her in the afterlife – the smell of cigarettes and gardenias an assault on his senses as he wonders if her madness is now his.  When Pilar arrives with Azul, it couldn’t have been at a better time.  She saves him twice – once in her involvement in getting him out of Cuba and again in Berlin when the walls are closing in.

Vanishing Maps is a story of the children of the diaspora. Of Ivanito, Pilar, Luz, Milagro, Irina and Tereza.  It’s a world where “the boys became men who lost their way while the women soldiered on.” And while we see Ivanito losing his way, we also see how La Ivanita soldiers on.  It’s a story of family without borders, of motherhood, of loss, and of blood, separated by secrets and circumstance, becoming a found family.

Read this book.

* A huge thanks to Knopf for sending me this finished copy!

A DAY OF FALLEN NIGHT – Samantha Shannon

“We will all be stories one day, and I’d want someone to believe we existed. Wouldn’t you?”

When I found out Samantha Shannon was returning to the world of The Priory of the Orange Tree, I was already smitten; she is a special author to me because I’ve been along for the ride since the beginning when the first few of The Bone Season were sold at auction. And while I love Paige and the world she’s created in that series, The Roots of Chaos claimed my heart. A Day of Fallen Night (Bloomsbury 2023), set centuries before the events of The Priory of the Orange Tree, is a slow burn of an epic fantasy, with dazzling world-building and a large cast of characters that are so beautifully entwined and depicted, it never feels crowded. I loved every word of this 866-page novel. Every last one.

Tunuva is a sister of the Priory. She’s spent decades training to fight “wyrms” following the Mother’s defeat of The Nameless One. In her five decades of training, she’s never seen a wyrm. The sisters are mages, fed by a magical orange tree, and hidden away from the rest of the world. The women are the warriors, trained for battle, while the men perform the more traditionally female roles. Love and family come second to loyalty to the Order. Tunuva will find her loyalties to the Order and to her lover, a woman on track to be Prioress, tested when the Dreadmount erupts and wyrms begin to set the world ablaze.

Dumai has been raised a godsinger, worshipping the dragons that terrify parts of the world. In her bones is an old light, a connection to the sleeping beasts that need to awaken. She’s also the secret heir to the Rainbow Throne, and secrets don’t always stay hidden. Her blood is from lines favored by the gods and her people need her in the battle against the wyrms. Dumai must come to terms with who she is and forge her own destiny, and she’ll do it on the back of a dragon.

Glorian, heir to the Queendom of Inys and rightful heir to Hroth, is a link in a chain. Her kingdom believes that her ancestor defeated The Nameless One and that the continuation of this line is the only thing keeping The Nameless One from returning. Each queen births a female daughter, only one, that is a carbon copy of herself. Generation to generation, they are born to breed more than lead as the link must not be broken.  One of the powerful wyrms, hellbent on destruction, has his eyes set on breaking the link.

Wulf was found in the haithwood as a child and adopted. Rumors have swirled that he is a witch, but the King of Hroth, husband to Queen Sabran of Inys, has much respect for Wulf’s fathers and brings the boy under his wing, where he grows in his loyalty. As the world erupts in chaos, he finds himself forced to confront his own past and the fears that keep him awake at night.

The world Shannon has built is one that screams and sings in duality. Fire and ice. Dragon riders and dragon slayers. Siden and sterren. It’s breathtakingly beautiful, and it soars like the dragons when it centers on the relationships between women and in its many seasons of motherhood. It’s also cruel in its chaos, but it’s most certainly magic – the kind that leaves fire under your skin and stars in your eyes.

Read this book.

THE FORBIDDEN TERRITORY OF A TERRIFYING WOMAN – Molly Lynch

Molly Lynch’s The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (Catapult 2023) was an unsatisfying but thankfully quick read.  Billed as an exploration of motherhood during an ecological collapse, I was expecting more of a developed and likable even if morally grey character in Ada.  Unfortunately, I didn’t care what happened to her, why it happened to her, or if it was going to happen again. I also didn’t care about her son or her husband, or if her marriage would survive her breakdown/breakthrough.  I was completely disassociated from the book, and much like the women and mothers of the novel were just walking away from their lives and disappearing, I was tempted to walk away from the novel. 

While reading, it reminded me of two novels – The New Wilderness, which was also a miss for me, and When Women Were Dragons, which was a homerun.  Much like Agnes in Cook’s novel, the women in The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman are becoming feral and motherhood is prominent.  The plot is a lot like Barnhill’s beautiful novel, only it’s set in the present day instead of the 1950s, and instead of turning into dragons, the women are essentially walking away from motherhood to rejoin Mother Earth.

A big thanks to the publisher for sending this finished copy.

*A quick note on this review: this book isn’t my cup of tea, but it is well written and developed. I typically don’t enjoy ecological/psychological thrillers – and my preferences are just that, mine. If you loved The New Wilderness, you would likely enjoy this slimmer but similar tale.

THE LAST RUSSIAN DOLL – Kristen Loesch

“She stood, with her doll beneath her arm, and she walked, across the blood-red floor, over her blood-red siblings, through the blood-red door, out of the blood-red house, all the way to the blood-red river. She forgot to wash her blood-red hands.”

Spanning the period from 1916 to 1993, Kristen Loesch’s The Last Russian Doll (Berkley 2023) covers an intense Russian history, from the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War, to the Great Purge and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, but that history takes a backseat to the romance between the dashing rebel and the married royal.  It’s an epic love story, dressed up like a family saga.

 Reminding me of Everything’s Illuminated, the novel tells two stories – the intense love affair between Valentin Andreyev and Antonina (Tonya) Nikolayevna, and that of Rosie – a young woman studying at Oxford who joins a professor in Moscow as a research assistant.  Rosie has ulterior motives; she wants to find the man who killed her father and sister, forcing her and her mother to flee their homeland a decade prior.  (The sections are uneven; and Rosie’s quest to find a murderer is short-changed.)

At the center of the novel are porcelain dolls. Rosie’s mother collects them, and they are one of the few things she fled Russia with.  After her mother dies, Rosie realizes items have been placed inside the heads of the dolls: scraps of paper carrying stories from Russia into England.  The stories, the fairytales that had fed her childhood, are just as important as the dolls. Dolls first show up in 1917, when Tonya’s husband, a man who treats her as little more than a pretty trinket, gifts her a beautiful and terrifying porcelain doll made in her image.

I wish the history and some of the characters had been given more flesh; the romance is very large and defined, but that love story isn’t what’s carrying the plot, and when the plot graces the pages and the novel wraps up, it’s unsatisfying because it’s skeletal. Would I recommend it?  Absolutely.  It’s a perfectly okay book, especially for a debut, and better than a lot of what’s being published.  But do I still wish for 150-200 more pages?  Absolutely.

THE GARDEN OF SECOND CHANCES – Mona Alvarado Frazier

When SparkPress reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in receiving a copy of Mona Alvarado Frazier’s young adult debut The Garden of Second Chances (6/6/2023), I said “sure.”  As a former immigration attorney who worked primarily with the undocumented in removal proceedings and in the cross-sections with criminal and family law, I was immediately interested in the story of an undocumented 17-year-old convicted of a crime she didn’t commit who is trying to retain custody of her infant child. As much as I wanted to love it, it wasn’t for me.

The novel is essentially Orange is the New Black, only with a younger cast of characters.  The blurb misleads the reader into thinking a prison garden that Juana develops and cultivates plays a huge role in her deciding to fight the system and fight for custody of her daughter; spoiler, the garden is barely given a cursory role.  The blurb also misleads the reader into thinking that this is going to be an appeal of a conviction of voluntary manslaughter; the conviction is not appealed despite clear grounds for such (she’s gaslit into thinking she cannot appeal because too much time has passed) and she’s not fighting for her innocence, she’s petitioning the board for a reduction in her sentence based on mitigated factors.  (Her factors being her innocence.)  Had the novel focused on her rising up, learning enough English in the library to craft her own legal argument and then being successful in court, this could have truly been a novel about the resilience of sunflowers.  But her innocence, the custody dispute, and the garden are all under-developed and rushed in favor of the more dramatic OITNB-esque dynamics of the facility and the inmates.

It’s an easy to digest young adult novel, but I was expecting something more – something different.  The voice of an undocumented teenage mother who is a domestic violence survivor and who is convicted of the voluntary manslaughter of her abuser and who is fighting her abuser’s mother for custody of her child – I want that story so bad.

THE COVENANT OF WATER – Abraham Verghese

“What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.”

“Yes, old man, yes, eyes open to this precious land and its people, to the covenant of water, water that washes away the sins of the world, water that will gather in streams, ponds, and rivers, rivers that float the seas, water that I will never enter.”

I’ve always loved a well-done epic family saga. (The Wakefields of Sweet Valley was my first taste of a family saga, and The Thornbirds was my second.)  Epic family sagas, the chunkier the better, have a special place on my shelves and in my heart.  Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water (Grove Press 2023), coming in at 715 pages, was everything I love and then some.

Set in what is now Kerala, India, a coastal state known for its network of waterways, The Covenant of Water spans from 1900 to 1977. The novel opens with the marriage of a 12-year-old girl to a 40-year-old widow with a son named JoJo.  (It may be unsettling for readers in 2023, but it was the norm in 1900.) Her introduction to Parambil is delicately and passionately detailed – the land, the people, and the silent and strong man who is her husband are rendered with such love.  She becomes Ammachi, “Little Mother” to JoJo long before she takes on the role of wife, and her husband does not even attempt any liberties or improprieties for years.  (There are multiple age-gap love stories within the novel; theirs is but the first.)

Ammachi becomes the matriarch and heartbeat of Parambil, as well as of the story.  Early on, she learns of the “Condition” that plagues her husband and his bloodlines; in a land where water is the lifeblood of the people, at least one person in every generation dies by drowning.  The Condition is evident in those who have it as it reveals itself early with an extreme fear of water, even at bath time.

The Condition is a constant concern in a novel that is swollen with the waters that give and take.  Even when the reader is carried away from Parambil, thoughts of the Condition still linger. The reader is quickly introduced to Digby, a Scottish doctor in Madras who is training to be a surgeon.  Through him, the reader gets a different POV as it relates to medical knowledge, art, politics, and social commentary, but Digby is far more than just a vessel to carry the story.

With the delicate precision of a surgeon, Verghese intricately threads this story together.  It flows like a body of water; at times it’s languid and glistening in the sun with a beauty so aching it hurts. Other times, it’s loud and chaotic – an uncontrollable force that destroys the landscape and threatens to take you under.  From the monsoons to the canals, water is a living, breathing character in the novel, and it will take you home.

Read this book.

PROBABLY RUBY – Lisa Bird-Wilson

“…like a salmon swimming upstream. In her blood to go there. An irresistible pull. Only she didn’t swim away in the first place. That’s why it was so hard to know the way back. She was a little salmon scooped up in a big net.”

Lisa Bird-Wilson’s Probably Ruby (Coteau Books(Canada), 2020 & Hogarth (US) 2022) is a beaded mosaic of intertwined stories that span from 1950 – 2018; the thread has frayed and the beads threaten to spill forth. Ruby Valentine, born to a white teenager and her Métis (French & Cree)  boyfriend and adopted by Alice and Mel, an older white couple with a relationship on the rocks even before the adoption, is at the heart of the collection; the stories whimper and wail with her struggles to find belonging, meaning, and family.

From forced Indigenous adoptions to the horrors of the Indigenous residential schools, the collection is as colorful, broken and loud as Ruby.  It’s a chaotic, far from linear read full of laughter that fills a room and dripping with grief for stolen moments, memories and lives.

Read this book.

THE EAST INDIAN – Brinda Charry

For my birthday, I ordered a mystery box from Chapters Books & Gifts, an indie bookstore out of Seward, Nebraska.  They tossed a couple of ARCS into the package as a fun little bonus, one being Brinda Charry’s The East Indian (Scribner – pub date 9 May 23). This is an ARC I want the final hardback of.  It’s beautiful historical fiction with a POV that has been woefully lacking.  In many ways, the voice Charry gives Tony is akin to the voice Lola Jaye gives Dikembe in The Attic Child, a recent read.  (If you haven’t read that, check out my review.)

Based on historical records, The East Indian tells the story of Tony, a Tamil boy born in East India to a courtesan mother; his real name is eventually replaced with the more palatable to the English “Tony.”   His childhood was beautiful; he was so loved and cherished. When an Englishman with the English East India Company takes up with his mother, he also dotes on the young boy. When Tony’s mother dies, it is Master Day who makes arrangements for him to join another Englishman in London.  And so, Tony’s journey begins, and in 1635, as a child, Tony becomes the first East Indian to reach America.

What follows is a heartbreaking tale of a boy with a lost name in a new land.  While Tony becomes indentured to a tobacco farmer in Jamestown, he still dreams of becoming a “medicine man” and following in the steps of one of the men rumored to have fathered him.  He will serve his time, and then he will make his way home.  Tony is resilient, charming, and observant – and the story is told through his POV as he reflects on his life, opening with him recounting the hanging of a witch on the ship to the Virginia colony – and what a life of adventure it is.

Prior to her death, his mother told Tony that she would like to return as a bird. The bird imagery throughout the novel is a quiet triumph of love even after death.  Also a triumph is the fragile and sometimes fleeting relationship between the three young boys, Sammy, Tony and Dick, who traveled to the colony together.

With Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play Tony saw at the Globe while in London, as a constant hum that hugs and holds the story tight, The East Indian gives the Indian boy a starring role, not just a fleeting moment. Read this book.