NOWHERE FOR VERY LONG: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life – Brianna Madia

I’ve been following Brianna Madia since just before the Dagwood incident.  (If you know Madia, you know what I’m referring to.) Part of what drew me to her are her abilities as a storyteller. Full disclosure – I have been openly critical of how she feeds the social media beast, the dangerous devil-may-care attitude she employs that sometimes puts her dogs in very dangerous situations, and a lifestyle that comes across as more about the likes than the experience.  I am critical, but I don’t hate her.  There are some folks with a level of hatred that rises well above toxicity into a danger zone; I guess it comes with the influencer territory.  When you are reading reviews of her first book, Nowhere for Very Long (HarperOne 2022), I encourage you to keep that in mind and weed out the bullshit.

I requested and received an advanced copy followed by a final version prior to publication.  (The pub date is set for 4/5/2022.)  And, as critical as I am of her, what drew me to and kept me as a follower is only amplified in the memoir; Madia is an extremely gifted storyteller.

Some minor issues: the memoir flows along chronologically for the most part, but some placements are a bit off – this is more noticeable toward the end where it is apparent a conclusion is being fumbled for.  These misplaced sections are jarring and detract from the general feel of the memoir; it’s clear they are important sections, they just don’t really have a home in the work. 

Madia is completely detached in some of the sections, especially the section concerning Dagwood’s incident.  She writes from what I recognize as a place of self-preservation, one step removed, but it still reads raw.

I was quite impressed with how she handled her ex-husband throughout the work.  It’s respectful and delicate.  Her memories, even the bad ones, are soaked in the love she had for him – the love they had for each other.  They were both Lost Boys; tragedy forced him out of Neverland and her further in.

While the memoir is about Madia’s “unconventional life” and her off the road experiences, it’s more about the internal struggles and workings of her head and heart.  The pages are soaked in the darkness of depression. When she recalls a particular memory of taking the family dog with her while searching for her father’s new home so she wouldn’t be tempted to run off the road and kill herself or seeing the picture he kept in his new home of his stepdaughter and fighting back the red-hot heat of anger, the blackness creeps into the pages. 

Nowhere for Very Long is about getting lost and finding yourself along the way.  It’s about wearing the go-go boots, swimming naked, and getting a third (or fourth) dog.  It’s about falling in love and growing apart.  It’s about trauma and fear and guilt and shame.  It’s about letting go and living.  It’s about healing your inner child. It’s about hope.

It tastes like sunbaked earth that leads to a hidden spring that no one knows about but you. It smells like flowers growing wild and untamed. It sounds like howling at the moon.

Read this book.

THE TOBACCO WIVES – Adele Myers

Adele Myers’s The Tobacco Wives (HarperCollins 2022) hit several of my boxes: debut author, NC setting, and the author is a fellow UNC alumna.  It’s one of the few new releases I’ve prioritized in my TBR, and while there are some notable issues, I don’t regret it.

Quick & dirty summary: After 15-year-old Maddie’s father dies in WWII, her mother becomes a bit unhinged while dealing with her grief, anger, and desperation.  She abandons Maddie with Maddie’s aunt, a seamstress in Bright Leaf, with no clear date for return.  While Maddie visited her aunt every year and had learned to sew under her tutelage, she’s never come this early in the summer – it’s too busy and important a time for the seamstress who makes the formal attire for the “tobacco wives.”  When her aunt becomes sick, Maddie finds herself forced to fill in.  She uncovers a confidential letter that could destroy not only her aunt’s livelihood, but the fabric of the entire town.  But the consequences of staying quiet are even worse.

I’m from NC, and any one from this state knows tobacco built us.  We know how much the leafy green plant defined our existence and built our empires.  And we sure were proud of our Bright Leaf tobacco, an accidental development in the 1830s.  (A slave created the curing process by accident, and we’ve never given proper credit where credit is due.) Our biggest sports rivalry, UNC & Duke, is even called Tobacco Road.  We know our tobacco.  And we know (or know people who know) tobacco farmers whose lives forever changed in the 1960s when the surgeon general released his report about the dangers of tobacco.  And that is why I think Myers’s conscious decision to set her novel in 1946 and play with the timeline regarding known dangers and studies regarding tobacco use annoys me.  The novel is historically inaccurate and should be viewed as a reimagined past.

On a related note, the novel also struggles to find its identity.  The opening is far removed from the “Nancy Drew-light” story that eventually emerges.  Myers could have readily removed the letter Maddie finds regarding the dangers of smoking from the plot – there was no need to have Maddie “go up against” the rich ladies in the fictional Bright Leaf.  There was enough meat to what she already had without it – post-WWII, women in the workplace as the men were returning home and wanting to return to their jobs, the great divide between those who ran the tobacco empires and the hardworking men and women who kept them running, how advertising built the tobacco industry, and a young seamstress abandoned by her mother while still grieving her father who finds herself in a world she couldn’t even imagine.  Maddie’s relationship with Mitzi had so much potential.  So much meat without having to play fast and loose with timelines.

That said, this is a solid debut.  It’s a quick read with a lot of interesting moving pieces.  I encourage you to read the book and focus on those pieces, not on the inaccurate timeline or the letter regarding the studies.

LACUNA – Fiona Synckers

J.M. Coetzee published Disgrace in 1999, receiving his second Booker Award for the novel set in post-apartheid South Africa. The already-celebrated author received even more kudos for this harsh and violent take on the role whites had in South Africa and what was the price to be paid for apartheid.  In Disgrace, the price is the rape of a white woman by several black men.  However, the novel doesn’t follow the woman – it follows her sexually-depraved father who is struggling with a changing landscape that he can’t control. The rape is an unseen trauma – an empty space in the novel, a lacuna – and Lucy silent.  Enter Fiona Snyckers’s Lacuna (Europa Editions 2022 – Pan Macmillan South Africa 2019).  Snyckers not only gives Lucy a voice, she writes directly back to the man himself.  She’s not going to let Lucy live like a dog – she’s going to let her live like a victim.  (Lucy refuses to call herself a survivor.)

Lacuna is a work of fiction about an author named John Coetzee. When a colleague, Lucy Lurie, is attacked and gang raped while visiting her father, Coetzee claims her story and writes Disgrace.  Coetzee used Lucy’s rape to make a statement about post-apartheid South Africa, and Lucy feels as if she’s been violated twice – her voice stolen from her and replaced with a narrative she does not support.  She’s denied her voice. Her emotions.  Her right to be angry. She’s told to be more like “fiction-Lucy.”

Snyckers’s Lucy is an unreliable narrator with PTSD and a vivid imagination.  She pictures confronting Coetzee at his home in Australia.  She envisions how she will testify at trial.  She imagines a world in which she, like Coetzee’s Lucy, became pregnant following the rape.  Sessions with her therapist are not to be trusted.  Her very story isn’t to be trusted, and she know this; it is her story and she will tell it how she pleases.

Disgrace is one of my more recommended novels, and I don’t think I would have enjoyed Lacuna nearly as much without having read and admired Disgrace.  I recommend you read them back-to-back – they are bookends to a story that blends and merges and bleeds and screams, and I can no longer imagine one without the other.

Read this book.

BLACK GIRLS MUST BE MAGIC – Jayne Allen

I finally got my hands on Jayne Allen’s Black Girls Must Be Magic (HarperCollins 2022 – originally published as Black Girls Must Die Exhausted: And Baby Makes Two in 2019 by Quality Black Books). The follow-up to Black Girls Must Die Exhausted continues Allen’s love letter to Black women, and all women. 

The second installment opens less than two years after the end of the first. Tabitha learns of her fertility issues in the first novel.  Upon the advice of her fertility doctor, the one viable embryo was transferred seemingly successfully.  The second novel opens after the transfer.  Tabitha is determined to be a “single mother by choice.”  She later refers to this as “single mother by courage” after speaking with her doula.

In the initial stages of the pregnancy, she is cautious and afraid.  At the appointment that would signal she’s moved from the risky zone to a viable pregnancy, she receives some unsettling news.  The baby is healthy and growing, but it’s unsettling news all the same and the trajectory of her life changes.  This unexpected turn results in her ex, Marc, returning to her life, and Tabitha is forced to accept that she has to lean on others.

In addition to being forced to make unanticipated decisions, Tabitha is fighting for another promotion at work. This time, she’s seeking a seat at the anchor desk. The microaggressions in the workplace and from the viewership continue; people have complained because of her natural hair, and her boss is concerned the ratings will drop. Tabitha wants to fight it, but she’s exhausted.  Luckily, she does have a village, even at work, to support her.

The novel seems empty without Granny Tab, but Granny Tab’s fabulous friend, Ms. Gretchen, fills some of the void.  Tab’s friends Alexis and Laila also appear, but it’s not the same. Laila barely appears, and Alexis is struggling with her own choices related to her marriage.  Despite being brought together in the first novel and reminded of the importance the three play in each other’s lives, they’re all keeping secrets and not leaning on each other when they should.  It’s disappointing, especially since Tabitha references the “village,” which assumedly includes Laila and Alexis, that will help raise her child.

This novel seems more of a pushed together pregnancy steppingstone to the third installment, which will hopefully give Tabitha, Laila and Alexis the happily ever afters they all deserve.  I’m not sure when the pub date is for the third and final installment of the trilogy, but I’m ready. 

It’s women’s fiction. It’s funny. It’s joy. It’s life.  I’d recommend this series to anyone who enjoys women’s fiction.

Read this book.

THE HIGH HOUSE – Jessie Greengrass

The jacket protector got wet. The book is fine.

It’s fitting that the sky is pouring buckets as I write this review/reaction to Jessie Greengrass’s The High House (Scribner 2021), a climate fiction (cli fi) novel in which weather becomes unpredictable and the sea takes back the earth.  Much like the other environmental dystopian reads of late, the novel focuses on family dynamics.  (eg. Bewilderment, The New Wilderness, Once there were Wolves, etc.)  Greengrass is a very gifted writer, but I found this a soggy (pun absolutely intended) read.  Maybe cli fi just isn’t for me.

The novel is told from alternating perspectives: Caro, her half-brother Pauly, and Sally.  In the first portion, Caro sets forth the foundation the novel is built on by explaining the relationship between herself and her father and herself and her father’s wife, Francesca, a climate scientist. At one point, Caro says her father loved them both, but he couldn’t love them both at the same time.  The relationship between her and Francesca is a contentious one, more so after Pauly is born and Francesca makes him Caro’s responsibility.  Francesca is the only person who calls Caro Carolina, but in a sweetly nuanced scene that Caro isn’t present for, Francesca calls her Caro.  It’s an interesting dynamic.

The dynamic between Francesca and Pauly is also quite interesting.  Francesca knows the end of the world is coming, and she struggles with having had a child knowing what she knows. The reader sees this internal struggle through Caro’s eyes as well as Sally’s.

While both Caro and Pauly think their parents have abandoned them, they were actually preparing the high house for their survival.  It’s a painful sacrifice to see play out because Caro doesn’t see the love until it’s too late, and Pauly has no memories of his parents.  After Caro’s father and Francesca die in an unpredictable and catastrophic hurricane, Pauly says it comes as a relief.  His entire life he’d be anxious wondering when and if they’d come back.  After they died, he no longer had to wonder.

Pauly’s sections are short and somewhat childlike, but the voice is very similar to both Caro and Sally.  This indistinctness could have been intentional as the three blend into each other for survival, but I didn’t like how similar they are.

Sally and her grandfather are hired as caretakers at high house, which has become self-sustaining and well stocked thanks to Francesca’s efforts.  There is even morphine, which is used to allow a peaceful passing for one of their small band of survivors.  Caro is most surprised that Francesca had used precious storage space for crayons and Legos for Pauly – another sweetly nuanced scene of sacrifice and anger dissolving into understanding.

Pauly is fascinated with birds, and there are many birds that are referenced throughout the novel.  There is a nesting pair of egrets at the marsh, and he checks on them daily. They are confused by the weather and wintering on the marsh when they should have flown to a warmer climate.  Egrets should have appeared on the cover – not a great blue heron.  While herons are mentioned and while egrets are a type of heron, it’s a great blue on the cover.  That bothers me probably more than it should.

Short story long, it’s well-written and portrays some though-provoking relationships and scenarios, but I didn’t love it.

I

A LONGER FALL – Charlaine Harris

I’m going to review the second book in Charlaine Harris’s Gunnie Rose series right on the heels of the review/reaction for the first book because I devoured them back-to-back – I’d suggest reading that review first if you’re looking for more of an intro.  Just like An Easy Death, the second installment is delicious candy.  I read it in one sitting.

A Longer Fall (SAGA PRESS 2020) takes place just a few months after the close of An Easy Death.  Lizbeth “Gunnie” Rose’s wizard love interest, Eli, has returned to the Holy Russian Empire and she’s joined another crew.  The novel opens with her and her crew en route to Dixie via train.  The cargo this time is a crate that they are to deliver to the town of Sally.  It quickly becomes clear that someone doesn’t want the crate delivered; the train is blown off the tracks.  In the melee, a gun fight breaks out as Lizbeth and her crew protect the cargo.

As Lizbeth tries to catch her breath and figure out who of her crew is dead, who is seriously wounded, and how they’re going to get the crate where it needs to go, Eli shows up.  Unbeknownst to each other, they each had missions involving that crate.  When the crate is stolen, they join forces to find it. 

Lizbeth sticks out in Dixie like a sore thumb.  She’s loud, brash, and could shoot the wings off a fly.  More disturbingly, she’s unmarried and in pants.  In order to complete her job, she agrees to play the part of Eli’s wife, donning dresses and even carrying a pocketbook, which she carries her Colt in.  You can put a dress on a gunnie, but you’re not taking their guns.

Even with Lizbeth in a dress and her and Eli feigning marriage, the two draw unwanted attention; wizards are generally distrusted in Dixie, but they are treated a bit better than the darker skinned members of the community.  The discriminatory aspects of the US appear in full force in this alternate history; the first book touched on racism with Mexicans, Indigenous tribes, and African Americans.  A Longer Fall centers around discrimination and the south’s racist upbringing.  As it is set in “Dixie,” I don’t fancy that surprises anyone.

When the secret of the crate’s contents is finally exposed and the motivations of the characters become clear, we see some character growth in Gunnie.  This growth has made me excited to continue the series.

The fast-paced action combined with the sharp writing and memorable characters continues to be an excellent working formula for Harris. There’s a higher body count, more spice, and some pretty interesting magic in the second installment.  It’s good candy.

Have some fun.  Read this book.

AN EASY DEATH – Charlaine Harris

Recently, I (accidentally) purchased book 3 in the Gunnie Rose series.  Instead of returning it, I just checked out the first two from the library.  I’ve already read a few very heavy books in 2022 and I needed some candy, so I went ahead and read the first two.  I’m going to review them separately, and I’ll hold on to book 3 until I need a sweet break.  But let me say here, Lizbeth Rose > Sookie Stackhouse.  I said what I said.

I’ve written before about candy books and how Charlaine Harris consistently excels in that realm.  Her characters are memorable, the writing is sharp and tight, and the action carries the plot.  Her novel are quick reads that are just familiar and fun.  Candy.

An Easy Death (SAGA PRESS 2018) introduces us to Lizbeth Rose, or Gunnie Rose, a 19-year-old gunslinger in the 1930s.  (Her age is my only real complaint.)  The novel is set in an alternative history where the United States fractured following the assassination of FDR – the 13 colonies have rejoined England and formed Britannia, the South has separated into a land called Dixie, Texoma covers the Southwest, and the Holy Russian Empire has claimed what was California and Oregon.  And there’s magic.

Gunnie Rose is a hired hand who works with a crew to transport cargo, including people.  An Easy Death opens with her crew transporting a family from Mexico to New America.  They’re attacked by bandits, and Gunnie is the only one of her crew to survive.  Through grit, pride and determination, she delivers what’s left of the cargo and returns home to recover. That’s when things get interesting.

Gunnie is quickly approached by two Russian wizards who wish to hire her.  They are searching for a wizard who is rumored to be related to Grigori Rasputin (yes, *that* Rasputin) and they need his blood.  She holds her secrets close to her vest, just as they hold their magic in theirs, and she joins them.

What unfolds is one thrill of a ride.  There’s some spice, some undead, and a lot of gunfire and magic.  It’s fast-paced, barreling from one scene to the next before Gunnie’s barrels can cool.  And just like candy, it’s hard not to eat it all in one sitting.

Have some fun.  Read this book.

THE FORTUNE MEN – Nadifa Mohamed

Despite my best intentions, reading the Booker longlist during the calendar year just wasn’t realistic due to US release times.  I did, however, finally get my hands on Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021), which is the last of the shortlist for me.  (There are two longlisted books that are still outstanding.)  Based on a true story, The Fortune Men is a fascinating read about a wrongfully convicted Black man in Wales in the 1950s.  Mohamed’s prose is matter of fact – built on a foundation of truth with sprinklings of humor and love – that focuses on building the character of Mahmood Mattan and not the tragedy that defined his existence.  The point is clear – Mattan was just a man.  He wasn’t a saint, but he wasn’t a murderer either.

In 1952, Violet Volacki, a Jewish shopkeeper, was brutally murdered in her store.  Her sister and niece had seen a dark-skinned man in the doorway just prior to the murder. Despite both saying the man they saw was not Mahmood Mattan, he was arrested and charged.  A trial, both said the man they saw was not in the courtroom.  There was no evidence supporting the charge, yet Mattan was convicted and sentenced to be hung.  His wife fought for decades to exonerate him and finally succeeded in 1998, over 40 years after he was executed. 

Mohamed paints Mattan with a delicate brush, showing the reader all his flaws as well as his richness, his devotion to his children, and the love he had for his wife, a white woman who would cleave to his memory and fight for justice for her husband, their biracial children, and their love – as imperfect as it was.  Mohamed doesn’t focus on the injustice, the intergenerational trauma or Laura’s struggles.  Even the trial is limited in scope in the text.  Instead, Mohamed focuses on developing Tiger Bay and what life looked like for the families, like Mattans and the Volackis, who called it home.  Most importantly, she puts flesh to the bones and breaths life into a ghost.

Read this book.

THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. Du BOIS – Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper 2021), is a five-star historical saga.  Jeffers’s background in poetry gives this chunky book a cadence and rhythm that carries the voices of the silenced ancestors such they stay with you long after the last page.  The truths and horrors of American history, all the blood and tears and broken bits that have defined this country, are beautifully and painfully found in Ailey’s family tree, but it’s the resilience, love, pride and determination of the females that shows the depths of the roots. 

With a subject matter as heavy as American history, this novel certainly comes with many trigger warnings.  I strongly suggest that sensitive and mood readers check those out before diving in.  There were many sections where I had to walk away from the book.  For me personally, my breaking point is with assault and sexual assault of children and there are many allusions and depictions of such assaults through the nearly 800-page novel.  Many. When Ailey is conducting research into the past, her mentor tells her to shower afterwards and pray.  When she doesn’t, she becomes violently ill.  Her visceral reaction to the horrors contained in the journals is mirrored in the reader – or it should be. 

The generational trauma is carried in the wombs and nestled at the breasts of the many women who came before Ailey, including her sister Lydia.  These women add life to the pages.  I wish Ailey’s other sister, Coco, had been given a bit more of a voice as she appears an afterthought – a shell of a character needed to advance the plot.  But the strength of this novel is in the strength of its women.

These words don’t begin to capture the genius that is The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.  It’s a sweeping narrative of a love letter to the lost and forgotten voices that made this country.

Read this book.

PLAIN BAD HEROINES – Emily M. Danforth

I don’t DNF (Do/Did Not Finish) books for assorted reasons.  (I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve abandoned after starting, and they still haunt me.)  A few hundred pages into Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines (Harper Collins 2020), I wanted to stop.  I had such high hopes for this sapphic gothic story-within-a -story, and it was quite the letdown, at least initially.  I kept reading hoping it would get better.  And it did, just too many pages into the 617-page novel.

Brookhants – a school for girls run by women.  A scandalous memoir embracing and encouraging young women to explore love and pleasures with other young women.  An obsession.  Or three.  Three ghastly deaths followed by three more.  The school never reopens and it, and the young women who met their demise there, become the ghosts who haunt the grounds in the stories people still tell.

Over a century later, Merritt Emmons, the brilliant and awkward child genius, puts the story to paper.  Centering on the queer history of the cursed school, the debut novel is a success.  Merritt was encouraged by Lainey Brookhants, current owner of the property, to write the story.  Lainey buys the movie rights and a mirror-image story-with-in-a-story develops.  Harper Harper (Nope – not a typo.), the current “it” girl, is cast as the lead.  Audrey, daughter of a washed-up scream queen with a few acting credits of her own is cast, against Merritt’s wishes, as the love interest.  The three young women are forced together prior to filming to forge a bond at the request of the director.  They all have their own secrets and pasts, as well as their own hauntings.  A modern love-story emerges.

The use of wasps both in 1902 and in present-day California shows the continued battle of the LGBTIQA+ community against the so-called WASPS – where the loudest condemnation still comes from – and the devastating and deadly effects this group had and continues to have.  It’s a bit on the nose and heavy-handily used, but it is effective.

With a nod to Jane Eyre (a tie-in that could really use a scholarly paper), the novel is addressed to the “Dear Reader” and told from an omniscient narrator who inserts her opinions, interesting tidbits and historical data through footnotes that are often cheeky little distractions.  I wasn’t a fan of the narrator – the style was fine – I just didn’t care for the voice.

Within the main story lines, there are multiple other stories nested – much like the cursed nesting doll that makes a couple of appearances.  These flash shorts and flashbacks are fantastic, and I wish there had been more of them.  That said, the novel would have been stronger with tighter editing, especially in the first half.  The tightening would have allowed the tongue-in-cheek dark and naughty humor to flank the horror better, and for the little dolls to shine.

It may have been a bit overhyped and not worth all the buzz (see what I did there), but for lovers of gothics and TMZ, this could be your jam.