WE WENT TO THE WOODS – Caite Dolan-Leach

I probably wouldn’t have picked up Caite Dolan-Leach’s We Went to the Woods (Random House 2019) had I seen the comparison to Donna Tartt.  I don’t know if Dolan-Leach studied the literary brat pack from Bennington, but her work is certainly reminiscent of that particular group of writers and their self-absorbed and unlikeable characters who show no growth or development. 

Mack, the narrator, was an anthropology PhD student until she was quite publicly removed from the program following her involvement in a reality TV series called The Millennial Experiment.  (It was the Real World meets Preppers, y’all.  And stuff got real.)  She became public enemy number one when she outed another housemate as trans with the intent to hurt that person, and cancel culture did what cancel culture does. Mack moved back in with her parents and picked up what jobs she could.  (The reveal of her fall from grace is unnecessarily and painstaking delayed.)

She’s looking for an escape when she meets Louisa, Chloe, Beau and Jack, and living “off the grid” on the “Homestead” is an easy ask of her.  It doesn’t hurt that all four of her new friends are breathtakingly gorgeous, and Mack wants to have sex with all four of them at some point in the novel.  She’s self-aware and understands that lust drives her ready acceptance to be part of this community they’re building. 

None of the characters are likeable.  Except for the dog, who, btw, dies.  (Spoiler alert.  Sorry.)  Mack in particular is frustratingly inconsistent.  She teeters between educated scholar who observes more than participates and half feral child of Neverland who ignores the very real and very serious signs that the Homestead isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  She investigates and questions certain half-truths she’s told but abandons the inquiry and never returns to it.  Maybe it’s intentional character development – Dolan-Leach’s way of showing someone so willing to overlook glaring issues just to “belong” – but it’s so very annoying.

Beau is every cult leader in history.  He’s attractive, mysterious, sexual, passionate about something, a leader. He’s the kind of man people would do stupid things for.  He and Louisa are the masterminds behind the Homestead, and they’re not exactly truthful about the intent as their off the grid lifestyle is teetering over into the dangerous world of activism and domestic terrorism.  Chloe is a flower-child – a lover of love – who is battling her own internal demons and hoping the quiet of the woods will bring her peace.

The Homestead is not the first community of its kind on the property, and Mack finds and hides a journal by one of the original community members.  When she puts on her scholar hat and isn’t running naked through the woods with her wolf-dog, the book’s heart beats a little stronger. The history of the first community and its crimes juxtaposed to the Homestead and their crimes is where this novel excels, but it just can’t get out of its own way.

It’s not a “bad” book, it’s just not for me.

ANXIOUS PEOPLE – Fredrik Backman

“Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of…”

If you’re going to split a book into the next year, you better make sure it’s a damn good one.  Otherwise, you’ll be cursed to read lukewarm works that just miss the mark for the entire year. (A bookish superstition that I’m not going to question.)  And so, as the clock counted down the last minutes of 2021, I selected Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People (2019, translated 2020 Atria Books) because Backman doesn’t disappoint. As I turned the last page on the first day of the new year, I knew without a doubt I’d read what will be one if not the top read of 2022.  What a way to start the year.

Backman is a heartbeat author, writing characters and communities so full of love, it spills over and leaks from your eyes. His books are hugs, eyelash kisses, and belly laughs – told in a voice that is uniquely grandiose yet understated all at the same time — and Anxious People was an absolute delight.

On the day before New Year’s Eve, a group of people are taken hostage by a would-be bank robber with not a toy gun.  I say “would-be” because the bank was cashless and no one was robbed, but that’s neither here nor there.  The robber flees the bank and ends up at an apartment showing, the potential purchasers become the hostages.  A father and son police duo are on the case, and when the robber goes missing after the hostages are released, they realize that someone had to have helped.  The son will not rest until he can “fix it.” He’s worried the robber is injured, and he wants to help.  Helping is his thing.  He comes by it honest though, with a priest of a mother and a cop of a father.

Taken hostage are Ro and Julia (a young lesbian couple who are very, very pregnant), Estelle (an 87 year old whose revelation about Knut had me biting my lip), Lennart (a mystery man in a bunny suit who had me laughing aloud), Roger and Anna-Lena (perhaps the most unexpected of the bunch, they are flippers with a few secrets of their own), and Zara (a wealthy banker whose been on her own journey, a decade’s old unopened letter serving as her albatross). As the robber repeatedly bemoans, they are indeed the worst hostages ever.  But the robber is pretty much the worst robber ever, so they all deserve each other.

The view from the apartment turned crime scene is of a bridge.  A man jumped from it ten years ago.  A young woman didn’t because a young man was there. Roger says bridges are supposed to bring people together.  And when a robber tried to rob a cashless bank and ended up at a showing for an apartment with a view of that bridge, another kind of bridge was built and a bunch of “idiots” were brought together.  The result is beautiful slice of life, love, laughter, and sacrifice.

Read this book.

THE SENTENCE – Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (Harper 2021) was my last read of the year, and it was my favorite read of the year.  (I didn’t think anything would edge out Black Sun, but Erdrich’s effortless, timely and amazing storytelling did.  I shouldn’t have been surprised; Erdrich has been weaving some of my favorite stories for decades.)

Set in 2020, The Sentence is a time-capsule of a novel that slices across your skin like a serrated knife; it hurts with the truth of itself.  The novel opens on All Souls’ Day in 2019 and ends a year later, carrying the reader through the initial fear and confusion of Covid-19, the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed (the novel is set in Minneapolis), and the election.  Nestled between events that will forever mark the year are the individual lives, and that is where Erdrich always shines.

Tookie is a felon.  She was sentenced to sixty years after she carried a body across state lines.  She was doing it for love and money, but she didn’t know about the drugs strapped to his body.  The white women who’d orchestrated the entire transport, using Tookie as the mule for their dead mule, received a slap on the wrist while Tookie was made an example of.  Years later, the racial disparity of sentencing resulted in her sentence being commuted.

She takes a job at independent bookstore because an old schoolteacher had gifted her a dictionary while she was imprisoned, and a love of reading and literature flourished. (The bookstore in the novel is Erdrich’s own indie, Birchbark Books. Erdrich even writes herself into The Sentence as the owner who makes a couple of appearances and is on a book tour when the world shuts down due to Covid.)

Upon her release, Tookie marries the tribal cop, Pollux, who’d arrested her.  He leaves the profession not long after her arrest, but his former profession and the arrest cause some tensions to bubble to the surface during the protests following George Floyd’s murder.

As the world burns around her, Tookie and the bookstore are being haunted by a former customer.  Make no mistake, Flora isn’t the only ghost Tookie has to face in these pages. She must face the demons of her past and the ghosts of today to move forward. How Tookie’s walls come down and the ice around her heart melts marks Erdrich still as one of my favorite authors; few can write a beautifully broken and memorable character as she can.

Sixty years is a sentence, but so are “The door is open. Go.”  And this is a book of life; it’s full of rawness and reality, a jagged scar of a read, but oh the hope.

Read this book.

TRISTAN STRONG KEEPS PUNCHING – Kwame Mbalia

The third and final installment of Kwame Mbalia’s Tristan Strong series, Tristan Strong Keeps Punching (Disney Hyperion 2021), was a near perfect conclusion to a story that writes itself in your bones and whispers in your sleep. All three works were five star reads for this bookdragon, and I know had I read this as a tween, it would be a series that would stick with me all the days of my life.  It *is* a series that will stick with me all the days of my life.  Put this book in little hands – little hands of all the beautiful shades of brown and cream we come in.  Let them read.

Tristan Strong Keeps Punching takes place just after the conclusion of the events in Tristan Strong Destroys the World. If you recall, Alke was destroyed and its inhabitants were released into Tristan’s world. The final installment begins with Tristan in New Orleans at a family reunion and juggling the task of finding those from Alke, including his friends. As if the task didn’t already seem insurmountable, who should show up but King Cotton.

While many of the heroes and villains from the prior two novels make appearances, there are also new ones that highlight the tortured history and continued racism and hatred in America.  Patty Roller and the theft of children and souls, the chilling danger of Harold and Darla, the meaning behind many of the spirituals… it’s all almost too much for Tristan, our resident storyteller who sees the magic and the trauma, and he is nearly consumed in a fiery rage.  Quite literally.  His magic boxing gloves burst into flames that he can’t control, and he nearly destroys the world.  Again.

Tristan must learn to control and direct his anger and his grief, something he’s struggled with throughout the entire series, if he is ever going to be successful in the facing King Cotton and stopping Patty Roller.

The importance of storytelling and of finding and telling the lost stories is what drew me to Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, and that theme sang loudly through the entire series.

Tell the stories.

Read the stories.

Remember the stories.

And keep punching.

ONCE THERE WERE WOLVES – Charlotte McConaghy

Charlotte McConaghy’s Once There Were Wolves (Flatiron Books, 2021) is a slow burn of an environmental novel that begins tumbling fast into a whodunnit. McConaghy skillfully masters three classic literary conflicts in this novel that initially appears to be man versus nature before turning to man versus man before showing its true colors as man versus self. The plot is captivating and the writing is strikingly beautiful; however, some scenes teeter too far into the “trauma porn” realm for this to have been a five-star read.

Inti Flynn grew up thinking she was part of the forest, and she wasn’t wrong.  As an adult, she’s made wolves and their reintroduction to the wild her mission.  When the novel opens, she’s just arrived in Scotland where she and her team will be releasing fourteen gray wolves into the Highlands. The reintroduction is met with resistance and fear from the local farmers, and Inti must walk a delicate balance to ensure the project is a success.  But Inti has little patience for humans, the true monsters of the world, and playing nice with them isn’t in her wheelhouse.  The wolves and their return to the wild are her life’s mission; she couldn’t care less what the locals think.

Inti wasn’t always so hard and unyielding.  She’d been the soft one growing up, the one her mother insisted needing toughening up due to a rare condition called mirror touch synesthesia that allows her to feel the sensation of being touched when watching someone else being touched, both caresses and blows.  But something had happened to her twin sister, Aggie, when they were in Alaska.  Something that Inti had witnessed and felt.  Now Inti is hard and unapologetic, and Aggie is a silent shell of the woman she once was. McConaghy is slow to reveal the root of Aggie’s trauma, but the novel is littered with hints that the actual triggering moment could have remained off page.  She opted, however, to include it.

When a local (a man Inti knows to be a wife beater) turns up dead, Inti does what it takes to protect her wolves.  She believes the animals were framed to cover up the true murderer.  As the novel tumbles forward toward its bloody and cold truth, we see just how far Inti will go to protect her pack and how her pack protects her.

Once There Were Wolves reminds us that the big bad wolf was never the villain of the story.  For someone who loved Julie of the Wolves as a child, this one held fast to my heart.  It’s a beautiful read that gently reminds us that we have to be better stewards of the world we’ve been given, while also reminding us of the importance of family and love.

All creatures know love.

Read this book.

WHEN TWO FEATHERS FELL FROM THE SKY – Margaret Verble

Margaret Verble’s When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky (Mariner Books 2021) is one of those disappointing novels that simply does not live up to its potential. It’s a perfectly okay read, but I wanted it to be as great as a historical novel written by Verble about a Cherokee horse diver should have been. Instead, I got a big ole chaotic slog with a lot of disconnect and dead animals.

Set in Nashville in the 1920s, the novel focuses primarily on Two Feathers, the Cherokee horse diver “on loan” from a Wild West show. Two’s name is actually Nancy Benge, but that’s not going to sell tickets, so she adopted a “wild Indian” stage name. Verble’s use of names and the importance of them is something that is carried well throughout the novel, especially with Two, Crawford, and Little Elk. Crawford is one of “the Crawfords,” an affluent black family in segregated Tennessee. He is Two’s closest confidant, and they’ve bonded over the care of the animals. The zoo where Two and Crawford work was built on an Indian burial ground, and Little Elk is a ghost who was killed before reaching manhood and stuck with a childish name. He isn’t the only ghost who shows up in the pages, but he is one of the more impactful ones.

When Two suffers an injury that breaks both her body and soul, she stays on at the Glendale Park and Zoo. She does so because getting home would be a painful, bumpy endeavor. Because she was seriously injured while on the job, Mr. Shackleford seems quite agreeable to letting her stay on even though she can’t dive; they’ll find something for her to do.  One of the workers, Jack, is obsessed with Two even before the accident, and as she recovers, his advances become dangerous.  He is a poorly written caricature of evil; had Verble focused more on him as a character and less on packing the novel with 1920s Nashville history and distracting sidetrips and plots, the novel could have been a five-star read.

When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky is a novel of race in the Prohibition-era South, but it just gets too wrapped up in itself, and it is just a little too clunky to excel.

WE ARE NOT LIKE THEM – Christine Pride & Jo Piazza

I’ve read mixed reviews of Christine Pride and Jo Piazza’s joint novel We Are Not Like Them (Atria Books, 2021), but this was to be expected with such a heavy topic.  Some of the criticism was very fair, but much of it revolved around unrealistic expectations and a failure to recognize the delicate balance Pride and Piazza had to draw to even give this novel life.  A select few dripped with racial tension, prejudices and microaggressions, but those can and should be wholly disregarded.

“When the bullets hit him, first in the arm, then his stomach, it doesn’t feel like he’d always imagined it would. Because of course, as a Black boy growing in this neighborhood, he’d imagined it.”

And so opens what proves to be an extremely weighty and timely novel that is so undeserving of criticism calling it “trite.”  Bookended with Justin’s murder at the hands of two cops at the front and Justin’s mother months later at the close, the novel makes it very clear that what happens in the middle isn’t a ready-made solution or a happily ever after, and the dialogue created BY the novel is more important than the dialogue IN the novel.

The novel alternates POVs between two childhood friends, Jen and Riley.  Jen, the white friend, was pretty much raised by Riley’s family due to an absentee mom and neglectful home life.  The two girls grew up together as close as sisters and maintained that closeness even after they were separated by school and jobs.  When Riley returns home, she’s a local celebrity – a reporter well on her way to the anchor desk.  Jen is married to a cop and finally pregnant (thanks to Riley who helped fund the IVF treatments).  They are together when Jen gets the call – her husband has been involved in a shooting.  Riley gets a call from her station – an unarmed black boy has been shot by the police.

What unfolds is messy and gut-wrenching as the two friends battle with internal demons and external perceptions.  Riley feels pulled to cover the story because it speaks to her but also because it can advance her career.  Jen doesn’t understand why Riley is a part of the “media circus” that is painting her husband a murderer, but she also doesn’t know how to stand by a man who shot an unarmed child or how she could survive without him if he’s imprisoned. 

How the two friends interact with each other and how they don’t, how their friendship is tested and subsequently altered by the local shooting of a young black boy, is intended as a jumping off point for discussion.  Some readers find that alienating, I find it realistic.  This isn’t a novel that could solve race issues in America; open and honest dialogue and recognition of race and privilege are ways we can grow not only as readers but as people, and these are the ways that both Riley and Jen learn to circumnavigate in the novel – allowing readers to use their journeys to advance their own growth and understanding. 

Read this book.

SANKOFA – Chibundu Onuzo

Chibundu Onuzo’s Sankofa (Catapult, 2021) is one of the best books I’ve read in 2021.  It would have been in my top three but for the last quarter of the novel, which I don’t think carries the same power and charm as the rest of the work.  Regardless, it’s a fantastic read about family, belonging, second chances, and finding yourself.  It also skillfully captures the African diaspora and the nervous conditions of the individuals who left and never returned as well as those who did return.

Anna is a middle-aged, biracial, soon-to-be divorcee who has just buried her Welsh mother.  Her father, Francis Aggrey, is from the fictional Diamond Coast.  He’d returned to Africa before she was born, and she’d never even seen a picture of the man until after her mother died.  While going through some of her mother’s things, she finds a picture of her father and two books; one is a journal written by Francis while he’s in London, and the other is a scrapbook of newspaper articles, carefully cut out and glued by her mother, about the man Francis became after he returned to Africa.  Through her father’s words and the collection of articles gathered by her mother, Anna gets the first real image of the man she has been missing her whole life.

Through his journal, Anna witnesses her father’s spiral into radicalism.  She also is given intimate details about his relationship with her mother, though her mother has redacted the spicier parts.  When his mother dies, Francis returns to Africa, promising Anna’s mother he will return to her and leaving the journal for her safekeeping.  Neither of the young lovers know about the life growing inside. 

Francis doesn’t return; the radical politics he’d been involved with while in London are given life in the Diamond Coast.  He shakes off the cloak of colonialism by dropping the two bookends of his name and using only Kofi Adjei. Kofi is viewed as a terrorist and jailed following attacks on the diamond mines.  When he is released, the Diamond Coast is free.  He wins the election by a landslide, becoming the prime minister of a new country, Banama.

Anna struggles with the conflicting sides of the man depicted in the two books.  She begins researching her father and Banama, becoming increasingly horrified at how Kofi is not the same dreamer as Francis.  Kofi is “the Crocodile” while Francis had been the man who had loved her mother.  Anna decides to go to Banama to decide for herself.

It’s an emotional journey to healing the fissures of her childhood and the prejudices she faced, to embracing the blackness that her mother and her own daughter can’t understand, to finding out just who Anna is and who she could be.  The title, derived from an African proverb about a bird who flies forward by looking backwards, is perfect.  The novel is cathartic and messy and beautiful.

Read this book.

VELVET WAS THE NIGHT – Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Last year’s Mexican Gothic was my introduction to Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and while her 2021 release wasn’t a horror, I was equally drawn to the plot and, truth be told, the cover; it’s not as stunning as the cover of Mexican Gothic, but just like that cover made clear the novel was a gothic, Velvet was the Night (Del Rey, 2021) boosts a cover that announces the novel, loudly, as a noir.

Set in the 1970s in Mexico City, the novel follows Maite, an unremarkable secretary at a law firm who spends most of her time reading romance comics and making up stories about her dating life to share with her coworker.  Maite is stagnant and dissatisfied with her existence; her only excitement comes from the romance comics she devours and the daydreams that fed her.  She’s not very likable.  I understand it’s a noir and she’s supposed to be flawed, but that doesn’t mean she has to be disliked.

Consider Elvis, the other voice in the alternating POVs.  He’s horribly flawed and does horrendous things to people, but he’s likable.  His mannerisms, his voice, his thought process… he’s just darn likable.  It doesn’t matter that he is a member of the Hawks, a gang funded and trained in secret by the Mexican government, whose entire purpose is to control leftists and activists, particularly students, by any means necessary.  (The Hawks was a real group, and some of the attacks depicted in the novel are based on actual events.)

Both Elvis and Maite are looking for Leonora, Maite’s next door neighbor.  Elvis is on assignment.  Maite just wants the girl to get her damn cat.  When she’d agreed to watch the feline, it was only supposed to be for a few days, and she needs Leonora to hurry home, get her cat, and pay Maite so that Maite can get her car out of the shop. 

Maite unknowingly finds herself eyeballs deep in a very dangerous situation, but she treats it as if she is the leading lady in one of her beloved comics.  She fantasizes about two of Leonora’s former love interests, promising to help them both in their search for Leonora and the film that she has.  It’s the film that everyone wants.  The undeveloped film allegedly depicts evidence of the Hawks.  Leonora’s “friends” want the photos so they can be published in the paper and the Hawks and the government’s involvement be exposed.  The man that Elvis answers to wants the film (and Leonora) for other reasons.  Regardless of who finds her first and what happens to the film, Maite’s life (and Elvis’s) will never be the same.  I just wish Maite had liked the damn cat!

Velvet was the Night is a slow burn but a quick read, and the nuances in the characters are what make it so unique.  It’s wrapped in shadows, secrets, and smoke – as every noir should be.  If you’re looking for a historical noir with a bit of flair, pick this one up. 

CAZADORA – Romina Garber

A few months ago, I reviewed Romina Garber’s Lobizona, and I stated that “there’s a comforting familiarity” to the story.  The follow-up, Cazadora: Wolves of No World #2(Wednesday Books, 2021), continues in that familiar pattern but maintains the very unique feel that set Garber’s worldbuilding apart in Lobizona; Garber’s story relies heavily on Argentinian folklore and the concept of “borders” and “belonging.”

Cazadora opens right after the events in Lobizona, with the cazadora close on the heels of Manu and her pack.  The undercurrent of the follow-up doesn’t hit as heavily on notions of undocumented and illegals because they’re no longer in the US.  Instead, it hits a bit more heavily on gender norms and the restrictive nature of the binary classifications that influence the Septimus world.  As Manu learns more about the magical world that would deny her very existence as a hybrid, she becomes more determined to turn it on its head; it’s time for a revolution and the female werewolf becomes the face of the movement.

Manu, Cata, Tiago, and Saysa set out to find the elusive Coven, always just one step ahead of the cazadoras who are hunting them.   They find the Coven in a way reminiscent of the Room of Requirement in the HP canon. (As I’ve mentioned before, there are numerous nods to the English series and this is but one.)  The Coven is full of individuals who don’t fit in.  There is a trans werewolf (remember, until Manu, all werewolves are male and must identify as such), a werewolf who has been shunned by his family and community after an injury left him unable to transition, and infertile women and women who do not wish to have children (remember, brujas are required to “breed” and there are very strict rules concerning magic and motherhood). Alongside them are men and women who crave a revolution and a change to the status quo.

Manu and her pack fit in seamlessly with the group of misfits, idealists, rebels and dreamers.  But they don’t know her darkest secret; she’s a hybrid, and Septimus laws say she must die. The cazadora will never stop hunting her. Will the Coven continue to fight beside her if they find out the truth?  Or will they fear her and turn against her?

Cazadora shows the transition of Manu into someone who is a bit more comfortable in her skin, a bit more willing to take risks, and a bit more vocal.  With her old friends and some new characters like Zaybet by her side, Manu is set to take down Septimus.

“All I know is they’ve been making up stories about independent girls in every tradition since forever…And I think it’s time we take back our narratives.”

Read this book.