YELLOW WIFE – Sadeqa Johnson

I love a good historical novel, particularly a well-researched novel that stands out both for its writing style and for a unique story that doesn’t feel regurgitated.  While I admittedly gravitate more toward historical fiction with hints of magical realism (Remembrance and Conjure Women from last year being excellent examples), Sadeqa Johnson’s Yellow Wife (1/12/2021) was a highly anticipated read for me.  I was absolutely floored when Simon & Schuster sent this gorgeous ARC several months ago, and I’d been waiting for the perfect time to savor it.  And savor it I did.

Despite being a slave, Pheby Delores Brown was born into a world that treated her quite a bit differently than it did the darker slaves that called the plantation home.  The cherished mulatto and the daughter of a highly respected medicine woman, she was consistently reminded that she was descended from Cameroon royalty and a slave in name only.  The Master’s sister doted on her, teaching her to play the piano and read – treating her more like a beloved niece than a house slave.  The Master was also a bit smitten with the beautiful girl.  He promised her and her mother that he would give her freedom when she turned eighteen.  Once free, she could go North and further her education. 

But the Master’s wife isn’t exactly keen on Pheby or her beautiful mother.  Armed with power and jealousy, Missus Delphina snatches the dream and breaks the promises made by her husband; Pheby is taken to Devil’s Half Acre, a notorious slave jail in Richmond, to be sold.  There, her delicate upbringing and light skin catch the eye of the Jailer and life pivots yet again.  While she is treated much differently than many others who pass through Devil’s Half Acre, Pheby remains a slave and her existence (and happiness) is subject to the whims of a white man known as “Devil” and “Bully.”

Based loosely on historical events, Yellow Wife is about the parts of life that are neither black nor white, neither right nor wrong.  It’s about a shared history and the contradictions of human nature.   More importantly, it’s about survival, family, and the choices we make. 

Read this book.

AND THE MOUNTAINS ECHOED – Khaled Hosseini

I don’t know how I’ve managed to go so long without reading anything by Khaled Hosseini, but here I am in 2021 reviewing my first book by this master storyteller.  And the Mountains Echoed (Riverhead Books 2013) is a novel I am unlikely to forget in this lifetime or the next.  The decisions the characters were forced to make out of love and/or necessity, a country thrust into decades of chaos and uncertainty, a fragmented people trying to reclaim lost lives and memories…  This novel, the broken and the beautiful, will linger in your memory like the bits to a nursery rhyme half-remembered.

The novel opens in Kabul, Afghanistan.  It’s 1952 and ten-year old Abdullah and his little sister, Pari, are each other’s worlds.  But life is hard, and the family is struggling.  A choice is made that will forever alter both of their lives; its impact ricocheting for decades from Kabul to Paris, Tinos, and even San Francisco.

It’s a story of family and a story of survival.  Abdullah’s father makes the impossible of decisions to save the rest of his family.  He tries to explain it to Abdullah.  That sometimes one has to cut off a finger to keep the hand, but Abdullah will never forgive him.  His childhood is scarred by loss.

Abdullah’s stepmother has her own demons and split-second decisions that altered her life’s course.  Her brother, Nabi, a central character in the novel, also must deal with the repercussions of a decision that he orchestrated and forever changed his life and his family’s – a decision that destroyed one family but created another.  One that was motivated but a love he’d never realize and supported by yet another love he couldn’t return.

The novel spans from 1952, with a few flashbacks to earlier years, to 2010.  Near the end of the book, an old man lost to dementia sings the first two lines of a nursery rhyme in Farsi and a woman finishes the forgotten verse.

“I found a sad little fairy
Beneath the shade of a paper tree.
I know a sad little fairy
Who was blown away by the wind one night.”

That scene, and the tightening of my throat that it caused, have forever etched this novel in my heart. 

Read this book.  

THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON – Kelly Barnhill

I read forty-seven books in 2020, and my last read of the year ended up one of my top two.  I knew I’d like Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Algonquin Young Readers, 2016), but I didn’t anticipate it even being in my top five.  Yet I found this novel of an “enmagicked” girl, a Perfectly Tiny Dragon, a good witch and a bad one, a Swamp Monster poet, and what it means to be a family as enchanting as the moon.

The premise of a child sacrificed for the safety and well-being of a community is not uncommon in fairytales and folktales, and that is the framework we find ourselves in.  The people of the Protectorate, a sad little place, sacrifice a baby every year to “the witch” so that she will leave the town alone.  The “offering” is a centuries old rouse intended to keep the elders in power; there is no witch.  Well, there is, but Xan is very much a good witch and nothing like the lies propagated by the elders.  Unknown to the townsfolks and the elders, she takes the yearly sacrifices to other towns where they are loved by families who can’t have children. 

But then comes the beautiful black-haired baby.  Xan doesn’t pay attention when letting her feed on starlight, and the girl drinks the moon.  She becomes “enmagicked” and Xan, more than anyone, knows the difficulties of a magical child.  She decides to raise girl.  She names the baby Luna and takes her home.  There, they, along with a Swamp Monster named Glerk and a Perfectly Tiny Dragon named Fyrian, are a family.

As Xan believed the babies were abandoned, she had no way of knowing that locked in a Tower, a mother’s madness grew.  She also had no way of knowing that a young man who had been present when Luna was taken from her mother has decided to kill the witch and save his people.  Meanwhile, history is burning to repeat itself as a dormant volcano begins to stir.

The Girl Who Drank the Moon is beautifully and fantastically told.  It reminds me, as I hope it does you, that we are never too old for fairytales or magic or a Perfectly Tiny Dragon that can fit in our pockets.

Read this book.

THE NEW WILDERNESS – Diane Cook

Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (Harper (August 11, 2020)) rounds out my 2020 Booker Prize shortlist selections.  This book has been heralded as the “environmental novel of our time” by Booker judge Lemn Sissay, but I’d like to think our time could do better.  I think I’ve actually read better.  (Barbara Kingsolver, anyone?)

Cook is a talented writer and the premise of the novel is certainly intriguing, but it comes off the rails pretty early on.  It’s a fragment puzzle of a book with characters that are inconsistently portrayed.  Those were some of the serious hiccups that held me back from fully enjoying a premise that I’ve dubbed The Hunger Games meets Divergent for adults.  The dystopian game has been so strong in the YA world and so over done as of late, that I can’t help but wonder if this was initially intended for a younger audience and then reworked.  That would explain some of the more jarring aspects with both Bea and Agnes.

The novel is set in a future where humans have destroyed much of the natural world except for the Wilderness State, a protected area of land upon which humans are not allowed.  A study is initiated between the government, scholars, and scientists to see if humans can return to nature without destroying it.  Bea, with a sickly child who needs “clean air” to survive, and Glen build up a team.  Glen wants to go because of the science behind it.  He’s a scholar with the heart of poet.  Bea wants to go because it’s the only chance to save her daughter.  A group of twenty are led into the Wilderness State with limited possessions and a lot of rules.  They’re certainly not the qualified bunch of “survivalists” Glen envisioned, but it was hard enough to get twenty warm bodies to volunteer at all.  

Agnes becomes healthy and feral in the Wilderness state.  With little memory of the City, she’s quickly able to adapt.  She learns to read the signs of the animals to determine where to go, what to eat, and when to be afraid.  Despite her age, she earns the respect of those within the Community and becomes a leader who briefly breaks out of her mother’s shadow. 

Man versus Nature and Man versus Man are two of the most common conflicts in literature, and Cook dabbles with both but neither seems fully developed.  The nature versus nurture conflict is more defined but still a touch incomplete, leaving the reader with frayed edges and abandoned subplots.  The characters were unlikeable and inconsistent, and the chronology was contradictory, especially when Agnes took the reins.  It was quite the disappointment.

SHUGGIE BAIN – Douglas Stuart

He wanted to crush her with his secrets the way she had once done him with hers. “What’s wrong with me, Mammy?” He asked quietly.

262

Douglas Stuart’s debut novel, Shuggie Bain (Grove Press, 2020) was recently awarded the highly coveted Booker Prize.  It’s my favorite book award, and I try and read some of the selections from the long list each year.  This year, I gravitated toward the shortlist.  Shuggie Bain is my third from that list, and while I still think The Shadow King should have received the award, I can certainly appreciate why Shuggie Bain won.  This is not a book I will soon forget.

If I call this novel the fictional and Scottish Angela’s Ashes, you will one hundred percent understand how weighty this novel of addiction, family, and sexuality is.  In the same breath, let me tell you this is not just another Angela’s Ashes and it doesn’t deserve any sort of “been there, read that” brush aside.  Set in 1980s Glasgow, Shuggie Bain hits like a punch or a hard kiss under a cold rain.

Stuart did a masterful job creating broken and beautiful characters, particularly in Agnes, and this book rings clear like the bells on Christmas day.  Agnes has dreams, but time and life and men keep getting in the way.  She leaves her first husband, a dependable (boring) Catholic, for Shuggie, a handsome cabbie with promises of a new life and all she’s ever wanted.  In a flashback, we learn that she was supposed to leave Catherine and Leek behind, but she couldn’t do it; Agnes could never walk away from her children.  Big Shug’s promises are empty, but the bottles of booze aren’t.  Agnes attempts to drown her demons and all of her shattered dreams in cans of lager and bottles of vodka.  It works only until the alcohol is out of her system and the weight of her reality comes crashing down.  It’s a heartbreaking portrayal of addiction and despair, worsened by co-dependent and abusive relationships.

Shuggie, the youngest of Agnes’s children, has his own demons.  He is “no right” as everyone likes to say.  As he mothers his mother, he struggles with his secrets and his truths.  He wants so desperately to be “normal,”, but he’s a boy who doesn’t like boy things.  He prefers dollies and fruity scented ponies to footballs and fishing.  Agnes believes it is because his father is a sorry excuse of man who left them all.  She begs a man in the neighborhood to spend time with her son, to take him fishing and do boy things with him.  The man uses her, promising to teach the boy how to fish, but it’s just words to barter for her body.  Each time a man pushed inside Agnes, Shuggie’s heart (and mine) broke a little more.

 This novel is wrapped in bruise, and it smells like day old beer and stale smoke. I’m still not quite sure how I feel about it.  It’s not a book I would recommend to everyone, but I would certainly recommend it. 

I AM NOT YOUR PERFECT MEXICAN DAUGHTER – Erika Sánchez

“But how do we live with these secrets locked within us? How do we tie our shoes, brush our hair, drink coffee, wash the dishes, and go to sleep, pretending everything is fine?”

(284-285)

Once upon a time, I was an immigration attorney.  Many of my clients were “undocumented” or had “undocumented” parents.  The point of that is to say that Erika Sánchez’s I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter hit a little differently for me.  I’ve met Julia and her family.  I’ve represented them in immigration court. While I haven’t lived it, I’ve seen the nervousness and uncertainty of a child thrust between two identities.  I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter should be required reading in every high school across America.

Julia is a mouthy but academically gifted teenager who dreams of being a famous writer in New York.  Unlike her “perfect” sister, Olga, Julia wants to get far away from her family.  Her parents just don’t understand her.  They don’t approve of her friends, the way she dresses, or her dreams.  “You should be more like your sister,” they say.   Neat.  Tidy.  A good cook.  A perfect Mexican daughter ready to step into the role of perfect Mexican wife.  But Olga’s dead, and her family is left broken.

Julia blames herself for her sister’s death.  If she had been a better daughter, her sister wouldn’t have been taking the bus.  The guilt eats at her.  At night, she sneaks into her sister room and sleeps in her sister’s bed.  In her attempts to bring herself closer to her sister and find closure, she discovers that maybe Olga wasn’t as perfect as she appeared.  Julia becomes obsessed with the mystery, obsessed with finding Olga’s secrets and revealing her as less than perfect to her devastated parents.

Depression wraps itself around Julia, filling her head with guilt and thoughts of inadequacy.  Her parents are so consumed with their own grief, they don’t notice their remaining daughter has spiraled to a place many don’t come back from until its almost too late. 

After a failed suicide attempt and a brief hospitalization, her parents decide to send Julia to Mexico.  She hasn’t visited her family in years, and she’s never gone without Olga.  Her parents are undocumented and it’s too risky for them to leave the US, so she goes on her own.  There, in the warmth of her Mexican family and with the help of the medication she’s been placed on, Julia begins to heal.  While in Mexico, she’s faced with a reality of her parents’ shared history that had long been kept a secret.  She begins to realize that some secrets should never be said out loud.

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter isn’t a fairytale.  It’s gritty, but it’s real.  Julia is whiney and ungrateful; in short, she’s every other teenager.  That commonality and Julia’s snarky voice brings levity to rather serious situations.  It’s a relatable and extremely well-done young adult novel.

Read this book.

THE MOUNTAINS SING – Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

It truly has been the season of “women at war” books for this booknerd.  After I left Korea, I went to Vietnam and a family saga that spans decades of turmoil.  The Mountains Sing (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2020) is Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s first novel in English.  A celebrated poet, Mai’s language purrs on each and every page of this beautiful novel.  (I have posted previously about the questionable manner in which I found myself with an ARC of this novel.  For these purposes, I’ll just reiterate that one should not sell ARCs, and I should have paid better attention to my purchase.)

The Mountains Sing is a complicated story set in a complicated country.  Set primarily against a backdrop of the Việt Nam War, the novel of the Trân family also touches on the Japanese invasion of Vietnam, which was followed by the Great Hunger and the Land Reform – a tumultuous history that defined every member of the Trân family.

Despite jumping around in the chronology, the novel centers around young Huong.  Both of Huong’s parents have joined the war effort – her father as a soldier and her mother as a doctor.  She lives with her maternal grandmother, Grandma Dieu Lan, a teacher by trade, in a beautiful house in Ha Noi.  Within pages of the novel opening, the sirens alert the residents that the American bombers are approaching and they must take shelter.  Huong’s grandmother yells at the mothers and children who are trying to find unoccupied bomb shelters to go to the school because they certainly wouldn’t bomb a school.  Huong and her grandmother survive the bombing, but bodies and parts of bodies litter the streets as they hurry home.  After months of quiet and relative peace, war has returned to Ha Noi.

As the story unfolds, we learn more about Huong’s grandmother, the daughter of wealthy landowners, and the deaths of her parents in the wake of the Japanese invasion followed by the Great Hunger.  Through her stories told to Huong, we learn of Wicked Ghost and the horrors he inflicted on her family.  We learn of the difficult choices Dieu Lan makes when she is forced to flee her home with all but one of her children during the Land Reform.  And we see the lasting impacts of those choices on her now grown children.

The Mountains Sing is about mothers and the ties that bind.  It’s about home and family.  The writing is poetic and beautiful, and that gorgeous writing style is what allows the light and hope to glitter in this story that is so full of war, death, and destruction.  I did find the pacing in the last fourth of the novel to be unpleasantly rushed as Mai attempted to tie up any loose ends.  It was a disservice to an otherwise gorgeous novel to vomit out the ending in such a hurried and uncontrolled way; however, I still strongly recommend this novel.  I can’t emphasis enough the importance of books like this and voices like Mai’s.

Read this book.

RIOT BABY – Tochi Onyebuchi

“If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see torches in the woods, keep going.  If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.” 

Riot Baby, 124

Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby (2020) perfectly illustrates how successful science fiction can be at providing social commentary on the injustices of the world.  In this case, it’s the centuries of repeated aggression and violations on black and brown bodies.  Clocking in at under 200 pages, this novella is a light weight that packs one hell of a wallop.

Ella has a Thing, and by Thing, I mean a special power.  She can control the atmosphere.  She can walk through the past and the future.   She can kill with but a look. It’s a destructive, untamed fire that rages within her, and she cannot control it.  She leaves her young brother and her mother to protect them because she’s afraid of what she will do.

Ella’s brother, Kevin, was born during the Rodney King riots.  He’s a smart kid, good with computers and numbers.  Under the protective shield of Ella’s powers, he thrives in a city that eats its youth.  But then she leaves, and he is no longer protected.  Kevin becomes just another boy of the streets just struggling to stay alive.  An attempted robbery lands him at Rikers.  Anger ignites in his soul, his body electric with hate.

Ella’s powers allow her to visit with her brother, and some of the power sticks to his skin – allowing him to see the things she’s seen, to walk through history and see the burning crosses, white faces contorted in hate, the broken and bloated brown and black bodies tossed in rivers, dragged behind trucks, and hung from trees.  It’s enough to suck all hope from a person.  It also allows him to walk in the shoes of his fellow inmates and prison guards.  Neither is an ability he wants.

Kevin is eventually paroled to Watts, a self-contained community of people just like him.  (And a place history remembers for its own riots.) A chip is implanted in his thumb that monitors his location as well as his vitals.  It also operates a key card to allow him access to his home.  He is happy here.  Or so he thinks.  But things aren’t always what they seem.  The fire still rages in Ella, fully under control and command, and he is the Riot Baby.

I have never read something quite so angry and full of despair as Riot Baby, but what is most striking is the hope that sparks just beneath the surface like a recently lit match.  Keep going.

Read this book.

A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD – Therese Anne Fowler

I seldom say that I hated a book because I can usually find something redeeming about it, but I hated Therese Anne Fowler’s A Good Neighborhood (2020).  This review will be quite brief and in a slightly different format because I don’t want to launch into a tirade about my visceral reaction to this novel.

Things I liked

  • The writing isn’t awful – it’s quite strong.  Fowler knows how to tell a story.
  • The novel is told from multiple narrators, and one narrator is the “neighborhood” – I’ve always enjoyed place as a character and collective voices as one.  It works well in this novel and probably should have been used exclusively.
  • The civil lawsuit based on the builder and homeowner getting a variance that should never have been approved based on the proximity of Valerie’s ancient and glorious tree.  (This really should have been the plot.)
  • The cover.

Things I disliked

  • The attempt to provide POVs of Valerie and Zay.  I’m not saying a white person cannot write the POV of black person, I just don’t think Fowler was successful.  She addresses this criticism in the author’s note, which, unlike most novels, appears at the beginning of the novel.  Fowler attempts to justify writing those POVs, which leads me to believe she knew it was bad idea and not properly executed. 
  • The character development was severely hampered by Fowler’s attempts to make this novel something that it’s just not. Valerie and Zay never seemly fully developed or well-thought out.
  • Valerie is a kick-ass and wicked smart ecologist.  Her fight for the tree should have triggered her to compare herself to other wicked smart ecologists – Rachel Carson quickly springs to mind – however, Fowler has Valerie compare her fight for the tree to Rosa Parks and MLK.  The constant dropping of names like Parks and King and John Lewis seem more like the author attempting to let the reader know she knows who they are.
  • The stepdaughter/stepfather trope.  This could have been done quite differently if Juniper’s POV is anti-Brad.  Instead, Fowler nods to Lolita and paints her the temptress.  This is supported by Juniper’s own sections, not just Brad’s sections.  This should never be a plot point used to propel the narrative.  Never.  Fowler attempts to walk it back after putting it out there, but it’s too late.
  • The ending is one of the worst endings I’ve ever read.  It’s not just unsatisfying because of how it ends, it’s disappointing in that Zay’s and Valerie’s actions are entirely uncharacteristic based on the development, however limited, Fowler gives them.

There are a lot of people who love this book.  People who think that it perfectly captures the plight of Black Americans in the South and that by reading it, they’ve broadened their horizons. While I applaud Therese Anne Fowler’s attempt at casting a light on racial disparities in North Carolina, this book will not diversify your shelves and I cannot recommend it.

THE MERMAID FROM JEJU – Sumi Hahn

From the battle torn France of World War II, to the women warriors of Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, and now to the haenyeo in post-WWII Korea, I’ve been on a bit of a “women at war” kick.  The Nightingale, The Shadow King, and The Mermaid from Jeju are all three written by women and primarily about women during armed conflicts in their homelands.

The Mermaid from Jeju (December 2020) is Sumi Hahn’s first novel, and what a brilliant first novel it is.  It is a love story of family, heart, and home.  It is a story of resistance and choices.  It is a story of magic and appeasing the Sea King, because he will always take back what is his.  It is a story of mermaids.

The haenyeo are deep-sea divers, exclusively women since the 1600s, from the island of Jeju.  While there are only a few thousand left today, these mermaids have been diving to feed their families for centuries.  Many of the divers that caught the attention of the American soldiers following World War II were grandmothers, their bent bodies barely able to move on land but are like fish in the water.  These women passed their knowledge to their children and their children’s children – a matriarchal tradition born of necessity that is dying; the majority of the divers today are over fifty. 

This beautifully crafted tale is set just following the Japanese occupation of Korea during World War II, and it follows Junja, a young girl who dives along side her mother and her grandmother.  Her mother is considered one of it not the best diver on the island.  Junja is the oldest of three children, and she’s trained her whole life to be a haenyeo.  Her father, a mainlander who’d been unable to come to terms with his beautiful wife being the breadwinner, had abandoned them all years ago.

Desperate to prove herself and show independence, Junja begs her mother to let her take the annual trip to the mountains to trade the gifts from the sea for a piglet.  Her mother relents, and the young girl begins the trip that will forever change her life.  She’s enchanted by the mountains almost as much as she is by Yan Suwol, the wealthy pig farmer’s firstborn son who is equally smitten by her.

Junja has been warned to keep her wits about her and watch for any trouble, be it wild animals or soldiers on the road.  She’s also been warned never to talk politics, to remain always neutral.  But no one has told her that her country remains in a tenuous position; the Japanese may have left, but what is coming may be worse.

She returns home from the journey with the flushed cheeks of someone who breathed mountain air and love for the first time.  She just in time to see her mother succumb to injuries Junja been told were from a diving expedition, despite her mother being an excellent diver.  Junja blames herself.  If she hadn’t begged her mother to let her take the trip, her mother wouldn’t have been near the water that day.  Junja’s grandmother blames herself because she knows the truth.  She knows the secrets that must remain buried.

As the conflict intensifies, Junja finds herself and her grandmother in the thick of it.  Suwol, the poet and scholar who has her heart, is hellbent on fighting the Nationalists.  Her grandmother has taken to cooking for a Nationalist soldier, speaking in hushed tones to him over the meals he praises.  Junja does not trust him, and neither does Suwol.  But Junja quickly learns that things are not what they appear, and people aren’t always who they pretend to be.  A carefully orchestrated ruse to rescue her beloved Suwol starts a series of events that Junja’s grandmother would insist were always meant to be – a series of events that will shatter you.

I wanted more of the haenyeo.  Hahn hints the ways in which they protected their families and homes, from whoring to spying, but those stories are just quick little teases.  I also wanted more of Junja’s grandmother, a woman who, unlike Junja’s mother, refused to stay neutral.  The things she did and the ways she fought during the Japanese occupation deserved more than a passing glance.  But this is the story of one mermaid, a mermaid who is forced to become a woman during a volatile time for her country, and like a mermaid, the novel is absolutely enchanting.

Sumi Hahn’s lovely debut, The Mermaid from Jeju, will be released on 08 December 2020.  Thank you to Alcove Press and Crooked Lane Books for getting this gorgeous ARC in my hands.  For those still doing their Christmas shopping, if you’ve a bookworm on your list who loves historical women’s fiction or women’s fiction in general, this will be published just in time and will look lovely under a tree.