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.

BLACK GIRLS MUST DIE EXHAUSTED – Jayne Allen

Jayne Allen’s Black Girls Must Die Exhausted (Harper, 2021 – first published in 2018) is unapologetically “black,” but it didn’t choose to be so – it just is, and it’s taken far too long for a book like this just to exist on the same shelves as books by white authors about white women with similar struggles. I’m not sure I’m articulating this the way I want to, the way this book deserves, and the author’s own words will better explain it.

“This book itself is my love letter – to you, to Black women, to women, and to all those who understand the beauty that comes through struggle and the benefit of doing their own work to heal, to understand, to grow, and, most importantly, to love more fully.”

And it is beautiful.

Tabitha Walker’s life is moving along just as she’d planned when it’s suddenly derailed following a routine doctor’s visit; Tabby’s eggs are deteriorating and if she wants children, which she very much does, she’ll have to make some tough decisions and fast.  She turns to her grandmother, her father’s mother and the woman she’d been named for, for advice and comfort, just as she’d always done growing up.  Tabby’s relationship with Granny Tab is sweetly done, and some of the more poignant scenes happen between the black woman and her white grandmother.

Tabitha also relies heavily on her two closest friends, Laila and Alexis.  The three women are remarkably different, but they highlight the importance of sisterhood; Tabitha can easily handle a boy not talking to her, but when she gets in an argument with Laila and Lexi, the silence is unbearable.  Laila and Lexi have their own struggles, and the three friends must come together to help heal.

This novel is written by a black woman about black women, but that should in no means limit its audience.  Its characters grapple with racism, sexism, imposter syndrome, infertility, infidelity, death, dating woes, family drama, depression, miscarriage, friendships, and fears.  It reminds me a bit of Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes, and I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys women’s literature.

Read this book.

CHINA ROOM – Sunjeev Sahota

Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room (Viking, 2021) was another slim selection from the Booker 2021 longlist, but unlike A Passage North, which is a little bit longer, I gobbled it up in one sitting; it’s the kind of storytelling I prefer, and Sahota weaves an intimate and heartbreaking tale of love, independence, hate, and the chains that bind us.

Set in India and based on his own family history, China Room is the story of Mehar and her great grandson. Mehar was sold as a bride when she was five.  Her new family changes her name, and her destiny.  When she was fifteen, they came calling.  She is not told which of the three brothers she is marrying, and all three are married in the same ceremony.  Neither Mehar nor her new “sisters” know who their husbands are; they are stock, bought and paid for, who must be bred and deliver a male child.  Until then, they are kept in the “china room,” where they prepare the meals, complete domestic tasks, and sleep.  When their mother-in-law commands it, they wait for their husbands in a completely dark room and do as they are bid.

The three women are curious about their husbands.  Emboldened, one asks their mother-in-law to identify which son she is married to.  Mai, ever cruel, refuses to tell her and snarls that maybe she sends all three men to all three girls.  Mehar, younger than the other two and so curious, sets her mind to determining which brother is her husband.

When her husband tells her that he will bring her pearls so that she will birth a son, she wrongfully assumes the brother she sees twirling the pearls in the air is her husband and shyly approaches him.  Suraj, full of lust for his brother’s wife, doesn’t correct her.  They begin to meet in secret – Mehar still thinking this is her husband.  When she learns the truth, it is too late. 

Mehar’s struggles are framed by those of her great grandson, who is telling the story in 2019.  Alongside Mehar’s tragedy, he speaks of his own.  In 1999, he went to India to try and recover from a heroine addiction.  He’d turned to drugs to numb himself from the racism and discrimination his family suffered in England. After he is no longer welcomed to stay with his uncle, he goes to the dilapidated family farm where he continues to painfully withdraw from the drug.  He sleeps in the china room, feeling more of a connection to his past and begins to heal.  He sets about restoring the property, painting it the same shade of pink it had been when Mehar lived there – her favorite shade.

China Room is the story of family and of life coming full circle.  Mehar lost herself in the china room.  Seven decades later, her great grandson finds himself there.

The novel is quick delight and well worth picking up.

Read this book.

A PASSAGE NORTH – Anuk Arudpragasam

In continuing with my attempt to read the Booker Prize 2021 longlist, I finally finished Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North (Random House, 2021).  While I didn’t hate it, it is certainly at the bottom of my rankings.  (It still comes in head and shoulders ahead of Second Place, though.)  My issue with the novel is not with the story or even the writing itself, but with the writing style.  The story is captivating, and, at times, the writing is beautiful; however, the meandering, introspective narrative is off-putting to this reader.

 A Passage North puts the reader deep within the recesses of Krishan’s mind, a place that is often selfish and whiny as he muddles over how to respond to an email he received from an ex-lover while he is traveling north to attend the funeral of Rani, his grandmother’s former caregiver.  When Krishan receives the call from Rani’s daughter that she has fallen in their well and died, he immediately decides something is afoot and he must go to her funeral, to represent his family, but more importantly to determine the true root of her demise.  He takes the train north, into the war-torn areas of Sri Lanka, his stream of consciousness flitting from Rani and her relationship with his grandmother and her cause of death, to Anjum, the bisexual activist he’d fallen in love with years before who’d recently reached out.

Krishan was distanced from the war in Sri Lanka by virtue of where he was born and raised.  He didn’t experience the brutal destruction firsthand, even though his father was killed by a bomb, and this distance makes him seem little more than a casual observer in his own country.  The observations are tinged with guilt, especially when he talks about Rani’s dead sons and  the children born of the diaspora who have returned for a visit after the bombs have stopped.

It is at the cremation ceremony, beautifully depicted and arguably the best section of the entire novel, that Krishan becomes more than a casual observer discussing a horror that left him relatively unscathed; as he watches the flames creep toward Rani’s body, he finally feels the full weight of the impacts of a decades long civil war on his home.  Suddenly, he is a participant.

While I dislike the writing style and found Krishan insufferable, I don’t think this novel, with its subtle survivor’s guilt, would have been as effective in any other style.  If philosophical reads and getting lost in the narrator’s headspace are things you enjoy, read this book. 

BEWILDERMENT – Richard Powers

Even though the 2021 Booker Prize has already been announced (Congrats to Damon Galgut!), I’m still making my way through the longlist.  Richard Powers’s Bewilderment (W. W. Norton & Co., 2021) received a lot of attention, and I’m not surprised it was shortlisted for the prestigious award.  The slim novel of grief and nature made me think of last year’s shortlisted “nature” book, The New Wilderness, which I found overrated.  Both are dystopian novels dealing with parent-child relationships in a world that humans are actively destroying.  The New Wilderness is a bit more gritty and narrowly tailored, whereas Bewilderment is more ethereal and expansive, displaying a heaven full of planets and hope.  And, unlike Cook’s novel, Bewilderment is dystopian-light, with the destruction of the country and society relying heavily on current political events but slanted and exaggerated toward the extreme.  As much I disliked Cook’s attempt, I loved Powers’s.

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist scrambling to be a good father to his special needs son, Robin.  Robin is special needs, with a diagnosis that varies depending on what professional is asked, but what remains steady is that Robin has difficulty managing his emotions and he is swimming in grief and anger following the death of his mother.  Theo is equally swimming, barely keeping his head above water as he battles his own grief and tries to parent a son who is more of an enigma than a cosmos that is constantly growing and being redefined.  Theo does not want to medicate his son, and a violent outburst at school has him asking a colleague of his wife for help.  He enrolls Robin in an experimental neurofeedback treatment that focuses on training the brain to follow the patterns of another brain.  Theo and his wife had made recordings years prior, and Robin eventually starts training using his mother’s recording.

Robin has always been a lot like his mother, passionately concerned about the life and well-being of the animals and plants that inhabit the earth.  The training intensifies and focuses this passion, such that Theo can almost hear his wife when his son talks.  The training works.  Robin is calmer, he is emulating his mother and able to face the world in ways that Theo never thought would be possible. 

It’s a novel of grief and hope set in a world not far removed from this one.  Unlike the planets Theo and Robin create as calming tools, there is no Planet B.  We are the custodians of this earth, and we need to take our jobs more seriously.  The novel is perfectly nuanced and beautifully executed.  This was the “environmental novel of our time.”

Read this book.