AUDITION – Katie Kitamura

“There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous that you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.” (38)

First up in the 2025 Booker 101 is a slim slice of metafiction in Katie Kitamura’s Audition. Understandably divisive, the novel with its unnamed 49-year-old actress of a narrator, presents two different realities along the same timeline with not gap or repetition; the only significant change is motherhood. There’s a lot of discussion, and a lot more room for it, regarding the two sections and how they work together toward the endgame. There’s also a lot of room for discussion about what the endgame actually is. Spoiler – the endgame is whatever the reader walks away with.

Actual spoilers will follow.

For me, part two signifies the narrator assuming the role of “mother” for purposes of “bridging the gap” in the play she’s acting in; it’s method acting, but she’s been playing a part for so long, she isn’t quite sure where she starts and the role ends. A deeper dive would say this type of method acting is also her way of dealing with her husband’s possible infidelity and absolute unhappiness, (of note, he’s unhappy in both “realities”), and her own varied emotions regarding both the abortion and miscarriage. (How she describes the miscarriage – “I had briefly borne death in my body…” is both a quiet moment and a visceral scream of writing that truly marks the writing style of the novel as a whole.)

Two things that solidify in my mind that Part Two is intended to be essentially “role play” – the gaps in the narrator’s memory (she only remembers what is necessary to move the “action” forward or build her character) and the change of the play’s title. In part one, the play is “The Opposite Shore” and it is “Rivers” in part two.  One is terra firma and the other is flowing, inconsistent and unpredictable waters – just like the sections.

Some continued threads that I enjoyed – the scarf she wears in part one that becomes Xavier’s in part two, and the continued use of pastries albeit with different motives.

I think Kitamura wrote herself into the novel not as the narrator but as Max, who got bored with a character and wrote an entirely new scene with a new character where the narrator has to “bridge the gap” between the two. 

Short story long, all the world is a stage and Audition drips with Booker-type.

Booker 1 of 13

*There is additional content on Instagram for each of the longlisted books if you want to check that out! My final thoughts will be posted here as well, but if you want to see the cover discussion or some quick and dirty facts, head over there!

THAT’S ALL I KNOW – Elisa Levi

“Look, sir, here’s your dog. I told you dog weren’t like me, dogs stick around.”

“And they’d tell me that if I was going to be so distrustful of the outsiders, I’d end up hating them, and in small towns hatred is more dangerous than guns, the forest, or illness.”

With perhaps the most perfect cover, the unassuming That’s All I Know, by Elisa Levi (2021) (translated from the Spanish by Christina Macsweeney – 2025) is likely going to be in my top reads of the year.  Coming in at 154 pages, the novel is a monologue, and I sat right still and listened to Little Lea’s story.

The novel opens with 19-year-old  Lea encountering a stranger hellbent on entering the woods to retrieve his dog. She stops him, cautioning that people don’t come back from the forest, and says she will wait with him for his dog to return. So, they wait. And Lea, quite the chatterbox, smokes a little pot and tells him her life story, focusing on the events of the past year that revolve around a new couple moving into the small town of ~200 folks and the rumored end of the world.

Lea is preparing to the leave the small town – a preparation that has been in the works for years, but she’s reached the point of no return. She talks about her family, especially her sister, Nora. Nora is special needs – confined to a wheelchair and nonverbal. She cries when she is in pain and when Lea is overcome with emotion, she’ll pinch or poke her to make her cry.

Lea’s best friends are Javiar, born on the same day as Nora and the person Lea most wants to love her, Marco, the rough and tumble man who loves Lea but has anger issues, and Catalina, the girl who loves love and is always crying.  The town is all they know, all Lea knows, and she has to get out.

It’s a trapped story, a life anchored in place and unfulfilled, and a desire laced with guilt and fear to escape it.

THE ORIGINAL DAUGHTER – Jemimah Wei

“Irrevocably dispersed throughout the land he abandoned, the land where he belonged.”

Until page 150, I thought Jemimah Wei’s The Original Daughter (Doubleday 2025) was easily going to be a 4-star read. I enjoyed the storytelling style and, more importantly for me, I enjoyed the story.  At page 150, there is a marked shift in our leading lady and what follows is a spiral into unreasonableness and unlikableness. What happened to the smart girl who flushed her grandfather’s ashes to release her new sister from the bonds of guilt? What happened to her parents who found so much strength and certainty in their love for each other until they didn’t? (I know what happened on the page, but the entire novel shifted and never regrouped.)

Genevieve isn’t a likable adult.  Not even close.  And the events that severed her relationship with her adopted sister are relatively miniscule (not the attack itself but how Arin uses the attack) but made massive due to jealousy, pride, guilt, and shame. I get that they are all human emotions, but the jealousy and anger that clouds Genevieve’s POV without flesh on those monsters makes the novel a bit hollow for me.

I just didn’t care.  Maybe that’s the point as neither does Gen.

The concept of a secret family and a cousin-of-a-stranger turned sister is great – Arin’s struggles as seen through Gen are well done and articulated. The building of the rivalry, the sudden and out of the blue desire to be a Youtube star, the academic pressure, the unreliableness of Gen as narrator, the dying mother and absentee father, each with their own twisted, broken motives… it all reads as tired.

But those first 150 pages.

JAMAICA ROAD – Lisa Smith

“I’ve missed you too.  I’ve been missing you for ages.”

Lisa Smith’s Jamaica Road  (Knopf 2025) is a heartbreaking debut of a love story that is very much time and place. Set primarily in South London, Jamaica Road opens in 1981 with a  young Daphne.  Daphne is the only Black girl in her class, and her goal is to be as unnoticed as possible. She does not want to call attention to herself now that the name calling has pretty much stopped.  Enter Connie Small, a tall boy from Jamaica that the teachers pair with Daphne because she is of Jamaican descent.  He becomes a target for her classmates’s racism.

What follows is the slowest burn of a friends to lovers. But it’s that friendship and the struggles the two face that build the foundation of their relationship. Connie and his mother have overstayed their visas and are subject to removal from the country. His mother is in a relationship with an abusive man who promises to marry her and get their citizenship. With each bruise, they hang on that promise. Daphne struggles with her finding her father, and Connie helps.

During this time period of the ‘80s, London runs rampant with racism, attacks, and the rounding up of people who don’t have current legal status. Smith captures the shift in young children to young adults clinging to the hatred of their family with portrayals of Daphne’s classmates, particularly Mark, who is modeling his older brother while still struggling with his own beliefs and attraction to Daphne. It also captures Daphne’s struggles of wanting to fit in with her English classmates and her attraction to Mark.

Connie and Daphne grow up, grow apart because of a decision she makes, and grow back together.  When Connie returns to Jamaica for a funeral, she joins him. I wish there’d been more to that section as it was beautiful, and its beauty made what follows even more heartbreaking.

This is fantastic debut. I may have hated the ending, but the ending is the ending it needed.

Read this book.

VERA, OR FAITH

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve read Gary Shteyngart, but thoughts of Absurdistan still make me chuckle nearly two decades later.  While that filthy funny novel followed the adventures of Misha Vainberg, the 325-pound son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia, Vera, or Faith (Random House 2025) gives us ten-year-old Vera – a Russian, Jewish, Korean bundle of anxiety and facts.  While she’s less raunchy than Misha, she is just as memorable.

After overhearing a conversation between her dad and Anne Mom, Vera believes that her Mom Mom has cancer and is dying. She becomes determined to meet her before she dies. With her classmate, a girl Vera wants desperately to be her friend, an automated car named “Stella,” and a sentient AI chessboard named Kaspie, she sets out to find her real mother.

There’s also the domestic struggle between her father and stepmother, the “March of the Hated (MOTH) and the Five-Three movement (a political movement claiming an unequal voice is equitable and white folks should have more of a say), a school debate where Vera is pro Five-Three, her younger half-brother Dylan, a blonde pest who like to show off his penis, and the possibility her father is a traitor to his country and his own half-Korean daughter. Let’s just say, Vera has A LOT of her plate.

Vera, or Faith is a quick, one-sitting read that’s full of heart, humor and substance. While I didn’t love it as much as Absurdistan, it’s still a fun read.  (One of my favorite parts is that Vera’s dad is a “manfluencer” for expensive pens.)

THE DREAM HOTEL – Laila Lalami

“Freedom isn’t a blank slate, she wants to tell them. Freedom is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others.”

My attempt to “get a jump” on the Booker longlist by reading predictions continues with Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel (Penguin Random House 2025). I’m not sure if it’ll make the list, but I certainly think it belongs there. It’s timely and terrifying, an absolute mindfuck of Chain Gang All-Stars meets Orange is the New Black meets a 2025 Orwell. The reality of the novel is so far removed from present day, and so devastatingly plausible – it’s unsettling and disturbing – a novel I read on edge, with a knot in my stomach.

In the not-so-distant future, in an America that could be, Sara Hussein is detained after landing in LAX following a work trip.  While she deals with Risk Assessment Administration agents, her husband circles the airport with their infant twins to pick her up. She is detained because her risk score is high. She’s not committed a crime, she’s not even suspected of committing a crime.  But her risk score is too high. She’s detained because data pulled from her dreams has indicated she is an imminent threat to her husband.

It’s not a detention center.  But it is.  She is not detained. But she is.  They are not prisoners. But they can’t leave. Sara and the other dreamers are monitored daily for any changes to their risk scores. Get snarky with an officer? Watch your score go up.  Refuse to work? Increase in your score. Hair and uniform messy? You guessed it – your risk score will go up.  You will not be released until your score is under acceptable levels, yet you have done nothing wrong but dream.  (And Uncle Sam is going to use those dreams to make a profit.)

By the end of the novel, Sara’s paranoia and isolation gets into the reader’s mind.  Pacing like a caged animal beside her, the reader also can’t tell what’s real or what’s a dream. I held my breath, waiting for a freedom, the last page, release.

Read this book.

THE BOOK OF RECORDS – Madeleine Thien

“It is late and, in these hours, the Book of Records always takes on a new form. The train continues, a sound that blurs into the tide of water against the shore.”

“The boy turned the page of his book. ‘I’m counting the hours until we get to the ocean. My mother and aunt sent me ahead but I wish I could turn around and go back. There’s something important I forgot to tell them.”

Current installment of Tommi Reads the World – we are now in the C’s!!!

Country: Canada
Title: The Book of Records
Author: Madeleine Thien
Language: English
Translator: n/a
Publisher: W.W. Norton 2025

In my attempt to “get a jump” on the Booker Prize longlist (which will be announced Tuesday), I’ve made predictions and read several of my own and other predictions. Of those, I am almost 99.9% sure Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records (W.W. Norton 2025) will be listed.  I’m also pretty convinced, without even seeing the list, that it will win. When I talk about books oozing with Booker type, this novel is what I mean. Was it my favorite of those I’ve read recently? Absolutely not. Do I think it deserves a reread, at a slower pace?  Yeah, I do.  The art of storytelling, the formation of this novel, the building pieces that make it what it is, that is where this novel soars.  It’s smart, but it makes you work for it. 

While reading the novel, I found myself staring at my copy of A Wrinkle in Time, a book I devoured as a 6th grader from a quartet I devoured a few years back. The two Madeleines seem to have a bit in common; in many respects, I’d say this is the beloved childhood classic for adults.

The nuts and bolts of the novel are a young girl and her father arrive at a port that is purgatory – a place where the water that crashes into the land is a different body of water depending on who you ask. They, along with others, wait to take their leave. While there, the father is forced to reckon with his own past – a past Lina must face as well.

But the novel is much more than Lina and her father. The Book of Records bleeds memories and choices into the future, a story about storytelling and memory and the human condition. How we cling to the past, how we retell the events of our lives and the lives that came before, how these lives never cease but stay afloat in a limbo land on the sea or on a train, how we can weave in and out of the storylines, retelling, re-remembering them, making them ours.

Read this book.

DAYS OF LIGHT – Megan Hunter

“It was a language, she saw now, the way he touched her.”

Megan Hunter’s Days of Light (Grove Press 2025) is very Bookery, and I read it as part of my “get a jump on possible longlisted books” journey. It’s The Safekeep meets Stone Yard Devotional, and while I loved both of those novels, I rather disliked Days of Light. The writing is gorgeous, and Hunter is clearly quite talented; I simply hated both the story and the way it was told – and most of the characters. This is a “it’s not you, it’s me” moment, and I recognize that.

The novel opens on Easter Sunday 1938. Ivy is 19. Her older brother, Joseph, is home from Oxford and his girlfriend is to join them. They have a bit of odd family – their parents aren’t together but are. Her dad has his relationships and her mom has Angus (who has his own relationships.) They’re all “artistic” and rather fit the tortured artist stereotypes. Ivy is passable at all creative efforts, but not really amazing at any of them.

Ivy has a schoolgirl crush on Bear, one of Angus’s “friends” who has, quite literally, known her since she was born. He’s a “writer” and, of course,  gorgeous and hellbent on seducing her. (Enter the first “ick”)

Joseph dies that Easter Sunday – and much like when the stone was rolled away, no body was ever found. He drowns while swimming with Ivy. She sees a bright light and pays him no attention as he calls to her. She and her mother blame her.

Ivy and Bear first hook up at the funeral. (Enter the second “ick.”) After a half-hearted suicide attempt, she agrees to marry him.  What follows is a story told over six days but over decades, ending on the sixth day, which is Easter Sunday 1999.

My takeaway? Ivy was supposed to be the one to drown – the light was for her, and she knows it. Everything that happens after that moment, she just lets happen to her.  Bear? He was as good of a choice as going to Paris – she didn’t really care. When she becomes involved with Joseph’s girlfriend? Is that for her or for Joseph? She spends decades trying to find Joseph. She turns to God and has a few years as a nun because Bear died and Frances rejects her for her own husband. (She becomes Sister Francis.  Third Ick.)  Finally, the light comes for her.

I didn’t like Ivy.  Not at all.

My dislike of this novel means it is likely to be listed.

THE HISTORY OF SOUND – Ben Shattuck

“She wished that she could read music. She might have hummed the melody, or at least understood why this phrase of music was important or original or innovative enough – or elusive enough, at the risk of being forgotten – to require being written out so urgently. But she couldn’t read music, and so the artifact remained just that: something from a long time ago that she would never really understand.”

I read Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound (Viking 2024) because it was erroneously on a 2025 Booker eligible list I saw. As it was published last summer, it’s not eligible for the prize this year.  But what a happy mistake. The History of Sound is a collection of connected stories set in New England and spanning centuries. The writing is beautiful and urgent and cold and wet. You can feel the dampness and chill, and hear the cracking of the wood in the fireplace as these stories, these artifacts of memories, paintings, songs, letters, are how we find glimpses of immortality.

The collection opens with “The History of Sound” – a short-lived first love broken by circumstances and the war.  It ends with “Origin Stories” – a dusting off of the “artifacts” of music from the first story and reflection of a modern love story.  These two stories are the perfect bookends for the collection, but each story is a part of another and the way the collection is intricately woven is masterful.

As to my favorites of the twelve – it’s hard to pick.  I adored “Graft” – about a young woman in the late 1800s whose “husband” had a real family.  She left her son with her brother and disappeared. Over a decade later, she sees a boy at a museum that reminds her so much of her former husband, she’s convinced it is her son.  “The Auk,” which really needs to be read with its pair, “Radiolab: “Singularities,” is a love story about a man who will do anything for his wife, who has dementia. When he finds a taxidermized auk, a bird long extinct, he takes some pictures to play a joke on his brother.  His wife finds them and lights up. And so, the daily rouse of looking for the auk begins, because it brings her joy and reminds him of who she once was.

Each story has a mate, a partner in storytelling. From the mysterious death of a camp of loggers that isn’t so mysterious to the appearance of the auk, to first loves and lost loves and last loves, there’s something so human about this collection.

Read this book.

THE ANTIDOTE – Karen Russell

“A person can lose everything in an instant. A fortune, a family, the sun. I’ve had to learn this lesson twice in my life.”

“The coroner gave me the only picture that I have of Mama, a print of her body in the ditch.”

“I guess, the way I see it, you could tell the story of the Dust Bowl another way. You could widen the lens and say: this land is blowing because we stole it from the people who knew how to care for it.”

Karen Russell’s The Antidote ( Knopf 2025) went a bit higher on my TBR due to Booker Prize predictions. Having read it, I can say without pause or question that this quirky, magical, gritty, historical novel needs to be on that list – it may very well by my top read of the year, and I was remiss to not include it. There’s something Maguire’s Wicked meets Louise Erdrich meets Stephen King about it, which explains why I love every single word on every single page, but it’s also wholly its own beast.  And what a beautiful beast it is.

With themes of stolen lands, lives, and stories, Russell plops us in Uz County, Nebraska, nestling her story between the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935 and the flooding of the Republican River, and the story that takes place between the dust and the rain is absolute perfection.

The Antidote is a Prairie Witch, a Vault. People can deposit their memories inside her to retrieve or not retrieve later. Only after Black Sunday, she’s found herself bankrupt – the memories are gone. Before she became the Antidote, she was Antonina Rossi, and her sections are told to her son, addressed as “You.”

Asphodel “Dell” Oletsky is the young girl sent to live with her bachelor uncle after her drunk mother winds up dead in a ditch. She’s driven to win and plays basketball on a team that’s heading to the championship but just lost their sponsor. She becomes the Antidote’s assistant to help fund the team.

Harp Oletsky is Dell’s bachelor uncle. A religious man, he tries to understand why God didn’t let a speck of dirt into his home during Black Sunday and why his wheat flourishes while all around him, the crops have withered and died. Something is happening at his homestead – he understands that much. He just doesn’t know what.

Cleo Allfrey is the New Deal photographer who finds herself in possession of a bit of a magical camera.

Other POVs that enter the novel are the Scarecrow, who stands tall during the dust storms and who is gathering memories of what or who he was before, and Cat, the sheriff’s orange tabby who has her own vendetta and motives.

The Antidote is strange and fierce, gritty and gracious, honest and hopeful.

Read this book.