The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

 The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

By James McBride

At this point, I think I might have read as many McBride books as Murakami stories. He's an author who's work I know I will love, whatever the subject matter, and this was no different.

The book is set in 1930s Pottstown, PA, in the community of Chicken Hill. The area was first settled by Jewish immigrants, who in recent decades had been moving out as they tried to align their lives with the town's white residents and, in doing so, made room for increasing numbers of black people to move in. Moshe, a theater owner, and his wife Chona, though, are holdouts, largely because of the latter's insistence. Chona refuses to live her life by the "white" majority's rules, does not see moving closer to their environs as a step up -- and cannot understand Pottstown's division of people into classes and races. She grew up in Chicken Hill -- her father was its first rabbi -- and would stay there.

Part of the draw is The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, which, thanks to good business, Moshe is able to buy. The couple live above it, and it becomes something of the child that Chona herself cannot have. Monetarily, it is a losing proposition; but as a community center it is gold. It is not only a gathering place, but a social services network as well. And so, when a young Chicken Hill black boy, rendered deaf by a stove explosion that killed his mother, catches the attention of the state, who wants to put him in an institution where he will receive an "education", Chona and Moshe hide him. 

But then he is discovered. By Doc, an affable small-town doctor to local whites -- and a predator to the black and Jewish communities. When, in the middle of a seizure, to which Chona is prone, Doc begins to assault Chona, Dodo, the hidden boy, reveals himself and defends his adopted mother, an act that seals his fate to the institution. The community then must work together to get him back.

This, of course, is just one plot thread in the book. As a colleague remarked, McBride is a master of building these apparently different lines for hundreds of pages, and then bringing them all together at the end. Plot aside, though, this is a meditation on white power and privilege and the sickness it creates. It was a wonderful read. McBride's dialogue was particularly spot on and helped bring life and laughter to the characters.

I Must Betray You

 I Must Betray You

By Ruta Sepetys

Set in Romania during the final days of the reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, this book examines the toll that a society of spies takes on one another. The book opens with the main character, Cristian Florescu, "recruited" by the Romanian secret police. The quotation marks because he really has no choice. His recruiter, dubbed paddle hands because of the size of his digits, claims to have caught Cristian in the act of trading items (stamps) with a foreigner (a diplomat's son) in exchange for currency (a dollar). The first two are true, but harmless; it is the last item that could get Cristian, and his whole family, in trouble. Moreover, he is enticed by the promise of medicine for his beloved, ailing grandfather. And so Cristian, feeling he has no choice, becomes the thing he hates most in the world: an informer.

He is not alone. It's a society full of informers, and Cristian is left wondering who it was who informed on him. He settles on his once-best-friend, Luca. Meanwhile, his grandfather, sick though he may be, continuously reminds Cristian of the evils of a regime that relies on fear to subdue an entire population, much to the chagrin of his mother and father, who has become a silent shadow of himself.

There is light even in this grim world, though. Cristian kindles a relationship with a girl, Lilliana. But even this isn't safe. It turns out someone is watching them, and when word of specific details of their rendezvous get back to Lilliana, she assumes it is Cristian who revealed them. Is Cristian an informer? Yes. But not of this kind! And so once again, he is left enraged, searching for who might have given him up. He settles on his sister, but, it turns out, he is wrong. 

And then it all comes crashing down. All across Eastern Europe, communist dictatorships fall, and Ceausescu is the last. But it only comes after an uprising that is met with cruel violence, which brings Cristian and Lilliana back together -- but which takes the life of Christian's sister. It is only long afterward that he learns the truth: It was his own mother who spied on him.

I found this an interesting read, particularly when tension builds toward the end. It is a pretty chilling reminder of how lucky we are to live in a democracy, even if it is far less than perfect. 

Vacationland

 Vacationland

By John Hodgman

Some light-hearted reading for our road trip. This is a series of connected essays that basically tells the

story of John Hodgman's second homes. Strange. The first was a place in northwestern Mass inherited from his mother. The second is in Maine, a state with which Hodgman's has a strange love affair -- and which gives the book its title. 

I am writing this more than a month after finishing it, just as many of Kes' friends are heading to Maine on vacation, a destination that I find very strange. What appeal does Maine have for Vermonters? Their mountains have nothing on ours. And if it is coast you are seeking -- why not head to waters that are actually comfortable to swim in? Or go north to Canada, where you can actually get away from people and feel like your in Europe, what with all the French and whatnot?

Anyway, Hodgman is charmingly funny and just self-aware enough about his privilege to make this book readable. I can't say that much about it stuck with me, other than it was hard to believe that Hodgman was managing to make money off a story that is essentially about him having enough money to buy more than one house. Well done there. This is why I keep telling Erin to write a best-selling novel. 

As the Crow Flies

 As the Crow Flies

By Craig Johnson

I picked up this Walt Longmire mystery somewhere in our travels out west this summer.  Maybe Iowa?

Figured it'd be a good read while in that country, and I was certainly right. This Longmire adventure takes place on the reservation just across the Montana/Wyoming border -- out of Walt's jurisdiction, but within sight of the Big Horn Mountains.

This might be only my second Longmire book, but already there are tropes to recognize. His daughter always plays a role, making Walt feel guilty about being hyper-focused on his work but ultimately validating his commitment to justice. In this case, Walt is inexplicably charged with finding a wedding venue for his pregnant daughter, who is traveling from her new home in Philadelphia to marry the brother of his deputy. Given that his daughter is from the area, it is unclear to me why Walt is given this job, but what do I know? 

Then there is Henry Standing Bear, Walt's best friend, who has some pretty stereotypical superpowers, mainly being able to sneak up unseen on anyone at any time. He always comes to the rescue, and does several times here.

In this particular version of events, a young woman falls from some cliffs near a potential wedding venue. Is it suicide or murder? Since it happens in the first chapter of the book -- definitely murder. Though Walt is technically unable to work the case, he becomes embroiled when it becomes clear that neither the newly-minted tribal chief, who is suffering mentally from her time in Iraq, nor the FBI are up to the job. He mentors the young tribal officer, gets the FBI off her back, and, of course, solves the case. 

A great summer read. Perhaps the beginning of a tradition? 

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

By Gabrielle Zevin

For the first one hundred pages or so of this novel, all I could think of was Kavalier and Clay, Michael

Chabon's novel about a partnership in the golden age of comic books. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is also about a creative partnership during a "golden age" of sorts 50 or so years later, when it was possible for two unkowns in their early 20s to develop a blockbuster video game. Despite its widespread acclaim, I didn't care much for Kavalier and Clay, and abandoned it after 150 pages or so. For a while, I thought I'd do the same with Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

But there was something different about Zevin's novel. Perhaps it was just the circumstances in which I picked it up -- at the beginning of summer vacation when it feels like work will never come again and there is oodles of time to read. But I was pretty quickly immersed in the story, which focuses on the relationship between Sadie Green and Sam Masur, who became friends in an LA hospital (Sadie there because her sister had cancer; same recovering from a car wreck that killed his mother) when they bonded over games. It is a tumultuous friendship from the beginning. Someone suggests to Sadie, who is going for her bot mitzvah, log her hours with Sam as "community service", and she does. While she goes far beyond her required hours, totaling something like 600, when Sam finds out he feels betrayed and doesn't speak to Sadie for 6 years after.

That changes at a Boston train terminal, where Sam, now a Harvard student, spots Sadie, who is attending MIT, and rekindles a connection. Sadie is enrolled in a game-making class, and hands Sam some of her work. He is enthralled and becomes convinced that they can make a great game together. And they do. It makes them rich, helps them launch a company, and leads to more and more games. It also leads to more and more conflict. Sam and Sadie engage in on-again, off-again feuds that ends, many years and a significant tragedy later, in a kind of frenemy detente.

The novel explores many themes: The way(s) games mimic reality, and vice versa; the nature of grief, loss, and trauma; adulthood; and cultural appropriation. But most of all, it's an exploration of different types of love. There is love of games and art and pop culture, to be sure; at the center of the book, though, is love between people -- especially the love between Sadie and Sam, a love that is consummated through game play rather than romance or sex. 

It sounds boring. But it was really, really good.

A few complaints. I felt like the love between Sadie and Sam was never established well enough. There was lots of TELLING the reader that the two loved each other, but not enough showing it. For most of the novel, the two were at each other's throats about something, and the reader was just expected to take the love between them for granted. In addition, the characters were Seinfeldian in their unlikability. You become so intimate with each character's inner life that you root for them, but their inability to communicate effectively and kindly was maddening. Finally, I wish the author had done more with the gaming theme. The book is organized around the games the characters make. This felt like an opportunity to play with the narration a bit so that it somehow mimicked the games. The author did this a bit, but there could have been more.

The Poisonwood Bible

 The Poisonwood Bible

By Barbara Kingsolver

I came across this book in the little free library at the Plymouth Schoolhouse; it was one of the few texts

there that seemed worth reading, so I thought I'd pick it up.

The book tells the story of an American family who, at the insistence of the father, fly to the Belgian Congo to do missionary work. It is a doomed mission. The father, a preacher before World War II, emerged from the conflict a zealot, convinced that he needed to make up for his fortuitous injury that helped him miss the Bataan Death March in which nearly all of his fellow soldiers died. 

The rest of the family, a woman and four girls, are less dedicated. They all react to the relocation in different ways, and take turns narrating chapters. My favorites were Rachel, a vapid teacher whose writing was filled with humorous malapropisms, and Ada, a selective mute with a disability, who copes with her place in the world with word play and Emily Dickinson. 

The patriarch is stereotypically dismissive of the culture he finds in his new home. He, for instance, doesn't bother to learn that the native language is tonal -- the meaning of words changes based on how they are said. Which is how the book gets its name. The father, thinking he is trying to say something else, inadvertently calls his holy book "poisonwood", which is symbolic of the challenges he faces in converting the Congolese people.

Things take a turn for the worse for the family when an independence movement, led by Patrice Lumumba, successfully frees the Congo from Belgian rule. Though other local missionaries plead for the family to leave, the father, haunted by his wartime past, refuses. The family is cut off from their meager stipend, which still made them the richest people in their village, and, as the father takes long walks working on sermons few people will hear and fewer will understand, the women of the family are more or less left to figure out how to survive on their own. Eventually, they flee. Or three of them do. Leah falls in love with a local teacher, whose participation in the independence movement becomes problematic when a US-backed coup leads to the murder of Lumumba and the rise of a despot bent on enriching himself and silencing his rivals.

Overall, the book was interesting -- but far too long.    

I Have Some Questions for You

 I Have Some Questions for You

By Rebecca Makkai

This was an immersive, couldn't-put-it-down read that explores the intersection of all sorts of 

contemporary issues: #metoo, predatory prep school teachers, podcasts, true crime obsession, racism, and cancel culture. It's a lot.

The way the book reads is reminiscent of Serial, which examined the case of Adnan Syed and ultimately resulted in his release. Its narrator is Bode Kane, a professional podcaster who normally dedicates her airtime to the abuse of Hollywood starlets of the past but who becomes obsessed with the murder of Thalia Kieth, her onetime roommate at an exclusive prep school in the woods of New Hampshire called Granby. Kane returns to Granby during a two-week break in regular classes to teach a course on podcasting and helps steer one of her students to Thalia's murder. This amateur first attempt spawns a full-blown podcast that results in a new hearing for Omar, a black athletic trainer on whom the murder was, it seems, unjustly pinned. 

At the same time as she is mentoring her students, though, Kane herself becomes embroiled in controversy when her former husband, Jerome, is accused of abusing an art-world neophyte just as his career was starting to take off. Though her life's work is exposing the abuse of women actors and her current project is finding justice for a murdered young woman, Bode defends Jerome -- because even the accused admits that everything in the relationship had been consensual. So what, Bode questions publicly, is the actual abuse? 

Meanwhile, Bode begins to suspect, strongly, that her one-time choral teacher was sexually involved with Thalia, and might be responsible for her murder. But these encounters were also "consensual". So where is the line? Who deserves to be cancelled? Obviously, a teacher-predator -- and Bode quite deliberately sics a devoted online following on the former teacher in the hopes that he will, in fact, be cancelled. 

Is the author suggesting that the line between bad relationships and abuse is actually very clear if only we opened our eyes and looked for it? Or is she saying that these things are more complicated than they seem? Is she implying that #metoo and cancel culture have gone too far? Or that a little collateral damage is okay if it keeps our society bending toward justice?

Interesting questions, all, and they are wrapped up in an addictive plot. Great book.