Once again, it's time for my monthly batch of book reviews:
→ LESSONS IN MAGIC AND DISASTER by Charlie Jane Anders: Jamie's relationship with her mother Serena has been strained ever since her other mother died. It's been more than six years, and Serena still hasn't recovered from the loss of her wife, and that grief keeps her isolated, living as a near hermit. Jamie thinks it might help Serena, and bring the two of them closer, if she shares a secret: Jamie is a witch. She's never spoken about this to anyone, even her own partner, but as a child, Jamie discovered that there's magic in the neglected, overgrown places where human structures and nature coexist. Throughout her life, Jamie has harnessed this magic to attain her modest desires for happiness, love, and success in her academic career. Magic has always made things better for Jamie, but the first time Serena tries on her own, the spell goes scarily wrong. Now Jamie isn't sure what to do about the fact that she's let her unpredictable mother in on knowledge that's far more powerful than she realized.
I was immediately invested in the emotional story of Jamie and Serena, and their uncertain attempts to heal their relationship and each other. I love how magic works in this novel, both the mechanism of finding neglected places and the subtle way that many of the spells take effect. An additional fascinating plot thread focuses on Jamie's academic research in eighteenth century literature. Anders has crafted a literary mystery involving real historical figures and a fictional book of unknown authorship, and Jamie's investigations lead to accounts of some fun historical scandals. The two parts of the story don't always sit together easily, but at the end, they connect up in a satisfying way. This is a beautiful novel full of big emotions and unexpected pieces, just like its characters.
→ THE WILDERNESS by Angela Flournoy opens with Desiree traveling from Los Angeles to Paris with her grandfather. She's been looking after him as his health declines, and now he has decided they should take this final trip before he undertakes assisted suicide in Switzerland. Desiree knows she needs to tell her sister what's happening, but she fears that revealing the plan only when it's too late to stop it will end their relationship—and she's right. Years later, Desiree is estranged from her sister, but she has three close friends, "almost enough to fill the hole a sister could leave." The three other women each take focus for parts of the story as it jumps forward and back in time, exploring the ways their lives and friendships evolve over more than 20 years.
This is one of those novels where I liked all the individual scenes but found the whole a bit lacking. Flournoy has crafted a great set of characters who I was glad to get to know over time, and sometimes wished to know better than the constraints of the story permitted. The friends are all Black women of the same age, but they don't have much else in common, making for interesting conflicts and changes in how close the different pairs are as the years pass. Each chapter places one or more of the characters in a situation that's emotional and realistically portrayed, if often fairly isolated from the surrounding events. With the way the book shifts between times, characters, and styles, leaving many pieces out, it might be better approached as a set of linked stories.
→ THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston: Janie returns to her Florida home after more than a year away, and the neighbors are abuzz with gossip. She left with a younger man, and because she's returned alone, they speculate that he ran off with someone else and stole all the money she inherited from her late husband. But Janie tells her best friend that isn't what happened to Tea Cake, and she'll relate the whole story, beginning back in her childhood. Janie was raised by her grandmother, who was born in slavery and tried to set Janie up well by marrying her off to a successful farmer. It wasn't the life Janie wanted, and her longing for love and for change led her into a second marriage. Eventually the story reaches Janie meeting Tea Cake, the love they share, and the adventures they have together before events bring her back home.
I first read this 1937 classic for a high school class—or at least I think I did, but I'd forgotten everything about it. I was inspired to pick it up now because of two recent podcasts: Our Ancestors Were Messy recounted the friendship and falling out between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and Zero to Well-Read discussed Hurston's novel and its position in the history of Black literature.
This was fascinating to read as an artifact of its time, even though my engagement in the story fluctuated. Some sections dragged for me, but I was completely captivated toward the end, when the last few chapters become nonstop tension. I love the way Hurston writes, switching between two distinct modes: poetic descriptions that paint a scene or convey an idea, and dialogue in dialect that captures the sounds of the characters' spoken language. I was glad for an opportunity to return to this novel and learn more about its context.
→ AUDITION by Katie Kitamura begins with a middle-aged actress (our unnamed narrator) meeting a young man for lunch. This is their second meeting, and Xavier wants something from her, but what he wants, and what happened on the first occasion, remains unspoken. There is tension to their interaction, and in the narrator's realization that people around them are making incorrect assumptions about the nature of their relationship, when the truth is something else entirely. As the chapters unfold, who Xavier is becomes clear, though the situation is strange. And then in the second half of the novel, there's a major shift, and everything is less clear, and far stranger.
All the talk around this novel concerns the mystery of the shift at the midpoint, and my curiosity drew me to the book, and quickly through the first half (it's quite short). I definitely didn't predict how the story would change, and that surprise delighted me and set my hopes high for how the two halves would connect. I continued speeding through, forming theories around various fascinating moments, but also starting to wonder whether the disparate pieces could all lead to a single conclusion, especially after the narrative grows particularly strange toward the end. As it turns out, Kitamura didn't intend for the story to have a definitive solution or interpretation, and that approach left me underwhelmed. Reactions to this book have been highly polarized, and my feelings fall somewhere in the middle. It's a well-written and compulsive read, and I like the concept, but I wanted something different from it.
Good Stuff Out There:
→ Mo Willems breaks down the mechanics of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! for Dan Kois at Slate: "When someone reads a book, they try to spend the same amount of time on each page no matter what. When an adult reads to a kid, each page, you're going to spend the same amount on the page. So when you have eight images on a spread like this, you're going to read that four times as fast as single images."
