November Reading Recap

I read some excellent novels last month, but am only realizing now that they all contain a good deal of tragedy.

→ CURSED DAUGHTERS by Oyinkan Braithwaite: Monife commits suicide by walking into the ocean at night on a Lagos beach. Her heart is broken by the events that have torn apart her young life (and that will be gradually revealed in the course of the novel). On the day of the funeral, her cousin Ebun goes into labor and gives birth to a girl who the rest of the family believes to be a reincarnation of Monife. Ebun doesn't want to hear any of that talk as Eniiyi grows up, and she also doesn't want to keep hearing about the family curse Monife was obsessed with. The story goes that because of a curse laid on an ancestor, women in the family can never keep the men in their lives, and this has proven true for generations. Interwoven narratives follow Monife to her tragic end, Ebun in the time afterwards, and Eniiyi as a young woman discovering that the idea she's a reincarnation may be more literal than she thought.

I love a story about family secrets when done well, and this one really delivered. As each section revealed new pieces, thickening the plot, I kept making different predictions about what was going on, and I was pleased to be sometimes right and sometimes wrong. I wasn't sure if the supernatural elements would work for me, but I ended up enjoying what they brought to the story. Braithwaite has created a great set of characters and given them a juicy (though often sad) plot to live out. I recommend this to fellow fans of family drama.

→ THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai: In 1985, Yale attends another memorial service for another young man dead from AIDS. The disease has been devastating his Chicago gay community, but Nico is the first close friend he's lost. Yale anticipates witnessing many more losses while he and his partner remain negative, thanks to falling in love years ago and making the unconventional choice to remain monogamous. Also experiencing the tragedy with a cushion of safety is Nico's younger sister, Fiona, who is estranged from her parents but has found a new family among her brother's friends, her "two hundred big brothers." In 2015, Fiona is middle-aged and traveling to Paris in search of her daughter, now estranged in turn. And back in 1985, Yale's story also becomes a search as his job at an art museum leads to investigating a mysterious set of artworks. In both timelines, the characters pursue their quests while the AIDS crisis looms large in Yale's present and Fiona's past.

The pieces of this novel fit together far better, and involve more nuance and complexity, than my brief description conveys. This type of dual timeline sometimes falls flat, but in this case, I found Fiona's chapters to be as compelling as Yale's and to add worthwhile layers to the story. An additional historical timeline figures into both threads, and all three are braided together in satisfying ways. Makkai is great at plot, building up suspense and mystery to create a page-turner while keeping the story believable and genuinely emotional. The novel clearly required extensive research, and the edition I read includes an oral history Makkai assembled from some of that research, recounting a 1990 Chicago protest for better AIDS healthcare.

→ THE UNVEILING by Quan Barry opens as a group of kayakers prepare to leave their Antarctic cruise ship for what's intended to be an hour's excursion paddling around the breathtaking scenery of the Southern Ocean. Striker is among the group because she's a location scout for a Shackleton biopic, so she's the only person not wealthy enough to afford the trip, and also the only Black person on the cruise. Before the kayakers even pull away from the ship, an albatross careens into a passenger on deck in a grisly scene that Striker immediately identifies as a bad omen. Sure enough, the expedition is soon thrown into disarray by bewildering tragedy, and that's only the start of the horrors. Striker reluctantly takes charge of the survivors while trying not to let on that she's increasingly unsure what's really happening and what's only taking place inside her troubled mind.

This novel is extremely tense and creepy, although Striker's sardonic narration does provide frequent moments of humor and incisive social commentary. Striker's narration also adds a disorienting layer to what is already a disturbing situation, ratcheting up the tension and creepiness. This is not a book where everything is explained by the end, but the story does unfold in a deliberate and satisfying way. I found it an effective work of horror that balances and blends external threats with psychological terrors. I continue to admire Barry's ability to write impressively complex novels that are completely different from each other in subject, tone, and genre. I imagine this one won't appeal to all fans of her previous work, but I do recommend horror readers check it out.

→ A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF by Megha Majumdar: In a not-too-distant future, the inhabitants of Kolkata are suffering amid severe food shortages and crushing heat. Ma, her toddler daughter, and her elderly father are better off than most. They have a house, a small supply of food stashed away, and most importantly, visas for immigrating to the United States on a flight that departs in a week. Ma is committed to doing anything necessary to keep her family safe, and so she's stolen most of their food supply from donations to the shelter where she works. Boomba, a young man staying at the shelter, observes her theft and follows her home to steal the food back and provide for his own family. He also takes Ma's purse with the travel documents, and not recognizing their value, he throws them away. In the days remaining before the flight, the lives of Ma and Boomba become further entwined, with terrible consequences.

This is a gripping story, effective at creating anxiety and tension. It is also unrelentingly bleak, all the way through to the ending. I'm surprised that hasn't tempered the largely effusive praise, because it makes me hesitant to recommend the novel, though it's well written. I appreciated Majumdar's narrative choices and descriptive passages. I was caught up in the situation and how it sets the characters at odds, but I was unprepared to be left with so little hope.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, two authors with new releases discuss their research and worldbuilding processes. First, Aja Gabel details the lessons she learned writing Lightbreakers: "I had to reckon with science in a way I resisted for many, many drafts. I thought I could gesture towards a time travel mechanism without getting too specific. While I do think that most readers don't need or want scientific precision in their literary speculative fiction, I failed to see that I was the one who had to be precise in my understanding if I was to give readers only what they needed to know. I didn't want my readers to drown in the details, but unfortunately, I had to. I had to build a believable machine, and I had to know exactly how it worked, even if readers only saw the tip of the iceberg."

→ Emma Donoghue explains her approach to historical fiction and the research for her latest novel, The Paris Express: "But as soon as I plunged into background reading about the kinds of painters, scientists, writers, inventors, artisans, aristocrats, students, radicals and queers who were living in Northern France in the 1890s, I realized that this was a dazzling pool of potential characters. Belle Epoque Paris, the heart of a wide French empire, was also a hub of modernity that magnetically drew a wider range of people than any place I'd written about before. Paris had expats from Philadelphia and Cuba, students from Ireland and Cambodia... I ended up only needing to invent two named characters. (One of them, a coffee-seller staggering about all day with a hot tank strapped to his back, like a human Starbucks, was suggested by a painting I spotted in a museum of the history of Paris.) The remaining fifteen are all real people who could plausibly have caught the train that day—and there's nothing to say that they didn't."