June Reading Recap

Someday I'll write another blog post that isn't book reviews, but for now, I once again have so many books to talk about!

→ In the world of SUBLIMATION by Isabel J. Kim, throughout history, whenever people migrate, they might leave behind a duplicate version of themselves. At the moment of instancing, the selves are identical, but from that point, each instance develops separately. Soyoung was ten years old when her mother decided the two of them should leave Korea and move to America, and they both split at the border. Consequently, Soyoung stayed in Seoul to grow up surrounded by Korean family and culture. Meanwhile, her instance took on the name Rose, acculturated to the US, and eventually became a New Yorker. After their grandfather dies, Soyoung asks Rose to travel to Seoul for the funeral. The instances meet for the first time in a reunion that raises questions about their futures. The possibilities become more complicated with the announcement of an instancing technology that may have global implications.

This is an inventive work of speculative fiction that succeeds at character, plot, and worldbuilding. I was engrossed from the beginning by the premise and the personal stakes of Soyoung and Rose's situation, then thrilled by the way the story gradually expands outward. By the end, the plot is action-packed, but there's still a strong emotional core. Kim has imagined many logistical details around instancing and presents these in fascinating ways, especially through the use of alternate versions of old texts. (For example, in this world, Odysseus left an instance back in Ithaca when he set out for Troy.) I'm excited to recommend this book widely, read more of Kim's many short stories, and continue following her career.

→ WHISTLER by Ann Patchett: When Daphne is middle-aged, she reunites by chance with Eddie, who was her stepfather only briefly, when she was nine years old. Daphne and her sister adored Eddie, and he made their life better during the short period he was in her life, but then their mother abruptly divorced him. Daphne never understood why, though it seemed connected to an accident that Daphne and Eddie were in together. She's overjoyed to have him back in her life, and as they quickly reestablish the bond created by their shared experience, Daphne can finally ask for details about what happened all those decades ago.

Patchett excels at writing about complicated family relationships with believable specificity, and this story is full of terrific examples. The center of the novel is Daphne's unique connection to Eddie, first as a child and then as an adult. But along the way, Patchett also develops Daphne's relationships with the rest of her parents, her sister, and her husband, explores Daphne's own experience as a stepparent, and shows a variety of other marriages and family ties. I was captivated by all of it, and I went through a range of emotions with this story, including a lot of laughter. Another delight from one of my favorite authors!

→ THE NIGHT SWEEPS THE MOUNTAINS AWAY by Tanvir Ahmed: In a desert town, Sado makes his living as a water carrier and keeps his past to himself. When he meets Mina, he recognizes a tattoo that marks her as a fellow exile from a failed rebellion. Mina lives a reclusive life, but she gradually opens up to Sado, telling stories of her marriage to a dangerous man. She tries to make Sado understand why she is also dangerous, and yet he falls in love with her, despite the curse she carries.

This compact novella drew me right in with its smooth storytelling. I was rooting for Sado and Mina to have a chance at happiness by overcoming the dark forces they face. Ahmed's evocative descriptions, informed by his background as a scholar of medieval Islamic history, bring the setting to life. This is a beautiful, haunting tale.

→ YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke: Natalie has constructed the perfect life for herself, and she shares it daily with her millions of followers. At Yesteryear Ranch, she and her husband raise their expanding brood of children on homegrown food and traditional Christian values. Of course they're aided by modern appliances, farmhands, and a couple of nannies, because Natalie is less concerned with following a traditional lifestyle than with creating a polished and lucrative online brand. But one day, she wakes to find herself apparently transported to the 1850s, somehow trapped in a pioneer version of her life. She doesn't understand if she's time-traveled into this nightmare, been kidnapped into a horrific reality show, or what, but she's desperate to figure it out and escape.

This is a great concept, and I appreciated that the story is more complicated (and much darker) than that basic premise, but a lot of it didn't end up working for me. Since the book's structure alternates chapters of Natalie in the pioneer world with the backstory of how she became a tradwife influencer, I was often impatient about having to switch away from the more compelling mystery, and both timelines felt too slow to develop. There is eventually an answer to the question of what's happened, and while it's sort of clever, I didn't think it was set up plausibly enough. Where the book succeeded best for me was Natalie's character and voice, and how the narrative continually changes our understanding of her as the story goes on. Despite my complaints about the structure, I found the writing good at a sentence and scene level, and I'll be interested in reading whatever Burke writes next.

→ THE RIDE OF HER LIFE by Elizabeth Letts is a biography of Annie Wilkins, who decided in 1954 to journey across the United States on horseback, or die trying. Annie was in her early 60s, in poor health, with no family left except her loyal dog, and she no longer had the money or energy to run her farm in Maine. Faced with the prospect of ending life in a charity home, Annie chose to seize her own destiny instead. She bought a horse and set out with her dog and the dream of reaching California, and not much plan beyond that. Her journey was made possible by her determination, the generosity of strangers, publicity from the media, and plenty of luck.

This was a book club pick that I never would have read on my own, and though I did become engaged in the drama of Annie's journey with her animal companions, I would have preferred reading about it in a different form. Letts did extensive research that fills in details of the places Annie passed through and the people she met, as well as context about how America was changing in the 1950s. While some of that is interesting, it's not really what I was curious about. And these reported sections sit oddly against the scenes Letts depicts novelistically, describing thoughts and actions that couldn't possibly be verified. At the end of the book, I learned Letts drew heavily on Annie's memoir, LAST OF THE SADDLE TRAMPS, and I was sorry I didn't get the story from the perspective of the person who lived it. Letts also drops the revelation that she chose to call her subject Annie, "instead of the name she called herself, Mesannie," and that doesn't sit right with me.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel makes the case for why There Are More than Five POVs: "It's not that the categories are wrong exactly. But they are rooted more in grammar than narrative. Grammatically, 'I' and 'we' are both first-person pronouns. Narratively, there is a dramatic difference between an 'I' narrator and a collective 'we' narrative voice. An I is a single character and the story is limited to one perspective. A we is a group, which can provide a plethora of perspectives or else a sort of consensus chorus perspective. That opens up entirely different storytelling opportunities and restrictions."