December Reading Recap

I'm back from a relaxing break that included a trip to the coast. As anticipated, I did little besides read, knit, and eat yummy food for a couple of weeks. Now I'm getting back into the swing of writing, starting with a final batch of 2015 book reviews:

→ PYM by Mat Johnson: Chris is a black literature professor who doesn't want to be shoehorned into only teaching Black Literature. For this sin, he's denied tenure and has to leave the historically white institution where he's been teaching, but a hefty settlement provides him the money and time to pursue a literary obsession. Chris is fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In this perplexing and racist story, presented as a true account shared with Poe, Pym travels to the Antarctic region, stops at an isolated island of black inhabitants, and upon reaching the Antarctic mainland, encounters an enormous white creature in the snow. When Chris finds evidence that suggests Arthur Pym and his journey might have really taken place, he joins an expedition to Antarctica. What he uncovers there is just as bizarre as Pym's adventures.

Johnson's novel is funny, clever, and wonderfully strange. I love the premise of tracking down the truth behind a 200-year-old tall tale, and this story executes the premise in fascinating and unexpected ways. The book is a madcap series of adventures with a cast of unusual characters. It's also an exploration of black-white relations and the very blurred lines between these groups. There are many more amazing things happening in PYM, but I don't want to spoil any surprises. If the description I've given interests you at all, you should read this book!

Previous knowledge of the Poe novel isn't expected, and all the relevant details are entertainingly explained by Professor Chris, along with his speculations on what it all means. The full text of Poe's story is readily available online, though, and I did enjoy comparing certain sections as I read PYM to find echoes.

→ FATES AND FURIES by Lauren Groff was one of the big literary titles of 2015, making many year-end lists, including President Obama's. I'm glad I read this engrossing, unusual story of a marriage that's told in expertly chosen moments and details. And I'm glad, but amazed, that a novel of that description found such wide appeal.

The story opens the day Lotto and Mathilde marry, a mere two weeks after meeting. He loves her deeply and obsessively, and he feels his whole young life has led to their union. The early years of marriage are full of love but disappointment, as Lotto fails to make it as an actor and the couple struggles to make ends meet in their tiny basement apartment. When Lotto discovers his talent as a playwright, Mathilde helps guide him into a successful career. While there are still creative struggles to contend with at times, Lotto is at home basking in the fame he always imagined for himself, with his loving wife at his side. Then we get to see the marriage from Mathilde's point of view.

The he-said-she-said structure is a big part of the marketing and discussion around the book, and that plus its popularity led me to expect a story like GONE GIRL, with shocking reversals and thriller plotting. FATES AND FURIES is about a marriage with secrets, yes, and its second half is full of startling revelations, for sure, but there's nothing so conventional as a mystery driving this story. I was struck repeatedly by how unexpected it all was, and not just because I didn't anticipate the twists and turns. The varied narrative style was a surprise, the plot developments were out of the ordinary, and I didn't even guess at the types of twists the novel had in store. All these elements are well executed, with beautiful writing throughout. I recommend this book, particularly to those interested in relationship dynamics or depictions of the creative process.

→ I was looking forward to PARABLE OF THE SOWER by Octavia Butler, who will be celebrated as the Honored Ghost at FOGcon this March. Many of my friends adore this novel, but alas, I wasn't a fan. I often found myself bored, and I wasn't interested in the aspects of the story that received the most focus.

Wrapping Up and Winding Down

The end of 2015 approaches, and I'm ready to switch my brain to vacation mode. Before I sink into a revel of books, knitting, and sugar, here's an update and overview of my writing year.

At the end of October, I mentioned I was a month into a new novel that I was writing with very little plan in mind. Yesterday I completed that first draft. I brought the characters and situation to a reasonable point of closure a bit past the 50,000-word mark that defines a novel in NaNoWriMo. The manuscript concludes with a self-indulgent epilogue that gives every character a happy ending, which was my reward for pushing through to the end.

Nobody gets to read this story. It's not at all good. Though I didn't restrict myself to writing in a single month, I basically NaNoWriMoed this first draft, and in true NaNo fashion, there are some tiny brilliant bits that emerged as surprises in the course of writing, and the rest is discardable. The premise turned out to be only marginally fruitful, and everything interesting happened in the subplots. I do like how many of the characters evolved, and some elements of the story have potential, so maybe certain parts could be salvaged and turned into something else. But that's a concern for another year.

At least I can report that I wrote a novel this year. I learned some things in the process and reminded myself what first drafts are like (bad). I derived some satisfaction from following through on a large project. It kept me from running wild on the streets or the internet for a couple of hours each day.

The more significant and satisfying writing endeavor of 2015 was yet another revision of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, which occupied me for the first half of the year. After confronting the fact that my manuscript was just too long, I shortened it by over 20%. By now I can't even remember how I possibly achieved this feat, so I'll have to review my series of posts about The Incredible Shrinking Manuscript.

All throughout the year, I've continued fiddling with the outline I keep talking about that I hope will eventually become another novel. This has been mostly a background project, and while I'm making gradual progress with it, I don't have any exciting milestones to announce.

I had a lot of fun this year composing blog entries that explore my childhood writing. Reading and analyzing the bizarre things I wrote as a kid has provided me with great amusement each month, and I'm glad my readers find these posts entertaining as well. I have more gems to share in 2016.

My final ongoing writing project is producing reviews of every book I read. The monthly recap format has been working out well for me, and I'll probably continue with that next year. Stay tuned for a January post with my favorite books of 2015, reading stats, and so on.

I'll wrap this up with two non-writing notes. First, for those who didn't see it elsewhere, check out the sweater I finally finished knitting and assembling this fall, a year and a half after starting it. And lastly, let's not forget that in 2015, we learned that I am a treasure chest once owned by the Visigoths.

May your 2015 wind down with some moments you can treasure. Here's to the end of another year!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel considers genres and the myths of popularity, with statistical analysis and an overview of ongoing debates: "There is an odd cognitive dissonance that happens in these conversations, where we are simultaneously supposed to believe that literary fiction is 'mainstream fiction' and genre fiction is 'ghettoized,' and also that literary fiction is a niche nobody reads while genre authors laugh all the way to the bank."

Mental Turmoil Aboard Flight 103

The journey through my early writing efforts has brought us to my eighth grade English class, which as I explained last time placed an emphasis on both writing and revising. Today we're going to look at a piece of fiction that was more heavily revised between drafts than anything else that year, though unfortunately not wisely.

I have strong memories of writing this story and being quite pleased with it. Apparently it was my favorite of the works I produced that year, because I chose it as my entry in the collection our class published (Xeroxed) at the end of the year. Encountering the story again now, I found it odder than I remembered, but also duller.

I'd recalled this was a very short story, unfolding in the space of a single limited scene, but what I hadn't remembered is that the assignment was actually "Write a Story Opening That Shows Mood". That explains why this feels like the setup for something more interesting, though it doesn't explain much else.

Mental Turmoil Aboard Flight 103

The airplane glided across the runway, then left the ground with a sonic boom. A man gazed longingly through the window at the city of Chicago.

"Would you like something to drink, sir?"

George Loring looked blankly at the stewardess for a moment. He blinked and came to his senses. "Oh," he stuttered. "I-I'll have a Miller Lite."

"I'll need to see some sort of identification, sir," said the stewardess.

George, a man well into his thirties, was very flattered. "Why, thank you," he said, pulling out his license, "that's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all day."

After the stewardess left, George sank back into the plush seat and sipped his beer. He glanced through the stack of papers on the table in front of him. Most of them were forms that he had to fill out to get on the spaceship. "They can put men on the moon," he muttered, "but they can't eliminate the paperwork."

He picked up a pen and started writing his name, address, date of birth, eye color, hair color, and shoe size. Once he arrived at NASA, the papers would be processed, registered, examined, and re-examined. He knew the whole system by heart. In spite of all the hype, going to the moon just wasn't all that much fun.

"We are experiencing some turbulence," announced the computer pilot in an unnerving monotone.

"I can see that," said George, though his teeth, as his beer splashed onto the table, narrowly missing the important documents. "God, I hate traveling!"

"This isn't as bad as it seems," George thought. "I should be grateful that I am going to the moon. Most people would die for the chance."

"I wish they would," said George's cynical side. "There's a terrible population problem."

"Come on," said the optimist George. "Look around you. Don't you feel lucky?"

George looked around at the plane. It was tastefully decorated in silver and blue, with all the latest airline technology.

"No," said George, "I feel like an idiot talking to myself. But yes, I suppose that I am lucky, having an all-expense paid trip to the moon to do boring experiments." He sighed. "Oh, well. Anti-gravity is nice."

Before George could continue his schizophrenic debate, the computer announced, "We will be landing at Quayle National Airport in Cape Canaveral in five minutes."

November Reading Recap

I had a very bookish November, what with my trip to Book Riot Live and further adventures in New York City afterwards, but that didn't leave time to read as many books as usual!

→ CARRY ON by Rainbow Rowell: Simon's last year at the Watford School of Magicks is off to a strange start. Sure, he's attacked by a goblin on his way to school, but that's par for the course when you're the Chosen One. What has Simon on edge is that Baz, his roommate and sworn enemy, hasn't returned at the beginning of the term, and Simon is sure Baz is plotting something terrible against him. The mystery of his vampiric roommate's whereabouts has Simon too obsessed to think about the danger posed by the Insidious Humdrum, who threatens to destroy all the world's magic if the Chosen One can't defeat him.

When I began reading CARRY ON, a couple of things were very distracting. First of all, Simon's world is unabashedly inspired by the Harry Potter series, so I had constant thoughts like, "Okay, that character's the Hagrid equivalent. That's a skewed version of the Sorting Hat." Second, Simon originated inside another of Rowell's novels, FANGIRL (a story I loved), where he was the hero of a popular book series beloved by the main character, and the subject of all the fanfiction she wrote. This origin story is a little difficult to wrap your head around; Elizabeth Minkel explains it in more depth.

But the farther I got into the book, the less these distractions bothered me, because this is a strong, exciting, well-developed story in its own right. The characters are complex, flawed people faced with all the awkward realities of human interaction. The plot is fast-paced and full of surprising turns. The writing is funny and clever (with bonus language cleverness in the magic system, as cataloged by Gretchen McCulloch). In short, CARRY ON has everything that makes Rainbow Rowell's books so wonderful, and I heartily recommend it.

You don't need to have read FANGIRL to enjoy CARRY ON, and you may even find it easier to get into the story without the confusion of previous knowledge, so start with whatever interests you more. Both books are great, and so is everything else Rowell has written.

→ CHALLENGER DEEP by Neal Shusterman: Caden is a fifteen-year-old boy having a difficult time functioning at home and school because of the disturbing fears that fill his head. Caden is also, at times, a crew member aboard a pirate ship bound for the deepest part of the ocean, subject to frequent taunting and torment from the cruel captain. The novel's extremely short chapters bounce Caden back and forth between these worlds to portray his descent into mental illness and his struggle to accept and comply with psychiatric treatment.

I was moved and appropriately terrified for Caden as he found reality increasingly hard to grasp. The scenes set in the real world worked best for me because that was where the stakes and my sympathies felt highest. I was less engrossed by the story of the ship, which seemed partly Caden's delusion and partly more of a metaphor. Ultimately, though, I found the book very affecting.

I was curious to read this because for a while I was working on a manuscript that also depicted a character who traveled between the real world and a delusional realm. Unlike my trunked novel, Shusterman's story benefits from a well-informed perspective. His son received a diagnosis like Caden's as a teenager, and Shusterman drew on the experiences of his son and their family to present an authentic representation of mental illness.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Tobias Carroll looks at board games adapted from books: "New York's King Post Games held a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2013 for Moby-Dick, or, The Card Game, their adaptation of Herman Melville’s novel. Their version of Moby-Dick is both compelling and faithful in its translation of the bleakness of Melville's ending: rather than winning per se, a game's winner is the final player left alive after the white whale attacks."

An Introduction to Me, Age 13

Throughout this investigation of my childhood writing, I've been excited to get to the thick folder of eighth grade work. English class that year placed a heavy focus on writing, with an emphasis on the planning and revision stages. I was eager to examine pages of crossed-out sentences and scribbled notes that might reveal my early story development process.

Alas, while at least two drafts of every piece survive, the differences between versions are minimal in most cases, with only a few word choices improved, punctuation errors fixed, and maybe an occasional sentence rewritten. And really, that's not surprising, since I was a 13-year-old kid who'd always been praised for strong writing skills. Why would I bother to alter my stunning prose?

Based on my own experience and what I've observed in others, it tends to take a long time for writers to understand and accept that what pours out in the first draft is often nothing close to the best possible version of a story. Revision is time-consuming, difficult, and frustrating, so it's no wonder we resist it. Still, I applaud the Sudbury (Massachusetts) Public Schools for teaching revision in the eighth grade writing curriculum, even if this step was only cursory in practice:

Book Riot Live Report

The very first Book Riot Live conference was an incredible success, and I'm so glad I was able to visit New York City to attend!

I stayed in New York for the post-con week, hanging out with various family members, attending theater, and seeing sights, all of which was awesome as well. In quiet moments between the continued fun, I jotted down the highlights of my Book Riot Live experience, and I finished assembling this report on the flight home.

The programming at the con was excellent, and my only complaint was that at times there were too many cool things happening at once! I started my weekend -- after eating gourmet doughnuts in a car wash -- with a live recording of the Book Riot podcast. This show keeps me informed about the most interesting news from the book world on a weekly basis, so it was cool and strange to see the faces of the people with the familiar voices. During the Q&A period, I asked the first question, and I was tickled when the hosts recognized me from Twitter! You can listen to the live episode and hear me at about 33 minutes in. (Is that really what I sound like?)

The next day I attended another recording, this one for the interview show Reading Lives. The guest was announced only a couple of weeks before the con, and I was thrilled to learn it would be Angela Flournoy. Back in May, I recommended her wonderful debut, THE TURNER HOUSE, and it was great to hear about her development as a writer and reader.

Fighting the Good Fight: Turning Awareness Into Action was a fantastic panel of representatives from We Need Diverse Books, VIDA, First Book, and the Harry Potter Alliance, all great organizations working to increase diversity in publishing and accessibility of books. The panelists discussed their activism efforts and ways for readers to participate. In particular, there was much talk about noticing and counting who is represented on any list of books or authors, whether it's a personal record of books read or a set of award nominees or guest speakers. Striving for diversity in any such list, and calling it out when it's not there, has a cumulative positive effect. Personally, I've been very happy with how my reading life has expanded since I started paying more attention to who I read and recommend.

I was delighted at the prospect of attending a conversation between Margaret Atwood and N.K. Jemisin, two amazing authors I admire. The subject of the panel was Writing What You Don't Know, but the discussion was a wide-ranging one. I really didn't care what topic these two were speaking on, because everything they had to say was so smart and funny. The event was covered by The Guardian, which recapped the conversation, and I suggest reading that article for some choice quotes.

October Reading Recap

October was an exciting reading month, with one much-anticipated new release and two books from Book Riot Live authors:

→ ANCILLARY MERCY by Ann Leckie is the delightful and satisfying third book of a trilogy. I've previously offered strong recommendations for the first and second installments, and I'm happy to do the same for the conclusion. If you like science fiction and haven't checked out this series yet, it's now safe to get started, and I highly encourage it.

The trilogy follows Breq, an artificial intelligence who once controlled an enormous spaceship and all its crew, but is now reduced to a single isolated body. A quest for revenge drove Breq through the first book, and the second found her embroiled in political and personal complications. In this final book, she has to deal with the many consequences of what's come before, and it's a messy affair.

As with the other books, I was impressed by the way this story is simultaneously epic and intimate. It's an extraordinary combination of tense action scenes and people processing their feelings. Both Leckie's writing and Breq's unique worldview are always wryly perceptive, and this was probably the funniest installment of the series. ANCILLARY MERCY closes numerous arcs of plot and character development, some I hadn't even realized I was waiting to see resolved, and it brings the trilogy to a perfect ending.

→ EDINBURGH by Alexander Chee is a beautiful and difficult novel. It tells the story of Fee, who joins a boys' choir at 12 years old, becomes best friends with another singer, and falls deeply in love with him. The purity of this unrequited first love is quickly shattered when Fee, his friend, and the other young boys in the choir are molested by the man who directs the group. This sexual abuse continues for months, and after it's stopped, Fee and his friends can't escape the effects of the trauma. As Fee grows older, suffers through more unrequited crushes, and eventually finds happiness with a man who loves him back, all these relationships are complicated by his first great love and his first unwanted sexual experiences.

I'm not going to lie: This is a grim book. But I was engrossed by the unusual ways the narrative reveals and explores the horrific events and how they impact and confuse everything that comes later. The scenes of abuse are not explicit and are in fact often nearly glossed over, reflecting the first person narrator's discomfort with speaking about them. The disparate topics that Fee chooses to focus on instead form a fascinating and strange story. The writing style throughout the book is gorgeous, filled with delicious, well-observed details like "The sky outside my window is a dark door with light peeping under the crack."

Chee is a great writer. I look forward to his participation in Book Riot Live, and to the release of his second novel next year.

→ I'm a big fan of Margaret Atwood, who has written some amazing novels. THE HEART GOES LAST is not her best work. The earlier part of the book explores some interesting worldbuilding ideas, and later it turns into an exciting conspiracy thriller that becomes rather madcap toward the end, so there's plenty of enjoyment potential, but much of the story didn't appeal to me.

In the wake of a large-scale economic meltdown, Charmaine and Stan are among the many who have lost their comfortable middle class existence. The couple is broke, desperate, and living in their car when they learn about a chance to improve their situation. They apply to move into an idyllic suburb, where they'll receive housing and good employment in exchange for spending every other month as inmates in the prison that fuels the local economy.

The premise behind the town's utopian vision doesn't make a lot of sense, but maybe it doesn't need to, because the town is actually funded by nefarious schemes Charmaine and Stan eventually uncover, though those don't necessarily hold up under scrutiny either. These issues of plausibility and some plot holes, as well as the amount of time spent on entertaining but unimportant tangents, made the novel feel unpolished to me. It's also the case that the author was interested in different aspects of the story than I was, and I wasn't amused by much of what was intended to be ridiculous or satiric. Despite my lukewarm reaction to this particular book, I'm still thrilled to hear Atwood speak at Book Riot Live this weekend.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Adrian Barnes writes in The Daily Beast about the strange and terrible synchronicity of receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer as his novel neared publication: "As both the disease and my novel progressed I began to notice eerie similarities between the two, even down to the physical similarity between the eye on the book's cover and an image of the tumor itself, with its vein-like tendrils spreading out across my brain."

Writing Methods

There's this idea that two methods of writing exist, plotting and pantsing (flying by the seat of one's pants). Plotters outline the whole story in advance, potentially in great detail, then write a first draft that follows the outline. Pantsers begin writing with no plan and discover the story in the process of writing it, knowing they'll revise later to make everything fit together better. Often these two strategies are discussed with the suggestion that any given writer is one type or the other.

As with most dichotomies, the reality is more of a spectrum. Plenty of plotters expect to adjust or even ignore their outlines once they start writing and think up new ideas. Pantsers usually have some overall plot concept in mind at the beginning and may have many smaller details planned out. People also swear by writing processes that fall in between the two camps or aren't identifiable as either. And while some writers can only imagine working at one or the other extreme, others try out both at different times.

A month ago I gave an update on the novel I'm plotting in a hardcore way. This is the first time I've done extensive outlining before the first draft, but much of the work feels familiar from planning subsequent drafts of novels I wrote pantsily. I'm now revising my outline, which is also a familiar process, and I'm still pleased at the idea that all this advance work will eventually lead to a first draft that's solid, well-structured, and doesn't require several rounds of rewriting.

In response to a discussion about that post, my friend Julia wrote an amazing breakdown of her writing process, which involves a great deal of outlining and advance planning. Many of the steps Julia details are similar to what I've been doing as I plot out this novel, as well as what I've done when preparing for past revisions. Some of the parts that resonate with me aren't things I was conscious of doing or wouldn't have thought to call out, so I'm very impressed with her level of insight into her own process. Do check out her post, and feel free to imagine me doing most of that stuff, especially lying on the floor in despair.

While I'm enjoying my plotting, other than the bouts of floor despair, I was growing eager to begin writing something new, and this plot-in-progress isn't ready to embark on yet. I'd been musing for a while on another idea I thought I might be able to start drafting, but once I took notes on what I'd thought of so far, I found I didn't have enough to work with. I went through the "I will never have another idea oh wait I have an idea" routine surprisingly quickly and came up with something that I was fairly confident could result in a novel-length text.

In the past month, I've written 25,000 words on this new novel, and while I will not claim that they are good words in their present combination, they do set in motion a story that I'm curious to get to the end of. I've been pantsing pretty hard, assigning the characters problems that come to me on a whim, setting up scenes with no plan for how they'll play out, and surprising myself with intriguing developments. I have a very general sort of conclusion in mind but only the vaguest sense of how I might get there, which is both fun and terrifying. I fully expect that if this story turns out to be any good, I'll have to throw out at least half the subplots and overhaul many of the characters in the next draft. This novel, unlike the one I'm pre-plotting, will require a ton of rewriting.

I like plotting, and I like pantsing. Maybe eventually I'll decide that one end of the spectrum is more useful for me to stick with, but at the moment, I'm quite content to be working with both methods.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ In The Atlantic, Noah Charney explains the the reality of the modern book tour: "Then arrived another solution that I only learned about on my first tour, back in 2007 for my novel The Art Thief. It peeled back the veil over this quasi-legendary concept of authors on tour (I imagined groupies, whiskey, cigarette smoke, typewriters), and exposed me to a new, and completely fascinating, role that I never knew existed: that of the awkwardly named 'escort.'"

Thoughts I Had While Young

Earlier in this journey through my childhood writing, I noted that I don't have much in the way of fiction from sixth grade, and the same is true of seventh, probably because my middle school curriculum put a heavy focus on creative writing in eighth grade. We'll get to that soon.

The documents preserved in my seventh grade folder are primarily nonfiction reports and essays, though one exception is an afterword I was assigned to write for the novel SHANE, speculating on what happens after the end of the story. (All I remember of this book is that it involves a guy on a horse, or maybe that means all I remember is the cover.) Throughout my school career, writing an additional chapter to a novel was a frequent (and fun, for me) assignment. If this is a widespread phenomenon, it's just occurred to me that a lot more of us have written fan fiction than we might have realized.

The most "interesting" works from this time period are a number of opinion pieces, but before we check out those essays, I want to share one fact-based report, in part because it has such a ridiculous cover.

September Reading Recap

I read outstanding books last month, mostly. I highly recommend two recently published novels, MAKE YOUR HOME AMONG STRANGERS and SAFEKEEPING, which I hope are on their way to wider recognition. The graphic memoir FUN HOME has already garnered much praise, and deservedly so. I was less impressed by the acclaimed older novel RABBIT, RUN. Read on for full reviews:

→ MAKE YOUR HOME AMONG STRANGERS by Jennine Capó Crucet: Lizet has left Miami and her Cuban immigrant parents to attend a prestigious college in upstate New York. She's completely out of her depth there and in serious academic trouble by Thanksgiving, when she makes a surprise trip home. Upon her return to Miami, she discovers that her mother, along with most of the city, is more interested in the arrival of a young Cuban boy, the only survivor from an ill-fated boatload of refugees. As the fate of this youngster (a fictionalized version of Elián González) turns into an ongoing news story, Lizet keeps running up against the ways she's grown apart from her family and the ways she doesn't fit in at school.

This novel pulled me in immediately with a strong narrative voice, and I remained engrossed throughout. Lizet is an excellent protagonist. At times her stubbornness is frustrating, and she possesses the impulsivity and arrogance of a teen on the verge of adulthood, but that same determination is just as often admirable, and I felt great sympathy for her fear and confusion as she faces new grownup challenges. The story is beautifully, powerfully written, and every character and situation is real and compelling.

Lizet and her family are a product of Crucet's imagination, but the author drew upon her own experiences as a first-generation college student. She published a fascinating essay in the New York Times about her real life challenges and another on realizing this story should be told. I'm glad it's out there.

→ Jessamyn Hope will be one of the guest speakers at Book Riot Live, so I looked at a sample of her debut novel, SAFEKEEPING. Within a couple of pages, I was invested, and I only grew more intrigued as the story took me deeper into the problems and pasts of the characters.

When Adam shows up in Israel to volunteer at a kibbutz, he's in bad condition. He's suffering alcohol withdrawal, he's fled New York City after committing a crime, and his only possession is a brooch, the treasured heirloom of his recently deceased grandfather. The brooch is what's brought him to the kibbutz, where he expects to find a woman his grandfather loved long ago, but the search is harder than he anticipated. As Adam hunts for the mystery woman, other people he encounters on the kibbutz are caught up in quests of their own. The collisions between the concerns of different characters and the gradual reveal of emotional backstories propels the story along and makes this a gripping read.

Historical and cultural details are skillfully woven through the novel without ever slowing down the story. I knew almost nothing about kibbutzim and was glad the book portrays this fictional, but probably representative, kibbutz from its founding in the 1930s up to the 1990s, when the main story is set and the community faces a financial crisis. The book also introduced me to several other pieces of history that came as surprises when they appeared in the story. The unexpected connections in this novel impressed me most. I loved watching how different pieces were set up and then fell into place, satisfyingly but not too tidily. Hope is a masterful storyteller, and I eagerly await more from her.

→ FUN HOME by Alison Bechdel is an engrossing graphic memoir that I'm glad I finally picked up. I don't often make reading time for comics, and I'm not usually interested in memoir, but I'd been curious about this book since I started hearing praise for it, particularly since I like Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For strip. Since I'll get the opportunity to attend the Fun Home musical on my trip to New York next month, I knew it was time to check out the book. It's just as good as everyone says.