Fiction Review: Lonesome Dove

Ever since I started my YouTube channel in 2021 and heard about the annual June on the Range reading event there, I've heard people raving about how amazing the novel Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry is. I remember all the hype over the TV mini-series in the 80's (though I didn't watch it), and lots of friends with similar reading tastes said the novel was excellent. But I'm not a huge fan of westerns generally, so I put off reading it. I decided this would be the year, and I read it in June for both June on the Range and my own Big Book Summer Challenge. Wow. Why did I wait? This beautifully written, moving novel blew me away and left me sobbing (three separate times!) and often laughing out loud. It was everything I'd heard and more.

In 1873, Augustus McCrae and Captain Woodrow Call are retired Texas Rangers, living a quiet life on the Texas/Mexico border along the Rio Grande, in the tiny, dusty town of Lonesome Dove. A couple of their ex-Ranger fellows, Pea Eye and a Black man named Deets, along with a teen boy named Newt make up the rest of their Hat Creek Cattle Company, which doesn't get a whole lot of business there in the desolate, tiny town. Both Call, often just called Captain, and Pea Eye are both reticent men, but Gus talks enough for the whole outfit. He can--and often does--talk about absolutely nothing for hours. The town mostly consists of a few meager farms and ranches, a general store, and a saloon, featuring a beautiful whore named Lorena. The few travelers that come to Lonesome Dove often come just for Lorena, though there is also a lot of drinking and card playing in the saloon, as a man named Lippy plays the piano. Into this quiet life on the edge of nowhere, another ex-Ranger named Jake stops by the Hat Creek outfit to visit his old friends. He regales them with tales of his recent trip to Montana, which is still a vast wilderness. He emphasizes that it is excellent cattle country (as opposed to Lonesome Dove, where grass for grazing is nearly non-existent), and Call is unusually moved from their typical routine to suggest a cattle drive all the way to Montana. First, they round up thousands of cattle from Mexico and a few more men, including a couple of experienced cowhands, two lost Irishmen they rescued from Mexico, and some teen boys from town. The expanded though ragtag Hat Creek outfit sets off, leaving behind their quiet existence, for the unknown wilderness ahead and untold dangers on the way, from Indians, horse thieves, and nature. Along the way, they meet many other people, whose paths they may cross for just a day or for much longer, following Call's unusual and emphatic need to drive their new herd of cattle all the way to the unknown territory of Montana.

This novel surprised me so many times and in so many ways. Yes, it's a western adventure with plenty of action. But McMurtry has also created fully-drawn, three-dimensional characters that soon feel like old friends. I expected an all-male cast in this cowboy novel, but he's included many fascinating, well-developed female characters, too. The writing is beautiful, but the novel is also plot-driven, with so many unexpected twists and turns that I never for a moment got bored through its gripping 850 pages. I was also surprised by the emotional depth and intensity of this story that had me sobbing, hard, three different times and also often laughing out loud (the first, wonderful instance of this is in chapter 8, about the origins and details of the sign for the Hat Creek outfit that Gus created). Here's another fun moment, as two people ride into camp:

 "The most surprising thing was that [she] was wearing pants. So far as [Gus] could remember, he had never seen a woman in pants, and he considered himself a man of experience. Call had his back turned and hadn't seen them, but some of the cowboys had. The sight of a woman in pants scared them so bad they didn't know where to put their eyes. Most of them began to concentrate heavily on the beans in their plate. Dish Boggett turned white as a sheet, got up without a word to anybody, got his night horse and started for the herd, which was strung out up the valley."

There is violence and tragedy, yes, but also friendship, love, honor, and commitment. It's an epic story that kept me engrossed for a full month and then feeling like it ended too soon. I will definitely be reading its sequel, The Streets of Laredo (and there are also two prequels).

NOTE: Do NOT read the Preface, written by the author, as it contains spoilers--of this book and the sequel.

858 pages, Simon & Schuster

Phoenix Books, Inc (audio)

This book fits in the following 2024 Reading Challenges:

 

Mount TBR Challenge

Monthly Motif - "Comedy Club" - while not strictly a comedy, it did make me laugh a lot!

Diversity Challenge

Big Book Summer Challenge
 

 

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.

 

Visit my YouTube Channel for more bookish fun!

 

Listen to a sample of the audiobook here and/ordownload it from Audible. The sample sounds great - I bet it's excellent on audio.

 

Or get this audiobook from Libro.fm and support local bookstores (audio sample here, too).

 

Print and e-book from Amazon.

 

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!

   
  

Fiction Review: The Grapes of Wrath

Every summer, I choose one classic for my #BigBookSummer Challenge (in addition to all my more modern big books), and this year that classic was The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Technically, this was a reread because I read it in high school in tenth grade (and liked it), but I didn't remember much more than the basic plot--and high school was 40 years ago--so this was like reading it for the first time. I absolutely loved this gripping novel that was suspenseful, moving, heartbreaking, and funny.

In the 1930's, Tom Joad has just been released from prison, after serving his sentence for killing a man in a bar fight. He's hitchhiking and walking back to his family's farm in Oklahoma. Along the way, he meets up with Jim Casy, who used to be the preacher in his community but has given up his profession and spent a lot of time thinking about life and humanity. The two men travel together through drought-dried land back to the Joad farm, to find the small house empty and pushed off its foundation. Jim explains that this has been happening all over the area: hardworking sharecropping families have been forced off the land they've worked for years by the land owners, who have decided they can make more money with high-volume farming with machines. Jim and Tom find the rest of the Joad family, staying temporarily at Tom's uncle's house. They've decided to pack up what they can and head west to California. They've seen flyers and heard rumors that there is plenty of farm work in California, which is verdant and lush with all kinds of fruit and vegetable farms. The entire family (plus Jim)--12 people in all--pile into a homemade truck, along with cookware, mattresses, and some food, and head west on Route 66. They soon see that they are not alone; tens of thousands of other families are making the same journey, with heavy traffic westbound, and the eastbound lane mostly empty. They encounter all kinds of challenges and losses on their long trip, and once they finally arrive, they discover that California is not the Utopia they'd been led to believe. In fact, the locals make it clear they don't want the "Okies" there at all. The Joad family struggles to make a life for themselves and earn enough money to at least feed the family, but it's an ongoing challenge.

This novel blew me away--Dust Bowl pun intended! Obviously, this is a classic, so I'm not the first to notice how outstanding it is, but it greatly exceeded my expectations. Steinbeck writes so cleverly, interspersing chapters about the Joad family with chapters about all of the migrants, as an entire population, what they were experiencing, and what factors were affecting them. In this way, he's provided a very intimate, poignant story of one family--that the reader gets to know very well and care about--alongside the larger picture of what was happening in the western United States, making such drastic changes in economy and culture. He zeroes in on the path of a turtle across the dusty land of Oklahoma, focuses on the Joad family and how they made their decision to leave, and pulls out further to describe how all of the sharecropping families were forced off their land. And all of it is written in an engrossing, compelling way that completely immerses you in theses places and times. Parts of the novel are heartbreaking, but he's also woven plenty of humor into the story, too, so that the book echoes real life: the highs and lows, the challenges, and the victories and defeats. I can see why this moving, thought-provoking book is such a renowned classic, and I am still thinking about it, after finishing it last week. I only wish I could discuss it again with my high school English class and my wonderful 10th grade teacher! My husband plans to read it next.

455 pages, Penguin Classics

This book fits in the following 2023 Reading Challenges:

 

Mount TBR Challenge

Classics Challenge - a 20th century classic

Literary Escapes Challenge - Oklahoma

Big Book Summer Challenge

 

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.

 

Visit my YouTube Channel for more bookish fun!

 

Listen to a sample of the audiobook here and/or download it from Audible.

 

Or get this audiobook from Libro.fm and support local bookstores.

 

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!

Fiction Review: The Overstory

Since its release in 2018, I have been hearing rave reviews of The Overstory by Richard Powers, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and was on lots of Top 10 lists that year. Many of my friends told me what an amazing book it was, as well. It was on my stack for Big Book Summer 2021, but I never got to it. Thankfully, I made it a priority this year, for Big Book Summer 2022, because this novel about trees (and people) is a powerful, engrossing story that is utterly original.

The book is cleverly structured in four parts: Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds. Roots is structured as a series of separate short stories. Each story focuses on a person or family and a tree or trees that are somehow connected to their lives. For instance, the first story is about a Norwegian immigrant in 1800's New York. He proposes to his future wife, an Irish immigrant, one evening while they are picking chestnuts in what was then a time of celebration in a region filled with chestnut trees. After marriage, they move to Iowa, buy five acres of land for a farm, and the man plants some of the leftover chestnuts. One grows into a giant chestnut tree, next to their farmhouse. Over the next 150 years or so, the tree grows (later, a unique sight after all the chestnuts on the East Coast die), as their family grows. Generations grow up, as the tree grows up, and a unique way of documenting the tree's growth is carried on through the family, until Nick, an artist and the great-great-great grandson of the homesteader is left to remember the tree's legacy.

That's just a brief outline of the first story in Roots. There are seven others, each focusing on a person or family somewhere in the U.S. (though sometimes with roots elsewhere) and the tree(s) that affected their lives. Each story is accompanied by a drawing of a branch of the tree. In Part 2, Trunk, the eight people highlighted in Roots, eventually come together on the West Coast, on a mutual mission to save some of our nation's oldest trees from being clear-cut. They are up against formidable forces in their fight, and each person carries his or her own roots, family, memories, and reasons why trees are important. In Crown, things fall apart, and the group separates, each devastated and coping in his or her own way to a tragedy that occurred. At this stage in the novel, they--and the reader--begin to feel that the goal of saving the trees (and the urgency to do so) are hopeless. However, in Seeds, there are glimmers of hope, as different characters each do their own part, and the trees themselves show some resilience.

That long description barely begins to capture the real essence of this book. It's magical, the way these people come together and find each other, in much the same way that trees connect with each other, communicate, and depend on each other. One character in the novel, Patricia Westerford, a hearing-impaired botanist who got her love of nature from her father, studies trees, writes books, and blows away old thinking about forests with ground-breaking research. Her passages provide some facts and science but in a beautiful, engaging way that is intricately connected with her life. It's a book about trees but also about people and mostly about the connections between both. This special novel uniquely combines science, spirituality, relationships, deep characterizations, and even suspense into a beautifully written and completely original story. This is one that will stick with me for a long time.

502 pages, W.W. Norton & Company

Recorded Books

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.

 

 

This book fits in the following 2022 Reading Challenges:

 

Mount TBR Challenge

Alphabet Soup - O

Diversity Challenge

Literary Escapes Challenge - Oregon

Big Book Summer Challenge

Visit my YouTube Channel for more bookish fun!

 

Listen to a sample of the audiobook here, from the prologue and the beginning of the first story, about the chestnut, and/or download it from Audible.

 

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local!

 

 

Or you can order The Overstory from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.

Nonfiction Review: The Sixth Extinction

One of my books groups chose the nonfiction best-seller and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert for our February selection, and everyone in the group loved this fascinating and eye-opening book. We also had a great discussion about it.

As Kolbert explains in the book, scientists agree there have been five mass extinctions since life began on Earth, based on the fossil record. One of those, of course, was the most recent one that killed all the dinosaurs--and three-quarters of mammals--that is now known to have been caused by the impact of a large meteorite, but there are four other, lesser-known but no less devastating extinctions. Many scientists also agree that we are now in the midst of a sixth, and Kolbert shared the evidence of that--and what it means--in this book. She opens the book with a chapter about huge numbers and entire species of amphibians disappearing all over the world due to a fungus; I had no idea this was going on! One small village in central Panama went from having so many golden frogs in its region that you could barely walk without stepping on them to within a few short years, the only ones now left are in a small laboratory in the village made specifically for their preservation. In chapter 2, she goes much further back in time to the mastodon and reviews the history of how humans first began to identify bizarre-looking fossils and finally came around to the idea that extinction was a thing. In later chapters, she reviews the histories and futures of ten more species, everything from the now-extinct penguin-like auks to microscopic sea creatures rapidly disappearing and affecting coral reefs to bats in the Eastern United States to Neanderthals. And, of course, she discusses the role of humans: what we have done in the past and what scientists around the world are doing now, in desperate attempts to save some species.

I was worried this book might be dry, but ... wow! It is very well-written, with the author integrating her own experiences in researching extinction into the book, as she travels to places like Panama, Iceland, Peru, and a tiny island near the Great Barrier Reef. In each place, she talks to scientists who are studying the past and working hard to preserve the future, against terrible odds. She combines history, science, travel, personal memoir, and some scary looks into the future. It's engrossing, fascinating ... and yes, terrifying, too. Yet despite the frightening subject matter, the author somehow makes the book engaging and even entertaining. Everyone in my book group loved the book (lots of 8's, 9's, and 10's for ratings), and we had a great discussion on Zoom.  It's a book that everyone on earth should read, to understand what is happening in the natural world today. Highly recommended.

269 pages (plus notes, bibliography, and index), Henry Holt and Company

You can get a brief overview of the book and its science in this CNN interview with Elizabeth Kolbert:

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.

 

Listen to a sample of the audiobook here, from the book's Prologue, and/or download it from Audible.

 

You can buy the book through Bookshop.org, where your purchase will support the indie bookstore of your choice (or all indie bookstores)--the convenience of shopping online while still buying local:  
 

Or you can order The Sixth Extinction from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.

Fiction Review: The Underground Railroad

I might just be the last person on earth to finally read Colson Whitehead's stunning and revered novel, The Underground Railroad. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2016, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017, and several other prestigious prizes, as well as being nominated for a bunch of other awards and being on just about every Top 10 list the year it was published. After gazing at it on my shelf with anticipation for over a year, I finally made time to read it in February. Wow. I was just as moved and engrossed by this unique and powerful novel as all the other readers, reviewers, and prize-awarders have been.

Cora has grown up on the Randall plantation in Georgia and has been an orphan since about the age of ten or eleven, when her mother, Mabel, escaped. She was moved to the Hob, a small cabin set aside for the misfits of the slave community, but she clung hard to - and fought to protect - her mother's (and previously, her grandmother's) tiny garden, a 3-yard square plot of dirt in between cabins. When Caesar, a newly arrived slave from Virginia, asks teen-aged Cora about escaping, she says no at first, but after a violent and terrifying incident, she agrees. The two slaves escape through the nearby swamp one dark night, with their masters and various slave catchers close on their heels. One young man, a boy really, almost catches them, but when he tries to rape Cora, she kills him and they continue. Cora and Caesar make it to the Underground Railroad station and begin their journey north, in constant danger of being re-captured, especially now that Cora has been labelled the murderer of a white man. Their travels take them through the Carolinas and beyond, seeking freedom.

Here, while in hiding on her journey, Cora muses about the meaning of freedom:

"What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your own haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway? Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand."

Whitehead has written a very honest, authentic, and thought-provoking story of what life was really like for slaves on a southern plantation and the dangers of life on the run...but with his own clever twists. As steeped as the novel is in real-life history (each chapter opens with a real fugitive slave ad), it also presents an alternate history. In the novel, the Underground Railroad is quite literal: a real railroad that travels through tunnels underground, with hidden stations below the barns and homes of anti-slavery white people, who risk their own lives to help slaves move north. In addition, each southern state they travel through in the narrative has established its own unique way of dealing with Blacks - one of them has even abolished slavery and set up an alternate lifestyle for the freed slaves. As Cora travels, she experiences each new state, some of them disturbingly horrific and some seemingly peaceful. These fictional experiences in made-up societies mirror much of what happened - and is happening - in the real world over hundreds of years. The overall effect of this mix of real history and alternate history is a compelling and thoughtful story with characters that you root for (and those you hate). The premise is intriguing and ingenuous and kept me riveted to the page. As with any book about the real horrors of slavery, some passages are difficult to read, but Cora's courage and determination kept me captivated to the very end.

306 pages, Doubleday
Random House Audio

Disclosure: I received this book from the publisher in return for an honest review. My review is my own opinion and is not influenced by my relationship with the publisher or author.

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.

Listen to a sample of the audio book. I read this one in print, but the audio sounds excellent and is probably even more powerful.

You can purchase The Underground Railroad from an independent bookstore, either locally or online, here:

Or you can order The Underground Railroad from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.

Fiction Review: Less

My husband gave me the novel Less by Andrew Sean Greer for my birthday last summer, and in my usual rush to read older book gifts by the holidays, it was my first book finished in January! This 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction surprised me because I think of books that win that prize as serious tomes. Less is a warm, insightful, and very funny book that explores love and life.

Arthur Less is approaching fifty and clearly having some problems with that milestone. When he receives a wedding invitation from Freddy, his recently ex-boyfriend of nine years, he decides to leave town so that he has an excuse not to go. But to just go on a single trip that week would be too obvious, so Arthur, who is a mildly successful but not well-known novelist, puts together a year-long trip around the world by accepting a bunch of decidedly second-rate invitations that he's been ignoring. He starts in New York City, with an unpaid job to interview a famous science fiction author, H.H.H. Mandern, whose next best-selling novel is about to be released. From there, he is attending a conference in Mexico City, where - unbeknownst to him - the wife of his long-time lover, Robert (who was before Freddy), is also invited. Then, he will head to Turin, Italy, where he has been nominated for a literary award he's never heard of for one of his novels that was translated into Italian. He will spend the winter in Germany, teaching a writing course at a college in Berlin; both Arthur and the college think that he is fluent in German, but it turns out he learned German from a teacher who'd never been there herself. His next stop is for pleasure rather than work: spending a luxurious week in Morocco on an expedition through the Sahara to celebrate the 50th birthday of a friend of a friend (and Arthur's 50th is the same week). Arthur will then focus on his next novel at a writing retreat in India. He will cap off this worldwide journey with a stop in Japan, to research and write an article for an in-flight magazine on a particular Japanese cuisine. Finally, he will return home, with the dreaded wedding long past.

As you might have guessed, things don't exactly go according to plan for Arthur. In fact, this is one of those stories where everything that could go wrong, does. Far from becoming tedious or depressing, though, Arthur's adventures are constantly surprising and hilarious. His challenges are never predictable and often had me laughing out loud and wanting to read passages out loud to my husband (he loves when I do that while he's trying to read his own book). Greer has a way of inserting humor into every situation, as in this one line from Arthur's attempt to drive to a remote location in Japan:

"Less is grateful the signs are clear because the GPS, after giving crisp, stern directions to the highway, becomes drunk on its own power outside the city limits, then gives out completely and places Arthur Less in the Sea of Japan."

Arthur is an endearing character, authentic and sincere, and as he's traveling across the globe and experiencing one crazy thing after another, he's also musing about his past and about love and life. The novel is narrated by an invisible third-party, someone who clearly knows Arthur well and knows all the details of this wild ride but who is removed enough to provide insights into Arthur's thoughts and actions. I enjoyed every moment of Less and look forward to reading more from this award-winning author.

261 pages, Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Audio

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Purchases from these links provide a small commission to me (pennies per purchase), to help offset the time I spend writing for this blog, at no extra cost to you.

Listen to a sample of the audio.

You can purchase Less from an independent bookstore, either locally or online, here:

Or you can order Less from Book Depository, with free shipping worldwide.

Fiction Review: The Sympathizer

My neighborhood book group selected one of my choices for our March meeting: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, along with seven other literary awards. This is one of those books that I might never have chosen on my own – a spy novel set in and after the Vietnam War – but the avalanche of rave reviews (and that stack of awards) convinced me I should give it a try. I’m glad I did – it’s a remarkable book, a combination of historical fiction, political thriller, and spy novel, with a hefty dose of humor and substantial emotional depth.

The novel opens with this line from its unnamed narrator: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” He is a Vietnamese man, working for a General in the South Vietnamese army, but his sympathies lie with the communists. It is April 1975, and the Americans have warned the South Vietnamese army that they are about to pull out, causing chaos in the country. His General has asked him to make a list of those who will be allowed to leave on the last flight out, supplied by the Americans for the General who they’ve worked closely with throughout the war. Our narrator, the Captain, would much prefer to stay behind and share in the glory of a communist victory, but his superiors have told him to put himself on that plane and accompany the General to America, so that he can continue to report to them from there.

As you may remember or have read, the Fall of Saigon was horrible, violent, and indeed chaotic, and that plane filled with the General, his family, and his men and their families is the last one that makes it out in one piece.  The Captain and his friend, Bon, both make it to America with other refugees and begin to try to put their lives back together, though it is not an easy life. Their other childhood friend, Man, stayed behind in Vietnam. The Captain knows he is also a communist, but their loyalties are unknown to Bon. After a while, the General settles into American life, still devoted to the Vietnamese cause, but he suspects there may be a communist spy among their community of refugees.

The entire novel is told within the framework of a confession that the Captain is writing to someone called the Commandant (clearly a communist, from his title), as he describes exactly what happened to him, from those last days in Vietnam through the refugee camps and onto the U.S. Wondering how he came to be writing this confession – and its circumstances – is one of the sources of suspense in the novel, as well as wondering whether any of his American or Vietnamese colleagues will suspect his true loyalties.

Describing the plot of this novel doesn’t even begin to do it justice because the writing is absolutely brilliant. It is clever, supple, and sometimes even funny, despite the serious circumstances surrounding the story. For instance, in his written confession, the Captain refers consistently to one particular fat and unimpressive Major as “the crapulent major.” In other cases, the author just expresses something so perfectly, with an amazingly apt metaphor, that you feel compelled to mark the passage, like where he explains as he listens to a colleague with a false aura of relaxation, alert for information, “I laughed, even though inside me the little dog of my soul was sitting at attention, nose and ears turned to the wind.”

He just has a way with words and a way of encapsulating human experience perfectly, and much of our book group meeting was spent reading sentences out loud to each other appreciatively. This passage was a favorite:

“The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself. But if talking to oneself was the ideal conversation in the cocktail party of one’s imagination, the crapulent major was the annoying guest who kept butting in and ignoring the cues to scram.”

There are other sources of humor mixed in among the horrifying and difficult events of the novel. A big one is when the Captain is hired by a Hollywood producer to be an advisor on a film about the Vietnam War (a thinly veiled reference to Apocalypse Now), to ensure authenticity. Of course, the Hollywood bigwig is more interested in pleasing his American audience than in actually portraying the Vietnamese people accurately (or even giving them any speaking parts), but the filming of the movie in the Philippines has many amusing moments.

There is so much meat to this novel – its beautiful writing, its historical setting, its political context – that our book group had plenty to talk about. Most of us agreed it was an incredible book and rated it between 7 and 9 out of 10. Some felt it moved along at a good pace, while others felt it was a difficult book to read, though ultimately worthwhile. One member only got about 50 pages in and decided not to finish it. We certainly had an in-depth and entertaining discussion, though we weren’t entirely sure we completely “got” the ending.

The Sympathizer is not just a novel about the Vietnam War. It is also about personal identity and the refugee experience, a topic of vital importance today. The narrator’s two faces, mentioned in the opening sentence, have multiple meanings. He is not only an undercover agent, serving two opposing political forces, he is also a refugee, with one foot in Vietnam and another in America, and he is also a bastard child (a big part of his identity), born of a Vietnamese mother and a French priest father. This deep emotional context along with a gripping and suspenseful story and the author’s beautiful prose make this a truly exceptional novel and well deserving of its many awards.

384 pages, Grove Press

Fresh Air's Terry Gross interviewed Viet Thanh Nguyen. He discusses the book, as well as his own history and experiences growing up in Vietnam and in the U.S. as a refugee. It's an excellent interview and very interesting. You can listen to this 35-minute interview online, download it, or read the transcript at the link above.

Here is a brief clip of the author on Late Night with Seth Meyers. He talks about his own experience as a refugee...and his wonderful sense of humor comes through as well.

Fiction Review: All the Light We Cannot See

-->

After winning the Pulitzer Prize, being a finalist for the National Book Award, and being on pretty much every top 10 list in 2014, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr was definitely on my own must-read list. My husband even gave it to me for Christmas last year. I finally found the time to read this hefty World War II novel and discovered what earned it so much praise.

Although this is a novel about WWII, it centers on children, one in France and one in Germany, who spend their childhoods and adolescence in wartime, each involved in the war in very different ways. Marie-Laure lives with her beloved Papa in Paris, where he works at the natural history museum, a place that they both love. When she is just six years old, Marie-Laure goes blind. Her father works hard to teach her how to find her way around their part of the city and learn to be independent. He even creates a scale-model of their neighborhood, detailing every curb, doorway, and step to help his daughter quite literally learn every inch of the area.

Meanwhile, in a rural mining town in Germany, Werner, and his little sister, Jutta, live in an orphanage, presided over by a caring though overworked woman. Werner becomes very adept, at a young age, at fixing and even building radios. Fascinated by these new devices, Werner has a unique talent with them, and he and Jutta secretly listen at night to broadcasts from all over the region, including their favorite, a children’s program about science coming all the way from France.

The coming war soon intrudes on both children’s lives. In France, the Nazis invade and occupy Paris. Along with many thousands of other citizens, Marie-Laure and her father set off on foot to leave the city and its dangers. Papa is carrying a famous, enormous diamond – one of five that may or may not be the real thing – in order to keep the invading Nazis from the museum’s greatest treasure. They head toward Saint-Malo, a walled city by the sea where Marie-Laure’s great-uncle lives a reclusive life in a tall house. They are welcomed by this distant relative and settle into the big house, though eventually, the war comes to them, even in Saint-Malo.

Back in Germany, an officer recognizes Werner’s unique talents when he fixes his radio and recommends him for an elite academy for Hitler Youth. Although Werner does have opportunities there to work on even more advanced technologies, he is frightened and appalled by the violence and brutality among both the officers and the children. Eventually, he is conscripted – at an early age – into the armed forces officially, to use his radio skills to find members of the resistance.

This is an epic novel, covering the years from 1934 through the end of the war, and even forward as far as 2014. The focus is on these two children – in different countries – who have never met each other, yet whose lives are both touched in different ways by the war and its brutality. Marie-Laure’s and Werner’s stories eventually converge, in unexpected ways.

This intertwining of two disparate stories is compelling (and something I love in a novel), but the reason for all the awards and recognition is Doerr’s writing. Each scene is depicted in intricate detail so that both Werner and Marie-Laure come to life on the pages. The places where they each live and travel also come to life, especially the walled city of Saint-Malo, a place so unique and fascinating that I searched for photos online after I read the book and now want to travel there to see it for myself.

The walled city of Saint-Malo in France

I came to care deeply for Werner and Marie-Laure (and their loved ones) while reading this book and was both anxiously anticipating and dreading how it would end (it is, after all, a war story). I have mentioned that I have sort of overdosed on WWII novels lately, and the last two I read – this one and The Nightingale – were both set at least partly in occupied France and were both lengthy books. So, I did feel this one ran a bit long, but I think that is just my own bias due to reading too many similar novels recently. All the Light We Cannot See is an engrossing novel that transports you into the lives of these two children, growing up during a horrific time in history. It is not just about the tragedies of war but also about the strength and resilience of the human spirit, even (especially?) in children.

530 pages, Scribner

Nonfiction Review: Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Back in 2012, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Katherine Boo published her first book, a nonfiction book called Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, and it won the National Book Award. That same year, my son and his friends started college, and their new school, the University of Delaware, selected Boo’s award-winning book as its All-Freshmen-Reads book. With all of that – plus a lot more accolades and publicity – I wanted to read Boo’s book for myself, but it’s taken me four years to finally get to it. I suggested it for one of my book groups, and we discussed it last night. I don’t know why it took me so long to get to this compelling, fascinating, powerful story of life in an Indian slum.

Although it is entirely nonfiction, Boo has written her book like a novel, introducing “characters” (who are real people) and following their lives through some incredible events that rocked their community. That community is Annawadi, a ramshackle shantytown with a sewage lake, built by squatters within sight of Mumbai’s big international airport. This real-life Mumbai slum houses 3,000 men, women, and children in 335 tiny, hand-built huts, people living from hand to mouth, literally, trying each day to earn enough money to feed their families.

As the book opens, Abdul, a sixteen-year old boy who earns his living – and supports his 11-person family – by collecting trash and sorting it for recycling, is hiding in the small shed where he runs his trash business. The police are coming for his father and will be looking for him, too, for a crime that neither of them committed. His mother, Zehrunisa, has urged him to hide, while his father, sick with TB, gives himself up to the police. This strategy will allow the family’s main income-earner to remain free for a little while longer. Abdul’s next-younger brother, Mirchi, has bigger dreams than sorting garbage. He still goes to school (their father recently told Abdul, “you didn’t have the mind for school anyway”) and hopes to get a job with a uniform in one of the luxury hotels near Annawadi.

There are many other young people living in close proximity in Annawadi’s huts. There is 15-year old Meena, who dreams of freedom; she’s been promised in an arranged marriage she doesn’t want. Little Sunil, just twelve years old, yearns for a “career” like Abdul’s – he wants to earn enough money so that he can finally stop being hungry all the time and start growing. Manju, a young woman, is an unusual citizen of the slum. She is attending college, with aspirations to be the very first female college graduate from Annawadi. When she isn’t studying herself, she leads a rudimentary school in her family’s hut, teaching eager young children – often teaching them the same things she herself is studying.

Manju’s mother, Asha, has her own aspirations, to both support her intelligent daughter and to boost their family’s income and position. Asha is interested in politics. Currently, she works unofficially for the Corporator, the elected official whose precinct includes Annawadi. She acts as his go-between on the ground, listening to the complaints of residents and trying to resolve them. She hopes to one day be the unofficial slumlord of Annawadi, and from there, move ahead in politics, thus moving her family into the middle-class on the backs of her neighbors.

The One-Leg is another resident of the slum, who rents a tiny room from Abdul’s family with her husband and two small children. Born disabled, her given name is Sita, but no one calls her that. They all call her the One-Leg, and she tries to prove she is worthy and attractive by making herself up and picking up men while she limps around on her crutches. There are no secrets in this community, with tiny huts crammed together, and thin walls between families (the lucky ones have walls; some separate their living spaces with sheets).

Boo introduces the reader to each of these people – and more – while also telling their stories: where they came from, their families, how they scrape by and try to support themselves. Meanwhile, the book starts with Abdul’s father’s arrest and then traces that event back to its origins and follows it through to what happens to each of the people involved. This nonfiction book reads so much like a gripping novel that I had to keep reminding myself while reading that these were real stories and real people. The author is completely absent from the book; it’s not about her experiences in Annawadi but about the residents there.

In the course of getting to know these individuals and following their lives, Boo naturally introduces (through the stories, not through any explanations of her own) issues of economics, politics, criminal justice (or lack thereof), and corruption. Oh, the corruption! It is absolutely unthinkable how corrupt systems are in India (and especially for these people with little money) – bribes are needed to get adequate medical attention, to get decent treatment from the police (I can’t say “fair treatment” because it’s all about who bribes more), and to participate in the justice system, such as it is. For those fed up with American or European politics who think all politicians are corrupt, wait till you hear what’s going on in India!

You may be thinking that this all sounds rather depressing…and certainly, it can be depressing to read about such extreme poverty. But this book isn’t about economics or politics; it’s about people. Boo lets us into the intimate details of these people’s lives, and we get to know them, as we would the characters in a great novel. The people living in Annawadi are not hopeless; in fact, they all have hopes, dreams, and aspirations. The children laugh, play, and joke just as children do all over the world. She shows us that poverty is not just a concept and that each of these people is an individual with their own story. In fact, the author said inan interview that she wants the reader to see hope on every page. Here she explains her goal in writing the book:

“Sunil and Sonu have tough, tough lives but if a reader comes away from this book thinking of them only as pathetic socioeconomic specimens I’ll have failed as a writer. They’re cool, interesting kids, and I want the reader to sense that, too. Because we can talk all we want about how corruption or indifference robs people of opportunity–of the promise our societies squander–but if we don’t really grasp the intelligences of those who are being denied, we’re not going to grasp the potential that’s being lost.”

And that is what is at the heart of this book – Boo puts real people, real faces, real hopes and dreams onto the sometimes abstract concept of poverty. With Annawadi, in particular, the reader clearly sees the absurd juxtaposition of the 5-star hotels and international airport right up against this world of raw sewage, little clean water, and scarce food. She takes the reader deep inside someplace that most of us have never been.

My book group had some great in-depth discussions last night about Behind the Beautiful Forevers. There is so much to talk about here, and the stories in the book provide insights into many different aspects of poverty and today’s world. We discussed that the lessons learned from this book are just as applicable here in the U.S. as they are in Mumbai. Everyone agreed the book had been interesting and engaging (ratings ranged from 6 to 10). As a bonus, one of our group is a woman who grew up in India and has actually been to Annawadi, so her observations and insights added more to our discussion.

This book is a perfect example of narrative nonfiction at its absolute best. As someone who reads about 90% fiction, I was completely riveted by this book and its stories. In fact, when rating books in my book groups, I rarely give anything a “10,” but that’s what I rated this one. To me, it was like the best of fiction and nonfiction combined: engrossing stories about interesting people, set against a fascinating backdrop that I knew little about. I learned a lot and loved reading this book – I wish that more nonfiction was written this well and this engagingly, and I can’t wait to see what Boo does next.

244 pages, Random House

 I'm not usually a fan of book trailers, but this one is 100% actual video taken in Annawadi as Katherine Boo spent time there, and the photos & video of this vastly different world are fascinating. See Katherine Boo's website for more photos.