Tooth of the Covenant by Norman Lock

 

I hope to expose both the moral horror and criminal injustices of the age and to speak to their persistence in our own. ~Norman Lock interview

As a genealogist I have uncovered things about my ancestors that were meant to be kept secret, things no one ever talked about. 

There are the usual crimes--sneaking out of Russia to avoid serving in the Czar's army, marriages soon gone sour and the divorces never spoken of, children born out of wedlock. And some that are disturbing, like a beloved grandparent who admitted to a crime and was jailed, which was kept secret from his children.

I found the newspaper articles, first downplaying that anything would come of the charges, then his admission of guilt, then the ad where my grandmother sold off furniture. She moved the children to her parents home and they never knew their father spent three months in jail. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne's ancestor's sins were not hidden. They were in the history books. His great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a Puritan judge in Salem, Massachusetts, who sent women and girls to their deaths, accused of witchery. To disassociate himself from this heritage, Nathaniel changed the spelling of his name.

Tooth of the Covenant, Norman Lock's eighth book in his American Novel series, places Nathaniel back in time, planning to arraign his ancestor and prevent the deaths. Framed as Nathaniel writing a story, using the persona Isaac Page, his journey through time alters his perception.

Salem in 1692 was a dangerous place. Isaac/Nathaniel uses his woodworking skill acquired at the failed idealist Brook Farm community to earn his bed and board on the fringes of Salem.

He drinks at taverns where men ignore the 'one and no more' mantra of the Puritans, and dangerously discusses theology condemned by the Puritans. Married in his own time, Issac/Nathaniel finds himself attracted to a pretty indentured servant. 

As Issac delays his mission, his resolve weakens, and fatally, he is able to see through the lens of the past and becomes allied to his detested great-grandfather.

We can judge the past, and yet we cannot escape it. We carry the prejudices and legacy forward, sometimes unthinking, sometimes purposefully. Our legacy insidiously skews our world view, distorts our perception.

"What are we if not our stories," Hawthorne/Lock writes early on, and he ends, "If there is witchery, it is in the stories that we tell, their power to enthrall, transform, uplift, and corrupt. A scarlet letter or a great while whale--what are they if not figures in a tableau behind which lie truths that can crack the foundation of the world and let the angels or the devils out into broadest day!" 

The American Novel series enthrall us as they break open the veneer of righteousness we sometimes claim for ourselves. We miss the log in our own eye when we think only of the sins of the past, for the past remains with us. 

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Tooth of the Covenant
by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press

Publication July 6, 2021
Trade paper
ISBN: 9781942658832
Ebook US $16.99
ISBN: 9781942658849

From the Publisher

Best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge. 

In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, we witness Hawthorne writing a tale entitled Tooth of the Covenant, in which he sends his fictional surrogate, Isaac Page, back to the year 1692 to save Bridget Bishop, the first person executed for witchcraft, and rescue the other victims from execution. 

But when Page puts on Hathorne’s spectacles, his worldview is transformed and he loses his resolve. As he battles his conscience, he finds that it is his own life hanging in the balance.

An ingenious and profound investigation into the very notion of universal truth and morality, Tooth of the Covenant probes storytelling’s depths to raise history’s dead and assuage the persistent ghost of guilt.

-

Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

Lux Aeterna. 

In the 1980s, I sang in masterworks choirs. We performed requiems, including those by Verdi and Mozart. "May everlasting light shine upon them, O Lord, with thy saints in eternity, for thou art merciful. Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may everlasting light shine upon them." The lux aeterna was always emotional, the grieving's hope that the afterlife will compensate for the suffering of life.

This past year, millions have mourned victims of the pandemic. We have lost the very old and we have lost those whose life was yet to be lived.  As someone who is nearing my seventh decade, I felt my vulnerability. I considered last things and the value of the life I have lived and the possibilities for the days that may be granted to me. At this time, reading Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford had special meaning and especially affected me. 

In 1944, a rocket hit a Woolworth's and killed 168 people, including 15 children. This real event inspired Light Perpetual.

 

Spufford begins his novel with an amazing description of a bomb exploding. 

And then, Spufford imagines the lives of  five, fictional, children who died in the explosion, jumping 15 years at a time through their lives. 

They are ordinary people living ordinary lives, with the ordinary sorrows and joys of being human. They are flawed people. Some try to do their best, while the actions of others are harmful and destructive. Their lives are just one thing after another, problem after problem.

Like ordinary people, their lives can be boring. Like ordinary people, they have fears and unfulfilled dreams. And, like ordinary people, they are here, and in the blink of an eye, they are gone. Into the light. Become dust.

It all seems accidental, how life works out. And not the way we had planned, or hoped. And then, we run out of options. We have lived our lives.

And yet. And yet. As one character faces death, he has peace and he is able to praise God for all the mundane beauty of this world. It inspired me to tears.

What a miracle life is--how we waste it! Let us praise those moments when the sunlight breaks through the clouds and warms our face and the birds are singing and someone holds our hand. Let us remember those who are gone and pray they find light perpetual.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

I previously read the author's novel On Golden Hill, which I  reviewed here, and I loved his nonfiction book I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination.

Light Perpetual
by Francis Spufford
Scribner
Pub Date May 18, 2021   
ISBN: 9781982174149
hardcover $27.00 (USD) 

from the publisher

From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, a mesmerizing and boldly inventive novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London.

Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: the Woolworth's on Bexford High Street in southeast London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages—after all, everything’s been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.

Who were they? What futures did they lose? This brilliantly constructed novel lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the life arcs of these five souls as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of twentieth-century London. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs, disasters; of second chances and redemption.

Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory and expectation, and the preciousness of life.

Highway Blue by Ailsa McFarlane

Highway Blue is a short novel of under 200 pages. Alisa McFarlane offers readers a moment in time in the life of her characters, two lost and lonely young adults whose lives intersect in a moment in time. 

Twenty-year-old Anne Marie is going through the motions of life, living with strangers, work at a bar and dog walking giving her just enough money to survive, still hurt by the disappearance of her husband after a year of marriage. Now he suddenly has returned, hoping Anne Marie can save him, but she has nothing to give him.

But when a man attacks them and ends up dead, Cal convinces Anne Marie to run and over the next days she remembers her past and contemplates Cal's place in her future.

They are helped by strangers along the way, a happy couple and a lonely trucker. Cal tells Anne Marie that he had hoped their marriage would give him a place to belong in this world. She had loved him. He loved the idea of them.

Heavy on dialogue and Anne Marie's inner thoughts, the story is about romantic ideals and disillusion, the limits of love, and the strength to recreate oneself.

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Highway Blue: A Novel
by Ailsa McFarlane
Random House Publishing Group - Hogarth
Pub Date May 18, 2021 
ISBN: 9780593229118
Hardcover $25.00 (USD)

A hypnotic debut of broken love on the run, from a blazingly original young writer

“A road novel, a love story, a coming-of-age tale, but with sentences so sharply wrought, characters so achingly precise, that it feels new and fresh and utterly alive.”—Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want

“In front of me the long length of the road wound out, wound out and wound on under hot sky. And I drove . . .”

In the lonely town of San Padua, Anne Marie can never get the sound of the ocean out of her head. And it’s here—dog-walking by day, working bars by night—where she tries to forget about her ex-husband, Cal: both their brief marriage and their long estrangement.

When Cal shows up on Anne Marie’s doorstep one day, clearly in trouble, she reluctantly agrees to a drink. But later that night a gun goes off in a violent accident and the young couple are forced to hit the open road together in escape.

Crammed in a beat-up car with their broken past, so begins a journey across a vast, mythical American landscape, through the dark seams of the country, toward a city that may or may not represent salvation. 

Highway Blue is a story of being lost and found—and of love, in all its forms. Written in spare, shimmering prose, it introduces the arrival of an electrifyingly singular new voice.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

As a reader I am inspired by stories that set my imagination afire, bring chills to my spine, tears to my eyes, and comfort in this baffling world. Great Circle is that kind of novel. 

As a genealogist, I am fascinated by the hidden stories of my ancestors. I can never learn enough to fully flesh out the details of their lives. What it was like to leave their homes and reinvent themselves in a new land? What lead to the seduction that left them unmarried mothers? How did they face the devastation of a child drowning in the canal they had to pass every day? I only know that they survived, for a while, and then they died, taking their secrets with them. As someday, I will, too.

Life throws us into despair--all of us. We give in and give up, or we resist and struggle to the surface of the water, take another breath, and reinvent our life in the after-world. Sometimes there is freedom in reinvention. Sometimes it saves us.

Great Circle is one of those massive reads that sweep us across time and history, a long journey into character's entire lives. They are orphaned or neglected and unprotected by unreliable adults, and make their way as best they can. They lose loves and are loved by monsters. Dreams are fragile and come with a cost. Again and again, they must reinvent a life with a new name or in a new place or with a new love or the end of a love.

First, there is the story of orphans Marian Graves and her brother Jamie who run wild with neighbor boy Caleb, their adult caretakers unreliable. When barnstormers pass through, Marian becomes obsessed with the idea of flying. Caleb cuts her hair so she can pass as a boy to earn money towards flying lessons by secret moonshine deliveries.

Barclay was a criminal, and he was rich, and he was used to getting what he wanted. And he wanted Marian from the first time he saw her as a girl. She entered into a dreadful bargain: he would pay for her flying lessons, and she understood the unspoken agreement that someday she would be his.

Trapped into an abusive and controlling marriage, Marian escapes, disappears into Alaska, reinventing herself as a bush pilot. When WWII broke out, she volunteers for the British Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying warplanes. She meets Ruth, who becomes her great love, and Ruth's gay husband Eddie. But it is Caleb she still turns to when broken.

After the war with its many losses, Marian is offered financing to fund her dream of flying around the world, pole to pole, she only trusts Eddie to be her navigator. After Antarctica, they are believed to have been lost at sea.

Then there is Hadley, also an orphan and abused by her uncle, who became a beloved child actress, and has a breakdown at age 20. Now, she has a change to reinvent herself in a movie about Marian's life, based on the journal Marian left behind at Antarctica before she disappeared.

Hadley goes on a quest to learn about Marian, discovering the truth of what happened on that great circle trip from pole to pole.

Marian's story gives Hadley a sense of freedom and control. And, and it can free us, too, showing us how to live with courage even in the darkest of times. How we must know what we want, and to always work for our dreams.

This past year has been a horror show of death and fear of death, political clashes and unimaginable chaos, outbreaks of hate and violence. We know full well the disappointments and pain of this world.  

A story can help us to heal. To know we are not alone, that there is a way to get through the hell and live into a moment of joy and moments of grace that can be enough to live on. This is the gift of literature. 

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Great Circle
by Maggie Shipstead
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pub Date May 4, 2021  
ISBN: 9780525656975
hardcover $28.95 (USD)

 from the publisher

An unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost—Great Circle spans Prohibition-era Montana, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Zealand, wartime London, and modern-day Los Angeles.

After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles.

A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.

Silence is a Sense by Layla AlAmaar

"I don't know how to explain to her that I am cornered by memories, caged in my recollection. I feel persecuted by the things I remember and by what my mind chooses to hide from me.~from Silence is a Sense by Layla AlAmmar

Everyone wants a story. A narrative with meaning. The doctors. The officials. The contact at a magazine who publishes her writing. 

She is recognized as 'other', Arab, Muslim. She is a refugee in England. People fear her. Or, they want to know things she holds close, the people lost and the atrocities of war and her escape across Europe. The experiences that left her enveloped by silence.

Trauma took her voice. Communicating only in the written word, she becomes "The Voiceless." 

The only reasonable response was to fill myself up with silence.~from Silence is a Sense by Layla AlAmmar

She looks out the windows of her apartment and observes the occupants of the other apartments. She knows their secrets. But she keeps apart until a horrendous crime evokes a response that frees her.

Layla AlAmmar's novel Silence is a Sense brilliantly delves into the soul of a woman who has lost everything, first by the war that destroyed her world, and then by her harrowing flight across borders, only to find there is no safe harbor even in freedom. 

Edgar Allan Poe's fable Silence informs the work, the narrator committing it to memory. "My heart pounds to the rhythm of his cadence," she thinks as she recites it in her head.

Front-piece in Vol. Seven of the 1904 Commemorative Edition of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

I picked up my grandfather's set of Poe to read the fable and noted images that appear in AlAmmar's novel. Poe describes a place where giant water lilies shriek in a yellow river, and forests quake in windless skies, and a crimson moon lights the view. A being in desolation is subjected to beating rain and roaring hippopotami, then by a profound silence by the Demon who tells the tale. The man hurriedly flees in terror.

The fable speaks to the narrator who has also been terrorized and left in silence.

For AlAmmar's protagonist, silence is the only sane reaction to atrocity. We don't need detailed descriptions of what she endured, for her reaction tells us all we need to know. 

What do we see when we look at refugees, immigrants, people who look different from us, or who worship differently from us? Do we think of their legacy of losses? 

Our immigrant ancestors kept their stories quiet, they did not tell us of the death camps or the burned villages, the rape and torture when they were powerless. We wrap these things in silence.

We demand stories and hope to hear pretty tales, happy endings. 

At the end of the novel, our heroine speaks her name, has found her voice. There is hope of healing. 

I received a free ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Silence Is a Sense

by Layla AlAmmar
Algonquin Books
Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 9781643750262
hard cover $25.95 (USD)

from the publisher

“Lyrical, moving, and revealing."~Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring

A transfixing and beautifully rendered novel about a refugee’s escape from civil war—and the healing power of community.

A young woman sits in her apartment, watching the small daily dramas of her neighbors across the way. She is an outsider, a mute voyeur, safe behind her windows, and she sees it all—the sex, the fights, the happy and unhappy families. Journeying from her war-torn Syrian homeland to this unnamed British city has traumatized her into silence, and her only connection to the world is the column she writes for a magazine under the pseudonym “the Voiceless,” where she tries to explain the refugee experience without sensationalizing it—or revealing anything about herself.

Gradually, though, the boundaries of her world expand. She ventures to the corner store, to a bookstore and a laundromat, and to a gathering at a nearby mosque. And it isn’t long before she finds herself involved in her neighbors’ lives. When an anti-Muslim hate crime rattles the neighborhood, she has to make a choice: Will she remain a voiceless observer, or become an active participant in a community that, despite her best efforts, is quickly becoming her own?

Layla AlAmmar, a Kuwaiti-American writer and brilliant student of Arab literature, delivers here a complex and fluid book about memory, revolution, loss, and safety. Most of all, Silence is a Sense reminds us just how fundamental human connection is to survival.

About the Author

Growing up in Kuwait, I often – some might say too often – found solace in the pages of a book; and if it was a really good book, it would soon become more of a best friend—lovingly read over and over again.

I also began writing at a very early age, from poems to articles to bits and pieces of stories, and I always had this vague, ethereal idea of being published one day.

I completed an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and soon after completed my first full-length novel. I began a PhD on the intersection of Arab women’s fiction and literary trauma theory in 2019.

I’ve had short stories published by the Evening Standard, Quail Bell Magazine, Aesthetica Magazine, the St Andrews University Prose Journal, and in the collection Underground: Tales for London (Borough Press 2018). My  story "The Lagoon" was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Magazine Creative Writing Award 2014. I was British Council International Writer in Residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival in 2018.

My debut novel, THE PACT WE MADE, which deals with the lives of young women in Kuwait, was published by Borough Press in March 2019. My second novel, SILENCE IS A SENSE, was published in Spring 2021 (Borough/Algonquin).

The Memory Collectors by Kim Neville

My home is filled with heirlooms and mementos, each associated with a person or time from my past. Wherever we moved, settling these things into the house transformed it into a home.

Some of these things make me a little sad, but most make me happy. I have good memories of the student lamp from Great-Grandma's house, the 1842 ogee clock we bought at our first auction, the cracked glass miniature vases Mom set on her knick-knack self, the fourth generation back heirloom Blue Flow soup bowls, the embroidery mom made for me, the Japan figures gifted to my husband on his birth. 

Very few people look at these things and feel the things I feel when I see them.

But...what if the emotions people feel could attach to their things and be sensed by others? What if these emotions changed those who encounter the objects? What if some people could sense this emotional baggage and use it for harm or health?

Kim Neville's debut novel The Memory Collectors imagines people with the special ability to sense the emotions that cling to things. 

Ev tries to control it, suppressing the effects of the 'stains' on things. She saw how her father fell victim to dark stains. She was unable to save her parents from the evil that overtook him. She has tried to protect her younger sister, Noemi, who flits in and out of her life. 

Harriet has hoarded these stained things. They are overwhelming her and affecting her neighbors, too. Perhaps she could make a museum filled with good feelings, a place of healing? When she mets Ev, she knows she has found the person who can help her.

We can hide from the past, suppress it, reject it. We can become enslaved to the past so it inhibits our growth. We can shape the past into works of art. And we can rise above the past to become changed and whole people.

The Memory Collectors is a fantastic story that uses fantasy to explore our common human struggle with the past and the lingering emotions that inhibit our growth. 

I received a free ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Memory Collectors

Kim Neville

Expected publication: March 16, 2021
Atria Books
ISBN: 1982157585 (ISBN13: 9781982157586)
Paperback $17.00

from the publisher

Ev has a mysterious ability, one that she feels is more a curse than a gift. She can feel the emotions people leave behind on objects and believes that most of them need to be handled extremely carefully, and—if at all possible—destroyed. The harmless ones she sells at Vancouver’s Chinatown Night Market to scrape together a living, but even that fills her with trepidation. Meanwhile, in another part of town, Harriet hoards thousands of these treasures and is starting to make her neighbors sick as the overabundance of heightened emotions start seeping through her apartment walls.

When the two women meet, Harriet knows that Ev is the only person who can help her make something truly spectacular of her collection. A museum of memory that not only feels warm and inviting but can heal the emotional wounds many people unknowingly carry around. They only know of one other person like them, and they fear the dark effects these objects had on him. Together, they help each other to develop and control their gift, so that what happened to him never happens again. But unbeknownst to them, the same darkness is wrapping itself around another, dragging them down a path that already destroyed Ev’s family once, and threatens to annihilate what little she has left.

The Memory Collectors casts the everyday in a new light, speaking volumes to the hold that our past has over us—contained, at times, in seemingly innocuous objects—and uncovering a truth that both women have tried hard to bury with their pasts: not all magpies collect shiny things—sometimes they gather darkness. 

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

One angry woman did everything, and she failed.~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

I read Imbolo Mbue's first novel Behold the Dreamers as a galley and for book club. I jumped at the chance to read her second novel, How Beautiful We Were. 

Was money so important that they would sell children to strangers seeking oil?~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

The novel is about an African village struggling for environmental justice, powerless, caught between an American oil company and a corrupt dictatorship government. 

They are a proud people, connected to the land of their ancestors. They have lived simple, subsistence lives, full of blessings. Until the oil company ruined their water, their land, their air. A generation of children watch their peers dying from poisoned water. Their pleas for help are in vain. 

School-aged Thula is inspired by books, including The Communist Manifesto, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and The Wretched of the Earth. "They were her closest friends," spurring her into activist causes when she goes to America to study. In America and becomes an activist. Meanwhile, her peers in her home village lose faith in the process and take up terrorism. 

How could we have been so reckless as to dream?~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

The fictional village, its inhabitants and history, is so well drawn I could believe it taken from life. The viewpoint shifts among the characters.

We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake?~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

The fate of the village and its country are an indictment to Western colonialism and capitalism. Slaves, rubber, oil--people came and exploited Africa for gain. The village loses their traditions and ancestral place as their children become educated and take jobs with Western corporations and the government.

This story must be told, it might not feel good to all ears, it gives our mouths no joy to sat it, but our story cannot be left untold.~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

This is not an easy book for an American to read. It reminds us of the many ways our country has failed and continues to fail short of the ideal we hope it is. And not just abroad--we have failed our to protect our children here in America.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

How Beautiful We Were
by Imbolo Mbue
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 9780593132425
hard cover $28.00 (USD)

from the publisher:

We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.

Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan

 

"We deserve our secrets."~from The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan

Secrets. Everyone has them. We keep secrets out of shame, out of fear, to protect loved ones, to protect ourselves. 

Keeping a secret can destroy. Guilt that alienates from others and eats at your soul. Suspicion that wracks relationships. 

Some families balance on the edge of a well-hidden secret, and when it is outed, life tumbles like dominoes.

Hala Alyan's family saga The Arsonists' City is a big book, with a big family, following forty years of their lives. I made a family tree to keep track of them! Their journey crosses the ocean, from Beirut and Damascus to America. It is a journey not only across time and space, it delves into the depths of love and grief.

I became obsessed with the novel. Foreshadowing brought me to guess some secrets and conflicts to come. I didn't know if the story was coming to a car wreck or redemption, resolution and growth or despair and endings.

At the heart of the story is Mazna, the beautiful Syrian who aspires to be an actress. When Idris sees her on stage, he is smitten and pursues her, taking her on day trips to his hometown of Beirut. When Mazna meets his dearest friend Zakaria, a poor boy from the Palestinian camps, she is drawn to him.

Forty years later, after his father's death, Idris is determined to sell his ancestral Beirut home, setting off a firestorm in the family. The family gathers one last time, Idris and Mazna, their three children, and a daughter-in-law. 

Idris, not handsome enough, not sure enough, had pursued the beautiful Mazna, a poor Damascan girl with powerful stage presence in the local theater. She dreams of going to London and then American to become the next Ava Gardner or Vivian Leigh. She poses as a friend to his sister Sara. Their marriage was rushed; he caught her "when she was broken." Idris gained a residency in America. They begin in poverty until he established a career as a cardiologist surgeon.

The eldest child, Ava, lives in New York City, married to the American Nate. She comes with their three children, Nate claiming a work trip keeps him from joining her. 

Next is Mimi, living in Texas with his American fiance Harper. Although he runs a successful restaurant, he is frustrated over his tottering music career and aging out of being 'cool'.

And there is Naj, the youngest, who stayed in Beirut. She is a wildly successful violinist, a media sensation, but self-destructive, angry and heartbroken.

Gathering mementos for the patriarchs memorial service, the children discover hints to their parent's secret past. 

The Beirut home takes its place as an important 'character', more than a backdrop to the scenes that play out there. It is a link, a reminder, a legacy. When one of the cherished almond trees is nearly cut down, it is a symbol of the family's frailty. But the other trees still remain, the house still stands.

The family drama is universal in its appeal and message. It is the setting and background that allows American readers like me to see through another lens. "We all come from tribes," Zakaria tells Mazna early on. "People don't need much of a reason to hate each other."

And that tribal hate manifests itself in the act that sends Idris and Mazna spiraling into a future neither expected.

Checkpoints, sectarian violence, the continual war, colors the scenes in Lebanon. 

"The war continued to chug along like a faithful engine, destroying the city. It's like background nose, Sara said once." ~From The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan

Once in America, the family discovers they are 'brown', other, victims of mockery and hate. "Neighborhoods are arranged by skin. Jobs, schools." Mazna learns. The beautiful Mazna can not find acting roles, passed by because of her accent, her otherness. She blames Idris for ruining all her chances. 

But it is a small mercy, how time distills what we know, how it fictionalizes it.~ from The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan

The characters struggle with their pasts, their relationships, their guilt and their desires. But over the summer in the ancestral home, they find truth and new understanding, family ties are ultimately strengthened. 

I received an ARC from the publisher through Amazon Vine. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Arsonsits' City 
by Hala Alyan
HMH
Publication Date: March 3, 2021 
ISBN-13/EAN: 9780358125099
ISBN-10: 035812509X
Price: $14.99 ebook, $26.99 hardcover

from the publisher

“The Arsonists’ City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan’s hands, one family’s tale becomes the story of a nation—Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It’s the kind of book we are lucky to have.”—Rumaan Alam

A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home

The Nasr family is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut—a constant touchstone—and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell.

The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets—lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame—that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together.

In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).

About the author 

HALA ALYAN is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, as well as the forthcoming novel The Arsonists' City and four award-winning collections of poetry, most recently The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by TheNew Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, LitHub,the New York Times Book Review, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist.

 

Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

Leaving is a kind of death~ from Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

In exquisite writing and storytelling,  Infinite Country explores love that transcends borders and separation, the bifurcated identity of those who have left their homeland for new countries, the longing and sorrow of family separation, and the myth of American Dream. 

Award-winning author Patricia Engel's moving story elicits compassion and an awareness that there are no safe havens except in a family's love. 

People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics--the elements most likely to ruin a life. They're wrong. It's love.~from Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

In Bogota, during a violent time in Columbia, teenagers Mauro and Elena fall in love. They have a child and move to the United States hoping for a better life. When Mauro is arrested and deported, Elena decides to stay in America with Talia, born in Colombia, and their American born son and daughter. When she finds she cannot work with the newborn girl, she sends Talia back to her mother and husband to raise in Bogota. Years pass with the family separated, growing apart.

What was it about this country that kept us hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring along there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.~from Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

The American children feel alien in an America that fears and diminishes Latinos, living in overcrowded apartments filled with illegals, targeted with hate, their mother abused by bosses. They do not see America as a haven and envy their sister in Columbia, living with their father.

But every nation in the Americas had a hidden history of internal violence. It just wore different masks, carried different weapons, and justified itself with different stories.~from Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

Talia, loves her grandmother and father, but longs to know her mother and siblings. Mauro tells Talia the stories and myths of their Andean people about the jaguar, the boa constrictor, the condor, the creation story he was told, including the lesson "we're all migrants here on earth."

When Talia sees a vicious act and reacts rashly, she is arrested and, only age fifteen, is sent to a school in the mountains for six months. She escapes and must find her way across the mountains to her father and an airline ticket to her birthplace--America.

This is a story with a happy ending. The journey is fraught and long and difficult. Each person must forgive and hold on to the one place they belong: in each other's loving arms.

That night I thought about how love comes paired with failure, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion.~from Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

I love this novel. The gorgeous writing, the way tears welled when I felt the loneliness of people losing connection without losing their love and commitment. The beauty of the Colombian land. 

One night Elena dreamed they were back on the roof of Perla's house. She stood with Maruo and the three children under the aluminium sky, gossamer clouds pushed to the mountain crests, the church of Monserrate like a merengue atop its peak. In her dreams, they'd never left their land. ~ from Infinite Country by Patricia Engel

Americans must face the depicted reality of our prejudice and laws, the way we dehumanize immigrants. How we are not better than countries we consider less free. 

This is a small book in size, but large in heart and vision, a stunning gem of a read.

I received a book from the publisher through a  Goodreads giveaway in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster 

Publication March 2, 2021
ISBN13: 9781982159467

from the publisher

“A knockout of a novel…we predict [Infinite Country] will be viewed as one of 2021’s best.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 from Esquire, O, The Oprah Magazine, Elle, GMA, New York Post, Ms. Magazine, The Millions, Electric Literature, LitHub, AARP, Refinery29, BuzzFeed, Autostraddle, She Reads, Alma, and more.

I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country.

Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family in the north.

How this family came to occupy two different countries, two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. We see Talia’s parents, Mauro and Elena, fall in love in a market stall as teenagers against a backdrop of civil war and social unrest. We see them leave Bogotá with their firstborn, Karina, in pursuit of safety and opportunity in the United States on a temporary visa, and we see the births of two more children, Nando and Talia, on American soil. We witness the decisions and indecisions that lead to Mauro’s deportation and the family’s splintering—the costs they’ve all been living with ever since.

Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself a dual citizen and the daughter of Colombian immigrants, gives voice to all five family members as they navigate the particulars of their respective circumstances. And all the while, the metronome ticks: Will Talia make it to Bogotá in time? And if she does, can she bring herself to trade the solid facts of her father and life in Colombia for the distant vision of her mother and siblings in America?

Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in America, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family—for whom every triumph is stitched with regret, and every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.

about the author 

Patricia Engel is the author of The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of Colombia’s national book award, the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, Patricia teaches creative writing at the University of Miami. 

Lost Son by M. Allen Cunningham

In my late 20s I was browsing in a downtown Philadelphia book store and happened upon a slender volume, Letters to a Young Poet. It changed my life. A few years later, I took the Duino Elegies on vacation to Maine, and sitting on pink granite cliffs overlooking the Atlantic ocean, I opened it and read the words, "If I cried out/who would hear me up there among the angelic orders?" It gave me chills.

Forty years later, I still read Rainer Maria Rilke and still struggle with understanding the words that thrill me. 

When I heard of a novel about Rilke I ordered a copy and it languished on my TBR shelf until I found myself the recipient of an egalley of previously uncollected Rilke poetry. I had to revisit Rilke to understand where the poetry came from. I hoped that M. Allen Cunningham's novel could be help.

Lost Son  follows Rilke's life from 1875 to 1915, incorporating the poet's letters into his text. 

Rilke's parents had lost a daughter; his mother turned her son into that lost daughter, naming him Rene Maria and putting him in dresses until his father took a stand. Rene was sent to military school, where he endured much suffering. 

His family had determined his sex, his education, his career, all unsuitable to his disposition and sensitive soul. He knew he was to be a poet.

At the center of his story is Lou, an older, intellectual, beautiful woman who eventually becomes his lover. Although married, she had remained a virgin. She listened to him, counseled him, consoled him, traveled abroad with him.

And then, held him at a distance. She studied with Freud, remained with her husband. Rilke met a young artist Clara. A pregnancy brought them to marry. Clara had studied with the master sculptor Rodin, and she encouraged her husband to write a monograph about Rodin.

Rilke took Rodin as his mentor, taking to heart the advice Rodin did not even follow: that work must displace everything else for the artist. Solitude was necessary for the artist to work.

And so he befriended women, felt eros, and fled.

Rilke struggled with his art in isolation, separated from his family, wandering from place to place, finding succor and temporary lodging, writing endless letters to Lou and Clara and everyone else he met along the way, pouring out his anguish and thoughts and communing from afar.

Rilke was out of France when the Germans took over; in effect, he was exiled from his home, his apartment, his possessions, his everything in this world.

"Even your papers are gone. Your manuscripts Your hundreds upon hundreds of letters and copies of letters...Uncle Jaroslav's old Rilke family crest. The small silver-framed photograph of your young Papa..." Cunningham writes, the chapter concluding with Rilke's letter to Princess Marie that ends,"Once again, my heart has fallen out."

Perhaps this is not a novel for 'everyone,' as Rilke's writing is not for 'everyone'. But for those who love the poet, it does feel right, a slant of light illuminating a difficult life. Cunningham immersed himself in Rilke's writings, especially those letters, and recreates Rilke's life in poetic prose. 

The Mission House by Carys Davies

"What was it, exactly, that he liked so much? Was it because it had an aura of home, or because it felt completely strange and new?"~from The Mission House by Carys Davies

I enjoyed Carys Davies last novel West so immediately requested his new novel The Mission House. 

Hillary Byrd was no longer comfortable in a changed England and sought escape by traveling to India. He was still miserable until he learned about the beautiful climate of the hills. He rents the house of a missionary on leave and discovers the village has all the comforts he requires, the legacy of the British army. For the first time in years he was content.

His host, a padre, has taken in a young woman, Priscilla, and asks Byrd to help polish her education to fit her for marriage. While teaching her English and sewing and baking, Byrd is drawn to her. The padre despairs for her future after he is gone and seeks a husband. Byrd is jealous.

Priscilla may be deformed and dependent, but she has dreams and is determined to make her own future.

Byrd can't escape the tribalism running rampant in the world, people "wanting to be surrounded only by people who were the same as they were," seeking an imaginary ideal past. He left it behind in England only to fatally discover it alive in India.

Byrd is condescending toward the natives; even his love for Priscilla is a parable of colonialism. Byrd uses his dedicated native driver thoughtlessly, spilling out his thoughts and grievances on their daily jaunts, but he never sees the man as a person. The ending is both ironic and tragic, Byrd's last action misguided but noble.

The novel wields a big impact in 272 pages. The writing is quiet and introspective, but there is a powerful story here.

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Mission House
by Carys Davies
Scribner
Pub Date: February 16, 2021
ISBN: 9781982144838
hardcover $24.00 (USD)

from the publisher:

From the multiple award-winning author of West and The Redemption of Galen Pike, a captivating and propulsive novel following an Englishman seeking refuge in a remote hill town in India who finds himself caught in the crossfire of local tensions and violence.

Fleeing his demons and the dark undercurrents of contemporary life in the UK, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in a former British hill station in South India. Charmed by the foreignness of his new surroundings and by the familiarity of everything the British have left behind, he finds solace in life’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town with his driver Jamshed and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery where the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla have taken Hilary under their wing.

The Padre is concerned for Priscilla’s future, and as Hilary’s friendship with the young woman grows, he begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems.

The Mission House boldly and imaginatively explores post-colonial ideas in a world fractured between faith and non-belief, young and old, imperial past and nationalistic present. Tenderly subversive and meticulously crafted, it is a deeply human story of the wonders and terrors of connection in a modern world.

Land of Big Numbers: Stories by Te-Ping Chen

Te-Ping Chen's debut story collection Land of Big Numbers started out strong and ended with a mind-blowing parable that knocked my socks off. 

I read the first story through BookishFirst and put in my name for the ARC. Set in China, twins go on separate life paths, the bright and driven girl challenging government repression, the boy excelling in competitive video gaming. A reversal of expectations challenges our values.

The stories are revelatory about life in modern China and the expat experience. I was unsettled by the portrait of life in China, seemingly normal people doing seemingly normal things, and yet so much at odds with American expectations. 

The generational divide shows up clearly. The older characters had lived hard lives of manual labor and poverty. Some hold onto fantasies of achievement and acceptance into the Party. Their children become teenage factory workers in the city or hope for a rich benefactor or play the stock market dreaming of easy money.

It is a world at once very familiar--and very alien. The details are different, but the human experience universal.

All around Zhu Feng, it seemed, people were buying, buying, homes and stocks and second and third houses; there was a whole generation who'd gotten rich and needed to buy things for their kids, and the same dinky things from before didn't pass muster: penny rides on those plastic cartoon figures that flashed lights and gently rocked back and forth outside of drugstores; hawthorn impaled on sticks and sheathed in frozen yellow sugar casings, a cheap winter treat. They needed to buy because they had the money and that's what everyone else was doing...Also, the government said it was the buying opportunity of a generations...China was going up and up and nobody wanted to be left behind."~from Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

The last story Guebeikou Spirit is amazing, a parable that reaches past it's setting to alert against the lure of complacence that can become complicity. Characters are stranded on a new high-speed train station after trains pass them buy. Regulations state that passengers must depart from a different station than they entered, and so they remain.

Every day they hear the announcement that the train is delayed. The guards reassuring,"we'll get there together," as they bring in food, blankets, personal health supplies, and as weeks go on, televisions and coloring books. 

The stranded people become a media sensation and the organize to represent 'Gubeikuo Spirit.' Several dissident young men try to follow the train tracks to another station, but always return and finally give up. The outside world's hardships come through the television news. They become comfortable so that when a train finally stops, they are unwilling to leave.

Obedience to an illogical rule, becoming comfortable, leading to the loss of volition and self-determination--it's a powerful message. 

Te-Ping Chen is a marvelous writer and I look forward to reading more from her pen.

I received an ARC from the publisher through BookishFirst and an egalley through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Land of Big Numbers: Stories
by Te-Ping Chen
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Mariner Books
Pub Date: February 2, 2021
ISBN: 9780358272557
softcover $15.99 (USD)

eBook $9.99

ISBN-13/EAN: 9780358275039

ISBN-10: 0358275032

from the publisher

A debut collection from an emerging “fiction powerhouse,” vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora that “entertain, educate, and universally resonate” (Booklist, starred review).

Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled—messily, violently, but still beautifully—into the present.

 Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China’s volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave.

With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.

About the author

TE-PING CHEN's fiction has been published in, or is forthcoming from, The New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Tin House, and The Atlantic. A reporter with the Wall Street Journal, she was previously a correspondent for the paper in Beijing and Hong Kong. Prior to joining the Journal in 2012, she spent a year in China as a Fulbright fellow. She lives in Philadelphia.