Archive for category Books
book review: Diamond Head
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on June 5, 2015
Diamond Head By Cecily Wong.
Harper| April 2015|256 pages |$25.99| ISBN: 978-0-062345431
Rating: ****/5*
Are we fated to experience what we do or do we choose what we do? That’s the question at the heart of the gorgeous novel Diamond Head. Author Cecily Wong’s debut novel takes you from China to Hawaii to document a family’s rise to power in Hawaii. At the turn of the 20th century, wealthy shipping industrialist Frank Leong relocates his family from China to the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Diamond Head mixes triumphs and tragedy in a multigenerational Chinese family that moves to Hawaii. In China, there’s a fable that a red string connects you to your destined partner, your perfect match. The fated red string can also be destructive and prevent happiness by knotting and twisting and hurt future generations. Sometimes the red string isn’t someone’s destiny. It’s not a good match. Diamond Head illuminates Chinese mysticism as well as individuality and contentment that we all seek.
Wong sets the novel in 1960s Hawaii and early 1900s China. After her father’s murdered in 1964 in Hawaii grand-daughter Theresa Leong begins to unravel her family’s history and a monumental secret her mother Amy kept for years. It’s up to her to keep her family together. Of her mom, Theresa says: “My mom spent and saved her words like gold, like precious stones, playing them strategically, saving some for difficult times to secure a certain outcome. The modification of words, of feelings and experiences, were simply tools that she hoped might pry her from the life that she was born into.” Amy: “My husband. Another word that inflicted so much pain. How stupid had I turned out to be? How pathetic? I’d sold my life to a man panicked by his own voice, a man with no friends, with no life of his own I thought of a lifetime with Bohai—his slow words, his tidy bed, his wire glasses—and I began to panic.”
“This was not fate, I told myself: it was the furthest thing from it. This pain was intimate, deeply, sickeningly personal, and as I closed my eyes and lowered myself to the ground. I knew that it had all been created. The tangles from one generation to the next, the mistakes passed from mother to daughter, the lies from father to son—it wasn’t fate, who would call that fate? These things were within our control, outcomes not linked to our flesh, and all of us, every single one of us, had played a hand in this destiny.”
When they start having difficulties with their son Bohai in China, Lin thinks: “As days passed and my son remained unchanged, I felt my failure swell and multiply. There was a voice, one I had silenced for many years, that now whispered to me at all times of the day. You are unworthy of this life, it said. It was all a mistake.” Destruction of family and business and bonds and healing that allow one to move forward. There’s plenty of detail and sense of place for the flow back and forth in time to work. Wong constructs place beautifully writing about the scenery and political battles for the Chinese (The Boxer Rebellion) and then the immigrant experience in Hawaii. Filled with page-turning secrets, deception and the genuine price of power and the risks of privilege. If you like Amy Tam and Lisa See this is the type of novel for you with deep layers and a complex familial story and a dark secret that might ruin everything this family built.
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Harper Collins.
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book review: How to Be a Man
Posted by Amy Steele in Books, Music on May 31, 2015
How to Be a Man By Duff McKagan.
Da Capo Press| May 2015|304 pages |$25.99| ISBN: 978-0-306-82387-9
Rating: ***/5*
–review by Amy Steele
Easy read that I often found tiresome. I get it. You’re a wealthy rock-star with a model wife and enviable life. I never really liked rock bands in the 80s. Sure I liked some of Guns and Roses hits but I wasn’t all into them. I’m an altgirl. Always was. Always will be. I am not the target audience for this book. I’m a single GenX music critic who likes alternative music. Duff McKagan expresses his disdain for music journalists quite a few times. Don’t expect a tell-all filled with rock and roll debauchery. Duff McKagan is now 50, sober and married with two teenage daughters. McKagan writes: “I don’t remember the 80s. I remember being in a band. I remember my family. I remember the friends I lost to addiction. I am fully aware that I am lucky to have emerged.” Now McKagan writes columns for Seattle Weekly, ESPN.com and Playboy.com.
This is the calm family-man rocker advice book. He works out and does yoga. He prefers perusing books stores to heading to a strip club. He likes to take in the culture of a city he’s touring if he’s allowed the time. He uses a Blackberry because he believes in loyalty and probably didn’t want to learn how to use an iPhone because people on iPhones do as much business on their phones as those on Blackberries. It’s true. He provides advice based on his decades of traveling whether in a van and staying in motels or in a streamline tour bus and staying at high-end hotels– don’t roam on your data plan; use conditioner for shaving; be kind.
In a chapter entitled “Don’t Burn Any Bridges,” he writes: “Lazy journalists love to put tags on things to sum up a whole genre or moment with a one- or two-word phrase that will make their job easier. IF the tag can take a little backhanded swipe at a band—even better. We’ve seen this a million times: “stoner rock,” “grunge,” “indie,” “hair metal.” Okay McKagan but when you refer to Death Cab for Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard you call him “one of Seattle’s illustrious and beloved indie-rock front men” Okay. There goes your great advice/theory. In that chapter he was discussing with Gibbard the Bon Jovi song “Wanted Dead or Alive” with the lyric: “I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all.” McKagan doesn’t think you possibly can “rock” or entertain EVERYONE you play for. Gibbard agrees.
He tells you the 100+ albums you need to hear—including Adam and the Ants, Kings of the Wild Frontier; Aerosmith, Aerosmith (only time I saw GNR was opening for Aerosmith in 1987); Alice in Chains, Dirt; The Beastie Boys, Paul’s Boutique; The Clash, The Clash; Death Cab for Cutie, Something About Airplanes; P.J Harvey, To Bring You My Love; Jimi Hendrix, Axis: Bold as Love; Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, I Love Rock and Roll; Joy Division, Closer; Jack White, Blunderbuss; The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell. He also recommends some favorite books including A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan [fantastic read]; Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand; Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro [a favorite of mine]; War by Sebastian Unger and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.
McKagan opens up about depression and how he deals with the dark moments. He exercises it out. He pushes it away. “Depression wants you to stay still. It wants you to lie in bed. That’s when you have to get up and run. If I am having black thoughts, I force myself up, and then I go and break a personal best record—or at least try. This has been my secret and savior. I run through it. I hot yoga with weights through it. I jump rope through it and life weights through it. I write when I don’t want to and ask my kids how school was and actually listen back through it. I make love through it and climb steep hills with a pack on my back through it.”
This book isn’t for everyone but many will find something in it that appeals to them.
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Da Capo Press.
purchase at Amazon: How to Be a Man: (and other illusions)
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book review: The Travels of Daniel Ascher
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on May 28, 2015
The Travels of Daniel Ascher By Deborah Levy-Bertherat.
Other Press| May 2015| 182 pages | $22.95| ISBN: 978-1-59051-707-9
Rating: *****/5*
Touching, creative, lovely novel. It tells the story of a child of the Holocaust in a unique manner. There’s a story within a story. French author Deborah Levy-Bertherat provides splendid descriptions of present day Paris as well as Paris during the Nazi occupation. It’s a wonderful translation by Adriana Hunter. The Travels of Daniel Ascher proves to be mysterious, adventurous and moving.
Archaeology student Helene Roche never paid much mind to her eccentric uncle Daniel, the author of a popular series of adventure novels in the vein of Treasure Island with a rapid following like Game of Thrones or Harry Potter. She arrives in Paris to study—living in a flat in Daniel’s building– and begins dating Guillaume, a serious fan of her great uncle’s novels and his heroic protagonist Peter. “In the most perilous episodes in every book, the insignia reminded Peter he’d brushed with death and it had saved him, and it would give him the strength to continue his battle against the adversities and injustices of this world.”
To create novels within a novel demands immense creativity for which Levy-Bertherat possesses plenty. Helene soon decides she needs to learn about the real Daniel not just the swashbuckling traveler who regales the children at holidays with his outlandish tales. Helene never knew that Daniel was adopted and one of the orphans of the Holocaust that her family took in during WWII. As she begins to investigate and discuss Daniel with her aunts she uncovers the truth. She travels to New York to meet his biological aunt. She then speaks with Daniel to discover that while he’s Daniel Roche he’s also Daniel Ascher too. He’s split between two worlds. Saved from great atrocities he lost his parents and sister to the Holocaust. Helene grows closer to her uncle and appreciates him much more.
It’s a delightfully-written exquisite novel.
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Other Press.
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book review: The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on May 19, 2015
The Life and Death of Sophie Stark By Anna North.
Blue Rider Press| May 19, 2015|288 pages |$26.95| ISBN: 978-0399173394
Rating: *****/5*
Want an engrossing read for the weekend? This book grabbed my attention from its title, cover and first pages. I was captivated and couldn’t stop reading. It’s a fascinating novel about creativity, artists, fitting in and being satisfied with success, fame and how we perceive ourselves and how we want others to understand us. Sophie Stark, who changed her name to suit her persona, is a renowned and elusive filmmaker. She makes enigmatic and often strikingly sad, honest films that strip bare the characters and dig into their psyches.
Author Anna North creatively writes through various viewpoints of those close to Sophie at some point or another– Sophie’s girlfriend Allison; her songwriter boyfriend Jacob (later husband); an older film producer George; former college crush Daniel and her brother Peter. Daniel describes Sophie: “She was that kind of alternative girl with a camera. She’s a director now.” Sophie has a strange magnetic control over all these individuals by simultaneously annoying them [“Her voice wasn’t rude, just flat, without feeling.”]; scaring them [“Sophie was worse than I’d thought, further away from normal. The coldness I’d seen in her movies wasn’t something she just called up every now and then to help her with a scene; it was the way she was.”] and interesting them [“I think she knew that I still loved her and that‘d be flattered that she needed me.”]. Sophie wasn’t well-liked in college or high school. She never fit in. She’s offbeat and stand-offish even when trying to market her films. She just doesn’t seem to care. But yet she does. She wants to be liked. She wants people to understand her through her films. Her brother says: “I realized then that Sophie did care what other people thought—at least, she liked to be praised.”
Sophie manages to get those close to her to reveal dark, personal moments and memories and then exploits them through her film-making. Jacob admits: “At the same time, I wanted to hold Sophie’s interest. I felt like I was performing for her—I didn’t know whether it was a good performance or a bad one, but I didn’t want to stop. And I didn’t like the way Sophie was looking at me, like she’s given me a challenge I was failing to rise to.” Allison starred in Marianne based on her experience being raped in her hometown in West Virginia. She thinks: “I’d gone to so much trouble to tell a good story about my life, a story that was exciting and didn’t make me look bad, and now the cast and crew and anyone who saw the movie would see the other story anyway. They would see me letting Peter do something I didn’t want; they would see me fearful and helpless and struggling.” This is Anna North’s second novel. The first, America Pacifica, came out in 2011. She’s a currently a staff editor at The New York Times and has been a writer and editor at Jezebel, BuzzFeed, and Salon.
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Net Galley.
purchase at Amazon: The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
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book review: The Green Road
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on May 13, 2015
The Green Road By Anne Enright.
W.W. Norton| May 11, 2015| 304 pages | $26.95| ISBN: 978-0-393-24824-0
Rating: *****/5*
A perfect novel with imperfect characters that spans decades and continents. Dublin author and Booker prize winner Anne Enright [The Gathering] writes beautifully constructing plausible and faulty characters, of which one wants to read more, know more and become attached. The Green Road is where the family matriarch Rosaleen Madigan enjoys taking long walks. Rosaleen is strong-willed, unyielding and resilient particularly after becoming a widow. In Ardeevin, County Clare, Rosaleen raises four children—two daughters Hanna and Constance and two sons Dan and Emmet. The children move away from their childhood home and live varied lives throughout the world.
Dan becomes a priest but then moves to New York with a fiancée. He carries on a relationship with the handsome Billy lying to himself that he’s gay only for Billy. Enright writes: “Two nights later, at eleven forty-five p.m., Dan the spoilt priest was outside Billy Walker’s door, looking for sex. Again. And sex is what he got.” During the early 90s he’s in the midst of New York’s gay scene at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Later he finally admits he’s gay and marries a man in Canada. Emmet travels the world to aid the impoverished and fulfill his wanderlust. He never has to commit to any one place or one person for long. He travels to war-torn, medically inefficient countries to work to help improve their living conditions. At one point he’s living with a woman in Africa. His relationships are always tenuous and he cares more for his own happiness and the people he’s helping on his various missives than any long-term coupling. Constance remains close to home to raise a family after somewhat settling in marriage. She once considered moving to America but didn’t get on the plane. “Constance still liked Ireland, the way you could talk to anyone. I would not be the same in America, she thought, and tried to remember why she failed to get on the plane.” Hanna gives up her love of theater and the potential for a career when she gets pregnant. These are flawed, struggling children that Enright describes and develops with compassion.
In 2005, Rosaleen summons her children home for one last Christmas as she’s decided to sell the family home. “She had been waiting, all her life, for something that never happened and she could not bear the suspense any longer.” This brings out the inner child in the four siblings and makes for a messy homecoming. Enright writes: “The truth was that the house they were sitting in was worth a ridiculous amount, and the people sitting in it were worth very little. Four children on the brink of middle-age: They had no money. Dan, especially, had no money, and he could not think why that was, or who might be to blame. But he recognised, in the silence the power Rosaleen had over her children, none of whom had grown up to match her.” No one wants the family house sold. No one wants that disruption. Nobody wants the truth. As Rosaleen thinks: “Such selfish children she had reared.”
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from W.W. Norton.
Anne Enright will be reading at Harvard Book Store May 13, 2015 at 7pm.
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book review: Cut Me Loose
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on May 11, 2015
Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood By Leah Vincent.
Penguin Books| May 12, 2015|256 pages |$16.00| ISBN: 978-0-14-312741-3
Rating: 3.5/5*
Leah Vincent divides Orthodox Jews in three groups: Hasidic; Modern Orthodox –“semiassimilated into modern life—and Yeshivish –“committed to the centrality of the yeshivas—study halls where men ponder ancient legal texts.” It sounds a lot like the Amish. No television or modern technology. Little higher education. Young girls get married off as teenagers to start families at age 16 if possible. It’s a fundamentalist religion that many don’t understand and with knowledge/education and other options might disagree with it.
At the beginning echoing back to a teenage voice Vincent explains how she began to question the Yeshivish lifestyle and faith as a teen when she became interested in boys. That seems to be the main issue with which she struggles: “Yeshivish girls were not permitted to talk to boys. We were not allowed even to think of them. Since adolescence had arrived, my desire had roiled within, getting larger in the small container of my skin. My feelings were intensified and distorted in their repression. Nearly every boy I saw became a swoon-worthy Prince Charming.”
At 16 she’s sent to a Yeshivish school in Manchester, England where she meets a boy and they begin a correspondence. Her parents find out and she’s banished first to Israel as a semi-last resort. Vincent writes: “Though I understood the smallest brush with promiscuity spread around a girl and her family like toxic ink in a fishbowl, my banishment from Manchester was crushing. I was not a loudmouthed slutty girl who laughed at Jewish law. I was a girl who cried real tears over the destruction of the Temples every Tisha B’Av. I was a girl who would never sneak a kosher candy bar that did not carry the extra-strict cholov Yiroel certification. I wanted to be good. I was good. I had just been curious.”
Vincent then attends a school in Jerusalem. Her parents aren’t happy but don’t give up immediately. However, when she’s caught hanging around with boys her parents cast her out to live and work alone in New York. At first tries to stick to her Orthodox ways by eating Kosher, dressing modestly but soon enough isolated, confused and alone she spirals into a self-destructive phase. She cuts her arms. “The cutting gave me such release, I returned to it again and again and again in the days that followed, until it became a regular habit. The relief I found in cutting my skin helped me cope as I lived my split life of religion and college, modesty and loneliness, hope and memory.”
She has unsafe sex. She puts herself into situations where she’s raped and abused. Vincent quite explicitly describes the sexual situations. Perhaps she thought it would intensify or explain her turmoil. For someone so downtrodden she manages to work, pay her bills and attend college. At college she has an affair with a married professor 40 years her senior. The misguided father figure affair.
“I had chosen freedom, and I had paid the price: The loss of my family. Too much heartbreak. PID [pelvic inflammatory disease]. But where was my delicious free-for-all? Where was all the candy sweetness of sin I had been so direly warned about? Wasn’t that supposed to come along with its toxicity? All I seemed to encounter was rejection and disappointment. What other commandments would I have to break to access the goodies?”
Being agnostic, I don’t understand the draw of religions that don’t value women, that want to keep women in domesticated roles, bearing as many children as possible and never becoming educated. Strict religions and cults intrigue me. How can these strict religions and cults exist in the modern world? That’s why this memoir intrigued me. Vincent writes well. A bit more on her college experiences besides the affair with the teacher and her drive to attend Harvard for graduate school would make this much better.
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Penguin Random House.
Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood
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book review: Whatever . . . Love is Love
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on May 10, 2015
Whatever . . . Love is Love By Maria Bello.
Dey Street Books| May 12, 2015|256 pages |$25.99| ISBN: 978-0-062351838
Rating: ****/5*
Actress and activist Maria Bello is known for her roles on ER and in films like Coyote Ugly and A History of Violence. She wrote a much lauded and popular Modern Love essay for the New York Times entitled “Coming Out as a Modern Family.” Bello wanted to share her disdain for labels and illuminate how her perhaps unusual family situation works. She’d fallen in love with a female best friend yet remained close with her 12-year-old son Jackson’s father. While struggling from a parasitic infection after a trip to Haiti, Bello started reading her journals and decided she thoroughly need to tell her story.
“In the summer of 2013, while I struggled in the hospital, I realized that waiting to do something isn’t always an option. In a moment, everything could end, and my stories would be lost—stories of love, partnership, miracles, and madness that filled the hundreds of notebooks beneath my bed. During my months of recovery, I read through each one of my trusted journals, collections of my thoughts since I was a teenager.”
In Whatever . . . Love is Love: Questioning the Labels We Give Ourselves, Bello ponders many aspects of her life. She shares intimate details about failed affairs, insecurities, challenges growing up with an alcoholic bipolar father and her own bipolar diagnosis. She shares stories and thoughts on being labeled a humanitarian, a feminist, a mother, a daughter, a sister, an actress and a lover. In her memoir Bello answers questions such as am I a partner; am I perfect; am I a good mom; am I a humanitarian; am I a feminist; am I a writer. This is how she shares her stories and shares herself with the reader. She lives life on her own terms. While Hollywood and acting situations constantly change and flow, Bello strives to remain in the moment and be appreciative. She possesses a beautiful spirit and attitude. It’s an enlightening read that’s honest, smart and thoughtful.
On labels:
“Traditional labels just don’t seem to fit anymore. These labels are limiting the possibility for people to question more and become who they are meant to be. By asking questions and challenging our own beliefs, I feel we can update all of our outdated labels and realize that labels need to evolve just like people do.”
On the term partner:
“I have never understood the distinction of a ‘primary’ partner. Does that imply that we have secondary and tertiary partners, too? To me, a partner is someone you rely on in your life—for help, companionship, mutual respect, and support.”
On sex vs. love:
“To me, sexual desire and love are two different things. That certainly doesn’t mean that people inside of long-term committed relationships don’t have great sex. I know some who do. But not many, if I’m honest.”
Maria Bello has struggled with the sex/love connection like many women:
“I felt rejected. I knew he just wanted sex and what I really wanted was sex and love.”
She’s done humanitarian work in Nicaragua, many countries in Africa and Haiti. After the Haiti earthquake Bello returned to help: “Those of us who went in those days after the quake all experienced a deep despair, and an incredible joy, feelings that would bond us together for life. In those first few months after the earthquake, I saw the best and worst of what human beings, nature, and I are capable of. I saw moments of grace that I won’t ever forget. We were all challenged by what we experienced. When I left Haiti for the first time after the earthquake, all I could think of was returning.”
She expresses what many with mental illness feel and for an actress, celebrity, public figure to discuss mental illness so openly and bravely is wonderful for the rest of us who also grapple with mental illness every day: “I cried because no one would ever want me, because I was too messed up. And now, everyone knew. They knew that my father was sick in his head and that I was just like him.” And another reality: “Now and again over the years I’ve had to adjust my meds, just like my dad and others I know who have this or similar illnesses. I am dutiful about taking my pills every day. But once every couple of years, if I am triggered in some way or the medicine stops working, I find I’m not quite myself. I know it’s time to go back to the doctor. And I do. I know that without medication I would end up suicidal and eventually dead.”
On feminism:
“For me, calling someone a feminist is one of the highest compliments I can pay a woman, or a man, for that matter. It’s a label I give myself and I wholeheartedly accept others giving it to me.”
On being herself:
“I am already whole—just complicated, wounded, loving, difficult, and kind. I have finally discovered the joy that comes from hitting bottom and pushing oneself up to the top again.”
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Dey Street Books.
Whatever…Love Is Love: Questioning the Labels We Give Ourselves
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book reviews: fancy a twisty psychological thriller?
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on May 6, 2015
Both these psychological thrillers drew me in and kept me reading to find out what would happen to the women involved.
The Pocket Wife By Susan Crawford.
William Morrow| March 2015|320 pages |$25.99| ISBN: 978-0-062362858
Rating: ***/5*
A woman’s mental illness grows increasingly worse as she suspects her husband cheated on her and that she may have killed her neighborhood friend Celia and erased it from her memory. Dana Catrell married a safe, quiet man—Peter– whom she thought would balance her and enable her bipolar disorder to remain mostly dormant. “For a while she took the medicine that made the world around her such a faded, unbright place to be, let it hold her in its sagging, dimpled arms until with a sigh she shuffled into the rest of her life, eventually trading the drug for a tall blue-eyed husband and a world more numbing than lithium could ever be.”
When Celia winds up dead, the day after the two women argued, Dana spirals out of control and her thoughts race. She’s not sure whether to implicate herself or her husband in the suspicious death. Crawford writes commendably about mental illness. It’s realistic. “This time Dana feels anger surging through her—anger for the lost, baffled way she’s lived her life, for the father who deserted her, for her enigmatic, cheating husband; for the cruel, disabling illness wrestling with her mind.” A great psychological thriller to read over a weekend.
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from William Morrow.
Where They Found Her By Kimberly McCreight.
Harper| April 2015|336 pages |$26.99| ISBN: 978-0-062225467
Rating: ****/5*
A baby is found in the woods near a prestigious university campus. Whose baby is it? How did it die? Who abandoned it? Using multiple female perspectives author Kimberly McCreight weaves a page-turning psychological thriller as complex as her first novel Reconstructing Amelia. Molly a freelance journalist who recently lost her own child gets assigned the story. “Despite my initial vertigo, I was no longer conflicted about staying on the story. I wanted to, needed to write about it, and with an intensity that even I had to acknowledge was somewhat disconcerting.” Sandy struggles to survive—she’s attempting to pass her GED– as her wayward mom spends nights out and skirts bill collectors. Then there’s rigid and regulated Barbara, married to the Chief of Police and concerned for her youngest child’s outbursts in school. McCreight creates complicated characters, develops each character and utilizes their innate differences to effectively advance the story. Many twists will keep readers captivated to the end.
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Harper Collins.
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MAY Boston-area Book Readings of Note
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on May 5, 2015
Charlotte Gordon
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
Brookline Booksmith
Tuesday, May 5 at 7pm
Erika Robuck
The House of Hawthorne
Newtonville Books
Tuesday, May 5 at 7pm
Sarah McCoy
The Mapmaker’s Children
Brookline Booksmith
Wednesday, May 6 at 7pm
John Palfrey
BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More than Ever in the Age of Google
Harvard Book Store
Thursday, May 7 at 7pm
Elizabeth Berg
The Dream Lover
Newtonville Books
Thursday, May 7 at 7pm
Heidi Pitlor
The Daylight Marriage
Porter Square Books
Thursday, May 7 at 7pm
Erika Robuck
The House of Hawthorne
Sarah McCoy
The Mapmaker’s Children
The Concord Bookshop
Thursday, May 7 at 7pm
Celeste Ng
Everything I Never Told You
Porter Square Books
Tuesday, May 12 at 7pm
Gregory Howard
Hospice
Brookline Booksmith
Wednesday, May 13 at 7pm
Anne Enright
The Green Road
Harvard Book Store
Wednesday, May 13 at 7pm
Heidi Pitlor
The Daylight Marriage
Newtonville Books
Thursday, May 14 at 7pm
Joanna Rakoff
My Salinger Year
Harvard Book Store
Saturday, May 16 at 7pm
Barney Frank
Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage
Brookline Booksmith
Thursday, May 21 at 6pm
Tina Packer
Women of Will
Porter Square Books
Friday, May 22 at 7pm
Mako Yoshikawa
Every Father’s Daughter: Twenty-Four Women Writers Remember their Father
Brookline Booksmith
Saturday, May 23 at 5pm
Dr. Jessica Stern
ISIS: The State of Terror
The Concord Bookshop
Thursday, May 28 at 7pm
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book review: Where Women are Kings
Posted by Amy Steele in Books on April 29, 2015
Where Women are Kings By Christie Watson.
Other Press| April 28, 2015| 256 pages| $16.95| ISBN: 978-1-59051-709-3
Rating: *****/5*
Simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming. Stunning. Entwines race, foster families, adoption, mental illness and cultural differences with exquisite descriptions and phrasing. Every so often I read a novel so gorgeously written and remarkable that I find it difficult to review. This is one of those novels.
The title refers to Elijah’s mother’s birth country of Nigeria. After being moved from one foster family to another, a bi-racial, British-Nigerian couple adopts the seven year old with a history of disruptive behavior. “Nikki had known people would talk. After all, a white woman didn’t suddenly give birth to a black child of seven. Still, she wished people would mind their own business.”
Nikki and Obi believe their magnanimous love and consistent support will make Elijah part of their family. His mentally ill and deeply religious mother told Elijah that there’s a bad spirit in him. She wrote in a journal: “I was so unwell, Elijah, hearing voices constantly, not sleeping, unable to eat, and I knew everything was down to that wizard destroying us. The insects were crawling around inside me.” He believes her and assumes that this evil cannot be stopped. He dreads discussing it and doesn’t know how to fight it “But Elijah could feel the wizard, churning up his stomach, and he had to hold tight to Granddad or the wizard might take hold of Elijah’s body and fly him far away.”
Social workers and therapists attempt to work with Elijah’s wounded spirit but Elijah’s thinking and behavior intensifies. “Nikki felt her own heart thumping against Elijah’s back. Ricardo had warned them about rages and that Elijah might lash out, but, since she’s first seen his scars, Elijah had been nothing but calm and loving. She felt the skin underneath her eye. What had happened to her son? She held him close.”
Often devastating. Completely riveting. Entrancing. Using empathy and humor, Christie Watson wrote one of the best novels I’ve read this year.
–review by Amy Steele
FTC Disclosure: I received this book for review from Other Press.
purchase at Amazon: Where Women Are Kings
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About Me
covering mostly music and books. focus on alternative/indie and women in music, literature and the arts. feminist. vegan. mostly alternative, a bit bohemian. Masters in journalism from Boston University. BA from Simmons College.
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Based on a work at entertainmentrealm.comCopyright © 2009. All writing, unless otherwise noted, by Amy Steele.
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