Book Reviews January 2019

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver.  I really enjoyed this novel.  It flips back and forth from a family in the present day living in a ramshackle house in Vineland, NJ, to a family living perhaps in the same house 100 years earlier.  In the present day, Willa is a middle-aged woman whose family is having financial difficulties.  Her husband is a professor whose job keeps getting downsized, her son is a widower with a newborn, and her daughter is a hipster with leftwing beliefs that tend toward the extreme.  Willa is not where she thought she’d be at this point in life, and the house they inherited is falling apart around her.  She starts doing research to see if they can declare it of historical value, and discovers that a famous scientist who corresponded with Darwin, Mary Treat, might have lived there.  Meanwhile the reader knows Mary Treat lived next door, since we are also privy to the situation of Thatcher, a young teacher and Darwinist who is trying to support his wife and her mother and sister, in the manner to which they would like to be accustomed.  He is trying to teach a more modern science in the high school there, but comes up against the founder of Vineland, a bit of a tyrant.  It has a welcoming, leisurely pace and Kingsolver of course does a great job of creating a world both factual and fiction and connecting it to what is going on today (there are many interesting connections between Trump and the tyrants of yore).  I recommend. 

At The Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen.  This was a pleasant, light read – nothing spectacular but it is fun in a tense way.  When the book begins, it is WWII and the young Maddie and her husband and best friend are living a rich alcoholic kind of life in Philadelphia,  Ellis and Hank tried to enlist in the army, but couldn’t, and the three of them are dealing with scorn from those who think they are cowards.  Ellis’s father was involved years ago in a discredited search for the Loch Ness monster, so on a drunken whim, the three end up crossing the ocean during wartime (and getting shot at), and end up in Scotland looking for the beast.  Maddie soon realizes that she didn’t know her husband as well as she had thought, and that he has all sorts of nefarious plans he is trying to bring to fruition.  Meanwhile, she becomes close to the owners and workers in the small guesthouse in which they are staying.  It’s a fun, fluffy, yet also tense romp.

This Close To Happy: A Reckoning With Depression by Daphne Merkin.  This was a more “enjoyable” read than I had guessed it would be, since the subject is Merkin’s life-long depression, which has had her in and out of institutions since childhood.  She is an excellent writer, though, and begins with her fascinatingly odd childhood as one of six kids born to wealthy Park Avenue parents who don’t seem at all interested in having or caring for children.  She and her siblings have thus struggled emotionally all their lives.  Merkin examines the beginnings of her depression as a young child, and explores honestly, it seems to me, how it was only when she was depressed that her mother would care for her.  It’s an honest and interesting exploration of her condition and how it has affected her personal and professional life.

Behind Closed Doors by B. A. Paris.  This was a really fun thriller to read!  I recommend.  One has to suspend disbelief a bit, but if willing to do so it won’t disappoint.  Jack and Grace seem to have the perfect marriage.  Jack is a wealthy lawyer, and a doting husband, who seems like he’d do anything for Grace and her disabled sister, Millie.  About a third into the book, however, you discover that all is not what it seems.  And all is pretty horrific!  I can’t say more without giving it away, but it is well-done and tense and very fun, subject-matter notwithstanding.

Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane.  This is the first Dennis Lehane book I’ve read and it has made me curious about the rest.  The first half of the book is about Rachel, a young woman who is trying to learn the secret of who her father might be, since her mother will not tell her.  She becomes a journalist, and investigates many leads.  She then becomes a successful television journalist, until her stint in Haiti causes her to have a breakdown live on TV.  So the first half of the book is establishing who Rachel is, and I found her compelling and the novel interesting.  But then!  Then all of a sudden she gets an inkling that her husband is not who he says he is.  She starts investigating what he has told her and then the rest of the book is this amazing fast-paced thriller, in which she discovers secret after secret, many of which are dangerous.  It is an exciting read, although I am still trying to piece together some of what happened.  I couldn’t put it down.

Astrophysics for People In A Hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.  I know nothing about physics, sadly, and not much about astrophysics either.  I’m not sure I’m “in a hurry”, but I definitely needed to start with the basics, and Tyson does a good job doing that.  He’s a good conversational writer, and also good at putting things in layman’s terms. I think I’d fail a test on the material, but I happily read a chapter each night, and enjoyed trying to wrap my mind around what he was explaining.

Inheritance by Dani Shapiro.  I really enjoyed Dani Shapiro’s writing, and would like to read some of her other memoirs.  This one centers around two years ago when she does the Ancestry DNA test and discovers from the results that her half sister is not related to her.  She begins investigating why her father is not her biological father – her parents are both dead so she has to figure it all out for herself.  She remembers a conversation she had in her twenties with her mother, who mentioned a fertility institute in Philadelphia, so Shapiro pieces it together – and somewhat amazingly figures out who her real father is in the course of two hours.  The rest of the book is her contacting her biological father, a man much different from the orthodox Jewish father who raised her.  Shapiro is smart and calm and explores all aspects of her new information, how it answers questions she always had about herself growing up (the only blonde in the family), and how it affects her sense of self and family.  It’s a very good read.