u/YakSlothLemon

It's rare that I read something that makes me experience so many intense emotions. It’s been a long time since I have been this moved by a book.

Nina Diaz is a middle-aged Mexican-American woman, caring for her elderly mother in a rundown house in Brownsville, Texas. She used to be a teacher but, when her mother could no longer live alone, her brothers volunteered her for this duty – "you never married and you're the only girl, what did you expect?" – and now she lives a life of almost total isolation. She gets only one day a week where there is any respite care, thanks to her housecleaner, Rumalda– who asks Nina for a favor. Her sister-in-law and niece are going to cross the border illegally, and they need somewhere safe to stay overnight – and since there's a small pink rental house, a standalone mother-in-law apartment, currently unoccupied on the property, could they use that? Just for one night? Nina says yes, only to learn that there's a high price to pay when the coyotes who smuggle people across the border find out that she has an empty house on her property...

Meanwhile, her nephew Eduardo – who moved to Houston and became "Eddie" – lost his wife to an aneurysm six months earlier and, in the aftermath, forgot to send in the deposit for summer camp for his son– so of course Nina won't mind looking after 12-year-old Orly for three weeks in the summer, she is his godmother after all. But if Orly (who barely understands Spanish never mind understanding the risks) finds out what's going on in the pink house, it could mean the end of everything for Nina.

I'm not conveying the heart of this book-- which is about families, the one we're born into and the ones we choose, and about what we owe one another. It is unflinching in its portrayal of the suffering of women under the culture of machismo, of the way their emotional work is taken for granted, and Nina's backstory is heartbreaking, how she lost the only man she's ever loved. But weaving in and out of her story (and Orly's story, because we enter into his point of view as well), are the stories of many different Latinos whose lives touch theirs, often in passing, written in brief passages that are one of my favorite parts of this book. Orly's favorite teacher at school, the family's maid in Houston, the coyote who keeps saying 'one more job,' the elderly woman whose plastic water jug blows across the highway as his father drives Orly past a seemingly empty wasteland… We learn those stories too.

Nina, like Orly, lives in a rich world of social connection, of the documented and undocumented, of families connected through secrets and lies but also by the power of compassion and love, and that's what this book is really about.

It's powerful and affecting and heartbreaking and really beautiful. I loved this book!

(PS— with all the controversy around American Dirt, I found a list of books to read instead of that by Latino/a authors, and this is the third book I’ve loved from that list – well, I’m not sure I “loved” The Devil’s Highway, I’m haunted by it, but I really enjoyed Signs Preceding the End of the World.)

I am absolutely in love with this small book.

Rika is a Japanese woman in her 20s, living a life of almost total isolation. Although we don't find out for quite a while why she is so alone, and I don't want to give that away, we quickly learn that she balances out her loneliness with a rich internal life, telling stories about the people she sees through the livestreams she watches in her tiny apartment, even giving voices to the frozen food that she stocks in her part-time job at a freezer warehouse. She's a woman that nobody sees, with little human contact except for her senile landlady, whom she does her best to watch over.

Then she's contacted with a very odd job offer. Rika speaks fluent conversational Latin, thanks to an unusual university course, followed by an international student experience where learning conversational Latin was the only alternative to having to socialize with the other students. Now a museum needs her skill. Their statue of Venus, sculpted in ancient Rome, has come to life from the neck up and she is bored. Venus needs to talk to somebody, and of course she only speaks Latin. So on Mondays when the museum is closed, Rika starts spending time attempting to entertain Venus, and the two women soon find they have more common ground than either would have expected. Venus has been ogled and handled by men for two millennia with no say in it; Rika has no trouble understanding the horrors of that. And as she begins to suspect the unnervingly handsome museum curator of having designs of his own on Venus, she realizes how much she's coming to care for the goddess of love…

The writing is gorgeous. "Her long black hair blew in the breeze, every so often revealing a streak of pink so vivid that I had to catch my breath. It was like she was concealing a secret springtime bomb."

“He closed his eyes as though he were an electronic device being charged.”

“In the end, words always expose our differences. Words help build a bridge, but in the length of the bridge, we learn the distance to the other shore."

The blurb is almost entirely wrong while also giving too much away; they're clearly trying to sell it as a 'quirky cozy novel,' and those usually are not my thing. I loved her previous book, Diary of a Void, though, so I gave it a try... This is too critical of Japanese society, and of the way that societies throughout time have treated women and assessed their attractiveness, to qualify as ‘cozy' for me, and it's never clear whether Rika is struggling with mental illness or neurodiversity on top of her isolation, which I would hesitate to call 'quirky.' That said, I would think people who like cozy books would find much to love here.

Don't judge this one by the blurb, just read it! 😁

Some of you might already know Lauren Groff from her amazing novels— I think I posted The Vaster Wilds on here, which was her previous book. I’m not always one for short stories but I loved this collection from her, it’s so powerful and gorgeously written, and each story is an actual full story (a lot of short stories these days seem to be more slices-of-life than narratives with a beginning and end, and I do like a story where something actually happens).

The stories are almost all about characters who are at some kind of crisis point. They’re also about the ways that we see and justify our own actions, and how other people in this world can see us and our actions differently, and enforce their vision of us on ourselves: the young woman taking her disabled brother to an institution, telling herself that it’s the best thing for both of them; the privileged boy who grows up into a man who refuses to accept reality, and whose behavior edges ever further into darkness as he is stymied by real life; the middle-aged woman who discovers that her closest friends have always viewed her magical summer of exploring sex as just her being a slut.

I don’t want to give anything more away, so I will just give you some of the amazing opening lines that made me excited to read these stories:

“Some nights, in my dreams, I find myself running through those hills above Palo Alto again.”

“It came up through the ground in the night. The worst things never wait for sunrise.”

“The women were drinking peach schnapps, telling stories about the worst things they had ever done.”

“Pretend, the mother had said when she crept to her daughters room in the night, that tomorrow is just an ordinary day.”

Truly, I’m so glad I read this book.

Weird note: the final story, ’Annunciation,’ has very sad things happening to a dog. I know it’s weird to be bothered by that in a book that does have quite a lot of sad things happening to people, and yet, for me, there’s something about critters. I know some of you feel the same.

I loved this book so much— it is brave, heartbreaking, unflinching, unapologetic and gorgeously written.

It opens with Jan living in a shack on the coast of Mexico, waiting for her 22-year-old husband John to come home, hoping that he’s caught some fish because otherwise they have nothing for dinner. She is eight months pregnant. She is fifteen years old.

From that opening the book divides into two alternating narratives. One is about her childhood and everything that led up to Mexico. Her mother was a fearless child of the ‘60s, entangled with the Beat poets, but women sometimes get pregnant, and men romanticizing being On The Road aren’t going to stick around for that. Jan grew up in true poverty, but loved deeply by a mother who worked hard to balance her own restlessness with her children’s needs. Sometimes that was enough. Sometimes it wasn’t.

The other narrative moves forward into the years after Mexico, becoming a coming-of-age story told from the road. You travel with Jan through the ‘70s, sampling hippie life on the West Coast, a dip into sex work in the Southwest, a journey back south into Central and then South America where she ends up with a man whom she truly believes is going to kill her, and from whom she must escape.

I don’t know how bleak I’m making this all sound, but the book doesn’t feel that way when you read it. Jan is utterly unapologetic and she also asks for no pity from you as a reader – in fact she actively refuses it. She has a sly feminist eye and does not miss the fact that exploitation always seems to end up in play with the men she gets involved with— as she says, “somehow I always ended up playing the servant”— but the next job, the next man, the next adventure is always just a bus ride away. She dips in and out of drugs and in and out of sex work, as she owns all of her choices. And the book is full of her joy in stolen moments— in fifth grade when her mother was a month late bringing her back to school from their beach vacation, and she was briefly queen of fifth grade and the envy of all the other kids there; the beauty of the birds surrounding her in Mexico as she sits and watches them for hours in the lush greenery; the friendships with women that she makes along the way- especially that.

This is a book about women in a way that only slowly becomes clear, as you move toward the book’s point, its revelation, and I don’t want to give that away. I will say it very much is a book about mothers and daughters.

This particular edition has an awful introduction. Do you ever read an introduction and think, “did you just read the same book I read?” I don’t think either the reviewer’s judgmental views on drug use nor her fascination with Jack Kerouac served her very well (Jan only met her famous father twice and even in that brief span she noticed his sexism). Jan didn’t write this about her father, she wrote this about her own journey.

It’s not just her story that haunts me now, a week after I finished it, but also some of the images and moments that she describes so beautifully that it’s as if you were there. At the same time, I don’t think I’ll see the Beat poets the same way: “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” looks a lot grimmer from a woman’s point of view.

Such a powerful book. It’s an incredible ride.

I did a quick search and someone has already posted the pages where Connie stares critically at her body so I’ll skip that and go straight to our “weird female mind.” (Seems worth mentioning that this is one of the few times any woman has a mind at all, most of Connie’s thinking is done by her womb or bowels (at one point, worryingly, they “faint”)… the author sees us is somewhat atavistic, with our ancient knowledge and all.

I included the gamekeeper’s horrific rant about how disgusting women are when they are active participants in sex, how clitoral stimulation results in women forming a “hard beak” down there(!!!), and of course the comment that all women who get off by clitoral orgasm are Lesbians whom he wants to murder. (The next page continues that murder-the-Lesbians theme, but also has a racial comment that I don’t think we all need to look at, it’s that gross.)

And I know that’s the character talking, but

1. the character is absolutely a self-insert for Lawrence, right down to his cough, his sexual history, and the way he writes letters; and

2. what he is saying here is the point of the book. Here on page 262, obviously Lawrence is worried that you have not understood that the takeaway is that clitoral orgasms are BAD/immature and that you only become a “real woman” with vaginal orgasm— yes, Connie becomes a real woman because of the gamekeeper’s magic dick.

Before reading this, I had the impression it was about a woman claiming her own sexuality/becoming liberated. It’s really not. If you don’t know the damage that the myth of the vaginal orgasm did in the 20th century in the hands of Freud, it’s horrifying reading. And this book is the fiction version of it: women who get off from the clitoris are frigid (yes, even if they have orgasms) and need psychological help/penetrative sex with DH Lawrence, and of course, being with another woman qualifies you as mentally ill. 😒

I think I just wanted to rant about it a little, thank you if you read this. Anyone else deeply, deeply disappointed by this book?

I picked this wonderful book up at the library because I was in the mood for some historical fiction, and fell in love with it.

It’s a story within a story. Our narrator is a journalist covering Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s, struggling to do her job and keep her marriage from collapsing completely. When she meets the elderly Miss Alice, an English missionary, she sees a chance for a quick human interest story, but finds herself pulled into the telling of a story that has haunted Alice for 60 years.

The heart of the book is Alice’s narrative, set at the beginning of the British Mandate in Palestine in the 1920s. Brought there at 17 by her missionary father to teach school, she’s especially proud of her student Tareq, only to be mystified along with the other teachers when he graduates and chooses to become a traveling magician. Restless, brilliant, possibly carrying messages to the burgeoning resistance – possibly heading up the burgeoning resistance – Tareq comes to the attention of the ruthless head of the British secret police, Challis, who becomes obsessed with the handsome young Palestinian.

The book is simply full of memorable characters who come alive. There’s Alice’s father, even more oblivious to the nuances of the culture around him than his daughter, and the British journalist Egerton, who becomes fascinated by Tareq but whose faith in a free British press is unlikely to survive contact with Challis. There are also amazing Palestinian characters – my favorite was Buthaina, the spoiled favorite daughter of a wealthy landowner who is shocked to be married off at the age of 12 and sentenced to a life of dreary household labor in rural Palestine. Tough and intelligent, she adapts and adapts again as the British occupation and eventually British violence intrudes on her life – and as Challis closes in on her as well for having sheltered Tareq.

It’s so rich for a book that’s not even 200 pages long. Antonius writes gorgeous prose that brings Palestine to life, allowing you to see it through so many different eyes, at the same time that her anger at the British occupation is represented with sly wit and cutting humor. It’s deeply political at the same time that it is deeply human. I hadn’t known much about the British Mandate in the 1920s, so I’m sure there are things I missed, but I learned so much from this book and had no trouble following it. It was exactly what I want from historical fiction – it made me feel like I was there, and knew these people.

I adored this book.

Anyone up for a great exploration book? I had never heard of this expedition, but apparently it was the talk of Europe when it happened – and for good reason. This has everything I want in an exploration book – fascinating information about places and people, survival against the odds (or not…), and a protagonist worth cheering for.

Like all good exploration books, it also is full of catastrophic occurrences, many of them the fault of the expedition members themselves.

In the 1750s, the king of Denmark decided to send out an expedition to “Arabia Felix” – what we now called the Yemen – to study its natural history, map it, and confirm “facts” from the Old Testament. From the beginning, the expedition was fraught, riven by academic infighting and big personalities, leading to one farcical event after another.

For example… when they were finally ready to go in 1761, it was the wrong season, and every time their ship tried to leave Denmark it was blown north instead of heading south, at one point reaching Iceland. Christian Von Haven, who saw himself as the leader of the expedition, noped out early and went overland, leaving everyone else to spend months attempting to sail south. When they finally got to the Mediterranean and von Haven rejoined them, he was shocked to discover that the men had become close as a result of their terrible voyage, and weren’t particularly interested in allowing him to step in and be leader. Von Haven’s response: buying a suspiciously large amount of arsenic. Was he planning to do away with all of them? Other expedition members secretly wrote panicked letters back to Denmark…

All this before they even reached Egypt!

As they travelled south, tripping over each other and their own egos, a quiet hero began to emerge: Carsten Niebuhr, a peasant’s son, along as a surveyor. Genuinely interested in the Arabs and their lives, skillfully guarding the expedition’s finances from Von Haven, he rose above the chaos to create maps so accurate they can still be used today, became one of the first Europeans to live as an Arab for months and enter holy cities, and charted the ruins of Persepolis with such accuracy that cuneiform writing was deciphered as a result of his work.

I’ve read a lot of “disastrous expedition” books set in the Arctic or Antarctic, and honestly it was nice to read a disastrous expedition book where there actually was a point to the science. The book also has lovely illustrations, not just maps but all kinds of sketches produced by the members of the expedition (so many types of hats!)

My only caveat: a bit of a slow start. I was really hanging in there for a while until the expedition finally got underway. I understood why everyone needed to be introduced, and why we needed to get the background on the academic infighting between Sweden and Denmark, but if you should start this book and find it… discouragingly slow… you could always skip forward to part seven of the first chapter, “Despite These Evil Times,” meet everybody as they’re getting on the boat, and off you can go. Just saying.

I loved the writing style, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. It was written in the early ‘60s and it has a very dry sense of humor. Once I really got into it, though, I couldn’t put it down. I laughed out loud a few times, I got so upset at one point that I had to put the book down and take a moment, and once I teared up. Carsten Niebuhr is an explorer for the ages.

I loved this book.

It’s 1920 in an unnamed colonial city somewhere on the African coast (reading it, it felt like Cape Town, but I don’t think the author wanted to be nailed down to a specific city). Soraya, a young Muslim woman, seems to have found the perfect housekeeping job. Her employer, Mrs Hattingh, lives alone in a beautiful but rundown house not far from the Quarter where Soraya’s parents live, and while Mrs Hattingh herself is profoundly racist (while thinking herself profoundly liberal) it’s easy enough work — and best of all there’s no man in the house.

But both the house and the employer are more than they seem. The house is troubled by spirits, including that of the prior housekeeper, Fatima, who visits Soraya at night, seemingly to warn her of some unknown threat. And as Mrs Hattingh begins to take more and more control over Soraya’s life, the lines between them begin to be dangerously blurred.

In particular, after Mrs Hattingh discovers that Soraya’s fiancé Noum is working on a distant farm, she offers to take down letters for him that Soraya dictates, and to read to Soraya any letters he sends back – but is what she writes exactly what Soraya says? And what’s really in his letters, that her employer will read to her but never let her see, never mind keep, for herself? Trapped together in the decaying mansion, the two women become locked in a battle for power.

I adored this book. It was so gripping that I read in one morning. It’s beautifully written in Soraya’s voice, and I’m not sure when I last hated a character as much as I hated Mrs Hattingh— I was so involved in this book! The author is South African from a Muslim community, and you can feel that deep knowledge and connection coming through the pages.

I highly recommend this one!

I hesitated over the tag, because it is technically science-fiction set in the ‘90s, but it’s also a mystery and a road-trip novel, with great female characters and an unexpected and satisfying resolution!

I could not put this book down!

The set-up: back in the early ‘70s, on a commune called the Homestead, Dr Joseph Bellanger created a medical miracle – parthenogenic pregnancy, little girls born to the women of the commune without biological fathers. Then a fundamentalist protester set fire to the Homestead, killing Bellanger, and his research was lost forever; eight mothers and their daughters survived, to live their lives as best they could.

Now: as the book opens in the 1990s, Josephine Morrow, a.k.a. Girl One, is in graduate school hoping to continue Bellanger’s research when a phone call upends her whole life: her mother’s house has been burned down and her mother is missing. Their relationship had been strained for years, partly because Josie has insisted on trying to learn the secrets of her own past, secrets that her mother guarded very closely. But when Josie finds out that her mother had contacted a reporter and had been seeking out the other mothers and girls from the Homestead, she finds herself retracing her mother’s steps, trying to unravel the mystery and find out where her mother is.

But Josie is being followed, and the man who set fire to her mother’s house is close on her heels.

As she reconnects with the other Girls, she will find allies and friends that she never expected, and together they will face the truth about what really happened at the Homestead twenty years earlier, and what is still happening to the mothers and daughters from the experiment.

Girl One was intriguing from the first moment and I loved all the twists and turns. Josie is a complex, flawed character, and watching her come to terms with the truth and allow herself to open up and become vulnerable to the other women was a great journey in itself. There’s a strong feminist subtext as well, as you might expect, but Murphy handles it beautifully, letting it emerge naturally as part of the story. I adored this book!