“The tree of our family was parted – branches here, roots there – parted for their lumber.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer
Every once in a while, a writer comes along who can tell a good story in prose so exquisite that it makes you want to weep. It’s not purple prose. It’s not inflated and self-important. It’s just beautiful. Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of those authors. He has a true gift, and I’ve been privileged to read two of his books so far. I look forward to lots more.
The Water Dancer tells the story of Hiram Walker, the son of an enslaved woman and a plantation owner. He has what we’d probably call a photographic memory, but he can’t remember his mother. All he knows is that she was sold away when he was nine. Tied up with his lost memories is a mysterious power which saved him in the past, but which he struggles to understand and control. He will find that the bonds he forms, his love, his relationships, his memories, his past, all allow him to unlock the potential within himself.
What I loved about this book is how family-centered it is. Many of the historical novels I’ve read that deal with slavery focus on the cost of slavery to the individual. We read of cruel punishments, hard labor, rape, torture, and death. What I feel is missing in some of these novels, and what The Water Dancer illustrates so beautifully, is the cost of slavery to the enslaved family. The children ripped from parents. The parents torn from children. The spouses who never saw one another again. The people who spent the rest of their lives wondering where their brother or sister was, whether they were still alive.
What Ta-Nehisi Coates taught us in this book is that slavery didn’t just destroy individuals. It severed bonds. And even when the enslaved enjoyed times of relative peace, they knew that it couldn’t last. Every moment was poisoned by the thought that their children were not their own to keep. They could not protect them from the block, just as they couldn’t protect their husbands from the lash or their wives from the lusts of their enslavers. Coates paints the psychological pain of these atrocities in painstaking detail. Sometimes it’s difficult to read, but Coates demands that we do not look away.
The whole injunction of The Water Dancer is to remember. We, as individuals, as a nation, must remember. We must remember the people who were lost, the lives that were destroyed, the sins that were committed. I read an article recently that listed some of the major U.S. buildings that were built by the labor of enslaved people: Mount Vernon, Wall Street, the White House, the Capitol Building, the Smithsonian, Trinity Church, Harvard Law School. There are more. We live in a society that was literally built on the backs of people, men, women, and children, who had their lives and their families stolen from them. We forget this at our peril.
I’m not sure why I’ve been reading such heavy stuff lately, but it all seems important and it all seems incredibly urgent. I knew The Water Dancer couldn’t wait any longer. You’ve got to read this one. I know it’s hard, but we can’t look away. We’ve got to remember.
“The judge had given Brock something that would never be extended to me: empathy. My pain was never more valuable than his potential.”
Chanel Miller, Know My Name
Let me tell you a story before I get into this review, and please be aware that this may be triggering if you’ve been the victim of a sexual assault. Honestly, this whole review may be triggering, so it may be better to skip this one if that’s something you’re sensitive about.
I had been married for a year, maybe two, when the women at my university started to be terrorized by a man we all called “The Groper.” It was a male student who would walk by, seemingly innocently, but then grab the body of a nearby woman, then take off running. We went to a pretty “safe” university, but there was a hill on the south of campus we all called “rape hill” because there had been a few assaults at night, and students were cautioned to avoid the area if they were walking alone. There were little signs and emergency telephones and everything. Even so, we felt pretty safe there. I’d never heard of anyone actually getting attacked until “The Groper” came on the scene. His assaults got bolder until he finally broke into some girls’ apartment. As far as I know, he didn’t harm them physically, but he robbed them of their feeling of safety.
At this time, my husband and I lived in a crappy little apartment near campus with a creepy parking garage, terrible lighting, and a few seedy neighbors. I was getting ready for work one morning and I asked my husband if he would walk me to my car since I was nervous about the parking garage with “The Groper” on the loose. He assured me that I’d be fine. He wasn’t dressed yet, it would be inconvenient, and there was really nothing to worry about after all. Now I don’t want you to hate on my husband, because he’s truly a caring and thoughtful partner, but in this situation he just didn’t understand how scary the situation was for me. I went to my car by myself clutching my keys between my fingers. I was fine. Nothing happened.
But that was the day that I realized just how different my experience of the world was from my husband’s. I lived in a world in which women carry pepper spray and hold their keys between their fingers like Wolverine. We avoid certain areas, especially at night, and try to never walk alone if we can avoid it. Meanwhile, my husband lived in a world in which he could pretty much go where he wanted without ever thinking about it. He’d never bought pepper spray. He’d never checked the backseat of his car for lurking danger. He could walk through a creepy parking garage and not give it a second thought. Since then, he’s learned about the sort of vigilance expected of women and why I act the way I do sometimes.
This sort of blindness is endemic to men in our society, I think. They tend not to see the ways in which women mold their lives around the possibility of sexual assault, and when they do see our precautions they mock us as being paranoid. That is, until a woman is assaulted, and then she was stupid for [fill in the blank.] She should have known better than to get drunk. She should have dressed more modestly. What was she doing walking alone at night? Why was she in such a rough part of town? What did she think was going to happen?
Chanel Miller’s incredible memoir, Know My Name, shines a glaring light on this type of attitude and shows us just how damaging it can be. For many years, I didn’t know Chanel’s name. I knew her as Emily Doe, Brock Turner’s victim. In this book, she courageously steps out, tells her story, and challenges the world to be better.
I can’t tell you how much I loved and hated this book. I hated the things that happened to her. I hated having to read about her assault and how the court system continually revictimized her over the course of years while Brock Turner fought his felony charges. I hated Chanel’s sleepless nights, her isolation, her pain. How her very hometown had been poisoned for her by Turner’s actions. I hated that the trial kept getting postponed, causing Chanel and her family to have to rearrange their schedules time and again to accommodate other people. I hated Stanford’s patronization of her, their too-late attempts to help her.
But I loved Chanel’s fighting spirit, how she was drowning but kept swimming toward the surface anyway. I loved her refusal to be silenced. How, when Stanford insisted she put a “hopeful, affirming” quote on the plaque in the memorial garden, she told them to just forget it. She’d rather say nothing at all than empty platitudes. I loved reading about the love of her family, the support of her friends, the steadiness of her boyfriend. There was beauty in the ugliness, and we’re privileged that she let us see it.
Chanel Miller is a talented writer. Period. She’s not a talented writer “for a rape victim,” or a talented writer “for someone so young.” She’s just good. Her voice is fresh and powerful, her words impactful. I listened to this on audiobook (which she narrated herself! Seriously, I don’t know how she got through it.) and I found myself whispering her words to myself to try to remember them.
Can I share some of my favorite quotes with you? I know I’m gushing, but I just want everyone to read at least some of her words.
“When a woman is assaulted, one of the first questions people ask is, Did you say no? This question assumes that the answer was always yes, and that it is her job to revoke the agreement. To defuse the bomb she was given. But why are they allowed to touch us until we physically fight them off? Why is the door open until we have to slam it shut?”
“I did not come into existence when he harmed me. She found her voice! I had a voice, he stripped it, left me groping around blind for a bit, but I always had it. I just used it like I never had to use it before. I do not owe him my success, becoming, he did not create me. The only credit Brock can take is for assaulting me, and he could never even admit to that.”
“What we needed to raise in others was this instinct. The ability to recognize, in an instant, right from wrong. The clarity of mind to face it rather than ignore it. I learned that before they had chased Brock, they had checked on me. Masculinity is often defined by physicality, but that initial kneeling is as powerful as the leg sweep, the tackling. Masculinity is found in the vulnerability, the crying.”
This book isn’t an easy read. If you don’t have the mental or emotional space to read it right now, that’s okay. But someday, if you’re feeling up to it, I really want you to pick this one up. Especially if you’re a man. Not so you can feel guilty, but so you can understand. So you can see the importance of being one of the Swedish bicyclists who saved Chanel, not the gross Freshman taking advantage of her behind a dumpster. So you can be the elderly man manning the booth to get signatures for the judge’s recall, not the judge who gave a young man six months (actually three, because of good behavior) for sexually assaulting a woman because he was more worried about the cost of accountability for the rapist than about the damage to the victim.
“Please don’t think that my circumstances stand between me and a full stomach.” At least not until lately. “It has been all for vanity, of course. I can sustain somewhere between one point five and one point six chins. But the moment I have more than that, my looks suffer catastrophically.”
Mrs. Jebediah laughed, startled. “But surely you exaggerate, my dear.”
“I assure you I do not. Via scientific trials, I have determined the precise weight, to the ounce, at which the shape of my face changes to my detriment.”
Sherry Thomas, A Study in ScarletWomen
I think my love of the Sherlock Holmes type started when I watched The Great Mouse Detective as a child. If you haven’t watched it, you must. Now. That was my first exposure to the concept of a brilliant, slightly mad detective and his stalwart doctor friend. As an adult, I discovered Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and Martin Freeman’s Watson. They remain my absolute favorite incarnation of the duo. But never before have I encountered a female Sherlock and a female Watson. I never knew what I was missing until Sherry Thomas’s A Study in Scarlet Women.
The thing I really enjoyed about this book was the fact that, when Thomas reinvented Sherlock Holmes as a woman, she didn’t just slap a dress on Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero. Instead, she made thoughtful and relevant changes to the character, transitioning Sherlock to Charlotte in a way that makes sense. Charlotte Holmes (alias Sherlock, when assisting Scotland Yard) has all of the original’s brilliance, but with a femininity that is neither forced nor false. And Thomas doesn’t ignore the fact that Sherlock Holmes would have a much more difficult time operating as a woman in Victorian England. She acknowledges the obstacles that could stop Charlotte from reaching her full potential and gives her the tools she needs to overcome those obstacles. All together, it makes for a very believable female Sherlock.
I also loved female Watson. In this case, Watson isn’t a retired army doctor, but a retired stage performer. It works very well for the character, and I loved Thomas’s take on Sherlock’s sidekick. What really worked about Watson in this capacity is that she’s able to take on the role of surrogate mother, business partner, and cheerleader for Charlotte. Whereas the original Doctor Watson, while useful, is mostly just there to be in awe of Sherlock, Thomas’s Mrs. Watson helps Charlotte realize the worth of her gifts. She helps Charlotte see what’s possible. It makes the relationship seem more even, gives it a feeling of give-and-take that’s missing in the original.
The plot, while good, was secondary to the character development here. You get a good mystery. I hadn’t a clue who the killer was until it was revealed at the end. It’s a satisfying read. But what I cared about most was Charlotte, Mrs. Watson, and Livia (Charlotte’s beloved sister). I cared about how Charlotte and Mrs. Watson were going to keep pulling off their charade. I cared about how Charlotte was going to help Livia escape the confines of her life with their parents. I cared about whether Charlotte was going to be able to remain free of male influence, living her life as she saw fit.
Really, I just loved this book. It kept me hooked from beginning to end. If you’re in the mood for a feminist, feminine, female Sherlock Holmes (no, those aren’t synonyms), pick this one up. I’m so excited to get my hands on the next one.
Who are we after we’re gone? I wonder. It’s a good question to ponder. Most people can’t come up with an answer right away. They frown, consider it for a minute. Maybe even sleep on it. Then the answers start to come. We’re our children. Our grandchildren. Our great-grandchildren. We’re all the people who will go on to live, because we lived. We are our wisdom, our intellect, our beauty, filtered through generations, continuing to spill into the world and make a difference.
Sally Hepworth, The Mother-in-Law
While men and women the world over bemoan their fate when they think of their mother-in-law, I have to say that I can’t join them. I’m being honest when I say that my mother-in-law is wonderful. Of course, she’s human and therefore imperfect, but she’s a lovely person who welcomed me into her family and her heart, no questions asked. (Well, a few questions asked. I was about to marry her son, after all.)
That said, I know that I’m one of the lucky ones and that not everyone has a warm—or even cordial—relationship with their mother-in-law. TheMother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth tells the story of one such individual, Lucy, whose mother-in-law Diana is a pillar of the community but quite cold towards her daughter-in-law. This all becomes very relevant when Diana winds up dead of an apparent suicide, but inconsistencies at the scene make investigators suspicious that she may have actually been murdered. Who would want to kill Diana? Maybe the daughter-in-law who’d been butting heads with her for years.
This is a murder mystery, and it’s a pretty good one at that. I certainly didn’t see the ending coming, although in retrospect it all became very clear. But I didn’t like this book only because of a decent mystery. I enjoyed it most because at its core it’s the story of two women who just don’t understand one another. If you read this, you’ll find that neither Lucy nor Diana has bad intentions when it comes to their relationship. Sure, they both do stupid things, but neither one of them is malicious about it. They’re just two very different people bound by marriage who have to rub along together and figure it out. I think that that scenario is true to life for many in-law relationships.
“Someone once told me that you have two families in your life—the one you are born into and the one you choose. But that’s not entirely true, is it? Yes, you may get to choose your partner, but you don’t, for instance, choose your children. You don’t choose your brothers- or sisters-in-law, you don’t choose your partner’s spinster aunt with the drinking problem or cousin with the revolving door of girlfriends who don’t speak English. More importantly, you don’t choose your mother-in-law. The cackling mercenaries of fate determine it all.”
Sally Hepworth, The Mother-in-Law
When I was first starting to seriously look for a life partner, my mom warned me to pay attention to the man’s family. “You don’t just marry the man,” she told me. “You marry the family, too.” It’s true, and for every daughter- or son-in-law who loves their spouse’s parents, there’s another who can barely stand their presence long enough to white-knuckle it through a holiday meal. I feel like The Mother-in-Law speaks to how hard those relationships can be while also giving hope that even ties that you think may be permanently broken can be fixed.
I can’t say that I’ve ever cried at a murder mystery before, but I criedhard toward the end of The Mother-in-Law. If you’re in the mood for a mystery with a heavy dose of family drama, give this one a try. I think you’ll like it.
“To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.”
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
A few years ago, I was driving through Marianna, Florida when we passed by a piece of property that felt wrong. That’s the only way I can describe it. It just felt wrong. I asked my husband what it was, and he shrugged. Neither of us are from Marianna. We didn’t know. I found out later that it was the Dozier School for Boys, the reform school that Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is based on.
The Nickel Boys is not a happy book. It follows Elwood Curtis, a bright, idealistic Black boy from Tallahassee. Elwood is on track to go to college and make his grandma proud, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time lands him instead at the Nickel Academy. It’s supposed to be a place to mold troubled boys into productive young men. Instead, it’s a living hell in which the boys are ground down, twisted and bent in ways that they’ll never escape even long after they’ve left Nickel behind.
Elwood and his friend Turner are both fictional characters, but Colson Whitehead borrowed heavily from the experiences of men who had attended the real-life Dozier School. Knowing that gives this book a real/not real feeling. On the one hand, there was no Elwood Curtis, but on the other hand, there were hundreds of Elwood Curtises. Hundreds and thousands of boys, black and white, who were beaten, raped, humiliated, tortured, and even killed at the very institution that was supposed to help them find their way in life. All while the surrounding community looked the other way.
What struck me the most was the thought, “What are today’s Nickel Academies. Where are the Dozier Schools of my time? What modern atrocities do I turn a blind eye to?” We like to think about stuff like this—people being mistreated and beaten by government officials—as something that happened in the distant past. That that sort of thing happened in the ’40s during the Holocaust, or during the ’60s in the Jim Crow South, but not today. All of the pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. are in black and white, after all. But the hard truth is that these things weren’t all that long ago, and they’re still happening today. We need look no further than the U.S. border with Mexico to see examples of children being mistreated. We can walk the streets of any city in America and see examples of Black men and women being dehumanized by those who are supposed to serve and protect. These things still happen. I guess it’s up to us to decide whether we, like the fictional citizens of Eleanor, Florida (or the real citizens of Marianna), are going to look the other way.
The Nickel Boys is intense—lots of violence, lots of swearing—but its a story that needs to be told. I hope you’ll pick it up when you’ve got the mental space to deal with a really heavy topic. In the meantime, take a look at The Official White House Boys to learn more. This is the website put together by the real survivors of the Dozier School.
“This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russian Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.”
Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?
A couple of years ago, I saw a trailer for a new Cate Blanchett movie titled Where’d You Go, Bernadette? It looked mildly interesting, so I looked up more about it and discovered that it was based off of a book of the same name by Maria Semple. I shelved it on Goodreads and went on my way. It was only this past week that I finally got around to reading it, and I’m so glad I did.
Bernadette Fox is a creative genius living a humdrum suburban existence in Seattle complete with all of the irritating minutiae that comes with it. Her neighbors hate her, her house is crumbling, and her husband is concerned that she’s losing her mind. One day, she disappears, and her daughter sets out on a journey to find her. If that makes it sound like a run-of-the-mill quest plot, let me assure you that it’s not. In fact, the search only takes up the last little bit of the book. Most of the book is spent showing us how Bernadette got to this point.
The story is told mostly through letters and emails, which I usually hate. I just don’t like epistolary novels, but the format worked for this particular plot.
This book has several wonderful things going for it. First, it addresses the issue of mental illness in a way that shines light on it without making fun of it, downplaying it, or romanticizing it. It also shows how mental health isn’t an exact science. Throughout the book, I vacillated between being convinced that Bernadette was having a major breakdown to being sure that everyone was exaggerating that there was nothing wrong with her. Maria Semple did a great job of showing situations from various perspectives while maintaining that air of mystery around Bernadette. Even when you see what happened clearly, you’re never sure that you are seeing it clearly. It was fascinating and very well done.
I also liked the fact that, for once, a woman has a problem that has nothing at all to do with her body. In fact, I don’t remember female bodies being discussed much at all in this book. There is some talk of miscarriage and the resultant feelings of loss and depression, but I can’t think of a single instance of a woman in this book talking about her weight or her looks. Even the teenage girls talk about other things. There was also zero discussion about sexual assault. I’ve often remarked that it seems like rape sells in literature. If something bad happened in a woman’s past, it almost always seems like it ends up being rape. I was almost certain that that’s where this was heading, and I was delighted to find that that wasn’t the case. The fact that the focus of Bernadette’s discontent was her career instead of her body was simply a breath of fresh air.
The characters in this book almost universally behave badly; no one comes off looking all that great. That said, Where’d You Go, Bernadette? has a theme of second chances. People who you thought were beyond redemption turn around and surprise you. Everyone gets a shot to make things right, and they mostly take it. It made for an uplifting read.
However, there was one character who I can’t get behind. Soo-Lin Lee-Segal. I hated Soo-Lin. She was just the worst. A deluded, conniving, myopic, opportunistic little tramp. You could argue that she gets her redemption, too, but I didn’t accept it. If she were a real person I’d have to allow for the fact that everyone should get a second chance, but as a character in a book I’m free to hate her.
Anyway, you should give Where’d You Go, Bernadette? a shot. I think you’ll like it.
If you’re on a book blog, chances are you read widely enough to have encountered at least some classic literature. Maybe high school English class scarred you and you find it snooty and inaccessible. Maybe it’s all you read. Maybe you can take it or leave it.
Even if you happen to love classic literature, and you’ve read a great deal of it, there will always be books that you miss out on. No one can read everything. If that’s you, then this list is five classic novels you may not have picked up yet, but definitely should. If you think you hate classic literature, may I suggest that you give one of these a try?
I first read North and South after a friend from England was shocked that I’d never read anything by Elizabeth Gaskell. I naively asked whether the style was similar to Jane Austen, and I think my friend almost choked on her tongue. No, I learned, Gaskell is not comparable to Austen. Not to knock Jane Austen; I love her novels, and so does my friend. But, as she put it, “Gaskell is grittier.” It’s true.
North and South is set in England during the Industrial Revolution. At it’s core, it’s a love story. However, the milieu of the Victorian factory town colors everything that happens. There are labor unions, strikes, and class distinctions to contend with. Plus a take-charge female protagonist! What’s not to like?
If you’re an audiobook lover, please listen to the Audible version narrated by Juliet Stevenson. She is the perfect narrator for this novel.
I sort of picked up How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn on a whim one day, but I absolutely fell in love with it. To this day it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. The prose is breathtaking.
This novel is basically a love letter from the narrator to his youth in a coal mining village in Wales. He reminisces on his childhood while coal slurry (basically the waste left over from coal mining), which has been encroaching on his village for years, finally overtakes his home. It’s a book about loss, about longing for home, and about how the ones we love never really leave us. I’m telling you. Read. This. Book.
The character of Dorian Gray, the beautiful young man who never ages while a hidden portrait depicts the hideousness of his soul, is pretty well known. But if you’ve never read the book, you’re missing out.
Oscar Wilde was a prolific writer of plays and poetry, but he penned exactly one novel. The Picture of Dorian Gray is that novel, and it’s a gift to the world. It’s somehow simultaneously heartbreaking, horrific, and hilarious. I read this book in my early teens, and it was the first time I realized, at least consciously, that the people of the past were just that—people, with inner lives and senses of humor just as developed as those living now. It was also the first time I laughed out loud while reading a classic novel.
I didn’t read East of Eden by John Steinbeck until I was out of college. Somehow we didn’t do a lot of Steinbeck in high school, and I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t really interested in his work. Don’t be like me. Dive into this Steinbeck novel if you haven’t already.
East of Eden has one of the best villains I’ve encountered in literature. Seriously, she gave me chills. But the story itself is quite uplifting. One important message from this book is that a person is in charge of their own destiny and decisions. They can’t blame their actions on blood or heritage or circumstance, because in the end we can overcome anything.
Tolstoy has a bit of a reputation (some might say a deserved reputation) for being inaccessible. I read War and Peace last year and, let me tell you, there’s a reason few people read that book anymore. However, if you’re looking for an “easier” Tolstoy novel, Anna Karenina is your girl.
This is a family drama, as opposed to a war novel. It follows the consequences of Anna Karenina’s decision to leave her husband and take up with the dashing Count Vronsky. It’s a fascinating look at social mores and what happens when someone decides to flout them.
“Eugenides,” I nearly stuttered, “was the god of thieves. We are all named after him.”
The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner
If you’d asked me a few years ago what my favorite series was, I’d have said Harry Potter without a second thought. But about five years ago I stumbled upon a story that has challenged HP’s spot as my number one pick. The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner is nothing at all like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, but those two series are tied for the top place in my heart and on my bookshelf.
I’ve been hesitant to write this post because I consistently fail to do these books justice when I pitch them to friends. The problem is that it’s hard to explain just what makes these books so genius while also being vague enough to not give away the plot. Suffice it to say that in the world of The Queen’s Thief, nothing is ever as it seems and everyone is lying.
This six-book series takes place on the Little Peninsula, a fictional Mediterraneanesque land whereon three small countries, Eddis, Sounis, and Attolia, jostle for prominence. The looming threat of invasion by the larger Mede Empire, and of a prophesied volcanic eruption, forces these countries to put aside their disparate goals and work together to preserve their independence. If you like political intrigue, this series is chock-full of it.
The fulcrum of the series is a thief named Eugenides, Gen for short. He’s the charmingly annoying, unreliable narrator of the first book in the series entitled simply The Thief. In The Thief, Gen is quite young, but we get to watch him grow throughout the series and come into his own. Of all of the characters in literature, Eugenides is one of my favorites. He’s a study in contradictions. He’s ruthless, but he can be surprisingly tender. He’s a genius who often plays the fool. He can be petulant, obnoxious, and sometimes plain ridiculous while simultaneously earning the respect of his countrymen. And his love story is one of the most unique that I have ever read.
The series boasts two powerhouse lead female characters—Irene and Helen. Irene, the cold, beautiful, pitiless queen of Attolia, is known for having poisoned her husband at their wedding feast. (He totally deserved it, though.) She’s maintained her power in the face of tremendous opposition from the Attolian barons and political maneuvering of foreign ambassadors. She’s the kind of woman who acts decisively and does what’s necessary.
Helen is also a queen, but her kingdom is the tiny mountain nation of Eddis. Where Irene maintains a white-knuckled grasp of her power, Helen keeps hers easily. Her people love her. She has the loyalty of the nobility, the commoners, and the army. She’s not an attractive woman. She’s more comfortable in armor than in a dress. She’s short and stocky, her nose is crooked, and yet she’s described as having a smile that most people would do anything to see.
Irene and Helen are examples of the “strong female character” done remarkably well. They’re depicted as human beings with rich inner lives, complicated relationships, and unique goals and desires. They’re queens, both literally and figuratively, and they wear their power much more comfortably than the men in the series.
Sophos is the last of the four main characters. He’s the disappointing heir to the kingdom of Sounis, a gentle young man who would rather study history than war. He’s the ultimate “cinnamon roll” character. You just sort of want to take him home, and it’s sometimes difficult to watch him come to terms with a world that’s often crueler than he’d like it to be.
The cast of supporting characters is just as loveable and interesting. Megan Whalen Turner has the knack for doing a lot with a little, and the short time we spend with some of the more minor characters (Costis, Kamet, Pheris, etc.) is enough to make us as invested in their stories as those of the lead characters.
Aside from the characterization, this series boasts an incredibly intricate plot. If you don’t read the books twice, you’ll probably miss half of what’s going on. The books are enjoyable on the first read, but the second (or third, or fourth) reads are so much fun because you find things in hindsight that you didn’t notice the first time around. This series relies a lot on misdirection and double entendre. On the first read, you experience the rush of seeing the plot unfold; on the second read, you get the thrill of being in on the secret.
Beyond that, the world-building is exquisite. Again, the author does a lot with a little. Without giving exhaustive descriptions or clunky info dumps, she introduces a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses, several political systems, and four distinct cultures. Truly, Megan Whalen Turner could give a masterclass on creating realistic, fleshed-out civilizations from thin air.
I hope I’ve made my case well enough that you want to read this series. The fact that it’s not more widely known is criminal. Read it. Read it in the correct order:
Resist the temptation to look at spoilers. I promise you that Megan Whalen Turner will take you on an incredible journey.
If you’re like me, your To Read list has become so long as to be completely unmanageable. I’ve always got my ear to the ground on the lookout for a good book, but it’s impossible to to read all of those books I see on the bestseller lists. If I do ever get to them, it’s like five years after everyone else has already read them. The Girl on the Train? Still haven’t read it. When Breath Becomes Air? Nope. I have every intention of reading these books, but it’s a Sisyphean task. There’s always another book that I feel like I should have already read.
That said, there are a few books that I’ve gotten to in a (relatively) timely manner, and if you haven’t read them yet, you should move them to the top of your To Read list. ASAP. When I want to recommend a general fiction book, these are the five I find myself recommending again and again.
A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
I first read A Fine Balance in high school as part of my AP English Literature class. We had a list of several books to choose from, and I pretty randomly chose this one. It’s been well over a decade since I first picked this up, but it has left an impression on me that few novels have.
A Fine Balance is a tremendous achievement in literature. It follows the stories of four people in India in 1975: Dina, a widow struggling to get by; Ishvar and Omprakash, an uncle and nephew duo who rose above their low caste to work as tailors; and Maneck, a college student who finds the idyllic world of his childhood disappearing. Fate brings these four people come together and they form a kind of family as the forces of greed, hate, and corruption work to tear them apart.
I will tell you that this book isn’t a light read. There some pretty heavy themes, vivid depictions of life in the slums, and some strong language. However, if you’re looking for a book that will make you love literature again, this is that book.
2. A Gentleman in Moscow, Amore Towles
When I first heard the premise of this book, I was skeptical. The entire plot of A Gentleman in Moscow takes place within the confines of one building. The main character, Alexander Rostov, is a Russian aristocrat sentenced by the new Soviet government to spend the rest of his life in the Metropol Hotel. If he steps foot outside the hotel, he will be shot. I had doubts that the author would be able to pull this off, and yet within the confines of the hotel, Amor Towles was able to build a full life for his protagonist. It was masterfully done.
What impressed me most was how Towles managed to bring the experience of Soviet Russia into the Metropol Hotel so Rostov, who never leaves the hotel, still feels the weight of what is happening to his country. Towles brings in several characters who give Rostov insight into the changing world outside, and it’s the relationships between these people that truly drive the story. It’s incredible writing, and if you pass on this one, I’m telling you that you’ll be missing out.
3. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine first seems like simply a quirky book about a quirky woman, but by the end you’ll find yourself reveling in the depth of the character development Gail Honeyman was able to create. Eleanor is such a well-rounded character. She is strong. She managed to survive some really traumatic things in her past, and in the beginning she has herself, and you, believing that she really is, on the whole, completely fine. Her weakness is that she wrapped herself in a blanket of isolation, thinking this would protect her from pain. It did the exact opposite. I think this independent loner character type is often glamorized in literature, but EOICF shows us that people are stronger when they have fulfilling and reciprocal relationships. People need people.
There are themes of abuse, mental illness, and neurodiversity, along with the importance of relationships. It’s deceptively heavy stuff in spite of the fact that you’ll also laugh out loud at some of Eleanor’s antics, and Honeyman is able to balance it perfectly. People have been talking about this one since it came out in 2017, so it’s probably on your To Read list. Bump it up on the list.
4. A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman
Okay, first let me put you out of your misery. The name is pronounced “Oo-veh.” It’s not “Ovie” and it’s not “Oh-vay.” It’s a pet peeve of mine and if you’re going to read this book, then gosh darn it you’re going to pronounce the man’s name correctly.
This book is relatable on so many levels, first of all because we all know Ove. I can guarantee that you’ve met Ove at some point in your life. He’s the crotchety older man who starts sentences with “Kids today….” and will argue with a sales clerk over minutiae. He’s got weird feuds with his neighbors that go back years. He can fix your air conditioner and thinks you’re an idiot if you can’t too, but also has zero idea how to turn on his computer. You know him, right?I know you do, and unless he’s your grandpa or something, you probably can’t stand him. A Man Called Ove humanizes him and gives him a backstory. It also challenges him and changes him, and is just generally one of the most heartwarming things I’ve read in a long time.
5. The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh
I know two other people who have read The Language of Flowers. One of them loved it, as I did. The other one was so stressed out by it that she was unable to enjoy it and we still argue about this book to this day. You know who you are.
Let me tell you why I love The Language of Flowers. First of all, you get to learn about Victorian flower language, which is fascinating. I think we all know things like “red roses mean romance,” but truly the language of flowers was a language. (Okay, maybe not in the strictest linguistic sense, but the point is that it’s much more complex than “red rose = I love you.”)
We meet the main character, Victoria, as she ages out of the foster care system and has to strike out in the world on her own. She…struggles (hence my friend’s stress). But we get to watch her learn to trust herself and others. We see her find her confidence and her competence. We find out about the heartbreak that she’s caused and endured, and we see her learn to forgive and be forgiven. It’s a beautiful story, and if it sounds at all appealing to you, you should grab it from your local library. Then let me know what you think of it, since this is one of the more controversial books on my list (at least in terms of my own social circle).
If you’re looking for something to read, I hope you’ll give one of these a shot. And if you do, let me know what you thought about it!
Out of the deepest betrayal Alexandre Dumas would weave imagined worlds that resurrected his father’s dreams and the fantastical age of glory, honor, idealism, and emancipation he championed.
“You see, Father,” he writes in his memoir, as if for himself, “I haven’t forgotten any of the memories that you told me to keep. From the time I could think, your memory has lived in me like a sacred lamp, illuminating everything and everyone you ever touched, even though death has taken it away.” (Reiss, 2012, 323)
Go out and get a copy of this book. Immediately. It was a beyond captivating read. I’m going to go pretty in depth in my discussion of this book, but I promise that I’m just gliding over the surface. It will still be well-worth the read, even after going through this review.
I’ve read several books by the novelist known as Alexandre Dumas père (as opposed to his son, Alexandre Dumas fils, also a novelist and playwright). But I’d known very little about the first Alexandre Dumas, father of Dumas père, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, known (thankfully) simply as Alex Dumas in adulthood. The book The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss brought General Dumas’ vibrant life into complete technicolor.
This is a story of courage. Of bravery and betrayal. Of a France that, for about a decade, was a place where “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” applied to everyone, regardless of skin color. And it’s the story of how one man, Napoleon, set race relations in France back decades. It’s also the story of how France has all but forgotten one of its most glorious sons.
Alexandre Dumas by Olivier Pichat – Musée Alexandre Dumas, Villers-Cotterëts
Alex Dumas was born on Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), the son of a ne’er do well marquis and his slave concubine. His father eventually sold Alex’s mother and his other siblings because, I don’t know, I guess he was just completely devoid of natural affection. Alex must have been his favorite though, because he pawned him instead of selling him outright, and redeemed him as soon as he could. He brought 14-year-old Alex back with him to France and made him a count. Alex lived the life of a Parisian dandy for a while, but he eventually joined the French army, leaving behind his fancy pants name and title and taking his mother’s last name, Dumas, as his own. He believed strongly in the ideals of the French Revolution, and he would hold fast to those principles throughout his life. He negotiated the shifting sands of Revolutionary France without getting guillotined and fought brilliantly in the military. He rose quickly through the ranks to become a General. Napoleon nicknamed him “the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol” because Alex had managed to single-handedly hold a bridge against an enemy squadron until reinforcements arrived.
However, spoiler alert (except not really because everyone knows this), Napoleon was a major jerk. At one point, Napoleon and Josephine were supposed to be the godparents to Alex’s firstborn son, but by the time little Alexandre Dumas was born, Napoleon and Alex were on the outs. Basically, Napoleon grew to dislike Alex Dumas because Alex truly believed in the principles of the Revolution and wouldn’t get behind Napoleon’s increasingly blatant attempts to seize power. Alex also insulted one of Napoleon’s friends, and apparently the little man knew how to hold a grudge. Napoleon had a big hand in ruining the Alex’s health, his life, and plunging his family into poverty.
As a lifelong fan of his son’s work, it was fascinating to see how the experiences of Alex Dumas are reflected in his son’s novels. Tom Reiss pays particular attention to the similarities between Alex Dumas and The Count of Monte Cristo‘s Edmond Dantès. Dantès and Dumas were both cast into prison for years without a trial. Both were essentially forgotten by those who could have, and should have, helped them in their plight. In fact, it seems that the image of his father, alone and forgotten by his countrymen, seems to have impacted Alexandre Dumas deeply.
To remember a person is the most important thing in the novels of Alexandre Dumas. The worst sin anyone can commit is to forget. The villains of The Count of Monte Cristo do not murder the hero, Edmond Dantès – they have him thrown into a dungeon where he is forgotten by the world. The heroes of Dumas never forget anything or anyone: Dantès has a perfect memory for the details of every field of human knowledge, for the history of the world and for everyone he has encountered in his life. When he confronts them one by one, he finds that the assassins of his identity have forgotten the very fact that he existed, and thus the fact of their crime. (3)
Tom Reiss also delves into the effect of Revolutionary France on People of Color. I was surprised to discover the French had a proud tradition of not having slaves in France itself, even though they depended on a particularly brutal form of slavery to keep their plantations in the Caribbean running. Things got messy when Frenchmen returned to France from the Caribbean with their slaves in tow. Should the slaves be freed once they set foot on French soil, or did the property rights of the Caribbean extend to France? Apparently there was a wave of lawsuits in which slaves brought to France sued for their freedom – and won.
There was certainly still racism. Reiss relates one episode in which young Alex Dumas, upon escorting a woman to the theater, was insulted and humiliated by a white man because of his race. However, Dumas’ race was much less of a hindrance in France than it would have been in America at the time. It didn’t stop Dumas from marrying his sweetheart Marie-Louise, the daughter of an innkeeper in Villers-Cotterêts. I had expected her parents to be against the match, but they were thrilled. Her father always proudly referred to Dumas as “the General,” and he enjoyed a warm relationship with his in-laws throughout his life. Neither did Dumas’ race keep him from a meteoric rise through the military. He was the commander-in-chief of several armies throughout his life, led numerous successful campaigns (sometimes against extraordinary odds), and had the respect and loyalty of his soldiers and fellow officers.
The fact that a Black man could rise so high in the 1790’s was astounding to me. Until reading this book, I’d never given much thought to race relations in other countries. I knew that the United States wasn’t the only country stained by the sin of slavery, but other than some general knowledge about William Wilberforce and the movement to end the slave trade in Great Britain, I was pretty ignorant. I’d certainly had no idea that Black and mixed-race people in France enjoyed, for a time, rights that they wouldn’t see in the U.S. for almost another two hundred years. I suppose I assumed that People of Color received the same treatment abroad as they had in the U.S.
This is absolutely not to absolve France from the horrors inflicted upon Black slaves in Saint-Domingue and their other Caribbean colonies. The conditions of slavery on Caribbean sugar plantations remain some of the most barbarous acts of cruelty man has ever inflicted on man. However, before reading this book I was less critical of American slave owners than I should have been.
When I reflected on the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson as he penned the words, “all men are created equal,” I think I gave him a bit of a pass because I believed that he was simply a product of his time and that most people in the Western world treated slavery as a matter-of-course. I considered Jefferson, Washington, and other slave-owning Founding Fathers to be “products of their time.” Well, it turns out that people in their time were well-aware that slavery was an abomination, and that the choice to continue the system was a simple matter of putting money over morals. Not only that, but while even free Blacks in America were being trampled on and degraded, a Black man in France could become the commander-in-chief of an army.
But then why did France not remain on that trajectory? Because Napoleon is the worst. That’s why. When he took over, he knew that France couldn’t remain competitive economically if it didn’t have the income generated by slavery in the Caribbean colonies, so he rolled back a ton of the progress that had been made in Saint-Domingue during the Revolution, and he severely restricted the rights of People of Color in France. When General Alex Dumas was released from prison in Italy, he returned home to a country that had largely forgotten him and which, in just a few short years, had decided that he was less than. He had to practically beg his best friend to be the godfather to his son, Alexandre, and even then his friend couldn’t actually be bothered to show up for the ceremony itself. General Dumas was not awarded the Legion of Honor, even though all of his fellow generals got the award. Nor did he receive his military pension, back pay for his time in a foreign prison, or a new commission in the army. France, it seemed, had no further use for the general. He died a broken, impoverished man in 1806.
In the early 1900’s, a statue was finally erected to honor General Dumas. It stood next to the statues of his son and grandson. But even then it remained covered for months because French bureaucrats couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to inaugurate it. The Nazis eventually destroyed it.
By Unknown author – Late 19th-century picture of a statue of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas that was destroyed by the Germans during the occupation of Paris, Public Domain
Several years ago, France did make an attempt to honor General Dumas. Here’s the result:
While I think we could agree it’s a powerful statue in its own right, I don’t think anyone looking at it would immediately associate it with Dumas. Said Tom Reiss:
In the race politics of twenty-first century France, the statue of General Dumas had morphed into a symbolic monument to all the victims of French colonial slavery, in the form of these mega-shackles. A military marching band played the “Marseillaise” in Alex Dumas’s honor, followed by an Afro-Caribbean drumming group, then by the mayor and the activist, who both made impassioned speeches. Then everyone went home.
There is still no monument in France commemorating the life of General Alexandre Dumas. (330)
Happy Reading!
Reference List
Reiss, T. (2012). The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (1st ed.). New York, NY: Crown.
