Anxious People: an insightful drama

I recently made the dive into audiobooks for the first time since childhood. I’ve been working my way through Wheel of Time and it takes so long to get through one book when I can only steal a few minutes here and there to read throughout the week. But an audiobook I can listen to at work, sometimes getting five or six hours of listening in on a single shift. The wait time for the Wheel of Time books is kind of long, so I’ve been using the time to knock out some of the other books I had on my 2022 must-read list, starting with Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People.

The book follows the investigation of a small-town Swedish police force trying to find an unsuccessful bank robber turned accidental hostage taker. The robber fled the bank upon realizing that it was a cashless bank and ended up crashing an apartment viewing, holding the prospective buyers hostage while trying to find a way out of the rapidly deteriorating situation. Meanwhile, a father-son police team is trying desperately to solve the case and prove that they don’t need the intervention of the suits from Stockholm. But the case seems impossible to crack. The hostages, once released, prove to be an unruly and unhelpful bunch. And worse, the robber seems to have disappeared into thin air.

Going into this book, I was worried it was going to be too much like Bel Canto (something of a classic read about a group taken hostage, but I found the book to be really slow and boring). However, Anxious People was quite its own story. Backman’s writing is conversational and funny. Each character had his and her own reasons for being at the viewing, tied into individual back stories and histories. More than a hostage drama, Anxious People highlights how most people have anxieties that we keep to ourselves, but that really unite us with the people around us. Despite different stories, we can often speak to each others’ anxieties through our own experiences.

This was my first Backman book, but I am definitely going to be coming back to him as an author. Even though I listened to it instead of reading it, I can tell that his style is one that I really enjoy. It’s funny, it’s simple, it’s engaging, and it’s poignant. Each character is an individual, rather than seeming like a variation of one another.

It’s taken me a long time to finally read his work, but I’m thinking Fredrik Backman is going to be an author I’ll stay up to date with from now on.

Being Mortal: The hard conversations about aging and dying

Sometimes my timing is horribly off when I pick up and read a book that deals with hard topics. But when it comes to hard topics about quality of life as you get older and can’t do things on your own, is there really ever a wrong time to think about it?

Dr. Atul Gawande approaches this subject with honesty. Being Mortal looks at these hard topics and conversations by giving examples of when they move been overlooked and when they’ve been intentionally sought out. Throughout his decades in the medical field, Gawande has seen many patients go through hopeless treatments because they are afraid of giving up—and they didn’t have a medical team willing to challenge them to think about quality of life versus the faint chance at longer life.

Gawande admits that he has been the doctor who avoids the hard conversations, while also recognizing that the way our society and medical field is set up does not cater to the quality of life for aging and/or dying patients, instead it clings to the idea that any pain or discomfort is worth it for the chance at a few extra months or years, even if they aren’t great months or years.

This book is one of the ones that is timely no matter your age or life situation. The reality is, we all have loved ones who will inevitably reach the end of their lives, and we have no guarantees of how long our own will last. To begin thinking and discussing what is important and how we want to approach age, disability, and/or death is to set ourselves and our loved ones up to make the most of each moment.

But it certainly is hard and uncomfortable to think about.

New Release Tuesday: A Mirror Mended

A little while back I read The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow and loved it. So when I had the chance to nab an advanced copy of an upcoming short story of hers I jumped at it. Fairy tale retellings and reimaginings can be challenging because an author needs to keep enough of the familiar to maintain the story, but also find a fresh way to approach the story.

In A Mirror Mended, Zinnia Gray is avoiding her own reality by slipping in and out of various Sleeping Beauty stories and helping save the heroines. Everything changes when she is pulled into a story where she doesn’t belong and should never be–a Snow White variation. Even more unexpected, it’s not the heroine who called her in but the evil queen. Zinnia tries hard to hang on to her righteous justice, but the story is forcing her to consider things from a different perspective. And when the dust settles, she finds she isn’t able to avoid her own reality quite as effectively anymore.

The first thing that stood out to me was that I sort of thought this was going to be OK as a standalone story, but it definitely did not. I was missing a lot of context that made the story much less engaging (I presume). Next, while the idea of a fairy tale multiverse is interesting, I found this story in particular to be less fresh than I would have hoped. It was essentially a role reversal, where the queen was revealed to be less evil than she appeared and another Snow White variant turned villainous. Naturally, Zinnia and the [formerly] evil queen have something of a fling while trying to escape the Snow White nightmare they land in, but it felt a little shallow to me.

I’m undecided on my feelings toward the character of Zinnia Gray. Harrow takes a very cavalier approach to Zinnia’s first-person narration, and while I appreciated it at times, because it made her quite relatable, I got to the end of the story wondering if any of the lessons Zinnia learned throughout the story would actually stick and change the way she approached her own story.

Overall, I think I can’t make a solid judgment on the book unless I read the first book in the series. The idea is interesting, but I’m not sold yet on the execution. Which, as I reflect on it, is not that surprising because I often am not impressed with retellings and reimaginings.

Book Club Review: The Book of Night Women

The first thing I have to say about Marlon James’ book is that it is not at all what I expected when I read the synopsis. I expected a very different story, and that left me a little bit disappointed. Additionally, I think it’s important to note up front that if crude and vulgar language offend you or bother you, this is not the book for you.

Lilith is a Jamaican slave who has never known a mother or father. Left to grow up under the influence of a loose woman and a mentally unstable man, Lilith doesn’t know very much when she is hidden away in the cellar of the plantation house to hide from revenge. Some of the kitchen slaves take her under their wings, but Lilith isn’t sure she wants much to do with their anger. But when she’s sent to a neighboring plantation to be punished for an accident, Lilith has finally had enough and anger of her own erupts. Soon she finds herself trying to find the balance between the freedom she knows should be hers and the facade of freedom she’s come to embrace.

This book was a challenge on many levels. The first thing any reader is going to notice is the vernacular James chooses to use. His Jamaican slaves speak in colloquial, uneducated English. For me, at least, this slowed the reading process because I tried not to allow myself to mentally translate it into my own English. Additionally, it required occasional thought to understand. Next, the book is filled with references to what I presume is Black magic. It’s not really explained and the reader must piece it together as they go, which is OK but it piqued my curiosity some without satisfying it. And I feel like maybe a few things were lost because of it. Finally, slaves and masters alike use all kinds of course and vulgar language, so much so that I was constantly worried that someone might read over my shoulder and take issue. It may be fitting and realistic to the era (I don’t know for sure) but it was still hard to read.

The synopsis of this book makes it seem like we’re going to have a story about Lilith as she discovers and embraces a dark magic or power that may be the key to the slave uprising that is in the works. And while this is true, to a degree, it also isn’t. It’s more a story of a young, unwanted slave girl vying for attention and eventually accepting a semblance of love (which she may or may not have actually wanted/enjoyed). She’s haunted by the darkness she’s experienced and embraced and torn when the other women behind the uprising see that same darkness as an asset.

The Book of Night Women is a story that left me unsure of how I felt, unsure of how I was supposed to feel. It wasn’t particularly hopeful. It didn’t feel like it had a clear hero. It’s a dark story. But perhaps that is the point–to show that history isn’t broken up into stories of heroes and villains. Its full of a lot of grey, a mix of understandable bases and inconceivable actions. The Book of Night Women is a challenging book, but I think it’s one that will stay with me for a long while.

So Many Beginnings: Reworking a classic

Readers will know pretty much what they are going to get when they read Bethany Morrow’s So Many Beginnings, because it’s in the subtitle: A Little Women Remix. Morrow reworks this classic story, keeping most of the things we love, reworking some of the tragic bits, and using it to make a statement on being strong Black women during the aftermath of the Civil War.

The March family is finally getting their first taste of freedom, building a new life in the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony. Meg teaches people of all ages how to read and write, all while dreaming of a family of her own. Jo helps the young men with building and entertains her family with stories. Beth works her magic giving new life to old clothes. And Amy dances her way through life, easily settling into the childhood that her sisters were denied. Although they are free, the March sisters find that they still have to fight tooth and nail for the things that they want, and soon each must make her choice between holding tighter to her family or to her hopes and dreams.

I went into this book a little unsure. From the cover any synopsis, it seemed like it might just be Little Women slightly rewritten from the perspective of Black characters. And while I have nothing against that, I worried that it might not be original enough to be called a “remix.” I was glad to see that Morrow took the bones of the story, held true to the hearts of the characters, but brought some originality to the table as well. Each sister is recognizable as herself, but she also works through the challenges of emancipation and the continuing fight for freedom in her own way.

I appreciated how Morrow brought to light the freedmen’s colonies that were established and fought for existence in the early years following emancipation. Freedom was crucial, but it was only the first step toward equality for southern Black people. Every step that followed was still hard. The only small issue I had was that I didn’t really understand the introduction and fascination with Liberia (and perhaps that’s historical context I am missing).

Taken as a whole, So Many Beginnings worked well as a retelling of a favorite story in order to speak to a different set of challenges and themes. Morrow did a good job at mixing the spirits of Louisa May Alcott’s March girls with the ways young women would face new freedom.