Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur
234 pages

What’s it about?
 Adrienne Brodeur is just fourteen when her mother, Malabar, wakes her in the middle of the night to tell her she has kissed her husband's best friend.  Adrienne immediately becomes her mother's co-conspirator in a torrid love affair that will last years.  What happens to a child whose well-being is second to her mothers' desires?

What did it make me think about?
 Wow! What is it like to have a charismatic, narcissist as a parent?  The harm we can do to children.....

Should I read it?
 This book kept popping up my radar, but for some reason I resisted it.  Maybe it was the cover?  I am so glad I finally gave in and read this one.  This memoir is so different than any other I have read.  I found it thoroughly engrossing.  Malabar was quite something, but it is Adrienne that you grow to admire.

Quote-
"I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn't have a moral compass.  It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused.  What I knew then was that nothing made me feel more loved than making my mother happy, and any means justified that end.  Starting when I was fourteen, what made my mother happy was Ben Souther.  With that, my lying took a dark turn.  Lies of omission became lies of commission.  What began as choice turned into habit and became my conscience's muscle memory."

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8 1/2 stars

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson 
196 pages

What’s it about?
This book begins in 2001 as Melody is turning 16.  Melody's grandparents are hosting a coming out party for her at their Brooklyn home.  The story goes back and forth in time to tell the story of Melody, her parents, and her grandparents.  
 
What did it make me think about?
What didn't this novel make me think about?   I came away wondering if people are more different or more the same- no matter what culture they come from.

Should I read it?
One of my favorites from 2019. Of course I would read anything Jacqueline Woodson wrote...

Quote-
​"He knew what she wasn't saying. That the house felt small with him and Melody in it.  Wrong.  That she didn't want to live with him.  Didn't want to raise anybody's child.  Pregnancy was one thing, but being someone's mom was another. "

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Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Ruby by Cynthia Bond
The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra
​Lazaretto by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

9 stars

What’s it about?
This story is set in Philadelphia and flashes back and forth in time from the late 1940's through present day.  Danny and Maeve are two children that have it all, and then lose it all.  They are siblings that grow up privileged  when their world is suddenly turned around.  This book is part fairly tale and part a story of redemption.  
 
What did it make me think about?
For some reason this book just felt nostalgic to me.  It took me back to why I fell in love with reading years ago.  Danny is a wonderful narrator and both he and Maeve are both such well drawn characters.  Ann Patchett is just a gifted writer- one of my favorites in fact.

Should I read it?
This is a great book to curl up with on a cold autumn day.  I highly recommend this one!

Quote-
​"We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it  I was sickened to realize we'd kept it going for so long, not that we had decided to stop."

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Driftless by David Rhodes

9 stars

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
257 pages

What’s it about?
 This novel is written in three distinct parts.  The first part of the novel is set in a performing arts school in the early 1980's. Mr. Kingsley is the head of the drama department and the students all revolve around him and his "trust exercises". I won't say more about the plot as it would give too much away.  

What did it make me think about?
 This ambitious novel made me think of another book I read earlier this summer- Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday.  Both books are written in three parts.  Both novels contain a story within a story and both are very smart novels.  However, I enjoyed Asymmetry and I did not enjoy Trust Exercise.  I just could not muster much interest in the characters...  

Should I read it?
 ​I would say this book is an intellectual trust exercise in itself.  It would be a good book to read as a class or in a group as it has so many themes to discuss.  However, I did not enjoy reading it at all.   So for me- the book was just tedious.  That is not to say that it is not a well-written, thought provoking book.  All the critics loved it- so maybe you will love it as well.  It just missed the mark for me.... 

Quote-
"Remember the impossible eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed liked gunpowder into the barrel.  Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days."

"All of us , I think it is fair to say, fixate on things from our past, maybe wanting to change them."

"Because we're none of us alone in this world.  We injure each other.  
Why should another be injured by choices I made for my Self?
You're choosing for another when you make choices.  We overlap.  We get tangled.  You can't help but hurt."

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​Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon
The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
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5 stars

The Gone Dead by Chantelle Benz
293 pages

What’s it about?
Billie James is in her early thirties when she inherits a shack from her grandmother in the Mississippi Delta.  Thirty years earlier Billie had been staying with her father at the shack when he died of an apparent accident.    Billie comes back to Mississippi and soon begins to question exactly how her dad died.  How much does she remember of that night?  What really happened?

What did it make me think about?
This was just a good mystery set in the Mississippi Delta.  Who did it? 

Should I read it?
I enjoyed this book.  Lots of style and grit to the writing and a pretty good plot too. 

Quote-
“They still thought that they would be rich when they grew up and buy their momma a big house, and that the Lord’s love would save them from a world that might find them too dangerous to live”.  

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8 stars

 The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste 
424 pages

What’s it about?
 This novel begins and ends in Ethiopia in 1974, but the majority of the  story takes place in 1935 as Italy invades Ethiopia.  The novel centers around Hirut.  Hirut is a newly orphaned servant girl living in the home of aristocrats Kidane and Aster. She is taken in as a servant after her parents are killed. Her relationship with each of her employers will shift and change throughout the novel.   Another central character is Ettore.  He is an Italian photographer who happens to be Jewish.  He is tasked with documenting the war in Ethiopia for the Italian citizens.  His participation in the war adds another layer to the novel. 

What did it make me think about?
 This book is about war but is also about the role of women in society and how that changes as war comes to a country.   As Hirut observes part way through the story,  “she is no longer afraid of what men can do to women like her."  ​In many ways this is a story of women.

Should I read it?
This work of historical fiction was beautifully written and very interesting.  I knew so little of the colonization of Africa and the lasting effects on Africa.  Ethiopia was originally colonized by Italy and when Mussolini decided to invade in 1935 it was a long and brutal war.  This story is set in that time period.   Not only was i drawn into Hirut's story, but I learned a lot as well.  I highly recommend this one to any fan of historical fiction! 

Quotes-
“Ettore turns away: He has never looked directly at these prisoners. He has seen them only through the lens, and only for the purposes of arranging them in perfect light: their worth measurable in the balance of shadow and sharpness. He has found ways not to hear there pleas and curses as they pivot, poised like a dancer, on the edge of the cliff for that last picture, the final image very likely the only one they have ever taken in their life. Every photograph has become a broken oath with himself, a breach in the defenses he set up to ignore what he really is: an archivist of obscenities, a collector of terror, a witness to all that breaks skin and punctures resolve and leaves human beings dead.”


"Across the country, guerrilla fighters have ambushed at night and walked peacefully through streets during the day, waving at Italian merchants and shopkeepers. The patriots have learned to attack in in expected places: officers’ clubs in the early morning, in brothels reserved for Italians, in hotel rooms used by high-ranking officers. They have crept behind dozing guards and sleepy administrators and left nothing but slumped figures. They are everywhere and nowhere, men and women of a shadow world where a different King rules.”

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9 stars

What’s it about?
 This memoir tackles some tough subject matter.  Saeed Jones is a gay, African-American man who was raised in Texas by a single mother.  Mr. Jones memoir is an honest, frank look back at his life.  He does not sugar coat his story- so be ready when you pick up his book.

What did it make me think about?
 I have often thought that this may be the best time in history to come out as a gay man.  However, after reading this book, I am not saying that anymore.  Saeed Jones makes you understand how truly difficult it is to be black and gay in America- even today.  ​"You never forget your first "faggot'.  Because the memory, in its way, makes you.  It becomes the spine for the body of anxieties and insecurities that will follow, something to hang all that meat on.  Before you were scrawny; now you're scrawny because you're a faggot.  Before you were just bookish; now you're bookish because you're a faggot.
   Soon, bullies won't even have to say the word.  Nor will friends, as they start to sit at different lunch tables without explanation.  There will already be a voice in your head whispering 'faggot' for them."

Should I read it?
 Saeed Jones is an award winning poet and the way he uses language is just beautiful.  ​"Just as some cultures have a hundred words for 'snow', there should be a hundred words in our language for all the ways a black boy can lie awake at night."  I found this one of the most compelling memoirs I have ever read.  It is raw, honest, and sometimes more graphic than readers might be comfortable with.  I urge you to read this book anyway.  Maybe it will change the way you look at someone that is different from yourself.

Quote-
​"However many masks we invent and deploy, in the end, we cannot control what other people see when they look at us."

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9 1/2 stars