Tag: book-review

Fiction, literary fiction

Book Review: Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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“There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.”

In 1980, a wealthy Jewish businessman, Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later and the family moves on with their lives. Two simple minded brothers are arrested for the crime after marked bills used to pay for the ransom are found in circulation but only a couple thousands are found with them. They are imprisoned with the underlying understanding by everyone that there is someone else who masterminded the whole thing and has gone scott-free. Nearly 40 years later, it is clear that nobody has ever gotten over anything, after all. Carl is barely functioning when he’s at home. Ruth, his wife, has spent all her time protecting her husband’s emotional health and left the kids to their own devices.

“They had watched all this, as the understanding of what had really gone wrong in their lives revealed itself to them, which was that the tide pool you’re born into is only manageable if someone gives you swimming lessons. Or, put more simply, in order to be a normal person, you had to at least see normal people.”

The three kids born into the family – 2 brothers that were alive during the kidnapping and a sister that was born after the kidnapping but born into a life that has been shaped by the most consequential thing in their lives. Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm and is constantly anxious. Beamer rose to Hollywood fame by writing a blockbuster that involves a kidnapping and now has not been able to write anything else and has had to watch his writing partner go off and start a successful series that Beamer suspects is based fully on his family. Beamer deals with his perpetual terror by consuming anything that will numb him – drugs, food, women. Jenny has spent her entire life so bent on proving that she is better than her family, railing against capitalism while accepting the money she is paid every month from the family business.

“The irony of it nearly crushed her. She had been locked in a debate with herself her whole life about how to be good in the world, and the only thing she left out of that very private conversation she was having was the actual work of being a nice, normal human being.”

I like a book that knows the characters they are writing about. I love the process of recognizing a character and just reveling in them being who they are and the author making no apologies for them. I recognize that people grow as they become older but as I’ve become older, I recognize that more people remain the same than grow. I think in a society and generation where we go to therapy and talk a lot about introspection, we have convinced ourselves that we are constantly self-improving, but I would posit that we are just talking about the same issues with our therapists over and over again and learning coping mechanisms, but we aren’t changing.

I say all this to say that the characters the author created are amazing. They are proudly Jewish and rich with all the trappings that come with that. They have grown up insulated from the rest of the world and it has played out in their lives and the author lets us be a spectator to their glorious lives. These are characters that seem so real, you feel like you can see them and you think you know them.

“Maybe that was the real Long Island Compromise, that you can be successful on your own steam or you can be a basket case, and whichever you are is determined by the circumstances into which you were born. Your poverty will create a great drive in your children. Or your wealth will doom them into the veal that Jenny described at her science fair, people who are raised to never be able to support a life so that when they’re finally allowed to wander outside their cages for the first time on their way to their slaughter, they can’t even stand up on their own legs. But the people who rise to success on their own never stop feeling the fear at the door, and the people lucky enough to be born into comfort and safety never become fully realized people in the first place. And who is to say which is better? No matter which way it is for you, it is a system that fucks you in the ass over and over, in perpetuity, and who is to say which is better?”

I loved the end of this book. I thought it was realistic. Rich people keep being rich and keep being bailed. This is not a fairy tale. We live in a capitalist society, and this is what it looks like. No one is better at the end of the book and that’s something you have to sit with and accept. You want to read about rich people being rich living their lives in their bubble and never knowing real life? This is the book for you but also what is even real life? Whatever life anyone is living is real. I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy

Black Authors, literary fiction, race, women's fiction

Book Review: Hold My Girl by Charlene Carr

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Tess and Katherine are two women who could not be any more different but they have one thing in common, they both desperately want to have a child. Katherine is married and has spent most of her life trying to be perfect, obsessing over her home and family looking perfect. The one thing that’s missing is a child. Tess is recently divorced, estranged from her family and generally unhappy. Both women underwent IVF a year ago at the same hospital. Katherine’s resulted in a baby girl, while Tess had a stillborn.

A year later, Katherine is about to celebrate her daughter, Rose’s first birthday while Tess is still grieving her loss. Katherine, who is biracial (half black/half white) has been harboring a secret fear due to her daughter’s pale skin and bright blue eyes and her fear is confirmed when both women receive a call from the fertility clinic letting them know that their eggs were switched. This starts the story of one woman’s life falling apart while the other thinks it’s a start of a new life for her and Carr takes us on a journey for the battle for Rose.

This book had me thinking hard – in a good way! I really enjoyed it. For me, it was a unique story in that I haven’t read anything with this storyline and that in itself is surprising as it seems like a very likely thing to happen. There were so many layers to the story that I cannot give away without spoilers but I truly kept going back and forth on who has the right to Rose? What makes a mother? One person carried her to term and raised her for a year but the other is biologically her mother.

The author is a black Canadian woman and I expected more in terms of Katherine’s race and how it played into the battle – in court and within her husband’s family. I also wish we got as much of Katherine’s parents as we did of her husband’s family. That being said, Tess was fully developed and we definitely understood every facet of her life and what made her who she is today. Carr did a good job of navigating multiple narratives with multiple characters and also time spans without it feeling bogged down.

While I highly recommend this book, I do want to let you know that there are some trigger warnings with topics of rape and infertility. Ultimately the book is about motherhood. Being able to be one, the journey to being one, the longing to be one when your body betrays you and all the side effects it comes with. This book is definitely one that would be a great one to discuss with others.

Taynement

Black Authors, Fiction, Historical, literary fiction, race

Book Review: James by Percival Everett

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“Belief has nothing to do with truth.”

When enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to sold to a man in New Orleans and separated from his family forever, he decides to hide in nearby Jackson Island until he can decide what to do. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father on that same day. This leads to a collision that leads to Jim being wanted for murder and being a runaway. This also leads to a dangerous journey via a raft, down the Mississippi River towards the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”

I avoided this book for the longest time because I believed it would be too depressing for my state of mind at the time. I went to Barnes and Noble with a friend who bought me a copy of this book and seeing how slim it was, I decided to just give it a go and then couldn’t put it down. Everyone says this is a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, which is a book I’ve never read, so you don’t have to be worried about not getting it if you haven’t read it. I decided to ignore all talks of a retelling and just read the book as its own thing. Even though this book is about slavery and its many horrors, Everett finds a way to make it a great adventure novel that always tried to put the humanity of its characters at the forefront of the novel.

“I did not look away. I wanted to feel the anger. I was befriending my anger, learning not only how to feel it, but perhaps how to use it.”

I don’t understand why the Goodreads blurb of this book calls it “ferociously funny”, there’s nothing funny about this book. I can’t even think of one scene that made me laugh out loud. This book is serious and thought provoking and no, this is not euphemism for boring. It really gives you a lot to think about, especially the power of language, how we use it and how it’s used to empower or colonize a group of people. This is not an easy book to read because lots of terrible things abound and most of these terrible things happen to people because of the color of their skin but Everett’s writing makes it a fast read.

I found this book to be suspenseful and heart wrenching and I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads.

Have you heard about this book? Have you read it? Let me know in the comments what you think about it!

Leggy

Fiction, literary fiction

Book Review: What Happened To Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez

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“We were not that kind of family, the type who spoke politely to each other about where and how we were in pain.”

In 1996, Ruthy Ramirez never makes it home from school. Twelve years later, her two sisters, Nina and Jessica are watching a reality TV show, “Catfight” which can basically be described like the real life show, “Bad Girls Club”. They see a girl called Ruby and are convinced that it is their sister. Ruby has red hair like Ruthy, a birth mark below her eyes like Ruthy and she is also from Staten Island. Same place they are from.

They hatch up a plan to stake out the Catfight house and confirm that Ruby is indeed Ruthy. Their mother, Dolores finds out about it and includes herself and her friend in the quest and the story goes back in time and gives us the POV of how Ruthy’s dissapearance affected each of them in different ways.

“Besides, you can only sympathize so long for somebody else’s loss before you run out of encouraging things to say.”

When I finished this book, one of my descriptions was that it was an easy read and I immediately felt like I had to take this back because though I found it to be a quick and easy read, it does touch on sexual assault and loss and that won’t be an easy read for everyone. Ramirez did a good job of making the characters real. You really felt like this Puerto Rican family were your family friends. Immigrant families would recognize some elements like family expectations, duties, religious mothers etc.

“Sometimes it feels like the three of us are still stuck in that car. Shouting out Ruthy’s name into the unanswering dark.”

While we get the POV from the sisters and mom, it felt like the main voice was Nina’s and she was a competent narrator. Part of what Jimenez does is take us into their mindset then and now. So we get to feel Nina’s unhappiness at her life at the moment and Jess’s home life with a baby. That being said, I felt like I could feel the hole that Ruthy left. Speaking of Ruthy, I liked that she was included in the POVs and we get to know her life before she disappeared. We learn Ruthy wasn’t an angel and had her own fiery personality.

And it seemed to me then, and still does now, that I could have become a completely different girl, a completely different woman, if Ruthy had never gone.”

I’ve seen a lot of people complain about the amount of curse words being used and I am so confused as to why this is even a thing. It’s 2024 and I assume it is adults reading this book, why is it a big deal? Anyways, I do recommend this book because I think the real story is more about following the story of a family who is still dealing with losing a family member many years later and are faced with a glimmer of hope. Another reason I liked this was that we actually get closure for Ruthy’s story and it is not one of those books where there is a vague ending where the interpretation is left to the reader.

Taynement