Tag: Fiction

Fiction, Historical, literary fiction, race

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

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“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran by America in a senseless accident and his father moved them to the same country responsible for his mother’s death. His father’s life in America is that of survival and making sure that Cyrus also survived. But now, after his father dies, Cyrus is truly alone and is struggling with a lot of addiction issues while developing an obsession with martyrs. He decides that he also wants his death to mean something as he stumbles upon an art installation in New York City where a woman who is dying of cancer is lying there every day until her death, talking to anyone who wants to talk.

“There’s this story I read one time, some old-school Muslim fairy tale, maybe it was a discarded hadith I guess, but it was all about the first time Satan sees Adam. Satan circles around him, inspecting him like a used car or something, this new creation—God’s favorite, apparently. Satan’s unimpressed, doesn’t get it. And then Satan steps into Adam’s mouth, disappears completely inside him and passes through all his guts and intestines and finally emerges out his anus. And when he gets out, Satan’s laughing and laughing. Rolling around. He passes all the way through the first man and he’s rolling around laughing, in tears, and he says to God, ‘This is what you’ve made? He’s all empty! All hollow!’ He can’t believe his luck. How easy his job is going to be. Humans are just a long emptiness waiting to be filled.”

It took me a while to actually start this book because every time it would check out to me; I would send it right back. I saw it so much on Instagram and on so many lists. I read the blurb and felt bored but eventually I decided to just give it a go and I absolutely enjoyed it. One of the reasons I was avoiding this one is because I expected it to be depressing. Martyrs? Lord. But once you meet Cyrus and his self-righteous deep thinking, you can’t help but roll your eyes at all his navel gazing. For a book that explores death, depression and sobriety, it never feels depressing. I actually found it funny in so many ways and the wry humor kept me reading even though Cyrus is the embodiment of “youth is wasted on the young”.

“The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.”

This book is Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, and everyone knows I grade these on a curve. I’ve never read any of his poetry and I wonder if his writing would have felt familiar if I did. This is an ambitious work that sometimes misses the mark but through Cyrus, we investigate the concept of identity, especially living in a country that caused your mother’s death. And even though you want to lean into your identity as an Iranian, you find out that most of your thoughts and even your addictions are thoroughly American. As he dives into his family’s history – his father’s slow descent into despair and alcoholism, his uncle dressed as the Angel of Death during the Iranian war to convince dying soldiers to die with dignity and not try to desert the army – you begin to understand why Cyrus is so obsessed with death.

“An anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”

Cyrus doesn’t want to be just another depressed boy who kills himself. He wants his death to mean something, and he is convinced that the woman who is dying in a New York art gallery will help him understand how to make his own death mean something. I really loved Cyrus’ discussions with Orkideh. When he tells her of his plans she says: ahh, another Iranian man obsessed with martyrdom.

“Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation?”

I didn’t know the author was a poet before starting this book but the amount of quotes I want to share with you shows you how incredibly well this book is written. Did it set out to do too much and at the end succumbed to cliche? Yes. But I liked the journey and even the cliche ending didn’t dim that for me. I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy

Fiction, literary fiction, romance

Book Review: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

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“Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.”

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties while his brother, Ivan, is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player whose career has stalled before it could even take off. In the wake of their father’s death, they each deal with this tragedy the best way they can – Peter over medicating himself and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women while Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman and becomes intensely involved with her. Rooney follows these two grieving brothers and the people they love or try to love through a period of desire, despair, possibility and growing up.

“what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”

When the blurb for this book came out, everyone went on and on about how this is Rooney stepping out of her comfort zone and writing about brothers. Actually, this is very typical Rooney, she is still exploring human sexual and romantic relationships but this time her main characters are brothers. Like all her books, people fall in love and engage in toxic relationships or less than ideal relationships so that the book suddenly becomes literary fiction instead of plain old romance. I feel, at this point, I’ve accepted that as much as Rooney annoys me, and I genuinely believe that I hate-read all her books, that she has become a must read author for me. Rooney releases a book, and I read it, she just writes books that I enjoy ranting about. I do not even know if I truly enjoy any of her books.

“Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.”

This book has no quotation marks. That’s probably why you’re reading the above quote and wondering if I made a mistake, but I didn’t. There is just no quotations or commas in the entire book. I came across a clip of Rooney on Instagram in which she said she enjoys exploring different human relationships and accessing what it’s like to need people. I think that clip made me enjoy this book more and I intend to find the full interview and listen to it. Maybe if I listen to her perspective, I’d enjoy her books more. That being said, I ended up appreciating this book even though I started out completely annoyed by the structure. I enjoyed reading about the relationship between the brothers and the relationship they have with their mum. I think this is one of Rooney’s books that I’ve appreciated in a long time.

“Didn’t human sexuality at its base always involve a pathetic sort of throbbing insecurity, awful to contemplate?”

I never recommend Rooney to anybody because even though I will be the first to say that she is a fantastic writer, I still think her books are sad girl aesthetic. Her books are about nothing or about sad people being sad and having sex with each other. It is about people of a certain class, navel gazing about things the rest of the world barely thinks about. Rooney is good at fucked up relationship dynamics, but Ivan and Margaret were just cringe to me. I can’t believe Margaret listened to Ivan chatting like a 12-year-old as opposed to his 22 and still made the decision to sleep with him. Ridiculous. I liked Peter more than Ivan. I found him to be a more complex character but then Rooney decided to wrap everything up in a bow and everything was just tidied up at the end. I found that completely disappointing.

“Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction — which even makes sense from an evolutionary perspective — is simply the strangest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.”

Overall, I liked this book better than I did her last offering. I gave this 3 stars on Goodreads. Am I going to read the next Rooney book? Who am I kidding? Of course!

Leggy

Fiction

Book Review: I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin

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“I have this theory, that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what’s happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It’s like a filter that only shows you others’ bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn’t exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it’s designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort. A friend of mine came up with a name for it, for these algorithms, this media mind prison. We call it the black box of doom.”

Abbott Coburn is a 26-year-old Lyft driver who gets a job to take a woman to LAX. When he gets there, he meets a woman (Ether) who makes him an offer – $200,000 to cancel the ride on the Lyft app but instead drive her and the big black box she’s sitting on to Washington, D.C. The catch is that they have to get there by the 4th of July for him to get the balance and he can’t come with any electronic devices. She gives him $100,000 upfront and promises him the balance if he keeps to their deal.

Abbott is a Twitch streamer and when he goes back to this house to pack, he uploads a quick video to let his followers know that he would be gone for a while. As he leaves all his electronic devices behind and embarks on a cross-country journey with this strange woman he just met, he is unaware of the online furor that unleashes due to his video spearheaded on Reddit and then spread across all online platforms.

“A sprawling audience of spectators whose demands for compelling news were growing faster than it could be produced. Attention-seekers were eagerly filling the void, and that, friends, is how you build a bullshit machine.”

This book has excerpts of threads from Reddit and comments from spectators as strangers track these two from California to Washington, D.C. The comments get more outrageous as video of him picking up said woman and the big black box with what is thought to be a radiation symbol on it surface online. Everyone has their own theory from a planned terrorist attack on the capital to aliens to drugs to dead bodies.

It’s fascinating and true to real life, watching people make up their minds about strangers who they do not know in real time. People pull up Abbott’s entire Twitch streams and find rants he’s made about women which clearly shows that he has incel tendencies. Every single thing he’s ever said in the past are examined and put up as proof of his intentions.

“Our whole society is idle and overeducated, and nothing spices things up like conflict. There’s an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I’d update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle.”

Abbott is a very unlikeable character, but I enjoyed reading his arguments and why he is the way he is. When I was reading comments about this book, I saw a lot of people say they hated this book because they couldn’t “relate” to an incel, and I think this is what is wrong in today’s art. I called it the Taylor Swift effect where everyone wants to relate to art for it to be good. We are demanding that people stop writing any characters that we do not see reflected in us because good art should only reflect us which is leading to artists making albums that are essentially tabloids of their lives.

All I demand from my books is that that character exists. I don’t care if I’m able to relate to that character, I just want the character to exist. Do I relate to Abbott and his arguments? Do I agree with him? Absolutely not. But you cannot argue that men like him exists. You only have to go to a woman’s page on Instagram and read the comments and you will find plenty of men like Abbott.

“Placebos work better when they cost more; it’s science”

I read this book after I wrote our best and worst books of the year, but this is hands down the best book I read this year. I even hesitate to say this because this is not the best written book or the most literary, but I think it’s the book that most struck me and delighted me. I read this book in one sitting. It’s been so long since I’ve been able to do that. Do I think it completely fell apart in the end and the author did not know how to keep up the momentum? Of course, but I still gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads.

Leggy

Fiction, Historical, literary fiction, Mystery

Book Review: The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

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“Rich people, thought Judy—she thought this then, and she thinks it now—generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

It’s early morning, August 1975 and Barbara Van Laar has gone missing. She’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished 14 years ago, never to be found. As a search begins, we find ourselves chasing down the secrets of the Van Laar family, their history, the 14-year-old stone cold case and the blue-collar community working in the shadow of this powerful family.

“It was funny, she thought, how many relationships one could have with the same man, over the course of a lifetime together.”

Liz Moore is the writer of Long Bright River which was a huge hit during the pandemic. I remember being the odd man out on that book because I did not like it and gave it 2 stars. I also realized that I had read her 2016 novel, The Unseen World, which I frankly have no recollection of reading, but Goodreads tells me I gave this book 4 stars. Anyway, I wasn’t going to read this book because it was getting so much hype, and I remembered my experience of her previous book and was going to stay away until I saw her on Obama’s list. I was intrigued that a mystery novel made it on there, so I decided to finally pick it up and was not disappointed.

“This is one of the few sheer pleasures Louise knows in life: the near-otherworldly feeling of touching another human’s body with your own body in a way that, for the first time, transcends mere friendliness. These are the times in her life that Louise has felt most acutely the animal nature of her humanity, and therefore they have been the most comforting. To be a human is complex, and often painful; to be an animal is comfortingly simple and good.”

This book is a master class in well written prose. I thought the descriptions and the turn of phrases were fantastic. This story is told through multiple perspectives taking us on a history journey through the Van Laar family. We get Tracy, a young meek girl who is suffering from her parents’ divorce and is sent to this camp by her father for the summer to avoid actually spending time with her. Alice, mother of the missing Barbara who also lost her son 14 years ago and is addicted to pills having never gotten over the disappearance of her son. Louise, a 26 year old camp counselor who is “engaged” to a boy from a wealthy family and wonders if this will be her ticket out of poverty until she encounters what it’s like to become a scapegoat to a family that finds you expendable and Judy, the first female investigator in the state at 26 who is smart, observant and very good at her job.

“she also believed that part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic; to fortify her during her childhood, so that in womanhood she could gracefully withstand any assault or insult launched in her direction. This was the method her own mother had used upon her. She hadn’t liked it at the time, but now she understood it.”

This book was a 5-star read for me till the end when I deducted a star because it was the worst ending. The author takes us through the book and dangles multiple suspects at us only to completely drop all of them for an ending that I found so unrealistic and ridiculous. I can’t believe her editor let her keep that ending. It just did not work for me at all. I gave this book 4 stars because I did not think the ending lived up to the entire work for me, but I still recommend it for the journey.

Have you read this one? Let me know in the comments.

Leggy

Fiction, literary fiction, women's fiction

Book Review: Here One Moment by Lianne Moriarty

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“I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predestined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road”

It was supposed to be a short, domestic, uneventful flight from Hobart to Sydney. We meet the passengers boarding the plance and get a short description of various characters. All of a sudden mid-flight, an older lady starts walking through the aisles, pointing at passengers and telling them their cause of death and the age at which they will die.

Some had long life predictions (we’re talking over a 100) and some had predictions that were round the corner. No one was spared because even the little baby got a drowning prediction in a few years. It was all a joke to everyone as the woman seemed to be in a dream like state and when she got back to her seat and asked for water, it seemed like a case of dehydration till a few month later, the first prediction comes true…exactly as she said it.

“You won’t necessarily win against fate, but you should at least put up a fight”

Once the lady, whose name is Cherry by the way, started giving the predictions, my anxiety shot all the way up because I imagined being trapped in the air and someone giving me unsolicited information about how and when I will die but once the first prediction happened, I was hooked. And was hooked to the very end. In the Moriarty books I’ve read, it usually takes her a while to get us to the point so having the premise from the get go was a welcome pleasant surprise.

“Everyone loves a particular version of you, and when that person is gone, that version goes with them.”

Moriarty did her big one here because the development of the story was great. We go back in and learn about Cherry, who is the main character and we learn about her upbringing and her life till the moment on the plane. Her mother being a clairvoyant was definitely an interesting tid bit. At the same time, we get to know a couple of characters who were also on the plane. We get to know more about their life and to make it even sweeter, Moriarty drops little easter eggs here and there that show connections among the characters.

“La vita va veloce: this life goes fast, much faster than time”

Part of getting to know the other characters involves how they react once the predictions start coming true. It was interesting to see how some were still cavalier about the whole thing while others took it very seriously and went over the edge convincing themselves that they could control their fate. I liked the balance of light and breezy and thought provoking because some story lines explore what could have been with certain life choices chosen or not chosen.

I always say Moriarty is an overrated writer and I can’t believe it but I enjoyed thisone and I would recommend. Because it’s quite intriguing, the pages go by fast. If you have read this one, what did you think?

Taynement

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

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