Organ Meats: A Novel

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Read: September 2023

Daughter: A Novel

by Claudia Dey

I started reading “Daughter: A Novel” by Claudia Dey today. According to Mona Dean, to be loved by your father is to be loved by God. Mona is a playwright, actress, and daughter of a man who is famous for a great novel. However, her father’s needs and insecurities significantly impact the women in his family, including Mona, her sister, her half-sister, and their mothers.

Mona’s father’s infidelity shattered her childhood, causing her to be in opposition to her stepmother, who also suffered from his actions. Mona’s father begins a new affair, and he confides in her. She enjoys his attention painfully and parasitically. When he confesses to his wife, Mona is blamed for the disruption, punished for her father’s actions, and kicked out of the family.

Mona’s life is chaotic, and she struggles to regain stability. Only when she experiences a profound and defining loss does she begin to replace absent love with real love? Pushed to the brink, she must decide how she wants to live, what Mona needs to say, and the risks she’s willing to take to say it.

Claudia Dey provides penetrating insight and devilish humor to chronicle our most intimate lives in “Daughter.” It’s an obsessive and blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, create, and break free.

Read: May 2023

Enter Ghost: A Novel

by Isabella Hammad

Isabella Hammad‘s highly anticipated novel, Enter Ghost, takes readers on a unique journey through modern-day Palestine, exploring themes of displacement, diaspora, and the unbreakable bonds of family and shared resistance. Hammad’s passionate and thoughtful writing brings to life a timely and unforgettable story, shedding light on the struggles of artistry under occupation.

The novel follows Sonia Nasir, an actress who returns to Haifa after years away from her family’s homeland to visit her sister, Haneen. However, this is no ordinary trip for Sonia, as it marks her first visit since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. Still recovering from a disastrous love affair and a dissolute marriage, Sonia finds her relationship with Palestine to be fragile, both bone-deep and new.

As opening night approaches, a troupe of Palestinian actors faces numerous violent obstacles. Sonia meets Mariam, a local director who ropes her into a production of Hamlet on the West Bank. She rehearses Gertrude’s lines in classical Arabic and spends more time in Ramallah than in Haifa, working alongside a group of dedicated men from all over historic Palestine. Despite their competing egos and priorities, each group member is united in their desire to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. Amidst it all, Sonia has the daunting yet exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: December 2021

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Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

by Andrea Elliott

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott was a gift from my son Jon. The New York Times selected “Invisible Child” as one of the best books published this year. It is indeed one of the top books on my all-time list.

GoodReads summary provides a good overview,

The riveting, unforgettable story of a girl whose indomitable spirit is tested by homelessness, poverty, and racism in an unequal America—from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrea Elliott of The New York Times

Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tight-knit family from shelter to shelter, this story goes back to trace the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. When Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis explodes as the chasm deepens between rich and poor.

In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani must lead her seven siblings through a thicket of problems: hunger, parental drug addiction, violence, housing instability, segregated schools, and the constant monitoring of the child-protection system. When, at age thirteen, Dasani enrolls at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, her loyalties are tested like never before. As she learns to “code switch” between the culture she left behind and the norms of her new town, Dasani starts to feel like a stranger in both places. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?

By turns heartbreaking and revelatory, provocative and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, this book vividly illuminates some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.

Jan and I were involved and knew that child poverty and homelessness needed repair. In addition, Jan lived on Washington Park across from Ft. Greene Park in 1974-75. We knew the neighborhood where much of the book’s story takes place.

Before meeting Jan in 1973, I was both a community/tenant organizer and a youth worker. In the latter role, I made weekly hostel trips for eight to ten young boys from East Williamsburg during 1973. The trips were the first the boys had ever been outside of their neighborhood.

Many of them had imaginations like Dasani. They also had her instinct to fight. One of my first tasks was to check for any weapons.

Decades later, when I would see any of them, now adults, they would ask when we were going on another trip. I wish I had met Jan when I made those trips. She would have helped me improve them and document the impact. If I could re-write history, I would have her join me as the second adult on the hostel trips.

After that summer, it was clear my primary skills were as a community/tenant organizer. Over the next few years, my work focused on creating affordable and supportive housing.

Jan and I did meaningful work that made a difference, yet the need for a permanent solution to the crisis remains. The book highlights the crucial role of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. As a nation, we cannot undermine those values by breaking up families, impeding resilience, and maintaining racial and economic inequality.

The current debate in Washington over the Build Back Better legislation needs to focus not on how much we spend but on its impact on children and families.

David Brooks, a conservative commentator, has supported these expenditures for what they can do to address this country’s cultural and economic crisis.

These packages say to the struggling parents and the warehouse workers: I see you. Your work has dignity. You are paving your way. You are at the center of our national vision.

This is how you fortify a compelling moral identity, which is what all of us need if we’re going to be able to look in the mirror with self-respect. This is the cultural transformation that good policy can sometimes achieve. Statecraft is soulcraft.

If you can only read one book this year, this is the one to read. Child poverty, homelessness, and inequality impact all of us. Ending child poverty and homelessness will make us a healthier and more inclusive nation. It is time for a compelling moral call to action!

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Read: October 2021

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Writers and Lovers

by Lily King

Writers and Lovers by Lily King is a page-turner of a book. From page one, I was engaged with Casey and wanted to continue reading to find out how she resolved the crises of her life.

The loss of her mother was a constant reminder of my loss. Although she mourned in a different way than I am, there was much we had in common. The big difference was she was writing a novel about her mother, and I am only doing journal entries and occasional posts.

Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she’s been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey’s fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.

Writers & Lovers follows Casey–a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist–in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

I very much recommend this book and this writer.

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Read: December 2023

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Chain Gang All Stars

by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Today, I started reading “Chain Gang All Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The story revolves around Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, the main characters of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, a highly controversial and top-rated program in America’s private prison industry. The program is called Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE), where prisoners compete for the ultimate prize- their freedom. It’s similar to the return of the gladiators but in a modern-day setting.

The story is set in a prison called CAPE, where inmates are forced to participate in death matches as a part of a chain-gang. These matches are held in front of cheering crowds, while the prison authorities claim it to be a righteous act. Among the participants, Thurwar and Staxxx are the most popular as they are also lovers. Thurwar is just a few matches away from her freedom, which she carries with a heavy heart and lethal hammer. Thurwar contemplates how she can help her fellow inmates preserve their humanity despite being forced into these brutal games. However, the owners of CAPE are determined to safeguard their status quo, and they will go to extreme lengths to stop anyone who challenges them. Thurwar’s attempts to resist the system have devastating consequences.

Chain-Gang All-Stars” is a powerful book that sheds light on the American prison system’s problematic alliance with systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration. It critically examines the situation from various perspectives, from the Links in the field to the protestors, the CAPE employees, and beyond. The book offers a clear-eyed reckoning of what freedom really means in America. It is a noteworthy contribution from a “new and necessary American voice,” as described by Tommy Orange in The New York Times Book Review.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Regarding gifts made this month, I will match dollar for dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: August 2023

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The Quiet Tenant

by Clémence Michallon

Today, I commenced reading The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon. It is not my typical genre, as it is a pulse-pounding psychological thriller about a serial killer narrated by those closest to him: his 13-year-old daughter, his girlfriend—and the one victim he has spared.

Aidan Thomas is a hard-working family man and a somewhat beloved figure in the small upstate New York town where he lives. He’s the man who always lends a hand and has a good word for everyone. But Aidan has a dark secret he’s been keeping from everyone in town and those closest to him. He’s a kidnapper and serial killer. Aidan has murdered eight women, and there’s a ninth he has earmarked for death: Rachel, imprisoned in a backyard shed, fearing for her life.

When Aidan’s wife dies, he and his thirteen-year-old daughter Cecilia are forced to move. Aidan has no choice but to bring Rachel along, introducing her to Cecilia as a “family friend“ who needs a place to stay. Aidan is betting on Rachel, after five years of captivity, being too brainwashed and fearful to attempt to escape. But Rachel is a fighter and survivor and recognizes Cecilia might be the lifeline she has waited for all these years. As Rachel tests the boundaries of her new living situation, she begins to form a tenuous connection with Cecilia. And when Emily, a local restaurant owner, develops a crush on the handsome widower, she finds herself drawn into Rachel and Cecilia’s orbit, dangerously close to discovering Aidan’s secret.

Told through the perspectives of Rachel, Cecilia, and Emily, The Quiet Tenant explores the psychological impact of Aidan’s crimes on the women in his life—and the bonds between those women that give them the strength to fight back. A searing thriller and an astute study of trauma, survival, and power dynamics, The Quiet Tenant is an electrifying debut thriller by a significant talent.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.