The Great Divide: A Novel
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The Great Divide: A Novel

Estimated reading time: 0 minutes, 55 seconds

I began to read “The Great Divide: A Novel” by Cristina Henriquez today. The book stood out for its compassionate exploration of the lives of activists, fishmongers, laborers, journalists, neighbors, doctors, and soothsayers. It sheds light on individuals whose essential contributions history overlooks. The novel weaves these characters’ stories in a unique and compelling narrative structure.

Set against the backdrop of the yet-to-be-built Panama Canal, the book delves into the lives of various characters. Francisco, a local fisherman, resents the foreign powers vying for control of his homeland. His son, Omar, works in the excavation zone, seeking connection in a rapidly changing world.

Sixteen-year-old Ada Bunting, from Barbados, stows away in Panama to find work and fund her ailing sister’s surgery. When she encounters Omar, who collapsed after a grueling shift, she rushes to his aid, setting off a chain of events that will change their lives.

John Oswald, a scientist dedicated to eliminating malaria, is in Panama when his wife, Marian, falls ill. Witnessing Ada’s bravery and compassion, he hires her as a caregiver, setting off a tale of ambition, loyalty, and sacrifice.

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Luky Us

Read: March 2022

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Lucky Us: A Novel

by Amy Bloom

Having surpassed my Goodreads 2022 reading goal, I wanted a lite, historical fiction book and found this one in the e-library. Lucky Us by Amy Bloom is a book that hooked me on the opening line – “My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.” I enjoyed reading it and highly recommend it.

The first section in Hollywood was the one I found less appealing. Partly that is because I identified with Eva, and she does not fulfill her leading role until the last two sections. Its depiction of how people survived the way years by sometimes is a reminder of our inner resilience.

Goodreads provides the following summary.

So begins this remarkable novel by Amy Bloom, whose critically acclaimed Away was called “a literary triumph” (The New York Times). Lucky Us is a brilliantly written, deeply moving, fantastically funny novel of love, heartbreak, and luck.

Disappointed by their families, Iris, the hopeful star and Eva the sidekick, journey through 1940s America in search of fame and fortune. Iris’s ambitions take the pair across the America of Reinvention in a stolen station wagon, from small-town Ohio to an unexpected and sensuous Hollywood, and to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island.

With their friends in high and low places, Iris and Eva stumble and shine through a landscape of big dreams, scandals, betrayals, and war. Filled with gorgeous writing, memorable characters, and surprising events, Lucky Us is a thrilling and resonant novel about success and failure, good luck and bad, the creation of a family, and the pleasures and inevitable perils of family life, conventional and otherwise. From Brooklyn’s beauty parlors to London’s West End, a group of unforgettable people love, lie, cheat, and survive in this story of our fragile, absurd, heroic species.

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Ahab's Wife: Or, The Star-gazer: A Novel

Read: August 2021

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Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-gazer

by Sena Jeter Naslund

Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-gazer by Sena Jeter Naslund is a book I could not put down once I finished the first chapter. “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.” is one of the most-recognized first sentences in literature–along with “Call me Ishmael.”

Sena Jeter Naslund has created a transcendent heroine – Una Spenser – who is as memorable as Ahab. Una’s universe spans a time that begins to redefine both women and men.

After a spellbinding opening scene, the tale flashes back to Una’s childhood in Kentucky; her idyllic adolescence with her aunt and uncle’s family at a lighthouse near New Bedford; her adventures disguised as a cabin boy on a whaling ship; her first marriage to a fellow survivor who descends into violent madness; courtship and marriage to Ahab; life as mother and a rich captain’s wife in Nantucket; involvement with Frederick Douglass; and a man who is in Nantucket researching his novel about his adventures on her ex-husband’s ship.

Ahab’s Wife is a breathtaking, magnificent, and uplifting story of one woman’s spiritual journey, informed by the spirit of the greatest American novel, but taking it beyond tragedy to redemptive triumph.

Having read this book, I can easily understand why my wife loved the book and encouraged me to read it. Her life story was much like Una’s, an uplifting story of her spiritual journey and her quest to repair the world.

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Checkout 19: A Novel

Read: December 2022

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Checkout 19: A Novel

by Claire-Louise Bennett

Checkout 19: A Novel by Claire-Louise Bennett, a New York Times Best Ten Best Books of 2022; the newspaper highlights the novel’s “unusual setting: the human mind — a brilliant, surprising, weird and very funny one. All the words one might use to describe this book — experimental, autofictional, surrealist — fail to convey the sheer pleasure of ‘Checkout 19.'” I fully agree with this description and found myself living in my mind.

Since Jan died in May of 2021, I have found myself with no one to talk to about the day-to-day events that consume so much of our lives. Checkout 19: A Novel reminded me that I have only been carrying those intimate conversations in my mind. Is it surreal? Yes. Yes, it is. Reading this novel helped me to accept the importance of those conversations. The new characters and scenarios I conjure are less creative than Ms. Claire-Louise Bennett’s. 

Goodreads describes Checkout 19: A Novel as the adventures of a young woman discovering her genius through the people she meets–and dreams up–along the way. Checkout 19 is a radical affirmation of the power of the imagination, and the magic escapes those who master it open to us all.

I recommend this book.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

In a working-class town in a county west of London, a schoolgirl scribbles stories in the back pages of her exercise book, intoxicated by the first sparks of her imagination. As she grows, everything and everyone she encounters become fuel for a burning talent. The large Russian man in the ancient maroon car who careens around the grocery store where she works as a checkout clerk, and slips her a copy of Beyond Good and Evil. The growing heaps of other books in which she loses-and finds-herself. Even the derailing of a friendship, in a devastating violation. The thrill of learning to conjure characters and scenarios in her head is matched by the exhilaration of forging her own way in the world, the two kinds of ingenuity kindling to a brilliant conflagration.

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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Sea of Tranquility

Read: September 2022

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Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel has been on my reading list for months. I recommend the book without reservations. Sea of Tranquility is a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. It was a page-turner from page one.

With the delay of Artemis I, I have been thinking a lot about the Sea of Tranquility, the original lunar landing site. Sea of Tranquility reminded me of the days of my youth when we believed that NASA would colonize the moon as it is in the novel.

One of the passages that moved me was when Olive Llewellyn asked, “What if it always is the end of the world.” A second profound passage asks, “A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”

The Goodreads summary provides a good overview,

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

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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The Day Tripper: A Novel

Read: April 2024

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The Day Tripper: A Novel

by James Goodhand

Today, I began reading “The Day Tripper: A Novel” by James Goodhand. The story centers around Alex Dean, who can travel through time but, unfortunately, always ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. This book is a perfect read for a rainy April day. The story moves quickly in just the first few pages, with time flying by faster than it does for Alex.

It’s 1995, and Alex Dean has it all: a spot at Cambridge University next year, the love of a fantastic woman named Holly, and all the time ahead of him. That is, until a brutal encounter with a ghost from his past sees him beaten, battered, and almost drowning in the Thames.

The next day, he wakes to find himself in a messy, derelict room he’s never seen before, in grimy clothes Alex doesn’t recognize, with no idea how he got there. A glimpse in the mirror tells him he’s much older and has been living a hard life, his features ravaged by time and poor decisions. He snatches a newspaper and finds it’s 2010—fifteen years since the fight.

After finally drifting off to sleep, Alex wakes the following morning to find it’s now 2019, another nine years later. But the next day, it’s 1999. Never knowing which day is coming, he begins to piece together what happens in his life after that fateful night by the river.

But what exactly is going on? Why does his life look nothing like he thought it would? What about Cambridge and Holly? In this page-turning adventure, Alex must navigate the years to learn that small actions have an untold impact. And that might be all he needs to save the people he loves and, equally importantly, himself.

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Brooklyn Crime Novel: A Novel

Read: October 2023

Brooklyn Crime Novel: A Novel

by Jonathan Lethem

I recently recommended reading “Brooklyn Crime Novel: A Novel” by Jonathan Lethem. The story is set in 1970s Brooklyn, where a daily ritual occurs on the streets. This ritual involves exchanging money, surrendering belongings, and asserting power. Violence is promised everywhere and becomes a currency itself.

Regardless of race, the street is like a stage in the shadows for the children. In the background, other players hide, including parents, cops, renovators, landlords, those who write the headlines, histories, and laws, and those who award this neighborhood its name.

Although the rules seem apparent initially, in memory’s prism, the roles of criminals and victims may appear to trade places. The voices of the past rise and gather as if in harmony, then war with one another. A street may seem to crack open and reveal what lies behind its shimmering facade. None who lived through it are ever permitted to forget.

Jonathan Lethem has written this story with kaleidoscopic verve and delirious wit, making it a breathtaking tour de force by a writer at the top of his powers. He has crafted an epic interrogation of how we fashion stories to contain the uncontainable: our remorse at the world we’ve made. He is known as “one of America’s greatest storytellers” by the Washington Post.

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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