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Read: November 2021

Black Sun – Between the Earth and Sky

by Rebecca Roanhorse

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. Black Sun is the first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy, inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven into a tale of celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.

I have always enjoyed fantasy novels like Black Sun, and this is the first one set in the Pre-Columbian Americas.

A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year, it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.

Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as quickly as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.

Will Serapio be harmless or a villain? The answer, my friend, will be known when you read this book or perhaps the second one in the trilogy.

Before meeting and falling forever in love with Jan, I had dreamed of the life of an American Studies professor. Thousands of students are relieved to know I did not pursue that life. If I had opened that door, an area of focus would have been on Pre-Columbian Americas.

I recommend this book and will read the next two in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy.

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Read: February 2024

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Come and Get It

by Kiley Reid

I recently started reading “Come and Get It” by Kiley Reid, a celebrated New York Times bestselling author known for her book Such a Fun Age. The novel is about a senior resident assistant named Millie Cousins, who, in 2017, attended the University of Arkansas. Millie aspires to graduate, get a job, and buy a house.

She is offered an unusual opportunity by Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, which she accepts. Unfortunately, Strange new friends, dorm pranks, and illicit behavior undermine Millie’s ambition.

Overall, “Come and Get It” is a gripping story about desire, consumption, and recklessness. It explores themes of money, indiscretion, and bad behavior through Millie’s eyes. The novel is highly anticipated, given that Kiley Reid is an acclaimed and award-winning author.

Read: December 2022

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The Candy House: A Novel

by Jennifer Egan

The Candy House: A Novel by Jennifer Egan focuses on a new technology that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had and to share your memories in exchange for access to the memories of others—it has seduced multitudes. According to the NYTimes, “this is minimalist maximalism. As a widow, I live in a world of memories, but I would not want them shared as they are in The Candy House. “It’s as if Egan compressed a big 19th-century novel onto a flash drive.”

Of course, I am not able to access my unconscious memories. Albeit in an amateur way, I write down some of my memories as they remind me of the power of the love that Jan and I shared. For example, the essay when I met Jan rekindles the memory and attempts to tell the story the way it happened, not how some would like it to be remembered.

The Candy House is one of the NYTimes’ top five fiction books of 2022. I have read two of them, The Furrows and Checkout 19. Initially, I was overwhelmed by the multitude of characters and was confused. By the novel’s middle, their interconnectedness helped me understand its real meaning. In the end, Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for authentic connection, love, family, privacy, and redemption. As a widow, authenticity Is what I need to heal.

The Candy House is the seventieth (70) book I have read this year.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

In spellbinding linked narratives, Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Egan introduces these characters in an astonishing array of styles—from omniscient to first person plural to a duet of voices, an epistolary chapter, and a chapter of tweets. In the world of Egan’s spectacular imagination, there are “counters” who track and exploit desires and “eluders” who understand the price of taking a bite of the Candy House.

Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game. Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy, and redemption.

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: January 2022

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Crow Lake

by Mary Lawson

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson is set in northern Ontario’s rural “badlands.” The badlands are where heartbreak and hardship are mirrored in the landscape of the farming Pye family. Crow Lake is that rare find, a first novel so quietly assured, so emotionally pitch-perfect, you know from the opening page that this is the real thing – a literary experience in which to lose yourself, by an author of immense talent.

Crow Lake was a page-turner for me once I read the prologue.

Two families dominate the story.

On the one hand, it is the Greek tragedy of the Pye family. On their farm, “the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur—offstage.”

Kate Morrison has left her two brothers and sister at the lake to become a zoologist. The four siblings lost their parents and struggled to remain together. Their “tragedy looks more immediate if less brutal, but is, in reality, insidious and divisive.”

As Goodreads describes the novel,

In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, of resentments harbored and driven underground, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control, continually overturning one’s expectations right to the very end. Tragic, funny, unforgettable, this deceptively simple masterpiece about the perils of hero worship leaped to the top of the bestseller lists only days after being released in Canada and earned glowing reviews in The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, to name a few.

I highly recommend this novel and am looking forward to reading more from Mary Lawson.

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Read: May 2022

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The Passing Storm

by Christine Nolfi

The Passing Storm by Christine Nolfi is a gripping, openhearted novel about family, reconciliation, and bringing closure to the secrets of the past. From the first chapter, it was a pageturner and a book that engaged me when I needed to focus on life’s challenges. I was looking for something different from my most recent books.

I very much enjoyed this novel. It is focused on losses, including one parent and a daughter. I had not anticipated that but found that Ms. Nolfi handled that in an empathic way that did not trigger my grief but helped me understand my grief. The primary characters Rae, Quinn, Connor, and Griffin are brought to life by the writer. It left me wanting to know what happens to them now that they have survived the early stages of grief.

The Goodreads summary provides a good overview.

Early into the turbulent decade of her thirties, Rae Langdon struggles to work through grief she never anticipated. With her father, Connor, she tends to their Ohio farm, a forty-acre spread that has enjoyed better days. As memories sweep through her, some too precious to bear, Rae gives shelter from a brutal winter to a teenager named Quinn Galecki.

His parents have thrown out Quinn, a couple too troubled to help steer the misunderstood boy through his losses. Now Quinn has found a temporary home with the Langdons—and an unexpected kinship because Rae, Quinn, and Connor share a past and understand one another’s pain. But its depths—and all its revelations and secrets—have yet to come to light. To finally move forward, Rae must confront them and fight for Quinn, whose parents have other plans for their son.

There might be hope for a new season with forgiveness, love, and the spring thaw—a second chance Rae believed in her heart was gone forever.

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Read: December 2021

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God Shot by Chelsea Bieker

by Chelsea Bieker

God Shot by Chelsea Bieker, one of NPR’s Books We Love from 2020, is about the town of Peaches, California, where drought has settled in for the long term. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms.

In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. Everybody is praying for survival through secret “assignments” to bring the rain.

God Shot is an enjoyable read. However, I first found it challenging to accept Pastor Vern’s assignments, especially to Lacey May and her fellow teenage girls. Would people believe in a cult leader and get “assignments” that involve women fully accepting male domination in the twenty-first century? When I had doubts, I would wake up, listen to the news, or read the papers and discover that it is plausible and does happen in our world.

After being god-shot, Lacey May becomes one day at a time feminist as she has to rely on herself and other women who do not accept Pastor Vern’s divine leadership. Slowly but surely, she and her friends find a miracle to help them escape not only the environmental disaster caused by the drought but the moral depravity of Pastor Vern.

Goodreads provides this overview of the God Shot.

Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.

Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit, humor, and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O’Connor’s Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own.

I recommend this novel without reservations!

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