I started reading Blue Skies: A Novel by T. C. Boyle today. The book is an eco-thriller with comedic elements. It explores the relationships between humans and their habitats in a world where natural disasters frequently occur, where "the only truism seems to be that things always get worse."
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by T. C. Boyle
I started reading Blue Skies: A Novel by T. C. Boyle today. The book is an eco-thriller with comedic elements. It explores the relationships between humans and their habitats in a world where natural disasters frequently occur, where “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.”
Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry” to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young “Burmie” she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently sets a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events threatening her survival.
Blue Skies follows the tradition of T. C. Boyle’s finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with biting wit and intelligent social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd—are struggling to adapt to the “new normal,” in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope.
But there’s more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the bland façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet’s future. Blue Skies deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, from pet bees and cricket-dependent diets to massive species die-offs and pummeling hurricanes, in which “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.
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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by Chetna Maroo
Western Lane: A Novel by Chetna Maroo is a taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete’s struggle to transcend herself. Western Lane is about three sisters who have lost their mother. Their father is encouraged to provide structure in raising his daughters. Gopi, the narrator, is a squash player, and her father imposes a brutal training regimen. I highly recommend this novel!
The following passage explains the importance of squash to Gopi and how she views the world.
In the court, your mind is not only on the shot you’re about to play and the shot with which your opponent might reply, but on the shots that will follow two, three, four moves ahead. You’re watching your opponent’s position and the game he or she is playing, making calculations. This is how you choose which way to go. Though your mind is following several paths at once, it’s not a splitting but expansion forwards and backward in time, and it happens so quickly that it feels like instinct. Sometimes, you don’t even know you are thinking.
In the first few pages, I wondered what I would have done if I had been a single parent when my sons were young. I do not believe I would have imposed on my sons what Gopi’s father did to her. However, I have found reading and art to be powerful tools to help me cope with grief. I have focused on rituals, structure, and purpose.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot, and its echo.
But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.
An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we know ourselves and each other.
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.
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.
by Lynn Steger Strong
Flight: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong is a novel about family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, forming a decisive next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time. The book has been on my to-read list for a few months. A New Yorker Best Books of 2022, it seemed like a good start on my 2023 Goodreads Reading challenge. Flight is the first book I read in 2023. Last year I read seventy-four books, and each helped me with my grief journey.
I recommend this novel as it is a page-turner highlighting the difficulty families experience after a loss. As a culture, we are experiencing declining social connections, including within families. Flight is an excellent effort to define the crisis.
Although several possible resolutions to the conflict became clear by the middle of the novel, Ms. Strong told the story so that until the end, it was unclear how or if it would be resolved. In addition, enough unresolved issues remained so that.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
It’s December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help.
With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as “a defining novel of our age” (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps
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.
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.
by Richard Powers
I started reading “Playground: A Novel” by Richard Powers today. This remarkable new novel comes from the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author of “The Overstory” and “Bewilderment.” Even more astonishing is that this marks my three hundredth book since I embarked on this reading journey on January 1, 2019! I’m also enjoying “Judaism Is About Love,” which means “Playground: A Novel” will be my 98th or 99th book in 2024.
In this sweeping, panoramic novel, four lives intertwine, showcasing Richard Powers at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu finds herself at the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal, strapped to one of the world’s first aqua lungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific, finding solace in art as her only home. At an elite high school in Chicago, two opposites bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game: Rafi Young gets lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work leads to a startling breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
Their paths converge on the history-laden island of Makatea in French Polynesia, once known for its phosphorus deposits that helped sustain the world. This tiny atoll has been chosen for a groundbreaking venture: a plan to create floating, autonomous cities to venture out onto the open sea. However, the island’s residents must vote to approve the project or turn the seasteaders away.
Set against the world’s most enormous ocean backdrop, this awe-inspiring book delves into the last wild place we have yet to colonize, exploring a still-unfolding oceanic narrative. It beautifully weaves rich characters, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep examination of our shared humanity—and exploration that only Richard Powers can deliver.
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by Brian Goldstone
Today, I delved into There Is No Place for Us by Brian Goldstone, a poignant exploration of America’s escalating homelessness crisis. Goldstone’s examination of the issue’s scale, root causes, and consequences is a wake-up call, passionately arguing that housing must be recognized as a fundamental human right. His compelling narrative demands our immediate attention and action.
The phrase “the working homeless” serves as a stark reminder of the urgency of America’s homelessness crisis. In a country where hard work and determination are expected to lead to success, it is scandalous that individuals with full-time jobs struggle to maintain stable housing. Rising rents, low wages, and insufficient tenant rights have contributed to this alarming trend. Families are facing homelessness not due to a failing economy but because of a thriving one.
In his compelling and thoroughly researched book, Brian Goldstone explores the lives of five families in Atlanta. Maurice and Natalia attempt to rebuild their lives in the country’s “Black Mecca” after being priced out of Washington, D.C. Kara aspires to become an entrepreneur while working at a public hospital. Britt has secured a much-coveted housing voucher. Michelle is studying to become a social worker. Celeste works tirelessly at her warehouse job while battling ovarian cancer. Each of these individuals strives to provide a decent life for their children. Yet, one by one, they find themselves among the nation’s working homeless, demonstrating their resilience and the system’s failures.
Through intimate, novelistic portrayals, Goldstone exposes the human cost of this crisis, following parents and their children as they sleep in cars or squalid extended-stay hotel rooms, then head to their jobs and schools the next day. These are the nation’s hidden homeless—people often omitted from official statistics—showing that overflowing shelters and street encampments represent only the most visible aspects of a much larger problem.
Brian Goldstone is a journalist whose long-form reporting and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, The New Republic, The California Sunday Magazine, and Jacobin, among other publications. He has a PhD in anthropology from Duke University and was a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University. In 2021, he was a National Fellow at New America. He lives in Atlanta with his family.
When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!
Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!
by Colin Barrett
Today, I started reading “Wild Houses: A Novel” by Colin Barrett and was impressed by the author’s ability to blend dark humor and intense emotions. Colin Barrett, the award-winning author of “Homesickness” and “Young Skins,” has crafted a debut novel that takes readers on a rollercoaster ride of crimes committed out of desperation, abandoned dreams, and small-town secrets that won’t stay hidden. The story is presented with a wry wit that adds to its appeal.
The story is set in the quaint town of Ballina, located in picturesque west Ireland, as it prepares for its biggest weekend of the year. The simmering feud between small-time dealer Cillian English and County Mayo’s fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum, painting a vivid picture of the town’s underbelly.
The story’s protagonist, Dev, is a reclusive man unwillingly drawn into the Ferdias’ revenge fantasy when he answers the door and finds Doll, Cillian’s bruised, sullen teenage brother, in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. With the help of his dead mother’s dog, Dev is jostled by his nefarious cousins and is struck by spinning lights as he is goaded into their plan.
Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can’t shake the feeling that something terrible has happened to her boyfriend, Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts, Nicky sets out to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.
“Wild Houses“ is a beautifully crafted and thrillingly told story of two outsiders striving to find themselves as their worlds collapse in chaos and violence. It is the long-anticipated debut novel from award-winning and critically acclaimed short story writer Colin Barrett.
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 sunIn 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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