New Book: Weather: A Novel

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Read: March 2022

Weather: A Novel

by Jenny Offil

Weather: A Novel by Jenny Offil was a book that I was confused and uncertain if I wanted to finish for the first few pages. I am delighted that I did, and I highly recommend this book. Its brief diary-like dispatches about life in our time when we sense that we may all be doomed to a climate catastrophe made this a book I truly enjoyed reading. The subtext of the rise of right-wing strongmen in the USA and abroad adds to the crisis her dispatches describe.

Her Obligatory Note of Hope challenges all of us to engage in solutions instead of accepting doom.

How can we contribute to the common good? There are people all over the world trying to answer these questions. In big ways but also in small ways. In grand leaps but also in fits and starts.

I always thought it was ridiculous to try and fight for social change when I couldn’t even get my own house in order. How could a meat-eating, plane-flying, march-hating person like me ever find a place in the climate justice movement? But then I started to read about all the different ways ordinary people were refusing to give into fatalism and were exploring the possibilities of what they could do, what they might fight for in this half-ruined world of ours.

There were saints among these accidental activists, but also stone-cold hypocrites like me. Slowly, I began to see collective action as the antidote to my dithering and despair.

There’s a way in for everyone. Aren’t you tired of all this fear and dread?

Goodreads provides an overview of the book if you are not yet convinced to read it.

Lizzie Benson is a very relatable woman who slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: a fake shrink. She has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother for years. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with her husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, proposes. She wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers concerned about the decline of western civilization. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.

As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you’ve seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience. But she still tries to save everyone, using everything she’s learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, floundering the library stacks her years of wa.. And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad.

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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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Read: January 2022

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The Night Swim

by Megan Goldin

The Night Swim by Megan Goldin is a book that I thought would be different from the last two books – Sarah’s Key and Send for Me – that I had read. Both of those were directly or indirectly about the Holocaust. I often selected this book from the e-library based on reviews and reading the sample section.

The Night Swim was a page-turner, but it also was about numerous social issues that Jan ad I had spent our lives working to resolve.

Among these are male violence and its impact directly and indirectly on women. Rachel Krall, a podcaster, spoke about how male violence had impacted her. Two of the other female characters were either a victim or the sister of a victim. Having spent my life trying not to exhibit male violence, I was reminded while reading his novel of how painful it can be and the impact of micro-aggressions.

I knew that the author had done her research when I realized that. Ms. Goldin set the story in Neapolis, a fictional town on the outer banks of North Carolina. Neapolis, which in Latin means “New Town,” is also the old Roman name for the biblical city of Sheechem, where the rape of Dinah took place.

I missed the role of the Nightingale as it appears more as a background piece and not a primary role. Of course, this is a subtle reference by the author to Greek mythology and the rape of Philomela by her sisters’ husband. Her assailant cut out her tongue to prevent her from speaking of the crime. She was turned into a nightingale to escape. That is why female nightingales cannot sing. The one in the novel never sings and is rescued by Rachel at the end of the book.

Rachel narrates two sections of the novel, first with her on-the-ground work at the trial and second with her podcasts.

Hannah’s narrative is initially only in letters and then emails.

This format helped move the story along and make the story unfold in unique ways.

The following is a summary from Goodreads.

After the first season of her true-crime podcast became an overnight sensation and set an innocent man free, Rachel Krall is now a household name―and the last hope for thousands of people seeking justice. But she’s used to being recognized for her voice, not her face. Which makes it all the more unsettling when she finds a note on her car windshield, addressed to her, begging for help.

The small town of Neapolis is being torn apart by a devastating rape trial. The town’s golden boy, a swimmer, destined for Olympic greatness, has been accused of raping a high school student, the beloved granddaughter of the police chief. Under pressure to make Season Three a success, Rachel throws herself into interviewing and investigating―but the mysterious letters keep showing up in unexpected places. Someone is following her, and she won’t stop until Rachel finds out what happened to her sister twenty-five years ago. Officially, Jenny Stills tragically drowned, but the letters insist she was murdered―and when Rachel starts asking questions, nobody seems to want to answer. The past and present start to collide as Rachel uncovers startling connections between the two cases that will change the course of the trial and the lives of everyone involved.

Electrifying and propulsive, The Night Swim asks: What is the price of a reputation? Can a small town ever right the wrongs of its past? And what happened to Jenny?

I highly recommend this novel and look forward to reading more of Ms. Goldin’s work.

Read: October 2022

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The Bookstore Sisters: A Short Story

by Alice Hoffman

The Bookstore Sisters: A Short Story by Alice Hoffman is a heartfelt short story about family, independence, and finding your place in the world. The overview should be enough to encourage everyone to read the book. I recommend this short story without any reservations. Ms. Hoffman has written a moving story that helped me to grapple with grief and reminded me that love is the highest and most important goal that humans can aspire.

Isabel Gibson has all but perfected the art of forgetting. She’s a New Yorker now, with nothing left to tie her to Brinkley’s Island, Maine. Her parents are gone, the family bookstore is all but bankrupt, and her sister, Sophie, will probably never speak to her again.

But when a mysterious letter arrives in her mailbox, Isabel feels drawn to the past. After years of fighting for her independence, she dreads the thought of going back to the island. What she finds there may forever alter her path—and change everything she thought she knew about her family, home, and herself.

Isabel sums up the power of love in this paragraph,

She was thinking about the way a fish loved a river, and a bird loved the sky, and a mother loved her daughters. She was remembering everything. How love could change a person, how it could cause you the greatest sorrow or shelter you from harm. There were moths hitting against the windowpanes. A night heron called in the marshland as if its heart were breaking.

I have always fantasized about working in or owning a small bookstore.

The Bookstore Sisters: A Short Story rekindled that dream and reminded me of the power of love.

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: September 2021

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The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett was a true page-turner, and I did not want to stop reading it even when I got to the last page. I am not a fan of sequels, but if I was ever going to change my mind, this is the book I would want to read a sequel.

Ms. Bennett focuses on two twins who run away from home at age 16. They have grown up in Mallard, a fictional town in Louisiana. “In Mallard, nobody married dark,” Bennett writes starkly. Over time, its prejudices deepened as its population became lighter and lighter, “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.” The twins, with their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,” would have delighted the town’s founder. One of the women chooses to pass as white while the other does not.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

The question of why people choose to live differently than their origins is one that I often ponder. Growing up in a small town and living in a metropolis raises questions for me as to what my life is now and what was once.

I strongly recommend this book.

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Read: November 2021

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Conjure Women: A Novel

by Afia Atakora

Conjure Women by Afia Atakora is about a mother and her daughter with a shared talent for healing—and for the conjuring of curses — at the heart of this dazzling first novel. Conjure Women takes place before, during, and after the Civil War. The book is structured around three-time frames; Slaverytime, Freddomtime, and Wartime.

Having grown up in the South and heard far too many stories about the Lost Cause, it was a joy to read a book narrated by two African-American women. The third leading character is the daughter o the owner of the plantation. At the end of the war, she was hidden away for six years and was unaware the South had surrendered.

Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina. The secrets and bonds among these women and their community come to a head at the beginning of a war and at the birth of an accursed child, who sets the townspeople alight with fear and a spreading superstition that threatens their newly won, tenuous freedom.

Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, and richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love.

Since Jan died, I have read many books that I know she enjoyed. We both enjoyed Call the Midwife, and this book focused on birthing and mothering. Although conjuring was their medical care and not the type practiced in poplar by the Midwives, we would both have enjoyed the book.

Conjure Women also raises questions about the meaning of freedom. For example, Rue chooses not to leave the former plantation after the Klan attacks despite being free.

I recommend this book and look forward to reading more from Afia Atakora.

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Read: March 2023

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Birnam Wood: A Novel

by Eleanor Catton

Birnam Wood: A Novel by Eleanor Catton is a gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries. Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama, and immersion in character. A brilliantly constructed consideration of intentions, actions, and consequences is an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our survival. I highly recommend this novel.

The review in The New Yorker and a personal recommendation made this novel my next read.

At first, the conflict between the guerrilla gardening group and a wealthy American billionaire seemed like a story that had been told too many times. However, Ms. Catton has created a page-turner that is a must-read during our current climate emergency and the growing income gap. Although the end is foretold, it may surprise the reader while confirming the conviction that we must find an alternate way forward.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and in neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. A natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker–or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust 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.

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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.

New Book: Weather: A Novel

Weather: A novel

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