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Read: August 2023

The Invisible Hour: A Novel

by Alice Hoffman

Today I started reading The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman. It’s a story about love, heartbreak, self-discovery, and the magic of books. The Invisible Hour is the story of one woman’s dream. For a little while, it came true. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.

Mia Jacob finds hope in the power of words on a brilliant June day. She reads The Scarlet Letter, a novel written almost two hundred years earlier, which mirrors her life. Mia and her mother, Ivy, live inside an oppressive cult in western Massachusetts called the Community, where contact with the outside world is forbidden, and books are considered evil. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words perfectly capture the pain and loss that Mia carries inside her.

As Mia journeys through heartbreak and time, she breaks free from the rules of her Community. Along the way, she discovers the power of reading to transport and connect people, the fluidity of time, and the strength of love to overcome any obstacle.

As a young girl, Mia fell in love with a book. Now as a woman, she falls for a writer as she travels back in time. But what if Nathaniel Hawthorne never wrote “The Scarlet Letter”? What if Mia never found the book on the day she planned to end her life?

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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Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson is one of NPR’s Books We Love from 2020. The dangerous magic of The Night Circus meets the powerful historical exploration of The Underground Railroad in this timely and unsettling novel, set against the darkly glamorous backdrop of New York City at the dawn of WWII. Amidst the whir of city life, a girl from Harlem is drawn into the glittering underworld of Manhattan, where she’s hired to use her knives to strike fear amongst its most dangerous denizens.

The book is written in three sections with different protagonists and voices. Phyllis, or Pea as her friends call her, is a black assassin for a white mob boss narrates the first section of the book. Her saint’s hands are the ability to use knives to commit murder. She can also pass as white as Phyllis, but she is a black woman from Harlem as Pea. The section she narrates is difficult at first to follow as she attempts to deal with the consequences of her actions. Can the past ever be the past?

Dev, Indian and Phyllis’s lover, narrates the second section. He is an undercover cop who protects her and helps her free herself from the mob boss. This section is located in the Hudson Valley and highlights the tensions before the war between whites and non-whites.

The third protagonist, Tamara, narrates this section. The war separates Phyllis and Dev. Phyllis is pregnant, and Dev and Tamara’s love interest are serving in the military. This section brings together the threads and reminds us that the past is never the past.

As Goodreads summarizes the book,

But the ghosts from her past are always by her side—and history has appeared on her doorstep to threaten the people she loves most.

Can one woman ever sacrifice enough to save an entire community?

Trouble the Saints is a dazzling, daring novel—a magical love story, a compelling chronicle of interracial tension, and an altogether brilliant and deeply American saga.

I recommend this book and encourage all readers to read it to the end.

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Read: January 2024

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Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

Today, I started reading Octavia E. Butler‘s acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel, “Parable of the Sower.” The book depicts a world in which global climate change and economic crises have led to social chaos, particularly in California. The state is plagued by dangers such as pervasive water shortages and masses of vagabonds who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive.

The novel provides a message of hope even in a gloomy environment. It tells the story of Lauren Olamina, a fifteen-year-old girl who lives with her preacher father, family, and neighbors in a gated community. They are protected from the chaos happening around them. However, in a society where everyone is at risk, Lauren suffers from hyperempathy, a condition that makes her highly sensitive to the emotions of others.

Lauren is a young girl who is wise beyond her years and acutely aware of the dangers that her community refuses to acknowledge. She must speak up to protect her loved ones from the impending disasters that could otherwise harm them. However, her fight for survival leads to something much bigger – the emergence of a new faith and a profound insight into the destiny of humanity.

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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How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith. This book was a gift from my son Jon. The New York Times selected How the Word is Passed as one of the best books published this year. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

How the Word is Passed is one of the best books I have read in 2021. I had read an excerpt in The Atlantic on the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. Like most of us, I had placed the book on my to-read list, where it remained lost in the cobwebs. Fortunately, my son Jon purchased the book for me.

Secondly, the book rekindled my long-lost dream of being an American Studies professor. As soon as Jan and I met, I dropped plans to leave Brooklyn and start graduate school in the fall of 1974. I made that decision primarily because of how much I loved Jan. But it was also partly that I did not have a clear vision of what my life would be like as a professor. The book provided clear examples of people like Yvonne Holden at The Whitney Plantation redefining history to be more accurate and inclusive. I probably could not have done as well as she did, but I can now see that it might have resulted in a career for me that could have been impactful.

Goodreads provides this overview for those who still need to be convinced to read this book.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola Prison in Louisiana, a former plantation named for the country from which most of its enslaved people arrived and which has since become one of the most gruesome maximum-security prisons in the world. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, Clint Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark work of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in understanding our country.

How the Word is Passed is one of the best books I have read this year and many prior ones. I encourage you to read it and share your comments.

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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: September 2023

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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.

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