Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ward's language is simply music, and the story of Jojo and Leonie and the ghosts that haunt them on their pursuit to reunite a family that never really was is dense and complex. Told in three generations of experience growing up in rural Mississippi, the tenderness the Jesmyn Ward uses to illuminate the full humanity of complicated characters in all her novels is entirely present in this one as well. The level of mysticism was a little tough for me, but ultimately, the hauntings help us come to know the living characters better, and ghosts don't seem unreal.

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Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Candice Carty-Williams has created a highly lovable, reasonably flawed heroine in Queenie. On the surface, the plot's deceptively simple (a young twenty-something navigates the messy terrain of a devastating break-up), but ultimately the novel is a fabulous illustration of how race and mental wellness twist around individual and systemic realities. Queenie's friendships with other women are essential to her survival, but they also serve to show readers the many forms privilege can take. I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

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High Tide at Noon by Elisabeth Ogilvie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my second trip through High Tide at Noon, and re-reads of the rest of the trilogy are soon to follow, I think. I've written elsewhere, and at length, about how I feel about Elisabeth Ogilvie (really stinkin' good!). To be clear, these are romance novels. They are relics of a an age when the anatomy of a romance novel was less concrete, when authors drafted by hand without the revision benefit of word processors. And, for the Bennett's Island books, part of the love affair is with the setting and a bygone way of life. The gender roles and light discussion of class and race don't hold up, but the idea that we long for fantasy worlds to call home that are similar-to-but-different-from our regular lives endures, and I'm grateful to E.O. for every word she gave us on Bennett's. I will come back to these books again and again, if only to hear Owen Bennett whine that his kid sister is "teaming" him around while she knits trap heads in the living room.

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Normal People by Sally Rooney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Completely engrossing and worthy of its hype, if not for working and sleeping, this would be a one-sitting read. It snags it’s tension from readers’ concern over whether these two characters can be with each other without hurting each other, and then whether that is the goal at all. Anyone who has ever claimed another human as “home” will find something to relate to in these flawed-but-well-meaning characters.

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Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Among other reactions, one is that diarrhea plays a larger role in Rodham than I expected. But that’s not a criticism; Curtis Sittenfeld’s novels are smart and compelling and this was a great story and frequently invited readers into interesting thought experiments. It gets a little rushed at the end, and that reveals a certain plotlessness- the story is mostly a series of “and thens” in an interesting life, but beyond the telling of Rodham’s political career and love life, there isn’t much happening. That’s a pretty big criticism, I suppose, but even so, I enjoyed the time to imagine an alternate reality for the Clintons.

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The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There is so much pleasure, often nestled up against hard edges, in The Book of Delights. It's a short book with essays that meander, but it fully lives up to its title. Gay is having fun- sometimes with language, sometimes with subject, sometimes darkly and sometimes in a bittersweet way. So many contemporary essays feel heavy with the burden of creating art. Gay simply explores, and the result is creative, surprising, smart art.

At one point, Gay talks about how Black people in America are often reduced to their suffering, and he quips that the joke is on the reader, who is reading a book of a Black man's delight. Especially in this moment, when books about Black suffering and books that appeal to white readers looking to "fix" themselves or history are trending across the country, this book that dedicates itself to illuminating that there are good things that are sometimes also difficult things, and that it is a gift to consider them with respect, humor, poetry, reverence, nostalgia, etc., is particularly appreciated.

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I'm Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Super fast, interesting read. I am perennially impressed with how much bolder YA is in exploring social issues and the humanity behind them than a lot of literary fiction intended for adults. I found I'm Not Dying with You Tonight after seeing Kimberly Jones' stirring clip on John Oliver. The book, like her segment responding to protests following the murder of George Floyd, goes an amazing distance in creating empathy and understanding for why people turn to violence with peacefulness doesn't motivate change.

In writing a story that helps white readers understand the desperation behind riots, Jones is doing work she shouldn't have to, and it's a gift. Social commentary aside, these are full, flawed, characters with challenges and dreams who learn a lot in a short span of time. An important and moving story.

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The One-Eyed Man by Ron Currie Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For much of the time that I was reading The One-Eyed Man, I didn’t really want to be reading it, which has absolutely nothing to do with the book, which is smart, funny, wry, tender and surprising in all the ways that I expected after having read Ron Currie, Jr.’s Everything Matters!Everything Matters.

But I started reading this book as America began protesting the murder of George Floyd, and I continued to read it through many days when I wished I had an input that wasn’t the voice of a white man from the county I grew up in. Currie is a lot of other things, too, and I mean any of this disparagingly, but as a reader who can count the number of white men I read in a given year on one hand and have fingers left over, I tend to value voices and stories that stretch beyond my understanding of the world. The lens of the white American man has been pretty reliably presented for most of my life, so it’s not where I tend to look.

It was a superficial disappointment and didn’t matter all that much, in the end. Ron Currie Jr.’s sharp eye for the terrors and embarrassments of the modern day is refreshing and validating. It makes you think he might be a difficult kind of guy to get along with, but you’d trust him to write a pretty good social studies book.

There’s a lot of satire here, and the kind of big, improbable-but-still-very-possible action that Currie is so skilled at, and a delightfully literal protagonist with a surprising
The descriptions of smoking are absolutely phenomenal. They’re enough to reform the most staunch non-smokers. This is a writer who has thought very long and hard about each intimate detail of smoking a cigarette. There is one action-packed chapter full of drama that I recall simply as “the cigarette chapter,” because the smoking weaves in and out of the narrative, providing safe and sturdy islands between chaos.

“Clarity? Certainty? Only children and republicans expect life to be that simple.” The One-Eyed Man is a delight, both an escape and heavily grounding, even if my timing was a little off.


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The Leavers by Lisa Ko
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I went into this one without any idea of what it was- I have no idea how it ended up in the TBR pile, but I suspect I was served some ads and then the ebook was cheap. Initially it seemed like I was in for bildungsroman focused on the Chinese American experience, but the novel unfurls into a really interesting look at a family's migration. Even the word "family" here is suspect, as the book deals heavily in trying to define what makes one.

I appreciated Deming as a flawed and likable narrator, and I learned more than I every expected to about Chinese immigration to and from the U.S., cast yet another critical eye at the white supremacy inherent in much of America's foster care and adoption systems, and grew maybe just a little tired of what felt like forced descriptions of how Deming experienced music. Not bad, on the balance of it.

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Call Me American: A Memoir by Abdi Nor Iftin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Really interesting and educational memoir. Abdi is a likable, trustworthy narrator, and his story widened my understanding of decades of Somalian conflict and the experiences of American refugees and immigrants. I haven't yet listened to the This American Life that sparked the buzz around Abdi Nor Iftin, but I will. It will be interesting to compare the way producers tell his story to how he tells it himself.

Perhaps most notably, Abdi's take on the election of 2016 is a powerful reminder that no matter how great my own fear of authoritarian leadership, the real victims of the the rich asshole administration will be Americans who are not white.

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