Rachel's Updates

Rachel added 'The Latecomer'

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:45:24 -0700

Rachel gave 5 stars to The Latecomer (Audiobook) by Jean Hanff Korelitz
bookshelves: jewish-fiction
The first thing I wanna know is: how far along are we on the tv adaptation? Is it still in development??? Book came out in 2022 and it’s now 2025. Do I have no idea how slowly this process goes? (Prolly.) Also—getting my snob out—maybe it won’t compare to the book anyway.

Premise is a bit of a doozy. We start in the 1970s with the meeting of the matriarch and patriarch of the Oppenheimer family at a funeral. If that isn’t dour enough, it’s the funeral of the patriarch, Salo’s, college girlfriend who was killed in a car crash where he was driving. :0 Honestly, it’s not about the melodrama (though Kozloff’s writing could be very funny.) Generational trauma is a backbone of this story.

In longer-ago past, the (fake 21st century) Oppenheimer’s are descended from the (real) Joseph Oppenheimer, a 18th century “court Jew�� who was tortured and executed, almost definitely on trumped up charges, and then proverbially resuscitated by Goebbels for Nazi Judenrein propaganda. A colorful piece of history, perhaps, and I’m always drawn to Jewish history. But it also speaks to generational trauma, which we see play out in the 21st century. Salo, feeling he doesn’t deserve happiness, is an absentee father who retreats into his own passions and a long-drawn affair with another survivor of the crash.

His three triplets (born in the 1980s during early in vitro treatments) are not warm, loving and connected to one another, and I think that has to do with trauma. In part; obviously nothing is that simple. But Salo was largely absent and their mother, Joanna, was grasping for a fictional salve for her husband and perfection for the family. Some might argue the triplets being “test tube babies�� also played a part in the dysfunction, but that doesn’t feel genuine to me. …speaking as another early 80s baby who is here due to fertility treatment, so. :P

Yup: many of the main characters of this novel (triplets Harrison, Lewyn and Sally) are from my generation! Just a couple years older than me. In all honestly, I’m not sure all the cultural touchstones were there. The prep school they attended engaged in the sort of leftist ideology that I’m not sure hit the scene until closer to the modern day (then again, maybe they were pioneers. :P) There were nods, later, to the dearth of social media, but nothing in real time about listening to the Dave Matthews band on a non-skip CD player before exams! Honestly, I’m watching a lot of “millennial nostalgia�� TikToks right now, where my middle-aged generation is trying to reclaim our youth by rocking out to jock jams and ��90s rap. But I digress!)

The novel takes off when the triplets go to college—Lewyn and Sally to their father’s alma mater, Cornell, and Harrison to a two-year pre-Harvard prep school where he’d study western canon (your Plato and Aristotle) and look after chickens. His trajectory takes him into a right-wing space, accompanied by Eli Absalom Stone, a formerly impoverished, self-taught Black peer fiercely devoted to meritocracy.

Harrison, already elitist and distant from the family, has found “his people.�� The schism between Sally and Lewyn stings more, as their mutual plan to deny each other’s existence on campus leads to a Greek tragedy with their peers around the same time that Salo, at long last, is planning to leave the Oppenheimer brood. I won’t spoil the date in history, except to say that the tragedy is bigger than expected.

Also during this time: Joanna has discovered the affair and takes drastic measures herself to have a do-over with a “latecomer�� child—Phoebe, who in fact was a fourth embryo, kept frozen since the 1980s. Phoebe plays a major part in the latter part of this story with regards to trying to piece her fractured family back together.

Korelitz throws everything and the kitchen sink into this—Harrison’s rise to MAGA-whisperer, Lewyn’s passion for Mormonism-turned-art history, and Sally as a closeted lesbian who finds purpose in antiquing and cleaning out old houses. There’s also a decent amount of Judaism, including a hilariously awkward college Passover seder. Listing it out like this feels trite, but the language and the character development say otherwise. One of my favorite authors, Allegra Goodman, wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “The Oppenheimers dare you to love them �� and even when you ��ǲ�’t, you cannot look away. The triplets are simply too original, too searching, too driven.��

Maybe I can dip into enough cynicism to question if the ending comes too easily. I will say—fangirl moment—I would have loved a resolution scene between Lewyn and Sally regarding their young adult foibles from almost two decades past, but to be fair we were in Phoebe’s head by then (about to embark on a collegiate journey herself.) Harrison perhaps rejoins the family because of a “gotcha�� development with Eli, which maybe didn’t feel personal enough to him except that secrets obviously sting. An already sprawling novel, maybe it wasn’t fair to ask Korelitz for even more of a psychological deep dive. How does she feel about a sequel? :P (She wrote a sequel to one of her more popular books, after all!)

This is a promising book for redemption without sentimentality, for the promise that there can be meaning after trauma, and meaning in our relationships. It is never too late.

Rachel started reading 'A Dark and Drowning Tide'

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 16:02:17 -0700

Rachel started reading A Dark and Drowning Tide by Allison Saft

Rachel entered a giveaway

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 12:15:45 -0700

The Belles

by Lacey N. Dunham

100 copies available, ends on April 27, 2025

Enter to win

Rachel added 'The Latecomer'

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 11:29:33 -0700

Rachel is starting The Latecomer

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 11:28:14 -0700

Rachel is starting The Latecomer.

Rachel added 'There Are Rivers in the Sky'

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 23:11:15 -0700

Rachel gave 5 stars to There Are Rivers in the Sky (Audible Audio) by Elif Shafak
bookshelves: fiction
Part of me feels like I shouldn’t like this novel, that maybe it is too preachy about environmentalism. After all, as it follows a raindrop throughout the ages, we often veer away from the characters to discuss past and present pollution and catastrophe. But dang it, I was too moved to care.

This is somewhat akin to a nesting dolls fantasy novel in the vein of CLOUD ATLAS by David Mitchell. Except that the far past storyline (during the Assyrian Empire) is largely prologue, and there is no future dystopian/post-apocalyptic one, either. The three main storylines are interconnected, and take place in the mid to late 1800s, 2014 and 2018 respectively.

Arthur “King of the Sewers and Slums,�� is born into abject poverty by the river Thames (aka London) during Victorian times. He’s a character with a fantastic memory—maybe too perfect, except he is technically based off of a real-life figure, George Smith, a self-taught cuneiform reader who translated The Epic of Gilgamesh into English. Mesopotamia is the cultural backbone of this novel, and the other two POV characters have roots there.

Narin is a young Yazidi girl who lives by the river Tigris (in Turkey) with her grandmother, a vaulted storyteller. During a pilgrimage she is swept up in ISIS’s genocide of that community. Zeleekah, named for the biblical wife of Potiphar, is an immigrant and orphan in London. As her marriage ends she moves into a houseboat on the Thames and befriends her landlady, a tattoo artist with a passion for cuneiform and ancient Assyrian culture. A little convenient, perhaps, but speaking as a geek myself, it’s nice to think we can find connections with others.

The settings are lush and engaging. As Alex Clark writes in The Guardian, “It would be possible for these juxtapositions �� meat pies, pickled whelks and a cameo from Charles Dickens giving way to child abduction and enslavement �� to strike a jarring, and even twee, note. But Shafak is a novelist whose interest in mapping the intricately related world and its history goes beyond literary device; her determination to trace connections is a matter of ambition, not merely aesthetics.��

The Epic of Gilgamesh nestles in all of these stories as a way to understand everything from environmental catastrophe to acts of war and violence to the search for meaning. Shafak also has to wade the murky waters (pun intended?) of ancient culture that in part belongs to all of us vs the ethical realities of removing artifacts from their places of origin and the indigenous communities most connected to it.

And yet lines between ancient and modern communities aren’t stark, even for cultural groups that haven’t faced genocide and ethnic cleansing. People migrate, especially in this story. Ancient history, which appears to be half myth and half hint about scientific realities, belongs to us all. Shafak makes room for that, particularly in Arthur’s story which is the most fleshed out. We see him grow from baby to adult, and we witness the forces, intimate and broad, that have shaped his life. Zeleekah’s story is more contained, but her passions, relationships and personal backstory lead her in interesting directions. I probably connected least to Narin, who was a young girl in a storyline that read almost like magical realism and then veered sharply into visceral (if realistic) trauma. But I held out hope for her because Shafak planted the seeds of her relationship to the other two characters.

Her goal is sweeping and expansive, about tying into these smaller human stories and broader cultural and environmental ones. Story in itself is a goal, as she invokes an old storytelling goddess who may be lost to history, and might also speak of a less violent path for humanity. Admittedly I also have feels because I’m trying to do something similar in my own fantasy manuscript, while drawing on a large scope of Jewish culture and history.

“The magic of this novel lies in [Shafak's] skill at captivating readers with terrific storytelling while reminding us that human arrogance and frailty are too often the engines that drive history,�� writes Martha Ann Toll in the Washington Independent Review of Books. “The same creatures who can create great art and reach the pinnacle of civilization have an equally powerful �� and terrifying �� capacity to destroy it all.��

But maybe--my take on the ending--there's some hope as well.

Rachel added 'Tell Me Everything'

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 23:06:54 -0700

Rachel gave 4 stars to Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5) by Elizabeth Strout
bookshelves: fiction
I may have enjoyed this book more if I’d read the rest of the Amgash series. Looking at it on GoodReads, the two Olive Kitteridge books I have read aren’t even listed here!

These are the stories about Lucy Barton, and Bob Burgess from yet another Strout book. I mean really, it’s the story of all of the characters mentioned and more, who come together on occasion in a gossipy fashion (hence the title of the book?)

Olive Kitteridge, who is perhaps softening in her 90s and trying to figure other people out, engages in various sessions with Lucy Barton where they impart peoples�� stories and discuss their meaning. Many of these stories, about lost love and straining for connection, are far less dramatic and strange than my other BookTube Prize fare. But without more of a previous connection to the non-Olive folk, I found myself straining to care, even if I found Lucy and Bob’s angst to be academically empathetic. :P

��.actually, speaking of bringing my own baggage into literature, it was difficult to read about Olive in a nursing home right after the recent death of my great-aunt, Baruch dayan emet. Other than a sense of boredom, Olive didn’t seem to go through the physical or mental aches and pains I might have expected. I mostly appreciated her relationship with an ailing friend at the home, and how it impacted her in small ways.

Oh, and we’re post-pandemic, which by this point might have as much impact on the characters�� lives as do occasional references to the war in Ukraine. (Which is to say: not much at all.)

Lucy is more or less an observer, in Olive’s nursing home or going on walks with Bob where she grouses about her grown daughters. Bob finally gets the semblance of a plot thrown at Bob himself, as he takes on a murder case and also deals with tragedy in his brother’s family. It’s all tied up kind of nicely, but I can’t deny I felt a little feklempt. I’m especially glad that Matt Beach, the son and brother of a complicated mother and traumatized sister, gets a second chance. And I appreciated Bob’s wife, Margaret, actually growing as a person in small ways.

Though I probably agree with Joanne Kaufman’s assertion in the Wall Street Journal that this is “compassionate if rather gimmicky.�� Linda Hall is more biting in The New Republic: “If Strout was once a master at portraying quiet lives in a big way, letting them unfold and trusting readers to draw their own conclusions, she now relies on easy plays for emotional connection and tidy resolution.��

But her technique still has its defenders. “Strout packs more empathy onto a single page than most writers scatter throughout an entire book,�� writes Helen McAlpin in the Christian Science Monitor. “There is no such thing as an unworthy story.��

Still, to an extent this novel feels less connected to itself than Strout’s collections of interconnected short stories. The obvious plot elements, like around Bob and Matt and the murder charge, were subsumed by all the rest of the oft directionless ruminations. I didn’t feel as connected to any of the characters. I missed Olive Kitteridge of yore.

I love the simple truths of the writing and character work, so what the hell, I’m rating high. :P I put it below the cut on my BookTube Prize ballot. Something is definitely lost in translation. “These devices feel overused and somewhat threadbare here,�� says Alexis Schatkin of the novel in The New York Times Book Review. “Over time they have lost the power to evoke the strong feeling they did in earlier books.��

Rachel added 'Creation Lake'

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 23:00:42 -0700

Rachel gave 3 stars to Creation Lake (Hardcover) by Rachel Kushner
bookshelves: fiction
It’s probably not surprising that this one wasn’t for me. Would take a lot of “literary�� to overcome the “espionage.��

Though technically, maybe this was more literary than espionage. The big ol�� spy plot didn’t feel too tense or action-packed to me. It was mostly one woman’s ruminations. So really, the reason this didn’t work for me is because I didn’t connect to the characters.

The MC is a spy, so already a bit of a cypher. She says her name is Sadie and she comes from Priest Valley in California, a place with zero residents. Once upon a time Sadie was an FBI agent undercover, but her methods on one case were questioned and she got the boot. Now she’s a spy for hire.

In this story, Sadie is spying on and ultimately infiltrating a radical environmentalist French group called Le Moulin, and also hacking the emails of Bruno, their eccentric, Neanderthal-obsessed muse. Frankly, I wish we got more of a story about why a geek was into Neanderthals, but these parts are too meandering (email screeds, after all) and tangential to the rest of the plot.

I think Sadie was an unreliable narrator, and maybe that in itself is intriguing. I kept thinking she had a mighty high opinion of herself, but not every aspect of this infiltration came easy. In fact, as Brandon Taylor complained about in the London Review of Books, the narrative could be downright clunky. I hate the snappy chapters containing snappy vignettes. I dunno, I had a lot of trouble connecting. Taylor says, regarding a series of flashbacks and descriptions that take up about 140 pages between two plot points, �� I wish I could say there is a reason for any of this, but I was left with the impression that Kushner had groped her way backwards through the novel and then decided to leave it this way. I understand that some people think chronology is passé or redolent of tedious realism, but I longed for a justification, no matter how small, for the scrambling of the timeline through the first third of the novel.��

So yeah, this really is about literary fiction for me, and its stupid eccentricities that take away from storytelling, imho. In general, a spy isn’t a good character to attach to, because she’s automatically a cypher and not personally aligned with the group she’s infiltrating. Maybe I would have liked this story more if it were like BIRNAM WOOD by Eleanor Catton, and we could see the radical group from the inside.

What did intrigue me about Sadie’s take is the idea of a person’s “salt.�� Maybe it’s because I’m chronically online and tired of the moral righteousness. So when Sadie comes around and says “People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized,�� I kind of want it to be true, out of my own form of revenge. Their performative passions, Sadie continues, are stripped away, and then “the truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and ‘beliefs,�� is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt.��

To me, “salt�� means our lives can’t fully be defined by identity politics or any group associations; it’s an understanding of universal truths that we’re all (or at least mostly) guided by the need for stability and connection and yadda yadda. Kushner and Sadie go into a more cynical direction about the lawlessness of nature. A sentiment that feels like it could lead to extremist takes on both the pro and anti-environmentalist sides. Sadie doesn’t care about anyone’s convictions. I think she cares about being a cypher instead. And the other characters didn’t even pop that much.

Sadie, at least, is personally freaked by the finale. Kushner remains adamantly distant. “Kushner has spoken about not wanting to judge her characters or their ideas,�� Brian Dillon writes in 4Columns. “Admirable, essential position for a novelist—except that when the stakes are caricatured to a choice between fanciful primitivism, cynical individualism, and faceless capital, then the writer’s irresolution may seem less heroic. (Is it still a novel of ideas if the ideas are mostly bad ones?)��

Pendulum is swinging too much towards lofty ideas, sure. We need more parsing of the individual salt.

Rachel added 'The Heart in Winter'

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 22:57:11 -0700

Rachel gave 3 stars to The Heart in Winter (Hardcover) by Kevin Barry
bookshelves: fiction
Sometimes reading a book is a lesson in learning what types of literature you ��ǲ�’t like. Hoo boy.

On it’s surface, this is the story of opium-addicted boy meets depressed married girl in the 1880s of rural Montana, boy and girl run away and are pursued by nefarious agents hired by the spurned husband.

As far as I can tell, only one of two writing techniques would advance this story beyond stereotypical mediocrity and into the world of literary fiction. You either have to focus on developing nuanced characters or you have to focus on unique, descriptive language. Barry took the latter option.

He is well-known and lauded for his style in literary circles. Spencer Peacock, in an Open Letters Review that’s even a little tepid on this novel, takes the time to praise the “extremely distinctive, colloquially eloquent writing style, very different from the bland, MFA-mass-produced prose so common in modern novels.�� I’m probably too basic a reader for this reviewer. :P

But even Peacock finds the pacing to be “precipitate�� (jolty and uneven, I’ll go with,) and the characterization is a bit hazy. One thing that differentiates Barry’s historical novel from frontier fiction written at the time, arguably, is the profanity. And the characters are a bit hazy. To me, the stream of secondary characters the couple find along the road to San Francisco (their utopia) felt like the X-rated version of Mel Brooks�� Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Like the drunkard preacher who is mourning the friend he himself killed because he wasn’t morally pure.

It’s strange to judge this for the BookTube Prize, because my take is Barry succeeded where he wanted to. It doesn’t speak to me, but what is universally loved? I do think the ending is deliberately opaque, favoring the knife twist as a finale, but if you ��ǲ�’t care about the characters, does it matter?

“Uses flowery language, big words and writes shit that goes on and on. Shit that could be said in three words,�� Sophie G complains in a one-star GoodReads review. But should Barry favor utility if his goal is, as Yvonne C. Garrett raves in Brooklyn Rail, “a wild ride of a story and sentences that force the English language into strange and musical shapes?��

It’s not what I come to literature for, and also I’m in general not a fan of westerns. So I’m doubly cursed. Oh, and did I forget to talk about the lack of quotation marks??? UGH.

Somewhere past the halfway mark the Cornishmen, aka the nefarious agents, catch up to the young lovers. I found myself engrossed here, but mostly due to the exterior stakes. This experience has made me a little uncomfortable with how often I seem to ignore the power of detailed language. There’s obviously beauty and power in, for example, describing the harsh Montana winters when it was frontier land. But I still do believe I get the most out of exploring interior story and nuanced characters.

Ultimately, I do think the pacing issues gave even many positive reviewers some pause. So hopefully I have broader justification than my own subjective opinions for docking some points in the novel’s BookTube Prize ranking. :P Shew.

Rachel added 'The Hunter'

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 22:53:42 -0700

Rachel gave 4 stars to The Hunter (Cal Hooper #2) by Tana French
bookshelves: fiction
A “literary�� mystery thriller from a well-established author that I enjoyed more than I thought I would. This is a sequel, too!

Cal Hooper, a retired American cop, now lives in a fictional small town in Ireland, working as a carpenter. His apprentice is the teenaged Teresa “Trey�� Reddy, from an impoverished and somewhat reviled family. Carpentry with Cal, of course, is a way to get her out of that mess.

But then comes the inciting incident, by way of Trey’s nudnik father, Johnny, returning home. Johnny’s return to the homestead never portends anything good, and he immediately brings up a scheme with his neighbors as a quick way to get some money. He claims he’s run into this Englishman, Rushborough, whose grandmother was from these parts. Rushborough has heard there’s gold on their land, and he’s willing to pay to look. To these farmers, beset by drought, the deal seems decent.

Of course there’s more going on underneath the surface, and some of that comes from Trey directly. She’s long been looking to take some sort of revenge on the men of the town who, in the last book, killed her brother, Brendan. (The rest of the Reddy family believes Brendan ran off, but Cal helped Trey uncover the truth, though she doesn’t know the exact killer, or the location of the body in the bogs.) Trey takes the narrative on twists and turns, even and especially after another body is found on the mountain.

Maybe I agree with my good friend, Kirkus: “the plot is a bit of a stretch but the characters and their relationships work well.�� For me, the characters are really fun to follow. Johnny is a charmer. Trey is a diffident-to-testy schemer. Other folks take on small-town stereotypes, with Cal’s lady friend, Lena, being level-headed and maternal. Cal himself, like all “detective�� tropes, is likely my least fave. Technically, he’s much more human than the archetypal hard-drinking, just north of sociopathic variety. Still, he’s hard, with inclinations towards violence and a “code�� that allows for it. At least his relationship with Trey is shockingly unsquicky. This is the second BookTube Prize novel I’ve read this season where a friendship between an older man and a teenage girl comes off this way.

The pace was slow enough that I could predict this novel’s murderer (well, I had it down to two suspects. :P) What I like about this choice is how it gives a burst of life to someone who otherwise came off as a doormat. When it comes to tying up the drama from the last novel (I think), where it’s a question of whether Trey can privately get over Brendan’s death and live her best life…well, probably. Though it does feel darkly unsatisfying, especially in a thriller mystery series, to not witness justice served.

I’ll also give props to French for her sense of place. As Jane Murphy writes in Booklist, “The atmosphere is rich as the reader is reminded that this is the 'real' Ireland and not the one idealized by the 'plastic Paddies.'�� Though hopefully these folks can see a little more peace and a little less crime in their lives! What a beautiful, if spooky, fictional place to live. :P

Not sure if French will be returning to Cal Hooper; again, this isn’t my genre. :P It feels like the closure to a duology (granted, I haven’t read book one.) Maybe Cal will finally get to live his dream of being a carpenter in peace. But we probably won’t hear from him again if so.