👍Bunny by Mona Awad – READ 

There have been times in my life when I considered applying for an MFA program; I grew up in Iowa, so that would have been my choice. The expense, the tough application process, and the need to earn a living were all partly responsible for my decision not to do it.  But the real reason I didn’t go through with it was the horror stories I heard from graduates of the programs. These aren’t your average critique groups; having your prose “workshopped” in an MFA program is apparently brutal.

The horror of the MFA workshop is the subject of Bunny, Mona Awad’s second novel, which depicts the brutality of the workshop itself and the class divides that poison the experience for the less-than-1%ers who get accepted at the most elite programs in the country. Awad got her MFA at Brown, and although her fictional program is set at the fictional Warren University, it’s clear that she’s herein exorcising pain from her own experience. The novel’s horror is at first unsettling and confusing (many consumer reviewers on Amazon were so horrified or confused they couldn’t finish the book) until you realize that it’s all a metaphor for the workshop itself. Very little really happens here in real life; some of the main characters aren’t even real. The horror on the page is a metaphor for the experience of having your work torn apart, for the literary extremes required by “break-out” fiction, and for “killing your darlings” as creative writing professors demand. Relax. No bunnies are slaughtered or men are actually murdered (their heads blowing up) during this year of Samantha’s MFA stint, although some prose and egos definitely are.

The novel opens as Samantha returns to the second year of the program, expecting the worst. A poorly defined and uncomfortable relationship with her faculty advisor causes part of her anxiety. But the real challenge to her equilibrium comes from the four rich girls who comprise the other four-fifths of their workshop, and whose appearance and behavior wreak of wealth and privilege. Sam managed to get into the program only by dint of scholarships and grants, and her insecurities about her socio-economic standing make her the perfect target for the horror that comes at the hands of her workshop-mates. The four rich girls call each other “Bunny” (“I love you, Bunny. I love you, too, Bunny.”) and Samantha is stalked by animal-bunnies that talk to her and pop up from behind bushes around campus. Sam despises the rich-girl “bunnies,” but once she’s invited to join their “smut party,” she’s hooked on the excitement of being accepted into their cult. She sets aside her crude Goth friend, Ava, in favor of the “bunnies,” and things get weirder and uglier and bloodier as she’s initiated into their rites. In the end, she comes back to earth, the novel comes back to earth, and the reader realizes who’s real and who’s not in this strange, dark world.

Professional reviewers and other novelists have waxed ecstatically about Bunny, but sales numbers, the heavily discounted price on Amazon, and wildly mixed consumer reviews indicate it but isn’t for everyone. Caveat emptor: I believe only those who have gone to or aspired to go to an MFA program (i.e., reviewers) will appreciate it. 

👍The Death and Life of Aida Hermandez by Aaron Bobrow-Strain – DEVOURED 

Aida, her mother, and her sisters face joblessness, economic insecurity, and abuse by men on both sides of the border. Trapped into accepting a dangerous job in Agua Prieta by single motherhood and poverty, Aida is stabbed repeatedly in a late-night attack by a stranger, leading to her brief “death” and her last trip across the border into the U.S. for emergency medical attention.

Over the twenty-five first years of her life, the period covered in this narrative, Aida makes mistakes—many mistakes, some minor, some major—all piling up to form a mountain of physical, emotional, and legal challenges that threaten her quest for legal residency and portend a life-long battle with chronic PTSD.  The book is in part a narrative about Aida, her family, and her friends—people stuck on one side or the other of the border by virtue of their place of birth. It’s in part a narrative about the exponential growth in this nation’s border-control industry and the counter-intuitive decisions that have exasperated rather than resolved the issue of immigration over our southern border.

In a back-of-the-book essay, “About This Book,” the author, a professor of politics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, which he credits with providing support for the research and completion of his book, makes the point of his book explicit: border policy isn’t “broken,” as is so-often stated. Instead, it is working well for many: politicians, private corrections firms that run detention centers like prisons, smugglers, law-enforcement job-seekers, and government contractors—even Western Union—all of whom profit from a system that stigmatizes, punishes, and destroys people based on their birthplace, their geographic and career ambitions, their big and little (but human) errors.

This is a big book—a book that pulls more weight than its relatively modest 340 pages of narrative (not counting back-of-the book material) might suggest. First, Aida’s story is complicated—the kind of story that would lead many authors or journalists to abandon the project and look for a simpler, more completely sympathetic protagonist. Many of Aida’s troubles are self-inflicted, but others are the result of circumstances out of her control. Once they begin to add up, it’s hard to tell one kind from the other.

The book is chock-full of detail and history about our complicated, expensive, ever-expanding, and often counterintuitive and irrational border-control agencies, laws, and systems. It records the decline of Douglas, a once-vibrant, multi-cultural border town where Mexican men and women made decent wages and felt safe raising their families. The town’s major industry today is border “security” and most of its residents are transient law-enforcement employees with no connection to the community. Finally, it’s a story about battered women and families—a subject which the author didn’t know he would have to address in such detail until Aida’s story made it clear how integral abuse is to much of what happens to women at the border.

The subject matter is so big, in fact, that at times I found myself checking how much of the book I’d read, compared with how much I had left to read, as if I were back in school and the book was a class assignment, wondering how much more I could stuff into my head without losing the string of the narrative.

That is not criticism. The author’s ambition is admirable, and his book illustrates how much the media over-simplifies and dumbs-down both the stories of migrants’ journeys and our border policy in covering the “crisis at the border.” Even multi-page articles in the New York Times—for example, a recent one that followed a migrant family from the border through several states—can’t do these stories justice. Don’t get me wrong: I also understand how the limits of media resources and the average readers’ patience make the kind of examination this book undertakes impossible.

So, bravo for Bobrow-Strain for taking up the slack, and for his publishers for accepting this hefty manuscript for publication. I heartily recommend his book for anyone who wants more than a superficial understanding of what has really happened at our border, and how we have ended up with a bloated anti-immigration industry that, by 2012, was costing us more than “the FBI, the DEA, Secret Service, ATF, and the U.S. Marshals Service combined, with enough left over to run all of the country’s national parks for a year.” One can only imagine how much more it is costing today in both budget and ruined lives. 

😒White Elephant by Julie Langsdorf – READ 

The two teenagers and two young children who fill out the nuclear families are narcissistic and irrepressible as any children, but here, annoyingly so. The more sympathetic of the teenagers, we’re told at the beginning, is troubled by global warming, immigration, and other worthy preoccupations, but she spends the entire novel trying to be as “cool” as the rich neighbor girl and primping to secure the attention of the “cute” teenage boy (also annoying) who constantly tosses his hair. In the end, a serendipitous house fire miraculously brings the town back together, rids it of the big-house scourge, and redeems the snotty bad girl who should never have escaped redemption.

The novel could possibly have been rescued by a more controlled point of view, or even a single relatable narrator. The author’s head-hopping from paragraph to paragraph, person to person leaves the impression that no one in this suburb ever thinks about anything other than an immediate carnal need (hungry? horny? jealous? uncaffienated? humiliated? angry?) for than a nanosecond. Further, the woman whose third-person voice introduces the narrative is one of the least interesting and shallowest of a cast of such weak characters. Far better to start with a clear sketch of a strong lead protagonist, giving readers a chance to ground their compassion in a person that may lead them to some reward in a transformation, or at least a tiny understanding of a human condition.

A mid-life, suburban, materialistic variant of snarky chick lit, this novel doesn’t deliver on its promise of hilarity or anti-materialism. Well before halfway through it, I realized, “I really don’t like this at all.” I wondered why I was finishing it and concluded: “Because I need to write a review to keep others from wasting their money on this galling waste of paper.” 

😒The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner – READ/SKIMMED 

By which, I mean, this thing is depressing.

Now, many books can be depressing and still deliver a message or say something important about justice, injustice, humanity, inhumanity, love, hate, etc. from a point of view that we haven’t experienced in our own lives. Books should open us up to real, darker worlds and other people’s sorrows, challenges and failures. They can build empathy and encourage remediation.

The Mars Room certainly brings the reader into a world that most people who can read and can afford to buy a book probably have not been in, at least for long. Snarky, slum-dwelling Romy is on her way to a women’s prison in California for two life sentences-plus. She killed a stalker, who probably deserved some severe punishment—probably just short of a death sentence—because she couldn’t get rid of him otherwise and in some vague sense, feared for the safety of her son. With inadequate counsel in an overworked and corrupt justice system, her inevitable path to prison only reflects all of the other inevitabilities in her life: disappointing relationships with men and women, drug addiction that provides transient relief, a life of petty crime that her single mother trained her for, and a precocious child she can’t adequately support. Quite interesting from my standpoint as a writer who tries to create at least semi-sympathetic—or at least relatable—characters, Kushner doesn’t even try to make us like Romy. It’s as if Romy doesn’t care what people think of her, and neither does Kushner. Understandable, perhaps, but empty.

You get that in the first half of the book. You also get a smattering of other characters, most similarly desperate and none more likeable, all in a similar trap of their own bad behavior conflated with uneven portions with that same corrupt justice system. They have suffered abuse and like to abuse. Most have (or had) drug problems. Their experiences with sex (most of them not consensual and a significant portion of them largely one-handed and drawn out) are uniformly unpleasant. In the end, a reader is left with a number of incomplete story lines, tales of truncated relationships, a bereft feeling of nothing having happened that really matters to anyone but the deplorable characters involved, and a sense that Kushner never really had a resolution to any of this in mind when she started the book. It was as if she didn’t care enough about her main characters to create a narrative arc for them.

The book received hundreds of accolades in the media and powerful book-review publications, uneven reviews on public review sites, a few impressive awards, and general critical praise from the literary community. Nearly everyone praises her writing for good reason; she is a master wordsmith and world-builder in the vein of Denis Johnson. But writing a book that has value, particularly in this edge-of-a-precipice time, also demands telling a story that provides us with some meaning, some context and some understanding of how we might all get out of this. This book doesn’t even prove that she can tell a story. 

👍Between You and Me by Mary Norris – DEVOURED 

Between You and Me is part memoir, part confessional, and part grammar lesson, sweetened up by Norris’ pencil-sharp wit and self-deprecation. A long-time copyeditor at The New Yorker, she makes a bit of fun of her employer’s refusal to change its rules with the times, introduces us to the characters she works with and has worked with, explores the idiosyncrasies of some very famous writers who have contributed to the magazine, and throws in a bitsy grammar lesson every now and then. But with the sugar that helps the medicine go down, I promise even those lessons are entertaining.

Norris’ digestible—even enjoyable—grammar lessons are neither pedantic nor preachy. I have tried over the years to explain the difference between “that” and “which” to probably hundreds of students. From now on, I’ll just suggest they read her chapter on the subject, “That Witch!” It explains the rules much better than I ever could have. Likewise, her chapters on commas, (“Comma, Comma, Comma, Comma Chameleon”) hypens, dashes, and apostrophes. For fun, I’ll suggest they read her hilarious (and I don’t use that word lightly) chapter on how The New Yorker’s policy on profanity has changed over time, in which she proves that, while she may be a nerd, she’s certainly no prude.

With a wide curiosity and the intellectual power to make her discoveries relevant and interesting, Norris has only recently started writing for the general public. Between You and Me is her first published book. Her second, published in 2019, is about everything Greek (Greek to Me: Adventures of a Comma Queen), and I intend to read it soon. It’s too bad she didn’t start writing sooner (my guess she’s in her mid-60s), as she’s a gift that I would like to keep giving for a very long time. 

👍& 😒Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman – READ 

But very quickly, the story took a turn toward the mundane: a lonely, interesting, socially challenged woman’s problems are fixed when she becomes “normal.”

In the beginning, Eleanor Oliphant behaves like she has Asperger’s, exhibiting an inability to understand people around her, what they say, or the things that interest them, and as such, she is the butt of office jokes and not invited to parties. Apparently good at her accounting job (and focused!), she is appreciated by her bosses, but due to her poor social skills, she’s not rewarded for it. Traumatized by a childhood tragedy that is unveiled little by little throughout the novel, Eleanor thinks her life is “completely fine,” although we can tell that it is not: she’s totally alone, binge drinks, and spends her weekends watching the BBC and waiting for Monday to come around again. Worse, she’s still trying to please “mummy.”

A sudden and naïve crush on a local rock star and the arrival of Raymond, a new IT employee at the firm, set the novel in motion and begin to transform her “completely fine” life. When Raymond and Eleanor stop to help an elderly man who falls on the street, Eleanor is thrust into a swirl of social activities that gradually teach her how to interact with people and get her out of her unhealthy work/TV/vodka routine.

At first, I was happy for Eleanor, thinking that this new understanding and comfort with the rest of society might cheer her up and enrich her life. But quickly, her metamorphosis starts to take on the character of imitating other “normal” women around her than becoming a happier, but still interesting Eleanor. She starts to dress more fashionably—new shoes, pants, coat, purse, dresses. She starts to wear make-up. She gets a new, flattering hairdo. She stops binge drinking. She learns to say appropriate things in public settings and to withhold her once prescient if unappreciated opinions. She makes friend after friend. She gets promoted at work.

Eleanor has a few set-backs, and, in the climactic last chapters, has a near-fatal bout of overdrinking. But Raymond and a therapist eventually bring her back on the path to normal. (The therapists’ visits are both tedious and predictable, lacking in charm or wit, and are perhaps the weakest scenes in the novel.) In the end, we get the story’s big reveal; whether you’ve read The Woman in the Window or not, you will have already guessed what it is.

As disappointing as Eleanor’s transformation was to me, Honeyman’s prose is wonderful. I was pulled along by her talent more than the narrative arc. In the end, I wished she’d given us the old Eleanor back—perhaps a little happier, perhaps with a friend, but with her quirky personality and wit intact. 

👍Circe by Madeline Miller – DEVOURED 

What has drawn me in is the page-turning quality of Miller’s writing. Yes, she knows the classics (her BA and MA are in classics), but she also knows hatred, love, fear, loneliness, passion, hunger, and the strength it takes to marshal the forces to manage them all, whether goddess or mortal. The truths that come to Circe as she learns what it means to be mortal—and eventually chooses it—put every self-help book on every library and bookstore shelf to shame. These lessons don’t come as quotable aphorisms that might caption a poster of a soaring eagle or erupting volcano, but as slow revelations about how humans connect with each other, for good and for evil, for now and for eternity, because of their mortality.

Many of the ancient stories retold in this novel are familiar to us, if only vaguely, but the author infuses them with living humans/gods that we can understand and relate to in a way that I never could with Homer’s hero/villain Odysseus, for one. By stepping away from the epic battles and monsters that dominate the ancient mythology, and entering the mind and body and garden of Circe, Miller has made the stories relevant to those of us whose battles aren’t fought with magic and swords, but with daily compromises and small emotional losses and victories. Further, the natural rhythm of the author’s voice (what? complete sentences?) make this novel more accessible than many that purport to describe the real world we live in. A reader can settle into this story from the first page as the quotidian detail of Circe tending her gardens, mixing her potions, and walking around her island with her lion and wolves are rendered without literary artifice.

I highly recommend Circe, regardless of your interest in mythology. If you’re interested in what makes humans tick, this book is for you.

👍Little Faith by Nickolas Butler – DEVOURED 

Reading that wise lesson, written with all the humility and good sense we hope our husbands possess after “decades of marriage,” reminded me how powerful it is when a great writer creates a character so human, flawed and loving that it gives us a new perspective on very old realities—in this case a decades-long marriage and the heartbreaking work of being a grandparent.

Butler’s story is about Lyle, a grandfather who tries to protect his precious, precocious grandson, Isaac, from a holy-roller preacher whom his mother has fallen in love with, at the same time that he is struggling with his own loss of faith. A classic clash between a high-dollar evangelical religious cult run by a charismatic and narcissistic pastor, and the quiet, pragmatic religion of rural America forms the central tension of the novel. Lyle’s life-long friends—a pastor, a similarly retired co-worker, and a couple who owns an apple orchard that soaks up some of Lyle’s post-retirement excess time—provide sounding boards for Lyle’s concerns about Isaac’s health, the bizarre behavior of his hyper-religious daughter, and the scary power of the handsome, well-spoken preacher who has won over a congregation by the power of his personality. Lyle’s interactions with his friends are quotidian, yet infused with empathy, reason, and sincerity; devoid of cynicism, rancor and pretension. Yet despite its calm delivery, both Lyle’s pain and his benevolence will haunt you long after you’ve finished its tear-inducing last pages.

The impetus for his novel, Butler tells us in an author’s note at the end, was the death of an 11-year-old girl in Wisconsin (the author’s home state) from complications of undiagnosed juvenile diabetes that went untreated as her family prayed for her recovery instead of seeking modern medical care. Like hers, Isaac’s story will break your heart at the same time that the love that radiates from this beautiful novel will help it mend.

👍Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens– DEVOURED 

Yet, I waited many weeks to read it because so many synopses I had read didn’t captivate me, which just proves that some books thrive in spite of their marketing, rather than because of it. The short descriptions stressed the “strangeness” of the “Marsh Girl,” as Kya is known to the townsfolk in nearby, tiny, backwater Barkley Cove, and the conservative community’s view of this remarkable woman, even though the book is written from the perspective of Kya’s beautiful world, looking inward and out, not the town, looking in. Also, many critics glossed over the beauty of this story or its writing, some even comparing this book with Barbara Kingsolver’s novels, which frankly is an insult to Delia Owens. Both her action and scene-setting passages have much more momentum than Kingsolver’s often laborious, tedious and pretentious writing.

Kya grows up alone in the marsh of the Carolina coast, abandoned by her dysfunctional family, and teaches herself how to survive. Tate, a sensitive, less-isolated young man, is drawn to her and befriends her in spite of the town’s disapproval. They share a love of nature and the way it accommodates the joys of solitude, learning and reflection. He teaches her to read, and from there, she blossoms, but after Tate leaves her for an academic career, she is charged with and tried for the murder of the town bully.

This is Ms. Owens’ debut as a novelist, which is surprising, given how beautifully she has mastered the elements of character, plot, tension, setting and arc of the form. How does anyone write such a beautiful masterpiece right out of the box? Her previous books—"three internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa,” as the book jacket relates—obviously indicate how she mastered nature writing, however.

In spite of the joy with which I consumed this book, I had three little reservations. First, the amount of head-hopping—switches in viewpoint from one person to another—within scenes indicated perhaps too little attention form her editor. Second, I am not a fan of courtroom drama, and the one here just seems to prolong the denouement without adding anything to our knowledge of what happened. Third, the very last few sentences of the book seemed unnecessary. We really don’t need—or maybe even want—to know who really killed the town bully to enjoy this novel.

All that said, the two days I spent in a lodge in the Black Hills, waiting for the rain to stop, reading this novel were among the most pleasant I can remember for a long time. This book was engrossing in the way nothing has been for me since A Gentleman in Moscow, the last novel I can say I found impossible to put down until I had blown through its last pages.

👍Commander in Cheat by Rick Reilly – DEVOURED 

But I say “very few” instead of “none” because Commander in Cheat may be one book that could change a Trump supporter’s mind about Trump—if they can get past the title and the unflattering (but frequently published) photo of him on the front. Because golf is largely a rich (yes, some poor people play golf, including me) man’s (yes, 6 million women play golf, including me) sport, country clubs around the world are largely Republican bastions (except for mine, again). But Republican or not, if a person plays golf, and if she loves it, she can’t help but hate what Donald Trump has done to the sport.

I would never have guessed this book would be written by Rick Reilly, a veteran golf reporter whose own novels about golf are so sexist they compelled me to write my own two golf novels with strong female (not the bar-cart girl) protagonists. But he won me over with this book, which reads more like a cri-de-coeur of a man trying to save golf for the world than one obsessed with politics. “We were just getting past the stereotype of golf being a game for fat, blowhard, rich white guys playing on fenced-off courses while people of color push lawnmowers behind them—and along comes Trump,” he writes in his sum-it-all up final chapter titled “The Stain.”

Commander in Cheat covers a lot of territory, from the way Trump cheats on the course to the way he cheats in business; from the way he bullies caddies and playing partners to the way he bullies countries and governments; from the way he lies about his golf courses to the way he lies about his affairs with porn stars; from the way he ignores the rules and etiquettes most golfers hold sacred to the way he ignored Puerto Rico’s hurricane devastation. I’m certain that the book won’t change the minds of his staunchest political supporters—who include his “inside caddy”—his social media manager—and his “outside caddy”—the guy who carries his golf clubs to and from his cart (Donald never walks). But it might reach across the aisle to some of those who hate cheating in golf enough to start to question the man who’s made cheating great again.  

👍A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles – DEVOURED 

👍Brass by Xhenet Aliu – DEVOURED 

👍Mama's Last Hug by Frans de Waal – DEVOURED 

     I read Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist when it was published in 2013. I found its central argument compelling: that morality and moral behavior don’t rise from religion, but are inherent in humans and in many of our vertebrate relatives. And in reading it, I discovered a primatologist who can make his science accessible to non-scientists and wears his heart on his sleeve while doing so. His is not dry, unaffected prose!

     Mama’s Last Hug is even more evocative and convincing as it argues for better treatment of all animals (even if we continue to eat them) on the basis of our shared emotions, sentience, and mental states. He describes in detail and in storytelling fashion (both) how research has shown that animals—in particular our closest relatives, the great apes—share our experiences of humor, empathy, sympathy, disgust, shame, and guilt; our reasons for and tendencies for murder and war; and our sense of fairness and illusion of free will. In chapters that explore each of these shared emotions, he is careful to not step over the line and propose we know what animals are “feeling,” while making a convincing argument that we can tell they have emotions because they react to them in the very physiological and behavioral ways humans do. He’s clearly frustrated and impatient with those psychologists and ethologists who continue to opine that animals only react to stimuli from instinct and don’t experience true emotion. Anyone who has ever had a pet—whether parrot, rat, dog, cat, chimpanzee, or duck—knows better, but often without proffering any evidence, many animal researchers refuse to acknowledge the obvious and provable.

     In a world where we are assaulted daily by declarations of American exceptionalism—proven or not—de Waal’s exploration of the fallacy of “human exceptionalism” is fascinating and enlightening and perhaps allegorical. While some readers may reject the notion of a book of science that lends some insight into our poisoned politics, I found his willingness to extend some of his analysis of emotion into the political realm a relief. The more we understand where hate, jealousy and tribalism come from, the better we can fix things. 

👍Educated by Tara Westover – DEVOURED 

👍Maid by Stephanie Land – READ