Mini-Reviews: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; Go Gentle; Wild, Dark Shore; Broken Country; Between Two Kingdoms

 All caught up now and ready for the new year! 

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by Jessica Guerrieri

282 pages

Published May 2025 by Harper Muse

Publisher's Summary: 

Leah O'Connor is torn between her current existence and the allure of a phantom life that can no longer be hers.

Swept off her feet by the gentle charm of Lucas O'Connor, Leah's unexpected pregnancy changes the course of her carefree and nomadic existence. Over a decade and three children later, Leah is unraveling. She resents the world in which her artistic aspirations have been sidelined by the overwhelming demands of motherhood, and the ever-present rift between herself and her mother-in-law, Christine, is best dulled by increasingly fuller glasses of wine.

Christine represents a model of selfless motherhood that Leah can neither achieve nor accept. To heighten the strain, Lucas's business venture, a trendy restaurant that honors his mother, has taken all his attention, which places the domestic demands squarely on Leah's shoulders. Seeking an ally in her sweet sister-in-law Amy, Leah shares a secret that, if made known to the wider family, could disrupt the curated ecosystems that keep the O'Connors connected.

As Leah dances with the devil while descending further into darkness, her behavior becomes more erratic and further alienates her from both Lucas and the wider family. Leah's drinking threatens the welfare of her family, prompting Amy to turn to Christine for support. A duel for loyalty ensues. When the inevitable waves come crashing down, it's the O'Connor women who give Leah a lifeline: the truth of what they've all endured. But Leah alone must uncover the villain of her own story, learn how to ask for help, and decide if the family she has rejected will be her salvation or ultimate undoing.

My Thoughts: 

Despite the fact that this one was only 282 pages, I still felt like it could have been edited down and I did feel like there were options for the O'Connors that would have allowed Leah to continue with her artwork while also allowing Lucas to pursue his dream of recreating his parents' former restaurant that would have avoided the conflict that fueled much of Leah's active addiction.

Still, this one felt like a good depiction of addiction, told from a couple of viewpoints and a good examination of what happens when a woman has children she wasn't planning on having. In this case, Leah very much loves her children, but she never stops feeling like she lost a part of herself when she had them. The publisher's summary seems to insinuate that Leah is the villain of her own story; that's untrue. The only villain here is addiction. 

Go Gentle by Maria Semple

384 pages

Published April 2026 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcée, she lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side. Having discovered that the secret to happiness is to desire only what you have, she’s applied this insight to blissful effect: relishing her teenage daughter, the freedom of being solo, and her job as a moral tutor for the twin boys of an old-money family. She’s even assembled a "coven"—like-minded women who live on the same floor in the legendary Ansonia—and is making active efforts to grow its membership. Adora’s carefully curated life is humming along brilliantly until a chance meeting with a handsome stranger.

Soon, her ordered world is upended by black-market art deals, secret rendezvous, and international intrigue . . . and her past—which she has worked so hard to bury—lands like a bomb in her present. Inflamed by unquenchable desire, Adora finds herself a woman wanting more: and she’ll risk everything to get it.

My Thoughts: 

I first encountered Semple's writing in 2010 and might never have picked up another of her books. But then came Where'd You Go Bernadette and the promise that I'd seen in that first book came to fruition in Bernadette. Going into this book, I wondered which version of Semple I'd get and was pleasantly surprised to find that, once again, I felt like Semple more than lived up to my expectations. 

There are some jarring jumps, which some readers may struggle with. There are also a number of things that will be tough for some readers. But once again, Semple's written satire that works on many levels and this is an intelligent read. Adora is a great character and it's nice to read a book about a middle-aged woman that allows her to be a full-fledged person. It's not a book for everyone but it is a book that I'll be recommending to a lot of my reader friends. Jump on board for the ride! 

Wild, Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

320 pages

Published March 2025 by Flatiron Press

A Reese's Book Club pick 

Publisher's Summary: 

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again. 

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

My Thoughts: 

One of my favorite books of 2025, which those of you who have been around a while will find surprising when I tell you there's an element of science fiction to this one. Climate change is having a devastating impact on the planet with drought resulting in fires and dying crops and rising sea levels devouring islands and the borders of continents. 

The Salts have to get off the island soon, before it's entirely devoured. Their job is to finish collecting seeds from the seed bank to bring back to the continent before the seed bank is flooded. But members of the family are all dealing with grief following the loss of their wife/mother and they're also harboring a secret they hope will never be discovered. When Rowan is found washed up after a boat wreck, she's also harboring a secret. Despite that, the family and Rowan begin to form an alliance that might just be what it takes to get them all off of the island before it's too late...as long as those secrets stay hidden. This would make an excellent book club selection. 

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall 

320 pages 

Published March 2025 by Simon and Schuster

A Reese's Book Club pick

Publisher's Summary: 

“The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

My Thoughts: 

Another of my favorite books of 2025, one I recommend to everyone. Hall's writing is marvelous and if I could have, I might have read this on in one sitting. 

There's a mystery to that death of the farmer, one that is slowly revealed as Hall moves readers from the past (Beth's and Gabriel's youthful love story) to Beth's and Frank's life together to glimpses into the trial of the accused murder of the farmer. These are well-written characters placed in a story line that allows each character room to explore why they are who they are. This one has everything I love in a novel - terrific writing and characters, a lovely setting both physically and in time, an emotional impact that stayed with me long after I'd finished the book. 

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

Read by Suleika Jaouad

13 hours, 2 minutes

Published February 2021 by Random House Publishing Group 

Publisher's Summary: 

In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch-first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward-after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant-she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it's where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal-to survive. And now that she'd done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked-with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt-on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who'd spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. 

My Thoughts: 

I was familiar with Jaouad as the wife of musical virtuoso Jon Batiste, and familiar with her recent battle with leukemia through Batiste's movie American Symphony. But I knew nothing about how her battle had begun, how she had beaten leukemia previously, or how she and Batiste had come together. 

Jaouad writes in detail about how her symptoms first appeared, how she battled to keep moving forward with her personal life before she was finally diagnosed, the man she nearly married who stayed with her through much of her battle until it just became too much for him, and the treatments she endured as she fought the cancer. It brings home that fact that battling cancer requires a team far beyond the professionals in the medical buildings and how hard it is for patients to deal with that. It makes it clear how important finding a community that understands is, and how much someone has to want to live to be willing to go through what it takes to come out on the other end. Even though my family members have battled (and some lost that battle to) cancer, I learned so much from this book about what it takes out of a person and their loved ones and about cancers themselves. Jaouad was fortunate to be a skilled enough writer to find work that allowed her to work as much as she could and even to travel the country in search of other stories as she felt able. We are fortunate to have all of those stories. 

The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing by Lara Love Hardin

The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing by Lara Love Hardin 

320 pages

Published August 2023 by Simon and Schuster

Publisher's Summary: 

No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards.

Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies. Furniture is made from tampon boxes and Snickers bars are currency. But Lara quickly finds the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder to become the “shot caller,” showing that jailhouse politics aren’t that different from the PTA meetings she used to attend.

When she’s released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. Now, she’s legally co-opting other people’s identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her. Shame is a poison worse than heroin—there is no way to detox. Lara must learn how to forgive herself and others, navigate life as a felon on probation, prove to herself that she is more good than bad, and much more.

The Many Lives of Mama Love is a heartbreaking and tender journey from shame to redemption, despite a system that makes it almost impossible for us to move beyond the worst thing we have ever done.

My Thoughts: 

I can't remember where I first heard about this book or what it was that appealed to me about it. I do know that by the time it became available at the library, I had already forgotten and was expecting something completely different when I picked it up. As has become my habit, I didn't look at the summary on the book and just launched into it. 

What Didn't Work For Me: 

• I finished this book a few weeks ago and what I might not have liked about this one has faded from my mind. Perhaps the only thing is that, toward the end, there is a fairly long bit about an encounter Hardin had (which I'm not going to get into because the encounter itself is really amazing) that I thought went on a bit longer than needed. 

What I Liked: 

• It's probable that I wanted to read this book because it's about an addict in recovery. Given how closely addiction has impacted my family, it's a subject I'm always interested in reading about and a subject I really wish people would read more widely about. 
• Love Hardin is an educated, white, suburban woman - not the stereotype of a drug addict and I'm grateful that she is shedding light on the fact that addiction can happen to anyone, anywhere. She makes no excuses for the things she did while she was in active addiction and doesn't cast blame on anyone else for her addiction. She does explain the things that lead her to use in the first place, how she came to be of a mindset that allowed her to justify it, and how others played a part in her drug use but she always makes it clear that her drug use was a result of an addiction which was greater than her ability to break out of it. 
• If you read or watched Orange Is The New Black, you saw that people in jails/prisons aren't universally bad people. Love Hardin introduces us to the people she met in jail, showing them to be women who are largely there due to the circumstances of life. Most of the women she knew in jail were resourceful, supportive, and caught up in a system that doesn't work. Many of them were addicts coming in and our prison system doesn't stop that; many others become addicts while they are incarcerated. 
• This might be the best look at how difficult it is to get your life back in order after your release from jail/prison that I've read. You're required to have a job but you have so many court required appointments that it's almost impossible to hold onto one...assuming you can get one with a prison records. You're required to have a home address to get a job but you can't find a home without any money which you can't get because you don't have a job. You have to distance yourself from the people who could drag you back down but those people are often the only people you can turn to when you need help. 
• Love Hardin was certainly aided in her ability to turn her life around by her educational background and finding good people who were willing to help. She knows she was blessed to find those people and to have reached the level of success she has now reached in her life. Now she is giving back, trying to help others. 

Would I Recommend This Book: 

• Absolutely. For anyone who wants to expand their knowledge of addiction or our penal system or for those who love a good survival story. It's well written, very personal, and very honest. 
• Book clubs will find a lot to discuss in this book. One thing I'd hope they would look at is the way they might react to finding out someone like Love Hardin lives in their neighborhood. 

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald

256 pages

Published July 2022 by Bloomsbury USA

Publisher's Summary: 

Isaac Fitzgerald has lived many lives. He's been an altar boy, a bartender, a fat kid, a smuggler, a biker, a prince of New England. But before all that, he was a bomb that exploded his parents' lives-or so he was told. In Dirtbag, Massachusetts, Fitzgerald, with warmth and humor, recounts his ongoing search for forgiveness, a more far-reaching vision of masculinity, and a more expansive definition of family and self. 

Fitzgerald's memoir-in-essays begins with a childhood that moves at breakneck speed from safety to violence, recounting an extraordinary pilgrimage through trauma to self-understanding and, ultimately, acceptance. From growing up in a Boston homeless shelter to bartending in San Francisco, from smuggling medical supplies into Burma to his lifelong struggle to make peace with his body, Fitzgerald strives to take control of his own story: one that aims to put aside anger, isolation, and entitlement to embrace the idea that one can be generous to oneself by being generous to others. 

Gritty and clear-eyed, loud-hearted and beautiful, Dirtbag, Massachusetts is a rollicking book that might also be a lifeline.

My Thoughts: 

I came to this book in an unusual way. Fitzgerald was on The Today Show just before Christmas last year, making gift book recommendations, and recommended a book by George Saunders. You would think that would point my in the direction of Saunders' book; but I didn't need that nudge. Instead I saw an author I'd never heard of before recommending a book by an author I like. If we have the same taste, maybe I'll like the book Fitzgerald wrote, I reckoned. So I requested it from the library with only the idea that it was a memoir. 

"My parents were married when they had me, just to different people. That's the way I open every story when I'm asked about met childhood. I was a child of passion! A happy little accident. Or, put another way, I was born of sin: a mistake in human form, a bomb aimed perfectly to blow up both my parents' lives."

Eventually Fitzgerald's parents left their partners, and the children they had with those partners, and married each other. In the beginning, they were poor, relying on both of their jobs and the charity of a Catholic charity to survive. But they did survive. Until they didn't. Until it was decided that Fitzgerald and his mother would move to a small town, next door to the parents who had chased his mother away because of her marriage to his father. She was miserable there, her parents made things worse, and her marriage began to crumble. A bomb went off in Fitzgerald's parents' lives but it wasn't Isaac, it was their own doing. And it was Isaac who suffered the greatest damage. 

Within four years, Fitzgerald was drinking, doing drugs, and stealing. He stole pornography and sold it to other young teenage boys, he stole cars to joyride, he became part of a fight club. He was saved, in a manner, when he was accepted on scholarship, to a boarding school. It was a first step to pulling himself out of the hell he was living in but it was a very long time before he would come near to being healed. 

This collection is not an easy read. Fitzgerald spent a lot of years drinking far too much, becoming a regular at a lot of bars in San Francisco, including one that would become his workplace for a number of years. Making ends meet was always a struggle; at one point, Fitzgerald even performed in pornography. But in that struggle, Fitzgerald finally discovered himself and learned valuable lessons and skills that would help him find his way back to his family. In the bars, he made friends who he would keep in his life long after he no longer lived in San Francisco. The porn industry taught him that open communication is vital and that maybe families should have inviolable safe words to stop them from harming each other. 

Fitzgerald's live isn't one that I can readily relate to; still, there were things he had to say that rang true to me. 

"Look. Not everything ages great, our own parts most unattractively of all. When you look back over your history, I'm sure it's not just glimmering perfect accomplishment after glimmering perfect accomplishment. If it is, then...good on you and I wish you a happy life, but I personally wouldn't trust you as far as I could throw you (which, given the whole aging thing, isn't very far these days)."

Fitzgerald doesn't hold back in this collection and he makes no apologies. He doesn't try to make us believe he's got it all figured out now. He's never entirely stopped drinking too much. He's still working on figuring out why he blames his mother more than his father for the pain in his past. And he's still working on forgiving both of his parents. But he and his half siblings have created a family unit in which all of the disparate parts have figured out how to work. 

One of my favorite sayings is, "Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." That's exactly what Fitzgerald's been doing all of his life. In that way, I certainly can relate to him. 

Mini-Reviews: People Person and Demon Copperhead

Honestly, both of these books deserve more than just a mini-review but here we are at the end of the year and I want to get the books I read in 2022 reviewed in 2022. Except for the two that I hope to finish before midnight on the 31st! 

People Person by Candice Carty-Williams

Read by Danielle Vitalis

10 hours, 4 minutes

Published September 2022 by Gallery/Scout Press

Publisher's Summary: 

If you could choose your family...you wouldn’t choose the Penningtons.

Dimple Pennington knows of her half siblings, but she doesn’t really know them. Five people who don’t have anything in common except for faint memories of being driven through Brixton in their dad’s gold jeep, and some pretty complex abandonment issues. Dimple has bigger things to think about.

She’s thirty, and her life isn’t really going anywhere. An aspiring lifestyle influencer with a terrible and wayward boyfriend, Dimple’s life has shrunk to the size of a phone screen. And despite a small but loyal following, she’s never felt more alone in her life. That is, until a dramatic event brings her half siblings Nikisha, Danny, Lizzie, and Prynce crashing back into her life. And when they’re all forced to reconnect with Cyril Pennington, the absent father they never really knew, things get even more complicated.

My Thoughts:

• I'd previously read Carty-Williams' Queenie and was impressed with her unique voice and was eager to see what she'd do next. 
• Carty-Williams ups her game, as far a unique goes, with this book. 
• Those half siblings of Dimple's have three different mothers. Prior to the night Dimple kills her boyfriend, she's only ever met each of them once, when their father picked them all up so they could meet each other. But when she needed help, and had nowhere else to turn, Dimple knew she had to turn to family. These young people have all kinds of issues individually and as a family. 
• Carty-Williams writes about people I don't normally find in books, broadening my world. If you've been around very long, you know I'm always looking for books that can do that. 
• Danielle Vitalis does a terrific job and I highly recommend this book in audio.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

560 pages

Published October 2022 by HarperCollins Publishers

Publisher's Summary: 

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

My Thoughts: 

• Barbara Kingsolver rewriting Charles Dickens? Yes, please.
• It's been a long, long time since I read David Copperfield or watched any of the adaptations. Still, I had some recollection of the characters and plot and went in knowing that things were just going to keep getting worse and worse for young Demon. 
• I appreciated that, while Kingsolver sets the book in an entirely different time and place, she keeps much of what makes Dickens' book so memorable, including many of the characters (although, thank God, she doesn't have nearly so many characters!). 
• As bad as life was for David Copperfield, life is even worse for Demon, with fewer bright spots. It makes a very long book feel even longer. 
• Like Dickens, Kingsolver writes about big issues in ways that educate and enlighten. And, here, feel a little bit guilty about the way I've always thought of poor mountain people.
• Like Dickens, Kingsolver's books are often quite long and they frequently feel to me as though they could well be shorter without losing a thing. Here I got to the point where I start skimming and thinking "I get, he's an addict; the life of an addict is terrible." This coming from someone who believes that we don't paint that life nearly dark enough as general rule. 
• Except for that last bit, this would have been a five-star read for me (assuming I gave stars out for books). Kingsolver brilliantly writes in voice that sound very believably like that of a bright young man of poor education, who has grown up in the impoverished mountains of southern Virginia. Her descriptions are vivid - I could easily visualize the squalor, the people, and, most vividly, the land that Demon so loved. 

Leave Out The Tragic Part by Dave Kindred

Leave Out The Tragic Parts: A Grandfather's Search For A Boy Lost To Addiction by Dave Kindred

Published February 2021 by PublicAffairs

Source: originally received, via Netgalley, from the publisher then checked out from the library

Publisher's Summary:

Jared Kindred left his home and family at the age of eighteen, choosing to wander across America on freight train cars and live on the street. Addicted to alcohol most of his short life, and withholding the truth from many who loved him, he never found a way to survive. 

Through this ordeal, Dave Kindred's love for his grandson has never wavered. 

Leave Out the Tragic Parts is not merely a reflection on love and addiction and loss. It is a hard-won work of reportage, meticulously reconstructing the life Jared chose for himself—a life that rejected the comforts of civilization in favor of a chance to roam free. 

Kindred asks painful but important questions about the lies we tell to get along, and what binds families together or allows them to fracture. Jared's story ended in tragedy, but the act of telling it is an act of healing and redemption. This is an important book on how to love your family, from a great writer who has lived its lessons.

My Thoughts:

You might think that a person who's dealt with addiction in her family would shy away from books about addiction. But there is a comfort in knowing that you're not alone and that you aren't alone in not having known the "right" thing to do to save your loved one. Perhaps even, selfishly, there is a comfort in knowing that your loved one is one of the lucky ones. 

Even if you can't relate to what Dave Kindred and his family went through, this is a book well worth reading. Kindred, a highly respected sportswriter, knows how to tell a story. For Jared's story, it may be even more important that Kindred knows how to research a story. Putting together the story of the life of a "traveling kid" isn't easy; they criss-cross the country, hopping freight trains, traveling with a changing cast of characters, and drinking and using drugs heavily. Jared never entirely lost contact with his family, calling periodically and sometimes paying visits where he brought along some of his companions, which made tracking his life from the time he left home easier to do but not easier to understand. Understanding would never entirely come for Kindred, as it doesn't for most families of addicts. There are no easy answers to addiction, nor to the need of some to be entirely free of the bonds of traditional lifestyles. 

This is not, as you can well imagine, an easy read. One reviewer said that it does, mostly, leave out the tragic parts. I don't know that I'd agree with that and I don't know that a book needs to be grittier to make readers understand how hard the life of an addict can be for the addict and those who love them.Included are pieces written by some of Jared "Goblin's" friends that tell the story better than anyone else could. Kindred writes with honesty (Kindred is quick to admit his own shortcomings) but also with deep love and a respect for the reasons that the travelers choose to live the way they do. 

Long Bright River by Liz Moore

Long Bright River by Liz Moore
Published January 2020 by Penguin Publishing Group
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher’s Summary:
In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling. 

Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit—and her sister—before it's too late.

Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.

My Thoughts:
This book opens with a list of people you quickly realize have died as the result of drug use. The final two people on the list? “Our father. Our mother.”

The first paragraph of the first chapter:
“There’s a body on the Gurney Street tracks. Female, age unclear, probable overdose, says the dispatcher.”

And just like that Moore had me. She tugged my heartstrings and then she made my heart start racing. She never let up for almost 500 pages on either score.

It's saying something that Moore was able to keep me caring about these characters given that this is a book filled with characters that aren't entirely likable or sympathetic. But to paraphrase one of the characters talking about the pieces of a chess board, all people are capable for both good and bad. Despite everything that happens, Moore keeps reminding readers of this. Again and again, I would make an assumption about a character about a person being bad or good. Then Moore would make me rethink my opinions. That went both ways as Moore had some tricks up her sleeve that absolutely surprised me.

Because the book moves back and forth between "Now" and "Then," the tension surrounding the murders wanes when we are looking back into Mickey's and Kacey's history. But Moore has no problem amping it right back up when she is ready to do that. I spent a good deal of time worried about Mickey's safety and was clueless about who the murderer might be. Now, if you read a lot of murder mysteries, you might catch wise before Moore revels the identity or if you're familiar with the idea of Chekov's gun. But then Moore throws a lot of red herrings into the waters to throw readers off. If you read this one, I hope you'll let me know when/if you figured it out.

Back to that very first sentence of my review. While this is a book about trying to catch a killer and about the relationship between these sisters and their family, it's the drug epidemic that surrounds it all. For me, that's where the book really excels. Moore has done a lot of research and it shows. She doesn't glamorize drug use nor does she pass judgment on those who have become trapped in that life. Addiction is a topic that I'm very familiar with and I saw in these characters people I have met. I have heard those people take about the demon of addiction. I have talked to people who have been through rehab more than once and seen those people relapse and then fight their way back. I saw those characters in this book and I appreciated that Moore wrote about them in a way that was sympathetic and honest.

I feel confident in saying that this book will be in my top ten at the end of 2020. It's a book I'll be thinking about for quite a while.

The Recovery: Intoxication And Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison

The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison
Published April 2018 by Little, Brown and Company
Source: my copy purchased for my Nook

Publisher's Summary:
With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction—both her own and others'—and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill.

At the heart of the book is Jamison's ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison's own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, "broken spigots of need." It's about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are.


My Thoughts:
I've read about addiction in a lot of books over the years, from Go Ask Alice when I was in junior high to, most recently, Daisy Jones and the Six. I've read memoirs and fiction. I've a lot of books by both men and women who battled addiction - William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Dickens. Jamison has read a lot of books written by addicts, too. When it was time for her to write her dissertation, it was those addicts whose journeys through addiction she chose to write about. Those were her people, writers battling their addictions.

Here Jamison has expanded on that dissertation. She writes a lot about how addiction and recovery affected creative lives. She was looking for answers to some questions - are active addicts better storytellers? are stories of active addiction more interesting? I'd add another question after reading this book and thinking about those questions - what does it say about our society when it seems that the answer is that stories of people behaving badly, giving in to their demons are more interesting to us? Perhaps the most interesting story off all the authors she included was that of Stephen King, who said he wrote The Shining "without even realizing...that I was writing about myself." But even though this piece of the book gave me much to think about, it was also this piece of the book that dragged for me.

Fortunately, there was so much in this book that made me happy that I picked it up. Jamison is incredibly honest about her own alcoholism and how it impacted her life and very open about her battle to get clean. Addiction has hit close in my family and I'm always looking for stories about people who have found a way to get and stay clean. I could picture those church basements Jamison described and the people who found their way to them. I know about addicts getting up to tell their stories and I know about the mantras that may seem trite to some but which seem to be lifelines for recovering addicts. Because Jamison is an alcoholic, her recovery experience is with Alcoholics Anonymous and she includes the history of that program. I did wish she would have touched on other groups that help other kinds of addicts; not all programs work the same.

Most interesting for me was Jamison's research into the history of the recovery movement in this country and her examination of the way we treat addicts and addiction. Have you ever heard of the Narco Farm, the "infamous prison-hospital for addicts?" Did you know that Richard Nixon, not Nancy Reagan, first initiated the so-called War on Drugs? In the past 100 years, it seems that we have made very little progress, as a society, in dealing with addiction. We rely almost entirely on programs like Alcoholic Anonymous or rehabilitation facilities that most addicts can't afford and which have a very low rate of sustained recovery.

But Jamison leaves readers with hope. Researchers continue to find new drugs that will help recovering addicts sustain their sobriety and the way addiction and treatment affect the brain. And there is hope for addicts who want to recover, who look to those fellow addicts who can show them the way.

Cost by Roxana Robinson

Cost By Roxana Robinson
416 pages
Published May 2009 by Picador
Source: Publisher for online book club

Jack Lambert is the son of divorced college professors, a sometimes musician, and the family black sheep. When his brother Steven stops by Jack's place on his way to his mother's Maine cottage, he becomes very concerned about Jack. When he voices his concerns to his mother, she is initially unwilling to accept that Steven believes that Jack is addicted to heroin. But when she starts to put things together and then talks to Jack's dad, Wendall, she decides the family needs to take action. With her elderly parents staying with her, Julia decides that what Jack needs is a family intervention, so she talks Wendall into bringing Jack to Maine. When they arrive, it's apparent to both Steven and Wendall that Jack is in bad shape; Julia is slower to realize what is happening. But when Jack decides to take the family boat out on the cove, unlighted and at night and has to be rescued, the police become involved and Jack's addiction spirals out of control.

This is the story of one family's struggle with addiction. It is heart wrenching in places and clearly Robinson knows what she is talking about. If you are a parent, this book will scare you. Although, to be honest, I think that Wendall and Julia did not necessarily handle Jack in the way that most parents would. They were so quick to write off the trouble that Jack got into as just being the way Jack is, despite evidence that he was slipping into drug addiction.

Robinson's writing caught me up right away:

"Julia wanted her parents here - she loved them - but their presence altered her gravity. She had to struggle to stay upright. "

"What she felt when her parents were here was something large and unsayable, confusing, nearly unbearable. Affection, anxiety, resentment..."

"When they were here, the house seemed small and ill equipped, the doors put on backward, the light switches unconnected, a troubling dreamscape where nothing was right."

I immediately had a sense of the relationship Julia had with her parents; Robinson was equally adept at portraying all of the relationships.

Where this book fell flat for me was the pacing and Robinson's tendency to repeat things or drag things out more than I felt was necessary. I found myself skimming over passages and even pages. But ultimately, this is such a strong story of addiction and it's effects on families, that I was glad that I read it.

Thanks to Gayle at Everyday I Write The Book for bringing this book to the book club. For the club's discussion of the book, please click here.