Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Read by Edoardo Ballerina

15 hours, 23 minutes

Published July 2024 by Random House Publishing

Publisher's Summary: 

“Were we gangsters? No. But did we know how to start a fire?”

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse, and the family moves on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that though their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what assured them their safety.

But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all. Carl has spent the ensuing years secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has spent her potential protecting her husband’s emotional health. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic fear won’t allow him to advance at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything—substance, foodstuff, women—in order to numb his own perpetual terror; and Jenny has spent her life so bent on proving that she’s not a product of her family’s pathology that she has come to define it. As they hover at the delicate precipice of a different kind of survival, they learn that the family fortune has dwindled to just about nothing, and they must face desperate questions about how much their wealth has played a part in both their lives’ successes and failures.

Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family’s history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life: tradition, the pursuit of success, the terror of history, fear of the future, old wives’ tales, evil eyes, ambition, achievement, boredom, dybbuks, inheritance, pyramid schemes, right-wing capitalists, beta-blockers, psychics, and the mostly unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

My Thoughts: 

I saw this one on numerous best-of-2024 lists (and have heard great things about Brodesser-Akner's Fleishman Is In Trouble) so I requested it from the library. It ended up being a read/listen combination because I struggled with this one and my loan timed out. 

The book opens with the kidnapping and return of Carl Fletcher and the immediate aftermath. It's fast paced and drew me in immediately. And then we moved to sections about each of his children as grown adults. To say they were screwed up is an understatement. Reading Beamer's story was, for me, very uncomfortable and a little disturbing and I almost gave up on the book before I finished reading his part. If something bad could possibly happen, it did; but each of the kids (and their mother and grandmother) brought a lot of it on themselves. I began to feel less and less sorry for these people. I get that their lives had been irrevocably changed with the kidnapping, but I couldn't help but feel that at least one of them might have overcome it all. 

There was a part of me that really hoped that things wouldn't work out for them. That they would all have to learn how to get real jobs and live like normal people. But, of course, rich people hardly ever have the roof fall entirely in on them and this story is no exception. The thing that saved this one for me was that Brodesser-Akner had a couple of surprises up her sleeve that totally took me by surprise and I always do like a book that can surprise me. 

Mini-Review: Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

Read by Kirsten Potter

5 hours, 57 minutes

Published June 2016 by Hogarth Shakespeare Series

Publisher's Summary: 

Kate Battista feels stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she's always in trouble at work - her pre-school charges adore her, but their parents don't always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner.

Dr. Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There's only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, all would be lost.

When Dr. Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he's really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to bring her around?

My Thoughts: 

Vinegar Girl is the third book in Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare project, with contemporary writers retelling Shakespeare plays. Vinegar Girl is very loosely based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. 

Here Kate is less a shrew and  more of a woman trapped by circumstances. While she is by no means a willing participant in her father's plot to find a wife for Pyotr to keep him from being deported, she's lured by the idea of a way out of her father's house, out of having to mother her fifteen-year-old sister. Truly, her father is something of a mad scientist, who has the family eating a hash meal every evening, who has no idea how to take care of himself or his youngest, who relies entirely on Kate to keep the household afloat. Can she be abrupt and a little too honest some of the time? Yes, she certainly can. But who can blame her? And Pyotr, while under the impression that he'll be the boss in the marriage, is also quite a nice guy when it comes right down to it. In this version of The Taming of the Shrew, Kate isn't so much broken, as she is presented with an opportunity that allows her to become a better version of her natural self. 

It's a little on the light side; but, overall, I enjoyed it. Now that I've finally gotten around to this one, I'll be looking for others in the series. 

The other books in the project are: 

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, a retelling of The Tempest

Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn, a retelling of King Lear

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson, a retelling of The Winter's Tale

Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson, a retelling of The Merchant of Venice

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier, a retelling of Othello

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Read by Marin Ireland and Micheal Urie

11 hours 16 minutes

Published May 2022 by HarperCollins

Publisher's Summary: 

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late. 

My Thoughts: 

Another in the line of stories featuring older women, this one's been on my TBR since it came out three years ago. I finally got around to requesting it from the library and requested it in print and audio, figuring I'd go with whichever became available first. 

And then Shelby Van Pelt came to town (well, not MY town, but Council Bluffs, which is right across the river) so I bought a copy of the book and had it signed. Three days later, the audiobook became available. I had thought I'd make it a read/listen combination, but I was enjoying the reading so much that I just "read" the whole book that way. You can never go wrong with Marin Ireland and Micheal Urie did a wonderful job. 

If you ever get the chance to hear Shelby Van Pelt speak, I highly recommend it. The story of how she came to be a writer and how she came to write this particular book is so interesting. She is funny, and warm, and signed books and took pictures for easily an hour after she was done with the scheduled speaking. 

As for the book, it was, for me, one of those "right book, right time" reads. I would have been happy if no one else appeared in the book except Tova and Marcellus (who is such a fun character); but, of course, it would be hard to craft a book entirely around only two characters, especially when one of them can't speak. Tova is lonely, despite having a tight circle of friends, since her husband died. Erik was their only child, and as she gets older, it's becoming more and more apparent to her that there is no one who will care for her when her home gets to be too much for her. But Tova is not as alone as she thinks she is and she'll soon find that there is a lot left for her to look forward to in her life. 

I don't want to give too much away, other than to tell you that there are characters who aren't even mentioned in the summary who come to be very important to Tova. And while the story line is sweet and bittersweet, it's the characters in this one that really make this a book worth reading. 

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry  by Gabrielle Zevin

288 pages

Published December 2014 by Algonquin Books

Publisher’s Summary: 

A. J. Fikry’s life is not at all what he expected it to be. He lives alone, his bookstore is experiencing the worst sales in its history, and now his prized possession, a rare collection of Poe poems, has been stolen. But when a mysterious package appears at the bookstore, its unexpected arrival gives Fikry the chance to make his life over—and see everything anew.   

My Thoughts: 

How long has this one been on my TBR? I’m going to guess 10 years; I can clearly remember being on Goodreads when this one became the big buzz, so I added it to my TBR, bought it for my Nook, and then forgot about it. Until a book club friend brought it up a month or so ago and then another said there had been a movie adaptation. So, I read it…and then I watched the movie.

A.J. Fikry is a man without friends, a man who owns a bookstore that is gradually failing, a man who is so deep in his grief over the loss of his wife that he has decided to drink himself to death. He is so morose that when a young publishing rep comes to pitch him the winter list, he all but throws her out of the building. 

Sometime later, a young woman comes into the store. His brief moment of kindness to her causes her to make a decision that will change A.J.’s life. The next day A.J. finds a toddler in his store when he returns from a run, with a note to “the bookseller” leaving the child to him. As cantankerous as A.J. can be, he can’t find it in himself to turn the child over to Child Protective Services and the law is, unbelievably, on his side. Maya changes A.J.’s life, as children will do. As the community rallies to help A.J. with Maya, friendships develop. And four years after he first met that publisher’s rep, A.J. finds love. All is well; this will be a happily-ever-after story. Except it’s not. It’s bittersweet.

Is it a little dramatic and sentimental at times? Yes. I didn’t care because it is also humorous and heartwarming and had just the right amount of drama and sentimentality for me. I loved these characters, and I loved the way they grew over the years and found love and friendship. In fewer than 300 pages, Zevin made me feel so many things. 

If you’ve ever read George Eliot’s Silas Marner, much of this book will feel very familiar, from a child that lands on the doorstep of a cranky man to the disappear and reappearance of a prize. Yes, that prized possession reappears – if you know about Chekov’s gun, you won’t be surprised when that happens much later in the book. I thought the story about where it was and how it reappears was wonderful. 

This is a lovely little book which I highly recommend if you’re in the mood for something lovely. 

As a side note, Zevin also wrote the screenplay for the movie so it’s one of the most faithful adaptations of a book I’ve ever watched, giving me exactly what I wanted, especially watching is so closely after finishing the book. 

And as a final side note, I just realized that this Gabrielle Zevin is the same author who wrote Young Jane Young and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Now I really want to read those books! 

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

336 pages

Published September 2024 by Penguin Publishing Group 

Publisher's Summary: 

“What looks like magic is simply a part of life we don’t understand yet…”

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.

Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life, and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed. But to dive into this impossible truth, Grace must first come to terms with her past.

Filled with wonder and wild adventure, this is a story of hope and the life-changing power of a new beginning.

My Thoughts: 

"A beautiful novel full of life-affirming wonder and imagination and, at its adventurous heart, a wry and tender love-letter to the best of being human.” —Benedict Cumberbatch

I don't usually put much credence into quotes about books from other authors. Publishers tend to pick authors for quotes who are prone to like the book and writers are likely to want to praise a book, in no small part because they'd like the same done for them. But Benedict Cumberbatch? I doubt he's hoping for a great review of his next film from Haig. 

Still not the reason I picked up this one. I picked this one because my book club read Haig's The Midnight Library and we all really liked it. Why not read his next novel as a club as well? Now I'm honestly question that decision. While The Midnight Library absolutely had a fantasy element, it worked for me as a device between chapters. But in this one the fantasy element is front and center and it's supernatural. I'm not sure how that's going to go over with my book club. I know I struggled with it throughout the book. 

"Once upon a time there was an old woman who lived the most boring life in the universe. 

That woman rarely left her bungalow, except to see the doctor, help at the charity shop, or visit the cemetery. She didn't garden any more. The grass was overgrown, and the flowerbeds were full of weeds. She ordered her weekly shopping. She lived in the Midlands. Lincoln, Lincolnshire. The same orange-bricked market town that she had stayed in - apart from a stint t Hull University centuries ago - all her adult life. 

You know the place."

Grace is a lonely woman, living with grief over the long-ago loss of her son and more recently her husband when she receives the notice that a long-ago acquaintance has left her a home. Grace once did a kindness for Christina, something that seems insignificant to Grace but changed Christina's life. Grace arrives in Ibiza only to discover that what she's inherited is a small, run-down house set far off from the city and has been left a list of things to do in her time on the island. Almost immediately warned to avoid Alberto Rios; but Grace, wanting to know what happened to Christina, soon realizes that Alberto is the only one who can help her find out. So to check something off of her list and because Alberto tells her he will show her what happened to Christina, Grace goes scuba diving with Alberto late one night. What happens leave Grace able to read minds, to have a far reaching knowledge, and the ability to move objects.  Now she must decide what to do with those "gifts" and if she can truly know what happened to Christina and stop the people who were trying to hurt her. 

All of which sounds like a crazy adventure novel. Which it is...kind of. But it is far more about how Grace, who has been battling anhedonia for years and living with the guilt of her son's death, find pleasure in life again and learns to forgive herself. And that is very much the kind of book I enjoy. Strangely, one of the things I really enjoyed about this book was all of the references to mathematics (Grace had been a math teacher) - Haig really uses math to explain how the magical elements in this book just might not be that implausible, but also to explain life. I liked that - I may have to rethink my opinion about math...and maybe magical realism. 

Twist by Colum McCann

Twist by Colum McCann

256 pages

Published March 2025 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

My Thoughts: 

In 2010, I read McCann's Let The Great World Spin and completely understood by it won the National Book Award, even if it didn't entirely work for me. But ten years later, I read his Apeirogon. That one I proclaimed "incredible;" so impressed with it was I that I couldn't put words together and had to just type in notes that I had taken as I read the book. 

This one falls somewhere in between for me. I was immediately pulled in by McCann's writing; but the story itself is a slow build as Fennell waits for his opportunity to get on that boat that will ship out to repair a broken internet cable. Even though it gave McCann a great opportunity to paint a picture of who both Fennell and Conway are and the world they find themselves in, I was as eager for Fennell to get on that boat as he was. Let me also be honest and admit that I really couldn't see why Fennell was so interested in being on that boat or what the draw was about the cables. 

Until I could. Once on the boat, though, McCann really begins to amp up the tension, but in the job they've set out to do itself and in the relationships between all of the characters. And I understood what those cables meant...not just to the world because they carry the glass tubes that carry the internet, but all of our connections to each other and our ability to communicate (or not) with each other, as much on a personal level as on a global one.

Once they are out to sea, once that tension began building, I was all in and the closer I got to the end, the harder it was for me to put down the book. Now here's a thing that often happens in a book - we reach the zenith of the story with fifty pages or so left to wrap things up and the story often flags at this point. This one did not. Even after we learn what happened to Conway (we know early on that something has happened that has tarnished his image), I needed to find out how Fennell and Zanele moved on from it. And how Fennell finally resolves his relationship with his son. 

Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg

Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg

Read by Bill Clegg

6 hours, 54 minutes

Published September 2015 by Gallery/Scout Press

Publisher's Summary: 

On the eve of her daughter's wedding, June Reid's life is upended when a shocking disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter's fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke-her entire family, all gone in a moment. June is the only survivor.

Alone and directionless, June drives across the country, away from her small Connecticut town. In her wake, a community emerges, weaving a beautiful and surprising web of connections through shared heartbreak.

From the couple running a motel on the Pacific Ocean where June eventually settles into a quiet half-life, to the wedding's caterer whose bill has been forgotten, to Luke's mother, the shattered outcast of the town-everyone touched by the tragedy is changed as truths about their near and far histories finally come to light.

My Thoughts: 

Well, first off I need to admit that I thought that Bill Clegg was Bill Bryson. I mean, I didn't think they were the same person; apparently I thought that there was only one author with the first name of "Bill" and I thought he was the guy who wrote At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Which I'm only admitting to so that you can understand that I had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into with this one. Even after I read the first paragraph of the publisher's summary. Which accounts for, to some extent, why it took me so long to get into this book, to be able to follow along. 

In the early morning hours of the day of June's daughter's wedding, while June is out of her house, there is an explosion and fire at the house, killing everyone in it - June's daughter, Lolly; Lolly's fiancé, William; June's ex-husband, Adam; and June's boyfriend, Luke. Almost immediately, I was convinced I was listening to a mystery, because it wasn't clear to me why June wasn't in the house, why she was fleeing. It wasn't until a couple of hours of listening that it was truly clear to me that June had fled to try to flee her grief, to make some sense out of the senseless, as she travels across the country, using Lolly's journal's as a guide. 

We gradually get the full story of the people involved and what actually happened through a variety of points of view: Lydia Morey, Luke's mother; Dale, William's father; the couple who run the motel June eventually ends up at; the maid at that hotel; and Silas, a young man who worked for Luke. Each of them has their own story to tell, their own sadness and grief to process. So many books that bounce from point of view to point of view leave me confused or wishing to get back to one or another of the characters - I never felt this way about this book, becoming completely absorbed in each storyline. Readers come to know and care about each of characters and I loved how everything came together, very unexpectedly for me, in the end. 

Did You Every Have A Family made the longest for the National Book Award in 2015. I can understand why. Kirkus Reviews says this book is: "An attempt to map how the unbearable is borne, elegantly written and bravely imagined." It truly is an utterly unique way of exploring grief and the consolation we find in the smallest of things. 

The Hunter by Tana French

The Hunter by Tana French

Read by Roger Clark

16 hours, 24 minutes

Published March 2024 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

It's a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die.

Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He's found it, more or less: he's built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he's gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey's long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn't want protecting. What she wants is revenge.

My Thoughts: 

Tana French is one of the author's whose books I will pick up without having the slightest idea what they are about. I read all six of the books in her Dublin Murder Squad series and there wasn't a weak link in the bunch. Five years ago she introduced us to Cal Hooper in The Searcher; I was so excited to find that she was writing a second book about Cal and couldn't wait to get my hands on this one. And now I'm crossing my fingers that this is not just a two book series. I'm looking this series as much as I did the Dublin Murder Squad series; possibly even more. 

I was recently trying to describe this book to someone, to put it into a neat genre. But it's not a book that easily falls into any one genre. Yes, there is a murder...eventually. It's a bit of a Western (and it is set in western Ireland)...there's even a bit of a gold rush.  I suppose it could be characterized as a crime novel, there's plenty of crime to be had in it. But it's far more about its characters and their relationships and an exploration of the grey areas between good and bad. 

It's a slow build of a book, but I was perfectly fine with that as we are reintroduced to the inhabitants of Ardnakelty, with all of their eccentricities, humor and long history. Relationships deepen and change. Hidden agendas are uncovered, motives revealed. Ardnakelty is much like a family - they can tease and hold grudges amongst themselves, but outsiders beware. More than two years after he's arrived, Cal is still something of an outsider, which is fine with him. As a former police officer, he struggles with the law of the land he now calls home. But in protecting Trey, and the others in the community he has grown fond of, he has to learn that sometimes things aren't just black and white. 

This one will still be on my best-of list at the end of the year, both as a novel and as a audiobook. Roger Clark does an incredible job. Clark is an Irish-American actor who easily handles the different accents and the storytelling. 

Three Days In June by Anne Tyler

Three Days In June by Anne Tyler

176 pages

Published February 2025 by Knopf

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit.

But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life, Three Days in June is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the height of her powers.

My Thoughts: 

I've been a fan of Tyler's for more than forty years now. While the past couple of her books that I've read have not had that spark for me that her work once did, they still had more than enough to recommend them and to keep me reading. So I'm always going to be ready to pick up another of her books, which is why I was excited to find this one available. 

Guys, Tyler is back for me! 

This book is only 176 pages long but it has everything in it that I've come to expect and appreciate from Tyler. Not only that, the compactness of it might very well be what makes it work best. We get the full story of Gail's life as we travel through only three days of her life. 

Gail is a bit of a prickly person. She wasn't the greatest mother (which puts her kind of out of the loop when it comes to her own daughter's wedding) and she wasn't the greatest wife. And just on the eve of her daughter's wedding, she finds out that she's also not the greatest people person, which is one of the reasons she's just found herself out of a job. But in just 176 pages, we come to really understand Gail and hope that things will work out for her. Not only that, but Gail comes to really understand Gail, which might seem implausible in such a short time, but with everything that's happening in that period, it's entirely believable. 

 It is lovely to see Gail reminisce about why she fell in love with Max and to forgive herself. Although there's a big event at the center of the story, it's the intimate details and the mundane that give the book its heart, which is where Tyler is at her best.

The Museum of Failures by Thrity Umrigar

The Museum of Failures by Thrity Umrigar

368 pages

Published September 2023 by Little, Brown and Company

Publisher's Summary: 

When Remy Wadia left India for the United States, he carried his resentment of his cold and inscrutable mother with him and has kept his distance from her. Years later, he returns to Bombay, planning to adopt a baby from a young pregnant girl—and to see his elderly mother again before it is too late. She is in the hospital, has stopped talking, and seems to have given up on life.

Struck with guilt for not realizing just how ill she had become, Remy devotes himself to helping her recover and return home. But one day in her apartment he comes upon an old photograph that demands explanation. As shocking family secrets surface, Remy finds himself reevaluating his entire childhood and his relationship to his parents, just as he is on the cusp of becoming a parent himself. Can Remy learn to forgive others for their human frailties, or is he too wedded to his sorrow and anger over his parents’ long-ago decisions?

Surprising, devastating, and ultimately a story of redemption and healing still possible between a mother and son, The Museum of Failures is a tour de force from one of our most elegant storytellers about the mixed bag of love and regret. It is also, above all, a much-needed reminder that forgiveness comes from empathy for others.

My Thoughts: 

This is the sixth of Umrigar's books that I've read; any new book she writes will automatically be added to the TBR list. Why? Because I can reliably count on her to write books that explore relationships - between parents and children, between spouses, between friends. Because she writes complex characters with empathy. Because she tackles complex social issues, particularly class and gender. And because she always teaches me more about the country of India and Indian culture. 

The Museum of Failures gave me all of those things. 

One reason Remy has spent so little time in India since going to the U.S. was the idea (initially introduced to him by his beloved father who urged him to get out of India) that, as a country, it is a museum of failures; failures that are all too obvious to Remy when he visits. The other reason is his relationship with his mother, who has always been cold and distant, even cruel at times. 

When he arrives in India to look into adoption (his American wife believes they should adopt a baby from India so that it looks more like one of them), he discovers that his mother has been admitted to the hospital and is very ill. The cousin he pays to look out for her doesn't appear to have been taking care of either his mother or her apartment. His frustration mounts when the young girl who was going to let Remy and his wife adopt her baby backs out and with the care his mother is receiving in the hospital. 

In dealing with all of these situations, and surrounded by old friends,Remy learns a lot about himself, his family, and his country. But there is a cost to be paid for what he learns when a long buried secret is revealed; now he must learn to forgive and understand. 

There's a lot going on in this book and a lot of introspection on Remy's part. Sometimes he felt like too much, too many complications in one place. And I have to admit that I wasn't wild about the ending, which just seemed a bit too tidy for me. But Umrigar's books are always satisfying reads. I love reading about this culture with all of its many facets. Here, Umrigar, as ever, makes readers see that you have to truly know someone and what they've been through in life to understand them. 

Erasure by Percival Everett

Erasure by Percival Everett

Read by Sean Crisden

8 hours, 16 minutes

Published January 2001 by University Press

Publisher's Summary:

Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been "critically acclaimed." He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We's Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies-his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer's, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father's suicide seven years before.

In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins's bestseller. He doesn't intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is-under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh-and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.

My Thoughts: 

In December 2023, almost a year before I became aware of Percival Everett, this book was made into the film American History, starring Jeffrey Wright. It's one of those movies that I had every intention of watching (and still do), but had no idea until I began looking for more books by Everett (after loving his James last year) that Everett was the author behind that movie. Movie I want to see? Author I'm newly admiring? Heck, yes. 

This was a rare experience for me. While I thought Crisden did a terrific job reading the book, I also felt like I would have enjoyed this one had I picked up a physical copy of the book. I think. Because there is a part of this book where we read the book that Monk ends up writing and it's probably much better experienced by listening to it. Still, I think I would have paid better attention, felt more attached to the characters. And as much as Monk annoyed me, with his snobbish attitudes about literature, I did want to care about him. 

Despite his literary skill, it's not been a lucrative career; and with two siblings, a father, and a grandfather who are/were doctors, he's something of the black sheep of the family. Sister Lisa is a doctor at an abortion center and takes care of their aging mother until tragedy strikes. Monk's brother is an addict with a failing marriage (and an awakening to the fact that he's gay) and a busy career so he can't be counted on. Clearly Monk has to step up. 

Fortunately, that book he didn't mean to write has actually given him the fiscal comfort to be able to do that. The problem is that Monk hates the book, doesn't want to have anything more to do with it. But the public is eating it up and the critics love it. Stagg R. Leigh is in big demand and Monk has to decide how whether or not it's time to fess up and risk losing continuing income from the book, or to take on Leigh's persona and dig in. 

It's an excellent satire that I imagine has an even bigger impact on those who live that life, who understands the line that Monk is walking as he writes about something he actually knows nothing about. Is Monk empathetic to the plight of his characters or has he written an exploitative work? This one certainly gave me a lot to think about. I just wish I had read it, rather than listening to it. I think. 

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

Read by Andy Arndt

8 hours, 56 minutes

Published January 2024 by Farrar, Straus, Giroux

Publisher's Summary: 

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. 

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.

My Thoughts: 

One of the best parts of being part of a family of readers is that they make another great source of book recommendations. In this case, Beautyland was recommended to me by Mini-me. As much as I like to think of myself as reading somewhat diversely, Mini-me puts me to shame. They read everything manga, sci-fi, fantasy, nonfiction, literary fiction. Beautyland is billed as science fiction, what with Adina being an alien communicating with her home planet. But this book can't be so narrowly defined; it reads much more like literary fiction to me. 

Adina "activates" when she is four-years-old, at the moment her head hits the concrete after she is pushed by the father she won't see again until she is an adult. That night she "wakes up" in a classroom with otherworldly teachers who tell her that her mission is to find out if Earth is a planet where others from her planet can survive when their dying planet is no longer viable. When her mother brings home a fax machine from a neighbor's trash and puts it in Adina's room, Adina discovers that if she sends a fax, she will get a reply she believes is coming from her handlers. She begins regularly sending them her impressions of our planet, the humans who inhabit it, and her own life. 

"I require speech lessons and corrective lenses and most likely teeth braces. I am an expensive extra­terrestrial."

‘‘The ego of the human male is by far the most dangerous aspect of human society.’’ 

 ‘‘Death’s biggest surprise is that it does not end the conversation.’’ 

Her observations are often spot on, often touching, and frequently amusing. Often equally amusing are the responses she receives.  

Adina is young, but wise enough never to mention the nightly lessons she will have in the coming years or that fact that she is from another planet that can't be seen. Still others can plainly see that Adina is unusual. It's that very fact that makes her a character that will stay with me for a very long time. While almost all reviewers refer to this as a work of science-fiction, I'm still unsure. Was Adina an alien being or a woman whose brain was rewired by trauma that left her with a unique life experience and take on the world around her? Beautyland works either way, and maybe the fact that I was left wondering made it all that much more impressive. 

Mini-reviews: Revenge Wears Prada, The Paris Bookseller, A Rosie Life In Italy, and Sorrow and Bliss

Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns by Lauren Weisberger

Read by Megan Hilty

7 hours, 10 minutes

Published June 2013 by Simon and Schuster

Publisher's Summary: 

Almost a decade has passed since Andy Sachs quit the job “a million girls would die for” working for Miranda Priestly at Runway magazine-a dream that turned out to be a nightmare. Andy and Emily, her former nemesis and co-assistant, have since joined forces to start a high end bridal magazine, The Plunge, which has quickly become required reading for the young and stylish. Now they get to call all the shots: Andy writes and travels to her heart's content; Emily plans parties and secures advertising like a seasoned pro. Even better, Andy has met the love of her life. Max Harrison, scion of a storied media family, is confident, successful, and drop-dead gorgeous. Their wedding will be splashed across all the society pages as their friends and family gather to toast the glowing couple. Andy Sachs is on top of the world. But karma's a bitch. The morning of her wedding, Andy can't shake the past. And when she discovers a secret letter with crushing implications, her wedding-day jitters turn to cold dread. Andy realizes that nothing-not her husband, nor her beloved career-is as it seems. She never suspected that her efforts to build a bright new life would lead her back to the darkness she barely escaped ten years ago-and directly into the path of the devil herself.

My Thoughts: 

I love the movie adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada, but I'd forgotten how far from the source material it veered until I read the sequel. Andy may have quit that dream job, but I was pretty disappointed to find that she quit it only to run a bridal magazine. Never trusted Emily or Max and Weisberger gave me exactly what I'd expected. Predictable. I'm a fan of a lot of movies adapted from books like these; but not, it appears, the books themselves. 

The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher

Read by Lauryn Allman

10 hours, 37 minutes

Published January 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself.

 
Shakespeare and Company is more than a bookstore and lending library: Many of the prominent writers of the Lost Generation, like Ernest Hemingway, consider it a second home. It's where some of the most important literary friendships of the twentieth century are forged-none more so than the one between Irish writer James Joyce and Sylvia herself. When Joyce's controversial novel Ulysses is banned, Beach takes a massive risk and publishes it under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company.
 
But the success and notoriety of publishing the most infamous and influential book of the century comes with steep costs. The future of her beloved store itself is threatened when Ulysses' success brings other publishers to woo Joyce away. Her most cherished relationships are put to the test as Paris is plunged deeper into the Depression and many expatriate friends return to America. As she faces painful personal and financial crises, Sylvia-a woman who has made it her mission to honor the life-changing impact of books-must decide what Shakespeare and Company truly means to her.

My Thoughts: 

Picked this one up because "Paris" and "Bookseller" intrigued me. Was pretty excited to find that it was about Sylvia Beach, who founded the famous Paris bookstore "Shakespeare and Company." While Beach led an interesting life, surrounded by fascinating people, the book dragged a bit for me, with so much of the focus on Beach's struggle with James Joyce and the publishing rights for Ulysses. Maybe the problem was that I wanted to shake her and make her understand what an a*# Joyce was before he about wiped her out. Part of it was just too much detail to getting that book "right" before it was sent out into the world. 

A Rosie Life In Italy: Move to Italy. Buy a Rundown Villa. What Could Go Wrong? by Rosie Melody

368 pages

Published October 2024 by Sourcebooks

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

When Rosie Meleady's landlady doubles her rent in cold, wet, overpriced Ireland, she packs up her family, her two dogs, and all her possessions into a camper van and sets off across Europe to sunny Italy, where she plans to grow her destination wedding planning business. 

Even though it has been a dream she attempted to follow several times, Rosie and her family soon find out moving abroad to start a new life is not all sunshine and gelato.

Between a hurricane, a global pandemic, and accidentally buying a massive villa—that has definitely seen better days— from eight cousins in the middle of a long-standing family dispute, Rosie pulls back the curtains on the less glamorous side of moving abroad. 

Lighthearted, uplifting, and utterly escapist, A Rosie Life in Italy is HGTV meets Under the Tuscan Sun—a delightful peek under the covers of what it's like to throw caution to the wind, take a risk, and build a life you once only dreamed of having.

My Thoughts: 

This one was a slow start for me (Rosie and her husband bounce around a lot in the beginning and seem particularly inept with their money) and things early on bounced between too much detail and giant jumps in time. But things picked up and I did enjoy this one, especially once I got more attached to the family and once they made the move to Italy. Although it does take all of the book before they actually have bought that rundown villa. This one's a memoir which makes the fact that they are only just getting their business in Italy up and running and have just started buying the villa (what a process!), when Covid hits all the more intense. 

That publication date is for the paperback edition, the edition I got through Netgalley. I wasn't aware of that so was startled, when I looked this one up, to discover that there is entire series to be read now. 

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Macon 

Read by Emilia Fox

10 hours, 38 minutes

Published February 2021 by HarperCollins

Publisher's Summary: 

Martha Friel just turned forty. Once, she worked at Vogue and planned to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content. She used to live in a pied-à-terre in Paris. Now she lives in a gated community in Oxford, the only person she knows without a PhD, a baby or both, in a house she hates but cannot bear to leave. But she must leave, now that her husband Patrick—the kind who cooks, throws her birthday parties, who loves her and has only ever wanted her to be happy—has just moved out.

Because there’s something wrong with Martha, and has been for a long time. When she was seventeen, a little bomb went off in her brain and she was never the same. But countless doctors, endless therapy, every kind of drug later, she still doesn’t know what’s wrong, why she spends days unable to get out of bed or alienates both strangers and her loved ones with casually cruel remarks. 

And she has nowhere to go except her childhood home: a bohemian (dilapidated) townhouse in a romantic (rundown) part of London—to live with her mother, a minorly important sculptor (and major drinker) and her father, a famous poet (though unpublished) and try to survive without the devoted, potty-mouthed sister who made all the chaos bearable back then, and is now too busy or too fed up to deal with her. 

But maybe, by starting over, Martha will get to write a better ending for herself—and she’ll find out that she’s not quite finished after all.

My Thoughts: 

I seems strange to say that I really liked a book in which mental illness and it's devastating consequences are the focus. But I really did - the book is well written and Emilia Fox does a terrific job. Family relationships and communication are explored in a caring way that shows that we don't always know what's happening in someone else's mind or life. Because we're getting the story from Martha's point of view, we're also getting the story from an unreliable narrator, which makes the entire book quite a ride. 

Trust by Hernan Diaz

Trust by Hernan Diaz

10 hours, 21 minutes

Read by: Edoardo Ballerini, Jonathon Davis, Mozhan Marno, Orlagh Cassidy

Published May 2022 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth-all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz's TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another-and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

My Thoughts:

Here is my recommendation to you: read the summary; read reviews of this book; decide whether or not it interests you and, if it does, add it to your list of books to read. Then don't pick it up to read for several months, until you've forgotten that summary and those reviews and only pick it up because it's on your list so you know it interested you at that time. 

To be honest, it's what I do so much of the time and it almost always works in my favor. It worked for me here. I had no idea when the book began that I was reading a book within a book. I was fascinated by Benjamin and Helen and their relationship. And then utterly startled when suddenly I was reading (well, listening to) notes written by Andrew Bevel, the man upon whom Benjamin Rask was based by the writer Harold Vanner in his book. 

Next we jump to Ida Partenza, a woman living with her out there father who had to run from Italy because of his political beliefs, who is hired by Bevel to write that memoir we just read the notes for. Ida's task is made all the more difficult by Bevel's insistence on clearing his wife's name while also refusing to include any real details of her life, much to Partenza's amazement. Neither book will yield a true picture of the real Mildred Bevel, a woman Andrew didn't seem to know well himself. Ida grows more and more curious and, ultimately, finds Mildred's diaries. And that's where readers go next, into the pages of those diaries to get to know the real Mildred Bevel. At least that's what we believe. In the end, though, we're trusting her to know that truth. But at this point, one wonders if the truth is still out there to be found. 

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and it's easy to see why. This is such an interesting and unique way to tell a story. Even more an interesting and unique way to remind readers that the truth is not easy to know. And within that unique structure is so much more. In Trust, Diaz has written: 

"...a glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery..." - Oprah Daily

"A remarkably accessible treatise on the power of fiction." - The Boston Globe

"A rip-roaring, razor-sharp dissection of capitalism, class, greed, and the meaning of money itself." - Vogue

If you're looking for a book that will challenge you, make you think, teach you something (lordy, did I learn a lot about the stock market, in particular in the early decades of the last century), that's exceedingly well written, I highly recommend Trust. Is it a book I loved? Not really. But it is one I greatly admire.