Family Drama by Rebecca Fallon
I didn't really like this novel I requested (and got) from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. There weren't many books offered that month that interested me, and maybe I would have been better off winning the other one I requested.
The story starts in November 1997 with the funeral of soap-opera actress Susan Byrne. She is Susan Bliss - Mrs. Al(cott) Bliss - to her history professor husband and seven-year-old twins, Sebastian (Seb) and Viola (Lola) - yes, named for the twins in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Susan has died too young, of cancer, after a career that necessitated traveling back and forth from her work in Los Angeles and the family home on the Massachusetts coast. The novel then goes back and forth in time, from 1983 (when Susan and Al met) to 2013, and various years in between.
A part of the story I had trouble with was Viola meeting one of her mother's co-stars, Orson, at age seven - and then falling in love with him when she was in college in London at age 20, when he's a big star. It felt creepy to me, given that Orson was in his late 20s when they first met. I also didn't care for the way he treated her, particularly a scene in Massachusetts when they accidentally meet up with Orson's and Susan's former producer.
Unlike some other reviewers, I actually have some sympathy for her husband Al. As a recent widow, I could very much relate to the feelings he had after Susan's death, particularly right after the funeral. The "certainty is eroding" (page 14 in the advance proof) that it was love at first sight:
Desolate questions. What he would give to know what she was thinking. His mind seeks absolutes and absolution, definitive confirmation that it all meant something.
Given everything else that happens in the novel, I could understand Al throwing away the videotapes of Susan's soap opera episodes, the "evidence of Susan's other life" (page 15 of the advance proof).
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
I read this book for Tarleton's No-Stress Book Club, where we don't all read the same book - just the same genre. This month's genre was science fiction, and, while I could have just talked about some books I've read in the past (and did), I needed to start a new book anyway, and found this one in the "skip the line" tags in Libby. It said it was a Hugo Award nominee, and I've always been a sucker for time travel books, so I decided to read it.
In this one, set sometime in the near future, the narrator, an unnamed female British government worker, is offered a well-paying position in the new "Ministry of Time" as a "bridge" to an "expat" - a companion to a person brought from the past into the present via a time door recently-acquired by the British.
The narrator is assigned to "1847" - British naval officer Graham Gore (a real person in history), who was about to die that year on Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition looking for the Northwest Passage in Arctic Canada. The book is interspersed with segments relating Gore's experiences with the expedition, as his backstory is relevant to near-future plot.
The best part of the book for me was the interactions of the two main characters with the other "expats" - two other men and a woman brought from 1645 (Cardingham, Battle of Naseby), 1665 (Margaret, the Great Plague of London), and 1916 (Arthur, the Battle of the Somme). Unlike Graham Gore, none of these were historical persons, but like him, all were pulled from their time period just before their deaths, in order to not affect the history from their eras. Their adaptations to modern life provide much of the humor and heart in the book, and I would have like to see more of their adjustments and interactions.
These four - and three others who did not survive in the novel (two died in transit and one, Anne from Robespierre's Paris in 1793, died in an escape attempt) - were brought forward partly to test whether time travel is feasible for a human body. As the book continues, the reader feels that something else is going on with this project - Cardingham and Gore are allowed to train with guns, for example.
In an article, author Kalianne Bradley explains that she got hooked on "a) Graham Gore b) Franklin’s Arctic expedition c) polar exploration in general" late in the pandemic. Essentially, the book started out as a fanfiction piece, as the unnamed narrator is much like the author (part-Cambodian; her mother is a refugee, and time travel becomes a metaphor for the immigrant experience). The narrator and Gore have a hot romance.
I had trouble following parts of the book - I'm sure I missed some clues as to what was going on along the way. There's a twist near the end of the book that I did not see coming, but the conclusion was disappointing for me. I think I may need to read it again to better understand it, but read Rogue Male (by Geoffrey Household, a book belonging to the narrator that Gore picks up and reads) first.
The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali
I read this book because Reading Group Guides said it was (one of) the most discussed books in 2024 - and, by this point, the only one of the most discussed books from 2000 through 2024 that I had not read. It's rather timely with the current (stupid) war with Iran.
This story begins in 1981, when Ellie (a nickname for Elaheh), an Iranian now living in New York City, gets a call from her old, estranged friend Homa. Then the novel goes back to 1951, when seven-year-old Ellie and her mother have to move after the death of Ellie's father from their nice home into the slums of Tehran. There, Ellie meets Homa, a girl about her age, and they become friends. But Ellie's mother later marries Ellie's father's brother, and they move back into a wealthy part of Tehran. Ellie forgets about Homa, until she shows up years later as a scholarship student in Ellie's elite high school.
The girls both get into the University of Tehran, where Homa plans to study law and become a judge, meanwhile becoming a communist activist, like her father (who'd been arrested). But naïve Ellie (studying English) shares too much information with the wrong person, and Homa winds up arrested too. During her six months in prison, she is raped and later has the baby, a girl named Bahar. A college friend, Abdul, marries Homa before the birth and claims Bahar as his own, but he is killed in the Cinema Rex fire in August 1978.
Meanwhile, Ellie has married a fellow student and they moved to New York City when he is offered a research position there, just before the Islamic Revolution breaks out. They are unable to have children, and Ellie works at a cosmetics counter in a department store. It's not long after this that Ellie gets the phone call. The book ends with an epilogue set in 2022.
This book reminded me a lot of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which was set in Afghanistan and takes place from 1973 through about 2003, primarily in Kabul. With that book, I found myself eagerly looking forward to finding out what happened next (there were some surprises). With this book, not so much, although I definitely admired Homa, the true shir-zan (Farsi for lion woman) of this story.
The Medicine Woman of Galveston by Amanda Skenandore
It's 1900, and Tucia (what an awful name), a female doctor who made a fatal mistake in the operating room during her residency and is unable to practice medicine, has lost her job in a corset factory. Needing to support her disabled son, she joins a traveling medicine show, as her medical degree provides its owner with some credibility. The show has interesting characters with their own backstories, a somewhat unrealistic romance (for the time period), and climaxes during the great 1900 hurricane in Galveston. There's a happy ending for Tucia and the likeable characters of the story (and the villain, the owner of the medicine show, gets his comeuppance).
I was disappointed because, despite the title, very little of the story takes place in Galveston, and I really didn't get a feel for the devastation of the storm. Also, I did not care for Tucia. First - what an awful name! Is it pronounced too-sha, kinda like tushy, or tuh-sha, or too-see-uh, or what? She suffers from trichotillomania (pulling hairs out from the roots when stressed), and her frequent panic attacks and descriptions of this trait became tiresome. It almost seemed like the author felt she had to give Tucia even more burdens (raped by the doctor who set her up for failure, a disabled son as a result, and then trichotillomania on top of all that).
Prickles and Prides by Wendy Barron, illustrated by Katherine Blackmore
Prickles and Prides is a rhyming picture book about collective nouns, specifically those used to describe groups of animals. Author Wendy Barron's text has her anthropomorphic animals taking actions that often create alliteration in her lines of poetry, such as,
A troop of chimps swings near a swarm of beesas a scurry of squirrels scamper from a pack of coyotes.
Katherine Blackmore's illustrations bring out the wordplay in the text. I especially liked the illustration for the line, "Who knew a company of moles loves to play in the dark," where the moles are dressed in Elizabethan outfits and appear to be acting in a Shakespeare play on a stage with a starry backdrop.
This book reminded me so much of Ruth Heller's A Cache of Jewels, another rhyming book on collective nouns (and not just those for animals), the first book in her World of Language series. Similarly, this is Barron's first book in her Tales of Fins, Wings, and Tails series, "which whimsically explores the sounds, movements, homes, and groups of various animals."
This book could easily be incorporated into lessons on vocabulary and parts of speech, as well as on animals. Even adults are bound to learn new words from this book - prickles (a group of porcupines - how fitting!) was a new one for me!
