Isabel Cañas

Historical Novel 2023 | 384 pages

As the novel opens, Nena and Nestor are 13 the best of friends.  Nena is the daughter of the owner of a Rancho; Nestor a Vaquero ... a class difference that is insurmountable in 1837 Mexico, where family and caste and economic/social status are firmly established.  One summer night, Nena and Nestor meet to search for buried silver, and a beast attacks Nena.  The beast emits a venom into her neck, which makes her appear, by all counts, dead.  After Nestor carries her back to her home, her Mama, Papa, and Abuela declare her dead.  Nestor bolts out the door in grief, shame, and fear, knowing that Nena's family blames him for her death.

And then, it is nine years later, 1846, and the Mexican-American War is ramping up.  All the Vaqueros as well as the higher-class men are called upon to fight the Yanquis and defend their Mexican lands.  Nestor returns to the Rancho where Nena lives and discovers she never died.

The story is a love story, and, of course a battle between the classes.  It is also a story of the Mexican-American war which occurred for just under two years in 1846 -1848.  I knew little about the Mexican-American war, and now I don't know much more, but it was fascinating to learn about the war, especially through the eyes of Mexicans.  Mexico ceded what is now California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and parts of other states.  A devastating loss for our country to the south.

But what about the vampires, you ask!  We meet our first vampire that we actually know is a vampire about halfway through the book.  But they are not presented as they are in the Twilight series.  They are not handsome young men who want to bite your neck.  They are ugly beasts who roam the lands in search of their unique food.  They are harnessed by the Yanquis to attack Mexicans.  They are supernatural, unearthly creatures who are key characters in the stories told of Mexican lore.

I enjoyed this rather unusual gothic historical romance novel.  Thank you to my friend Kathleen who thought I would like it.  I did.  The one major fault?  Perhaps more than any other book I have read, this book needs a map.  I googled in search of a map of the two countries at the time of the war, but they only gave me a sense of the large lands that were in the dispute.  I need a map that shows me, in Spanish, the towns, villages, rivers, borders, battlegrounds, and ranches.

Yes, I recommend Vampires of El Norte.

March 2025

Sophie Stava

Novel 2025 | 326 pages

Sloane, a nail tech, meets four-year-old Harper and her dad Jay at the local park, when Harper steps on a bee.  Immediately, two lies pop out of her mouth ... that her name is Caitlin and that she is a nurse.  Conveniently, the nail techs in her spa wear scrubs.  Sloane is a pathological liar.  Disappointed to learn that handsome Jay is married and not a single dad, Sloane meets his wife Violet and begins to interact with the family.  Soon, she becomes Harper's nanny (it is true that she was a nanny in the past.). It is difficult to watch her obsession with Violet grow.  She buys the same hat that Violet wears, colors her hair the same color, and attempts to cut her hair in the same manner (a disaster which Violet's hairdresser must rectify).  She has low self-esteem and creates her life by mimicking the occasional "friend" she seems to acquire.

Sloane/Caitlin is clearly not emotionally healthy.  She is pathological, shallow, vapid, empty.  I wonder why am reading about this uninspiring character.  And yet, I keep turning the pages eagerly.  There is something about the writing and about the inconceivable story line that keeps me quite engaged.

And then, at the halfway mark, a new section in the book is introduced, entitled "Violet."  And, wow!  Who is the better pathological liar, Sloane/Caitlin or Violet?  Everything gets turned, quite literally, upside down and backward. Violet's plan is complex, amazing, brilliant.  But it doesn't turn out the way she expects.  Somehow, it turns out even better!

If you are a bit unsure while reading the first half of this book, as I was, stick with it. Yet another astounding debut novel!  Can Sophie Stava keep this up?  Will she write another suspense novel?  I will keep my eyes open and be the first to order it from the library!

Yes, have fun with this recommended read!

March 2025

Sophie Stava

Novel 2025 | 326 pages

A GUEST BLOG POST BY BRIAN GOMEZ!

A great read! Sloane is a woman with low self-esteem. Her lies get her into trouble, and not for the first time she finds she must start over. Then she finds a true friend in Violet, a wealthy woman in need of a nanny for her preschool child, Harper. But Violet is not all that she seems and the story marches excruciatingly toward tragedy, but for whom?

March 2025

Tommy Orange

Fiction 2025 | 336 pages

Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange's follow-up novel to There, There, which I loved.  What a vast disappointment Wandering Stars is.   This novel follows two sequential timelines: what happens after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the aftermath of a shooting at a powwow in 2018.

There is no plot.  The only theme I find is drug addiction, and repeated failure with sobriety, rejuvenation, and recovery. This goes on for seven generations of this Native family (except we miss some generations, given the 100+ year gap in the story line).  The drugs they use include laudanum, morphine, opiates, dust, opium, alcohol, morphine, hydromorphone, ketamine, MDMA (ecstasy), fentanyl, and a drug created by one character’s father, Blanx. I found the writing to be very jumpy. He intersperses present tense and past tense and has numerous confusing sentences.  He uses first person, third person, and even has a very odd section of second person writing.

At page 201, I decided to skim, so I could give it two hearts instead of one.  In part this was because the girls and young women of the first story line were quite interesting, but the boys and young men of the present-day timeline were boring.  And in part it was because I was just very tired of reading about addiction, though I did learn a bit about Native culture, norms, values, challenges, communication, loyalty, and familial relationships.

I have no right to this opinion, but my blog is not public and only read by my friends and acquaintances, so I will venture to express my viewpoint. It seems to me Tommy Orange has sadly done a big disservice to Native populations, portraying them as drug-addicted, generation after generation, in Wandering Stars.

I do not recommend this book.

March 2025

Anthony Marra  |  Fiction

2022, 416 pages

The story is about a young woman who emigrates from Italy to the US and, in 1941, is hired at Mercury Pictures.  It sounded interesting!  But I did not survive.

The average reading level of best-selling books, across genres, is 7th-grade.  While many novels (especially) are dumbed down to this level for a more general audience, and that irritates me, I guess I am also displeased when an author uses ridiculously flowery language to express a scene or event.  Here are three examples, looking only at pages 40, 41, and 42.

"Every family is a palimpsest and most days, in the kitchen, Mimi felt herself the half-effaced hardly legible text overwritten by the energetic bluster of her successors." (Pg 40). Even rereading this sentence multiple times, I still don't know what it says.

"It looked like the royal treasury of Atlantis had been dredged from the deep, given a fresh varnish, and relocated to downtown's gray-beige busyness."  (Pg 41). The royal treasury?

"Once she wandered into a speakeasy gents room and beheld in the wall-scrawled vulgarities the sense of expressive possibility Monet must have felt when he saw his first waterlily."  (Pg 42). Would one really actually sense this amidst the vulgarities?

One reviewer said it gets better at page 80.  Another reviewer argued for page 200.  Defying the "Pearl Rule of 50," I made it to page 100.  I am just not enjoying myself.

Did you read and like Mercury Pictures Presents?

March 2025

Nikki May

Novel 2024 | 340 pages

Lizzie and Margot are sisters, raised in England. Lizzie meets a Black man from Nigeria, marries him, moves to Nigeria, and her family disowns her.  Later, both become mothers.  Margot is cold, distant, mean, and greedy.  Lizzie is warm and loving.

But this book is not about Margot and Lizzie.  It is about their daughters Liv (Olivia) and Funke (Katherine/Kate).  Lizzie, along with her son Femi and her daughter Funke are in a horrific car accident near their home in Nigeria.  Only Funke survives. In his immeasurable grief, as well as his anger with Funke for living when his wife and son are dead, Funke's father sends her to England to live with her Aunt Margot.  Liv and Funke meet for the first time, at about ten years old.

Liv takes Funke under her wing.  It is a challenging adjustment for Funke, where her skin doesn't match the rest of the family nor her school or neighborhood. The girls transcend vast differences in culture, food, values, even morals, to become fast friends. We delight in their discoveries, shenanigans, coming of age together.

Until one night, a few years later, they go out to a bar together and everything turns topsy-turvy and inside out.  Again Funke (now called Kate) is shipped back to her other country (Nigeria) through no volition of her own.  And we follow them both into adulthood.

I liked this book.  I liked Liv and Funke.  It wasn't a page-turner for me, but I recommend This Motherless Land as a readable tale about the challenges of growing up in a cultural divide, and about the unbreakable love between two cousins, despite what the world throws at them.

March 2025

Amanda Peters

Fiction 2023 | 302 pages

I found The Berry Pickers to be sad and rather boring.  There are two primary characters ... and their chapters are interspersed.  One fact that makes these characters interesting is that they are First Nation people, members of the Mi’kmaq tribe, though one of them does not know this.  Their homes are originally in Nova Scotia and when young, travel to Maine each summer to pick berries and earn a living.

Joe is dying and has held on for all his life to two tragedies that happened when he was a child, the kidnapping of his little sister Ruthie, and the beating death of his brother Charlie.  Joe is a sad, unredeemed man, who becomes violent and distant.

Norma is plagued by bad dreams and always has a sense that something is amiss in her family, where she is an only child of an overprotective mother and distant father, both actually decent parents.

By the third chapter in, you know the denouement.  This may sound like a spoiler, but it is quite obvious that Norma is actually the abducted little sister of Joe, Ruthie.

I found the characters rather shallow and cliche-ish, and I didn't much like either one.

But the sweet tenderness of the ending almost made it all worthwhile.

Suggested by KK.

February 2025

John Boyne

Novel 2017 | 580 pages

I am struggling a bit to write this review.  I guess it is because this book is more of an epic than a novel.  It is large and deep and bold.  Thank you, Pam, for recommending this book.

Cyril's mom is 16 and pregnant when she is thrown out of her parish and her small Irish town by her Catholic priest in 1945.  She gets on a bus to Dublin and begins her adult life too soon and with no support.  She gives birth, then turns her baby boy over to a nun, who takes him to a couple that (allegedly) want a child, Charles and Maude Avery, when he is but a day or two old.  His adoptive parents, a cold and distant mother, and a cruel and dishonest father, drill into his head that he is NOT an Avery, and should never think of himself as one, and that he is NOT their biological child, and that he should never refer to them as anything but his "adoptive" parents.

Thus begins the life of Cyril, our main character in The Heart's Invisible Furies.

Cyril's story is told in eleven parts, each seven years apart.  This structure provides interesting gaps ... there is enough time for things to happen in-between each part, but not so much that you lose the thread.

Cyril comes to learn that he is a gay man, trying to find his place in the world, in a time when Catholic Ireland believed gay people were reprehensible, immoral, filthy, inferior species of humans.  It was a very challenging time to learn anything about the normalcy of being gay, much less to be loved or admired or respected.  But Cyril eventually understands his own humanity and fights away his shame.  But that takes many years.  Meanwhile, he falls in love with his best friend Julian, who is a vigorous womanizer.

Eventually, he comes into his own and finds a real relationship with Bastian, always battling the social morays of his time.  He finds a job, makes friends, is happy, though life keeps pitching curve balls to him.  As a reader of his life, we are privileged to follow him from the hiding and pain of his youth, to a loving, generous man who is comfortable in his own skin. His character, as written by Boyne, is astounding.  We come to know Cyril extremely well.  We live in his mind and heart.  We cheer him on and wish him peace, clarity, and authenticity.

In the end, one important piece of his life comes to closure.  I won't tell you how; that would be a major spoiler.

During the years he is 14 and 21 and 28, there is a lot of sex!  I am no prude, and even enjoy reading about sex ... I just want you to know, there is a lot of it! But as he matures, of course, his hormones and Julian's calm down, and we see the more well-rounded men they have become.

I really enjoyed this book. I think it will stay with me a while.  I certainly recommend it.  If you have read another John Boyle, please let me know in the comments section.  I think I would like to read another by this fabulous author, but don't know which one to choose.

February 2025

Percival Everett

Novel 2024 | 303 pages

An astounding book from the prolific Percival Everett, you will find this tale about "Nigger Jim" captivating.  It is the story of Huck Finn and the slave Jim (who renames himself "James") from Jim's perspective.  Where he went when he and Huck were separated; what feelings he had; how he thought;  how he learned to run; how he concealed his proclivity with English as well as his ability to write and to read.

From The Guardian:

And whereas the Jim of Huckleberry Finn is ignorant and superstitious in ways that are played for comedy, James is a thoughtful bibliophile who debates in his dreams with Voltaire and John Locke and harbours an ambition to write his own story one day.

As in the original novel, James and Huck take flight together on to the Mississippi: Huck running from his abusive father, James because he’s going to be sold. Many of the same key incidents occur. In Huckleberry Finn, there are various sections when Jim and Huck become separated. Now we learn where James has been in these interludes.

I fell in love with Jim.  His character is fully developed, and he has a pure heart and soul.  I gained a new and deeper understanding for the hardships of trying to run away from slavery, at the start of the Civil War.  James is incredibly well-written, and I completed it in under 48 hours.  The interactions Jim has with others, and with nature, will hold your interest.  But most compelling are Jim's inner workings.

I fully and heartily recommend that you read James.  I know it is very popular this year and is difficult to get, and you may have a long wait at your library, but it is well worth the wait.  In the meantime, I would suggest you do something I did not do ... reread Huckleberry Finn before your copy of James arrives.  That will ground you further in the narrative.

February 2025

Elizabeth Strout

Fiction 2024 / 326 pages

I saw this cool graphic on the Oprah website, identifying the number of characters in Elizabeth Strout books.  The highest number of characters is in Tell Me Everything.  Twenty-three characters.  Be prepared!  The descriptions about the book tell us it is about "unrecorded lives."  This is an apt description. It is a panoply of stories from people living in Crosby Maine.  And the stories are interesting, even though these are everyday people.  But/and I have an image of a peg board.  The stories are hung on the peg board like a bunch of tools, or more accurately, pieces of fabric.   Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they stand on their own.

Except of course for our main story ... the life of Bob Burgess.  Bob is the 65-year-old defense attorney who is trying to find out how Delores Beach, also known by the unattractive name of "Bitch Ball" came to be found dead.  Bob, who is married to Margaret, also has a burgeoning relationship with Lucy, who is living with her ex-husband William.  Bob and Lucy meet once a week for a talk and a walk, and I frankly grew real tired of how Strout, at the end of each of these meetings, talks about how Bob feels seen and listened to by Lucy.  The author kind of drives this point into the ground.  Clearly Bob is falling in love with Lucy.

And, of all the "unrecorded lives" in this book, Bob's life is the centerpiece.  It is his mind and heart we come to know, not only as he defends Matt, Delores Beach's son, but his he brings Matt back to life, how he copes with his brother’s wife Helen dying, how he helps his brother heal his relationships with his children, his strong intuition, his ability to care for and about other people’s children (though he has none of his own), his support and forgiveness for his alcoholic ex-wife Pam  … and on and on.  His character is somewhat implausible.  Everyone loves him, he is a helper with a big heart.

So, do I recommend this book?  It is fun, pleasant, rewarding.  A little too saccharin for me, but it might keep you warm on a winter’s weekend.

February 2025