Thomas Kohnstamm

Fiction 2025 | 388 pages

My local library has a wonderful program called A Novel Idea.  Each year since 2004 the library has chosen a book for us to read as a community.  The author comes to speak, and there are workshops that highlight salient aspects of the book.  It's the largest community reading event in Oregon.  I have enjoyed every single book, some more than others, over the last 20 plus years.

Until this one, that is.

How did a team of very well-meaning readers choose this book?  Clearly they were remiss in rejecting me when I applied to be a member of the reading team.  At that time, hey were looking for a young Hispanic person who lives in a small rural town in the county. Three strikes against me!

Anyway, the book is a series of stories, almost vignettes really.  We had 1897, in which we learned about the Duwamish tribe who occupied the land that later became Seattle.  This was the most interesting sub-plot.  Unfortunately,  it was also the shortest, only about 15-20 pages.  

There was 1971, probably our most complex subplot, which consists of Ruth and her mother Masako, and Ruth's love interest Larry, who works on the supersonic jet in development that inspires the title.

Finally, there is 2014 where we see Sami trying to save her local elementary school, along with the grudging help of her sister-in-law and the bumbling antics of druggie Loose Bruce.

About 75% of the characters are somewhere between despicable and unlikeable.  And they all seem to be mere caricatures and stereotypes of themselves.  The wealthy and ostentatious sister-in-law with cooks and cleaners and paid staff.  The drug-addled former hippie who can't get it together to open a cannabis business or make copies at a copy machine.  The underdeveloped immature low-self-confident woman who still lives with her mother at 25 and allows her mother to control the hours she keeps, the people she sees, the clothes she wears, the music she listens to, and her education. 

If this were not a community read, I would not have made it through.  It is disjointed, not well written, at times confusing.  What was the library thinking? I was glad to close the back cover. 

April 2026

Amity Gaige

Fiction 2020 | 267 pages

So many of my posts lately speak to shallow, underdeveloped characters.  Well, Sea Wife redeems them all!  Our main characters, Juliet and Michael,  are nuanced, rich, deep, intriguing, surprising.

How has Sea Wife gone unnoticed? I had not heard of it before my friend and colleague recommended this fine book to me.  Thank you, Sigal!   This book is a real gem, and Amity Gaige is a superb writer.

Michael convinces Juliet to go sailing for a year with their children, seven-year-old Sybil and George, just two-and-a-half.  It was Michael's dream, and Juliet was a hesitant partner in this journey.  We learn of their travels and relationships through both their voices.  Juliet writes after the trip is complete, recalling the many adventures and challenges in the current day, and we learn Michael's perspective from the log he kept while captaining the "Juliet" in the Caribbean. Yes, Michael named the 42-foot sailboat "Juliet" after his wife.

Juliet is clinically depressed.  This, of course, colors everything.  She is great mom, creative and playful, but not very self-confident, especially around sailing.  She is a poet, who has become stuck in her dissertation.  Her marriage is important and she deeply loves Michael and her children.   Michael tries hard to navigate the ups and downs of living with a depressed person.  He can be incredibly sensitive one moment and blind the next; loving but sometimes angry; introspective and also extroverted.  He asks Juliet many insightful questions, trying to keep the marriage and the boat afloat.  He is a great dad.  He is smart, adventurous, tender.  Both of these people are REAL, with depth and strengths and weaknesses.  

Even the children, Bosun Sybil and the Doodle George, have strong and unique personalities.  It is engaging to watch Sybil navigate living on a boat, home-schooled, creating ways to play and laugh and learn, serving as a foil for her sometimes arguing parents.  And by the end of the book, George still does not know how to talk, to the chagrin of his big sister.

I strongly recommend delightful Sea Wife. It is a story vividly told.

April 2026

Nikki Erlick |  Fiction

2022, 352 pages

One day in March a small box appears on the doorstep of every living adult in the world, age 22 and up.  On the outside, there is an explanation. Each box is inscribed with the message “The measure of your life lies within”.  Inside the box is a string that tells the recipient how long they will live ... from just a few minutes to 70 or 80 years from now. Every character in this book must decide whether they open the box and look at the string; and then, who they tell or don't tell about their string.  The author also explores the private reactions to their string after they look, if they look.

A very interesting premise!  Too bad it is hindered greatly by lousy writing.  I read many reviews before I closed this book up on page 128.  It seems people either love this book, or dislike it immensely, if they could finish it.   But every single reviewer found the premise to be very clever.   One reviewer suggested the author sell the premise to another writer and see where they take it!   The idea is great; the execution was fumbled.

We spend time with about seven characters.  Unfortunately, the characters are carbon copies of one another.  They all live in New York and are about the same age, 30s and 40s. . The characters are shallow, and decidedly not unique. I only see their top layer.  This makes them pretty uninteresting.  I would have liked to also follow a 22-year-old in Dubai and a 75-year-old in Paris or a Black man in Soweto.  For once, this debut is not a great first novel.

I was too bored to finish it. I do not recommend The Measure.  (Sorry, dear friend Leslie.  Thank you for the recommendation anyway!)

March 2026

Virginia Evans

Fiction 2025 | 284pages

"I believe one ought to be precious with communication."  Sybil, page 123

Sybil Van Antwerp is a writer.  Not an author,  but a writer of letters.  She has thousands of letters that she has received over the years (we follow her life from age 73 to 79) and has written even more.  She writes to family members, to professional acquaintances, and, interestingly, to authors of books she has read, creating a literary subplot.

At the beginning of The Correspondent, I made a list of who Sybil was writing to, thinking the number of characters would be confusing. But it wasn't at all.  Not only does each letter end with the name of the writer,  but Evans does an excellent job of making the correspondent's voices unique in this, her first, and excellent, fiction book.

I appreciated how Sybil writes challenging letters as well as loving ones.  She writes to people she is close to, like her friend Rosalie (they close every letter with the title of the book each is reading), and to people who threaten her, like DZ, a former client from her days working in law. She writes to her ex-husband and her children, becomes an important figure in the life of a teenage boy, and manages to have two romances as a septuagenarian.

I enjoyed The Correspondent a great deal.  I thought it would be an interesting way to write one's memoir,  as a series of letters.  I surely recommend it ... it took only a weekend to read.  I look forward to your comments on this blog post because it seems almost everyone I know has read this book, is reading it, or is waiting in a long line at the library for it to become available.

I think my opening quote from Sybil tells us a great deal about who she is and what is imperative in this book.  You might have to read it twice ... she doesn't say "precise," she says "precious."  It is still causing me to ponder as I type this post.

March 2026

Anna Johnston

Fiction 2024 | 327 pages

If you can get past the incredulous premise of the opening pages of the book, you will find a sweet, delightful and insightful novel about people's relationships, life in a nursing home, dementia, families, grief, and joy.  Above all, joy.

So here is the context.  Impoverished Fred Fife is at a neighborhood park on the day he is ousted out of his apartment for failure to pay his rent.  He sees a man in a wheelchair who appears dead.  He investigates and discovers the man is in fact dead.  As he attempts to wheel him over to the group of people Fred assumes this guy is with … an outing from the Wattle River Retirement home ...  Fred trips, hits his head, and the man, Bernard Greer, falls out of the wheelchair and into the river.  Fred watches with his mouth agape as Bernard’s body floats downstream.

One of the caregivers arrives and sees Fred sitting aside the wheelchair.  She helps him back in.  Turns out Bernard and Fred look so much alike, it never occurs to anyone that the man in the wheelchair is not Bernard.  Fred tries to tell the caregivers over and over that he is not the man who was in the wheelchair, but Bernard's dementia has developed so far that no one believes him.  They all assume Bernard is off again on one of his delusional stories.  Next thing Fred knows, he wakes up in Bernard's bed in the retirement home.

Johnston manages to write this whole story as a comedy of errors, seeming to laugh at herself as well as her characters.

Fred is now ensconced in the retirement home, wracked with guilt for living on someone else's dime and trying his best to tell the truth, but he is never successful.  There are some changes in "Bernard."  Not only does his dementia seem to be gone, but so is his incontinence.  And his personality has changed radically from a grump to the kindest, most compassionate, and loving man.  The caregivers scratch their heads but never doubt his veracity.

From there Fred/Bernard's story unfolds as he makes friends, continues to grieve the death of his wife Dawn, and then discovers that Bernard has an estranged daughter, Hannah.  But you will learn more about his evolving life when you read The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife.

I recommend this easy and enjoyable debut novel and wonder what Anna Johnston will write next from her home in Melbourne, Australia.

March 2026

Dan Brown

Fiction 2025 | 704 pages

"What if I told you ... that I could fit all the information in the world into a container the size of a deck of playing cards?" ... Katherine held up her cell phone ... "It's all in here.  What do you want to know?" 

"Clever,"  Faukman said, smiling.  "But that information is not contained inside the phone.  The phone is accessing data contained in countless data banks worldwide."  

"Exactly," she said ... "It's the identical concept" ...  "The brain is accessing data from elsewhere ... Your brain is just a receiver -- an unimaginably complex, superbly advanced receiver -- that chooses which specific channel it wants to receive from the existing cloud of global consciousness.  Just like a Wi-Fi signal, global consciousness is always hovering there, fully intact, whether or not you access it."

(Chapter 56)

(The above quote is when the concept of "noetics" really landed for me while reading this book.)

The Secret of Secrets (2025) is the sixth novel in the Robert Langdon series written by best-selling American author Dan Brown. The novel follows Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and his longtime friend and love interest,  Katherine Solomon, as they fight against a plot to sabotage the publication of Solomon’s newest book about the nature of human consciousness.

I really enjoyed this long book.  It is complex and nuanced.  Dan Brown is such a good writer!  Secret of Secrets opens with Katherine delivering a lecture in Prague, accompanied by Robert.  I have never been to Prague, and Dan Brown's descriptions are so vivid I felt immersed in the city.  I could "see" it.  

I perceive two parallel themes in this journey.  First is the mystery ... why were all copies of Elizabeth's yet-to-be-published book destroyed?  Who cares, and why do they care so much? There is considerable intrigue, travel in Prague, some murder, rich discoveries, people not being who they seem to be.  The process and flow of this mystery book is compelling and engaging.

The second interwoven theme is about the context of the book, which is, in a word, noetics.  "no•et•ic: From the Greek noēsis/ noētikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, intuition, or implicit understanding."  As the book expands and moves forward from Katherine's lecture, we learn more and more about noetics, science, the brain, spirituality , intuition, paranormal phenomenon, near-death experiences, epilepsy, and more, from conversations with Elizabeth. The content of this book is jaw-dropping, interesting, and educational.

There are also social themes about the limits of technology, the ethics of national security, and the values of a culture.    Lots of symbology, which is not a surprise from Dan Brown.  Do you really know what a halo is and why it exists and what it may represent?  And are the rays pointing out?  Or in?  Hmmm.

I really enjoyed Secret of Secrets, and it comes with my full recommendation.  Please post here after you have read it.

March 2026

Sanaka Hiiragi

Fiction 2019 | 199 pages

This is another delightful book given to us by our former book club Pam, written by a Japanese author and translated into English.

Mr. Hiraaka holds the position of the keeper of the door to the afterlife.  People who die wake up on his couch, where the after-life FedEx person delivers a box of photographs to Mr. Hirasaka.  People die and enter his chambers.  They must choose one photograph for each year they were alive, and then he puts them on a lantern, and they see their entire life on display.  They can travel back unseen to one of the days of their life and take another photograph.  Once they have see their entire life, they can enter the afterlife and move on to heaven or wherever.

He shepherds three people through this process.  The first is Hatsue, who is 92 and has spent her life being a nursery school teacher.  Then we meet Wanigichi, a criminal who also has compassion.  Finally, we encounter Mitsuru, a nine-year old little girl who dies at the hands of her abusive parents.

Charming, whimsical, easy to read, uplifting, this is a fine short read.  I recommend it completely!

February 2026

Ian McEwan

Fiction 2025 | 303 pages

The year is 2119.  Tom Metcalfe is searching for a poem written in 2014 by the famous Francis Blundy.  There exists only one copy of the corona poem, a birthday gift and tribute to his wife Vivien.  At a small birthday party in which Francis reads the poem to Vivien, she takes the one copy, rolls it up ... and does what with it?  Our protagonist, perhaps an important historian, perhaps just someone who is obsessed, is searching for it.  He studies journals and e-mails of Vivien, Francis, and their friends, especially those who attend the “Second Immortal Dinner,” during which Francis reads his corona for Vivien.

Slow and a bit boring, I decide to stay with this slightly dystopian novel.  I was disappointed that McEwan didn’t insert more visceral descriptions of the decline of the human race.  It is the background, the context, but not very vivid.  However, there is something about it that speaks to me.  It promises a surprise.  Not to mention the irony that I am at a writing workshop and we are learning to craft poetry.  Much has happened in the period Tom studies, 1990-2030. We pay no real attention to profound climate change, tension between countries, nuclear capability, authoritarianism,  and the decline of civilization.  An apt read for these current days.  And the results in this novel are a crisis of dystopian proportions.

And then, just over half way, we meet Part Two. Part Two is an entirely different book.  No more bouncing back and forth between 2119 and 2014.  We are now firmly ensconced in 2014, and we are about to hear Vivien’s story of what really happened with her first husband Percy and her second husband Francis.

Suddenly it is a page turner.  I am balancing this book in the midst of a travel crisis.  Our flight from Cabo (where I had just spent eight days in a writing workshop in Todos Santos) was cancelled.  Abruptly, all of us on flight 2423 are catapulted into the arms of dazed Alaska Airline employees who are befuddled, confused, and anxious.  “What do we do with these hordes of people who need to collect their luggage (because we are still in Mexico and have not yet cleared customs) and every single one of them are seeking new flights?”  They shepherd us quite well I think.  My companion Leslie calls Alaska while we are standing in some line.  (Good thing I checked with my phone carrier before I left to make sure I could make phone calls in Mexico.  Um, not.) She discovers that they rebooked her on a flight the next day.  Then she asks about me, and discovers I am booked on a flight through Seattle in 58 minutes.  I quickly say goodbye to Leslie, run up the escalator with my luggage, cut into line, and deposit my bag again for its trip to Redmond after convincing the agent that I really DID have a seat on the “completely full” flight.  I run to the gate and board, only to find that it seems I am sharing seat 3A with another woman.  All that sorted out, I eagerly open my page turner to finish that last 80 pages.

Though you may struggle a bit with the first half (or maybe not) it is worth sticking with What We Can Know.   But Part Two clearly engages my literary senses.  I recommend it.

The is a book to be read later in the year by the book club of the very same Leslie and my other friend René.  Thank you for the suggestion.

p.s.  A corona (or "crown of sonnets") is a demanding poetic form comprising seven linked sonnets of 14 lines each that explore a single theme.  The final line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next sonnet, and the final line of the last sonnet repeats the opening line of the first, creating a continuous circular structure.

February 2026