Charles Graeber

Nonfiction 2018| 302 pages

No one on my blog list will likely read this book. For probably the first time in Dusty Shelves, I am including the title and subtitle: The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer.  While this book was recommended to me, I was disappointed to learn it was published in 2018 which means it was written about 2016, and so is nine years out of date.

Nevertheless, I learned a great deal about the history of immunotherapy.  How physicians first tried to infect other viruses, diseases, and bacteria into non-responsive cancer patients in the late 1880s to entice the body to supercharge its immune system and fight the non-self cells of cancer.  Though wildly unsuccessful, the germ of a good idea was inoculated (so to speak!)

I learned about T cells, B cells, and the all-important anti-CTLA-4 ipilimumab. Performance status, checkpoint inhibitors, pigs, mice, and TNF (tumor necrosis factor) were all concepts I learned.  The role of T cell research and application with AIDS patients is imperative.. All of these are important to and informative of today's medical oncology use of immunotherapy.

I rated this two hearts because it is likely a very obscure topic for most of you.  However, it is written with the lay person as its audience, making it readable and typically easy to understand.

June 2025

Any Weir

Fiction 2017/ 305 pages

Jazz Bashara was born in Saudi Arabia, but emigrated to the moon colony of Artemis with her father when she was six.  Intelligent, strong, opinionated, resourceful, intense, nuanced, naughty, and irreverent, (I like her!!) at 26, Jazz earns her meager wages mostly by smuggling for the rich on Artemis.  She is also an excellent welder, having been taught by her father, the best welder on Artemis.

It is interesting to learn how Artemis is setup (a good map is included in the book) with pods and domes and management of air, food, transportation, energy, laws.  It makes me think and wonder ... how would I design a city in a hostile geographic environment?

Jazz and her friends (she has quite a few) are fascinating to watch, and I find her character to be well developed and intriguing.  It is fun to watch the tourists come for a vacation and experience gravity at 1/6th of earth.

She becomes involved ... no, more, she takes the lead, in a major corporate criminal action designed to reallocate power and resources in Artemis. Is the civil disobedience worth it?  I don't know .  All's well that ends well!

My major objection is, like in The Martian, Weir gets too technical and too scientific for me.  In Artemis,  I did not understand anything that happened between pages 220 and 280, where Jazz is orchestrating her crime.  Someone geekier than me, more educated, or more intrigued by the workings of air systems and valves, rovers, chemicals, EVA's and welding may feel this is quite a great section!

I liked The Martian a bit better than Artemis.  Though in Artemis,  there is more context-setting, and more interaction with other parts of the system and other characters, The Martian gives us technical challenges spread throughout the book, and each is vastly different, part of what holds my interest.

In Artemis, there is but one significant technological challenge, and it all occurs in the above-mentioned pages.

I must recommend this with various grains of salt!

June 2025

Lewis Carroll

Fiction 1865| 101 pages, and

Fiction 1871| 126 pages

A few weeks ago, we went to the Central Oregon's School of Ballet performance of Alice in Wonderland.  It was so well done!  And the costumes are the best I have seen in a local performance.  Spectacular!  The director came out and spoke at intermission and admonished the children in the audience (of which there were many) now that they had seen the ballet, to read the books.  I thought it was a great idea!

There are memes I recall easily ... the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, and "one pill makes you larger and one makes you small and the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all."

So much I have long forgotten over these sixty years or so since I last read these books, about puppies and thistles and a Dodo; and cucumber frames, hookahs, gryphons and juries; Tweedledum and Tweedledee.  Carroll's writing is amazing!  So much great dialogue, and never-ending creativity, while we root for Alice whether she is having a delightful experience at this moment, or when things are not going so well.

I didn't like Through the Looking Glass nearly as well as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but the only copy I could get is an audiobook, and I am NOT a fan of audiobooks.  I just can't focus.  So take that comment with a grain of salt!

We went to a neighborhood gathering last night, and I mentioned I was reading these books when the conversation turned to "what have you been reading?"  One of my conversation partners said she taught these books to her 4th and 5th graders when she was a teacher.  She said there are significant political undertones and messages.  I decided I didn't want to know about those!

How great to reread these creative books.  I recommend doing this with many/any books we read decades ago!

June 2025

Patti Callahan Henry

Fiction 2025 | 352 pages

Another novel by Patti Callahan Henry with a book as a main character!  I am not certain if I enjoyed The Story She Left Behind more or less than The Secret Book of Flora Lea. (See my earlier book review). But Henry has a least one more novel of her 34 published books with a book in a central character role, The Bookshop at Water's End, and it is on its way to me.

Context: In The Story She Left Behind, we learn about Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, who was a child prodigy.  She writes a highly successful book, The Middle Place, at eight years old, and it is published when she is 12.  We pick up her story years later when a family crisis causes her to abandon her daughter Clara and her husband Timothy when Clara is an impressionable 8-year-old.  And then we move forward another 25 years, to Clara's adulthood.

Fast forward.  Clara is living with her own 8-year old daughter Winnie, in South Carolina.  (Yes, the author does seem a bit obsessed with eight-year-old girls).  She receives a phone call from Charlie, a man in England, unknown to her, who tells her he has found a satchel among his recently deceased father's belongings.  The worn satchel includes a sealed letter to Clara Harrington along with many pages relating to Bronwyn's sequel.  Somehow, this man has vital information about the second book, that her mother penned after The Middle Place.  The sequel is written in an invented language, which is absolutely intriguing and inspired me to create an invented word!

Clara and Winnie board a steamer for London (the year is 1952) and our story unfolds as we discover how these families in South Carolina and England, who never heard of each other, are inextricably intertwined.  All of this raises hope in Clara that her mother is still alive.

The story is delightful and filled with intrigue, visual acuity, love, loss, mystery, the power of story, the role of make-believe, and romance.  Interesting twists and occurrences happen, such as the Great Smog in London, which threatens Winnie's health and their safety.   And their discovery that The Middle Place has been turned into a play.

I highly recommend The Story She Left Behind.  It is an easy and delightful page turner.

May 2025

Michelle Zauner

Nonfiction Memoir 2022 / 239 pages

I call this a "tender" book. It is about a biracial Korean American young woman and her relationship with her mother, Chongmi.  Her relationship is beautiful ... even though mother and daughter do not share their values completely. Michelle's mother is much more focused on her daughter’s beauty than Michelle is herself, for example. And yes, there are conflicts and stress when she is a teenager, but what woman did not have a challenging time with her mother in those years?  This part of the story is bookended by a loving, tender and respectful relationship between mom and daughter.

Both when Michelle is little and when she comes home to Eugene Oregon at 25 and finds her mother has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she works hard to establish and keep a relationship with Chongmi.  This non-fiction story focuses shamelessly and without hesitation on the pain and sorrow of watching your mother deteriorate and die and tells us the gripping-ly honest story of her and her father's grief.  It is powerful in its honesty.

The thread of the book, however, is food.  Michelle and her mom relate through Korean food all their lives, as they search for authentic ingredients when living in Eugene, and Chongmi attempts to teach Michelle how to cook tasty Korean food, and they share an inordinate number of meals, both in Eugene, and during the summers they spend is Seoul.  There is considerable description of food, how it is prepared, what good, fresh ingredients are.  I did not truly understand a bit of this, as all the food they eat, I have never eaten!  Sheltered cuisine life, I guess!

I gave it three hearts because if what feels to me Iike filler.  Michelle writes a lot about her days in college, as a struggling musician, and as a new entrant into the workforce.  But these do not seem to matter much to the central theme of Chongmi’s death and Michelle’s subsequent loss.  But Ms. Zauner is telling her own story, and I suspect she believes these years impacted her latter years with her mom in a way I do not understand.

Crying in H-Mart is definitely worth a read, for the insight you may gain into both Korean-American culture and the intimate processes of death.

This book is one of the GoodReads books of the year, 2021.

May 2025

Charlotte Wood

Fiction 2023 / 293 pages

I am a fully-recovered Catholic.  Yet this book brings me back to some of the joyous moments of my youth as a Catholic, and 12 years of Catholic school.

During my time in my all-women high school, we had two or three retreats in the convent where the nuns lived.  It was a spacious, beautiful, modern building with lots of couches, chapels, prayer rooms, individual small bedrooms. And staying there was incredibly peaceful and meditative (and prayerful).

In my first year in college, my roommate and I took a class on Community, and we spent a weekend in the convent where the Franciscan nuns who taught at my grade school lived, for our class project.  Though older and more worn, the wooden building had an aura of peace about it and the nuns embraced us with love, gentleness, and tranquil calm.  I still recall there was a lot of laughter.

Stone Yard Devotional is an unusual book, making this a difficult review to write.   The narrator, whose name we never learn, abandons her life and work as an environmentalist in Sydney, and also leaves her failed marriage, to spend a few days on a very remote piece of land in a small convent, just outside the town where the narrator grew up.  She goes for the peace and quiet, and for the meditation (though the nuns call it prayer).  On her last visit, she simply never leaves.

She never becomes a nun and is not religious.  There’s no great conversion moment, no sense of redemption; it is just women getting on with things. This probably does not sound like the most spine-tingling premise for a book, and it is not.  There is no plot as such, but Charlotte Wood's prose is very thoughtful and spiritual.  She writes in a slow, contemplative pace.

No plot doesn't mean nothing happens. There is the return of the bones of a nun who used to live in this abbey and was murdered 30 years ago.  The bones are accompanied by another nun, whom the narrator went to school with. This other nun, Helen, is a loner who seeks the limelight, a woman who was psychologically damaged in her youth and cannot really relate to anyone.

And then there are the mice.

The mouse plague is horrendous, disgusting, turn-your-stomach-ill. Mice have taken control, both indoors and outdoors, multiplying overnight, every night, and eating their food, wiring, and furniture.  And dying and smelling.  These religious women have to figure out how to come to terms with the killing they must do.  Page 147:  "We wore latex gloves and surgical masks. A macabre job: the smell, the soft bodies tumbling by the shovel load. I closed my eyes as I pushed the shovel into the pile." Poking around to learn more about this book and the author, I discover that the mice represent the Covid 19 plague.  Yes, it all makes sense, while being repulsive.

Stone Yard Devotional an introspective meditation on guilt, the nature of forgiveness, prayer, being in community, unresolved grief, relationships, personal peace and presence, and how to live in the world.

I cannot give this book a whole-hearted endorsement.  You must be someone who is in the mood for something that is not compelling, but meditative.  Neither can I not recommend it.  I am glad I read it.  I have a sense of peace, having read Stone Yard Devotional.  As long as I don't see a mouse scurrying across my kitchen floor.

I am co-reading this with my friend Mary.  I look forward to hearing what she has to say.  (I know her from that same all-women Catholic high school, mentioned in my second paragraph).

May 2025

Colum McCann

Fiction 2009| 350 pages

The through-line in this novel is delightful! Periodically we see our focus ... a tightrope walker who strings a cable between the top floors of the Twin Towers (back when they still stood) and walks, dances, and hops back and forth between the buildings.  (A true story from August 7, 1974).  Sadly, this delightful story is only about 50 pages of the book.

The rest of the novel is about various people who watch him, or hear about him, or know someone who was watching him.  I have no problem with this format. It is clear who the people are, and McCann does a good job of bringing them together, with characters and relatives of characters appearing and reappearing in a variety of vignettes.  And his writing is superb; beautiful in fact.

So, why is this a two-heart book?  What I really dislike about this book is the content itself. Nearly all of the vignettes are depressing and include violence and sometimes death.  All of them are connected in some way to sex workers, which in and of itself is not depressing, however, he represents the poorest of the poor, the addicted, the depressed, the sad, the downtrodden people and buildings in NYC.  The novel is gritty, challenging, and often desperate.  Too much grit for me right now.

This is our book club book for this month, so I reserve the right to change/shift my mind after our discussion!  In the meantime, I suggest you look elsewhere.

May 2025

Patti Callahan Henry

Fiction 2023 | 350 pages

"Not very long ago and not very far away, there was and still is an invisible place right here with us."

On the last day, in the last hour, of her 15-year job at Hogan's Rare Book Shoppe in Bloomsbury, England, Hazel Linden opens a package that was mailed to the store, and in it she finds a first edition and original illustrations of a book that takes her breath away and is about to change her life.  The title: Whisperwood and the River of Stars by Peggy Andrews (whoever she is!) The Secret Book of Flora Lea is, in some way, reminiscent of The Echo of Old Books (see Dusty Shelves, September 2024).

Hazel knows the quote above, and all about Whisperwood, because it is her story, from her imagination shared only with her sister Flora.  She started each tale about Whipserwood with these words, and Henry starts this book with the same words.

Hazel (14) and Flora (6) were "vaccies."  They were sent away to a temporary home that was far away from London to keep them safe from dropping bombs in 1939.  They were fortunate; they ended up in a home with a mom who loved them, and a “brother” named Harry.  Their real mom visited them often, and they stayed safe from much devastation and death in London.

But one day her little sister Flora disappears and isn’t seen again.  The police think she drowned in the river, but her body is never found.  The time in this book travels between 1939 and 1960.  So we see Hazel and Flora during the war, and we see Hazel (the main character) in 1960, having found this book that tells the story that she made up and no one knows about except Flora.

So, of course, the essential question is, “Is Flora sill alive?  Did she write this book?”  And that’s what we witness as we read this tale, which the author calls historical fiction because of the truth around the evacuees and children who become lost.  We witness her search for the answers, while we experience the love she still holds for her younger sister.

I LOVED this book! The story; the development of Hazel as a character; the intrigue in finding the answer to “Is Flora dead?”; as well as excellent and engaging writing all combine to make it a page turner.  I may suggest it for book club next year.

I absolutely recommend reading The Secret Book of Flora Lea.  The author has written 20 books.  I just requested her last book, which has only been out six weeks, at the library, If you have read any of her straight fiction or her historical fiction, please let us know in the comments section!

May 2025

Ellen Raskin

Fiction 1978| 182 pages

Sixteen people are invited to live in an apartment building north of Chicago.  One of them allegedly murders the owner of the building.  The owner’s will invites them all into a game, with clues, because he knows who is going to kill him.  Whoever discovers the murderer inherits his $200,000,000 estate.

I read some five-star reviews so I could understand why anyone LIKED this book!  Adults are writing reviews, so much of it was nostalgia for their youth, and it brought back memories.   I thought it was one of the poorest written books I have ever read, even trying to accommodate for the YA audience.  Too many characters, all of them stereotypes, cliche and shallow. Each character was just glossed over, and even though they were described in a basic way, there was nothing to really draw me in or make me care about them.  Everyone, including me, loved Turtle, however.  She was the only character with any development; she is the exception.  She is 13 years old for most of the book.  In the end, she acts as the lawyer who tries the alleged murder case. I can see why a young reader might remember Turtle well into adulthood.

Not an uninteresting plot, but I thought the search for the culprit was more interesting than the conclusion.  I did not have difficulty reading it, just thought it wasn’t any good.

My friend Mary and I read this book together.  It is one from the Goodread’s 100 books list (one for each of the last 100 years).  Some of Mary’s words are in this review.  Neither one of us will be recommending this book to you or anyone else!

April 2025

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Fiction 2019 | 402 pages

I was intrigued to read how the enslaved Black man Hiram Walker refers to the land-owners as "Quality."   Slaves are "Tasked."   "Low" refers to low-class whites. Those sent down to be sold are “gone Natchez-way.”  The novel explores the dehumanizing effects of slavery, focusing on the emotional and psychological toll it takes on individuals and communities.

We begin when Hiram is still a child and follow him into adulthood.  He is so brilliant, so real, so aware and conscientious, that he is brought to his white enslaver's home, the home of Howell Walker, to care for the house and his idiot of a son Maynard, through his white wife.  Though both Hiram and Maynard are sons of Howell, Hiram is the son of one of Howell's slaves, Rose.

In The Water Dancer‘s opening pages, Rose returns ... this time as a phantasy figure on a stone bridge, her hips dipping and swaying to invisible music, an earthen jug “fixed on her head like a crown.” Hiram has no memory of her or the day she was taken away ... which pains him ... but does see her magic.  Hiram has two supernatural powers. He has a literal perfect memory, and he has the gift of Black magical realism, a supernatural gift of travel through space and time, which allows him to remember the past and alter the present.

It is easy to get lost in Coates' lush language.  The story pulls you in and along.  As Hiram runs from the Walker home, he encounters many trials but is ultimately connected with the Underground.  For all I thought I knew about the Underground, The Water Dancer taught me so much more.  I have greater perspective and knowledge about how the Underground extensively planned for those they helped transition from slave to free man.  A slave did not just run to a certain place and wave a flag and be transported.

Hiram Walker is recruited into the Underground and uses his powerful memory and begins to understand how to harness his other, more mystical, powers and put them to good use. And that good use involves escaping from slavery and helping others, through challenge and triumph, to do so as well.

Coates’ characters are rich and deep.  I particularly like that he can write female and male characters with equal insight.  There are many powerful women in this book, including some who are buried deep in slave-owner families who, following their truth and heart, are invisible abolitionists.  Some reviewers were put off by the magical realism.  I was not.  It added a layer to this story that would have rendered it incomplete if it was left out.

This is not an easy read, nor a quick one, but it is a novel that will stay with you, and make you think, and I do surely recommend it.

April 2025