Tag Archives: books

June 29, 2026 · 3:37 pm

Flashlight: And I thought I had family drama

It took me nine weeks and three recalls from the library to finish Susan Choi’s Flashlight and it’s my fault, I know. My excuses are feeble – how many times can I claim divorce as a distraction from fiction? just the once? lol – and made more pathetic by the quality of the book, which is: excellent.

There is the beautiful writing – and it is – and the core mystery of the book that begins with what happens to the father and continues throughout – but there is, more, the depth of the characters. A great ability to hold a character over a lifetime – from child to aging adult – and make moments of their development and change feel neither forced or inevitable, instead the ways we choose our life in scenes of deliberate (in)action.

You want more of a plot description? Fine, fine. Serk – the dad – and 10 year old Louisa are out on the beach in Japan (despite Serk hating the water, but these are the sacrifices we make for our children). Next thing we know Louisa is washed up on shore, Serk is gone (presumed dead) and Louisa attatches herself to a memory of a flashlight.

Then back and forth we go through space and time – to Serk’s childhood in Japan to a family in postwar North Korea to Louisa’s mother, Anne, and her choice to give up her son Tobias before marrying Serk and the kind of kid Tobias is and how they all fit together in bits of part truths and a lot of Things That Go Unsaid.

It’s a book about memory – those that are real, those we invent, those we wish we could forget, those we didn’t know we had until something (a song, a smell) finds them for us – and a book about how and why we hope.

And so with that – here’s hoping this was a blocker book – the kind so rich it held me for literal months – but now complete I can with a rush read all the many, many books mounting around me in my ceaseless aspiration to be 25 again and doing nothing all summer but reading. Alas.

I’m not actually sure if I should suggest this one for your summer reading list given how long it took me to finish. But you, dear reader, are better focused and better energized than I. So read. So read.

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June 29, 2026 · 3:24 pm

Under the Same Stars: Stand Up

I remembered liking Libba Bray from a hundred years ago when I read Going Bovine but on reading that review it turns out that book was just “okay,” and so is Under the Same Stars: just okay.

In this case a three-part time frame set around the same loosely connected family and a quasi-mystery. The mystery: two girls disappear in a German forest during WWII presumed dead. The loosely connected family are the girls and the generations that follow – connected in some cases by family but more through place.

It is mostly a book that repeatedly and excessively emphasizes its theme (it all but quotes the poem ‘first they came for the X and I did nothing) that against moral outrage we have responsibilities to stand up and resist. And while the current political moment is not named, the book makes very clear the repeated instances of authoritarian violence and the obligation for people of good conscience to do more than passively observe.

This morning L. was telling me how her friends play a game where one child is excluded by the rest – the excluded game – and she was trying to explain that she wasn’t doing anything because she was just walking around with them. And while rushing out the door to camp was not the moment to get into bystanders and the immorality of inaction, I did strike me then, as it did when I was reading the book, how obvious it is that we should each act in the face of injustice and how difficult it seems to be to exercise that kind of agency and courage when the appeal of just walking around is so tempting.

Anyway, it’s not a very good book in that the characters are not that rich, the plot not all that surprising (you can call the outcome to the mystery pretty early on) and the theme so transparently aggressive that one does want to scream a bit (though reminding myself it is YA I’ll try to be more generous).

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April 24, 2026 · 6:55 pm

The Guardian and the Thief

Who knew a book so heartbreaking could be so suspenseful. Maybe there are lots of examples? Well here is one: Megha Majumdar’s The Guardian and the Thief. Set in the near-future of India where the climate catastrophe has brought famine and social/political unrest we follow two families as they try – in their unique ways – to escape the conditions that keep them hungry and suffering.

A terrific book for any course wanting to consider ‘social determinants of health’ the book sets up in stark terms (somehow without being annoying about it) the way class intersects with bodies – where they can go, what they can expect, and how they will thrive or fail.

For this reader it was a sort of awe at the way Majumdar manipulates sympathy – vacillating between Ma and Boomba, but then also for Ma and Boomba amid an environment where they are set up to make – in their various ways – chillingly choices about who and what to prioritize, and at what cost. And while it is meant to be the near future, it feels urgent and present in ways that were/are unsettling and uncomfortable: what are we willing to look away from to prioritize our immediate family, ourselves? What will we hoard – if not food, then land, or transportation, or access – and how much do we need to imagine ourselves safe (and from what, or whom) and for how long?

Over the course of one week we are kept in suspense and agony for what they can each control and what is wrested from them. And beautiful writing that lets the reader slip inside the story and align, betray, align again with characters without noticing that the story is being spun.

Go, go and enjoy, while being prepared to be asked to reckon with what you might give up and what you might take so as to save who you claim as your own.

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April 4, 2026 · 12:51 am

A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck; or, what is wrong with me

There must be something funny in my subconscious that it just keeps picking books about marriage, or divorce, or the complications of marriage or or – but it’s not that I’m seeking these books out. More that the ones that find might right now are… all of a theme. Call it the universe helping me work through it all.

Anyway, Sophie Elmhirt’s non-fiction A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck follows Maurice and Marilyn on their ill-fated sailing trip from one place to another (exact locations are used in the book, but dear reader, this writer does not care enough to look them up).

Before they set out on the journey we figure out the married couple are odd. Odd as individuals; odd as a couple. They decide to sell their house, built a boat over a few years and dedicate their lives to living at sea. Odd as it is to imagine doing such a thing yourself, odder still (to this reader anyway) that fate or fortune would bring together two people so similarly devoted.

But so goes the world, and so goes Maurice and Marilyn off to sea. ONLY TO BE SHIPWRECKED (it’s not a spoiler, it’s in the title) when a whale bashes up their boat. Honestly many reviews make much of this whale (maybe for the improbability of it?) but the whale did not feature heavily in my read of it, so much as the absolute nuttiness of them having set out without a radio (for the purity!) and working flares (just…. oops).

Of course we know the whole time that things must work out mostly okay because they survive to tell the tale (or at least that was my comfortable read of it until A. suggested that perhaps it was written posthumously based on journal entires and so I spent the rest of the book in gasping suspense worried they’d be eaten by a shark, or let’s be honest, starve/die of dyhydration/exposure etc).

I’ll give you the same gift of suspense and not tell you for sure, except to say that by and large the best parts of the book were not about shipwreck or (possible) survival, but instead were about how these two managed not to eat one another alive (and I don’t mean literally) in the torment of being alone at sea.

I’ve heard – though I am an unreliable narrator on this point – that marriage can be tough and requires Some Work to make it through. One can only guess the kind of fortitude being married while dying at sea requires. Actually, you don’t need to guess. You can read this gripping and engaging book and be reminded – and don’t we all need the reminder right now – of how much hope and love alone can accomplish.

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