Character-driven stories stay with reader

Sometimes a novel is good because of its complex plot structure, its sophisticated symbolism, or its sweeping dimension. But other times, a novel that seems less important than a literary masterpiece is good because its characters swirl around in our heads long after we’ve closed the book.

One example of the latter is Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s new novel, “Take My Hand,” which is told through two chronologies. In 1973, Civil Townsend, fresh out of nursing school, goes to work in a Montgomery, Alabama family planning clinic. Two of her first clients are sisters, Erica and India, whom Civil is supposed to give birth control shots to. Civil is stunned to learn that the girls are just eleven and thirteen years old.

Neither girl is sexually active, and India hasn’t even started her period. So troubled by the situation, Civil stops giving the girls their shots. When the clinic's director finds out, she takes the girls to the hospital and has them sterilized.

The story is framed by Civil’s narrative in 2016 as she travels back to Montgomery to visit Erica and India, who has been diagnosed with cancer. Civil recalls the guilt she felt about what happened to the girls and how she unwittingly contributed to their tragedy.

The book does a good job of presenting the historical facts about the government-funded sterilizations and the lawsuit that revealed that over 150,000 low-income women were sterilized under federally funded programs and that 55 percent of these were teens. Ironically, this revelation came just one year after the public learned of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, in which Black men were intentionally left untreated for syphilis.

“Take My Hand” examines the emotional toll on the women and girls who were coerced or tricked into sterilization and their families. The story is rich in ideas of freedom, justice, and autonomy. The book is a quick read, and the accessible prose makes this a good novel for both adult and young adult audiences.

Another set of characters still swimming in my brain are from Namrata Patel’s debut novel, “The Candid Life of Meena Dave,” which launches June 1. Adopted and then orphaned, Meena feels alone and rootless in the world. As a free-lance photojournalist, Meena travels the world and has no fixed address other than a friend’s rented spare room. She convinces herself that this is all she needs or will ever want, that she doesn’t need the same interpersonal connections of close friends or family that others have.

She returns to the US from six months abroad to find that she has inherited an apartment from someone she’s never met or even heard of. She moves into the apartment, intending to stay just long enough to sell it, when she begins finding cryptic notes from her benefactor, Neha.

Meena begins to suspect that Neha has some connection to her birth family and sets out to discover the truth about her background. She starts to see similarities between herself, with her dark hair and brown skin, and the other residents of the building, all Indian Americans.

But Meena also learns that Neha doesn’t like people—she says as much in her notes—and that she did not even love her husband. In fact, Neha admits that she’s never felt love for anyone.

Neha is the true embodiment of what Meena has convinced herself that she herself is: without any emotional connection to other people. Meena is shocked and saddened by Neha’s lack of human feeling. Objectively, Meena is nothing like Neha. She loved her parents dearly, she does have one friend she truly enjoys being with, and she finds herself attracted to Sam, the young game designer in the building.

When she starts to suspect that she may actually have a heritage and a family, she finds herself longing for things she has previously dismissed as unnecessary.

The other residents of the building are three “aunties,” who are best friends and into everyone’s business. The aunties walk into her apartment, which they insist she keep unlocked, whenever they like, but they also teach her to make chai and how to wrap a sari.

The story is sweet and funny, and if a 30-something woman can be said to be “coming of age,” then it is a coming-of-age novel, too. Most importantly, Meena learns how to let other people into her heart after the trauma of losing her parents. She also learns to see things for the way they are instead of how she would like them to be. It is just this kind of small story that leaves us thinking about the characters for weeks and months.

Allende's 'Violeta' recalls century of life

Isabel Allende packs 100 years’ worth of life, memory, love, passion, wisdom, and foolishness in her latest novel, “Violeta.”

Violeta Del Valle is born in 1920, the same year that the Spanish flu arrives in Chile, her home. In the 100 years of her life, she recalls the changes, disasters, and upheavals of the 20^th century as well as the births, deaths, marriages, and love affairs that punctuate her own story.

After Violeta’s overbearing and unethical father loses his fortune and takes his life, Violeta’s family “exiles” themselves to the far south of the country where they live without electricity or indoor plumbing on the farm of a family friend.

Violeta marries young and foolishly, and not long after falls in love and runs away with Julián Bravo, a gorgeous pilot. Despite his infidelities and criminal activities, Violeta stays with Julián for many years, having two children with him.

After a military coup that plunges her country into a brutal dictatorship and her activist son’s name appears on a wanted list, Violeta helps him escape the capital before he is “disappeared.”

Violeta, who always had a head for business and finds myriad ways to earn a very comfortable living, raises her grandson in the capital and is determined to do a better job with him than she did with her own children. However, she eventually finds that possessions are meaningless and that money is only worth the good you can do with it. At age 63, she describes herself as “reborn.”

Violeta’s change in direction is not the result of one huge event, but rather “the turns that we don’t notice in the moment they occur” (p 254). Her story is told by her 100-year-old self, full of the wisdom derived from decades of “stumbling down narrow, winding paths” (p 286) that take us from one day, one week, one year to the next.

Allende of course draws upon her own life to fill her novel with the people and events that fascinate the reader. Like Allende, Violeta survives earthquakes, patriarchy, and a cruel dictator. “Violeta” touches on themes present in many of Allende’s works. A friend and mentor tells Violeta, “Exert some independence; you’re not a little girl…You have to take care of yourself in this world” (p 99). And Violeta observes the difference in how the world treats men and women, writing “Julián…went wherever he pleased; he was free of blame, while I was the adulteress, the concubine, the wayward woman who dared to parade around pregnant by her lover” (p 137).

Allende has created another sweeping saga in “Violeta” that whisks the reader through the last century, offering readers fascinating and endearing characters. The world events in Violeta’s life may be familiar, but Allende presents them in a way that demonstrates the cyclical nature of history and offers a subtle warning about the present.

Erdrich's 'The Sentence' is moving, enjoyable

When I began reading Louise Erdrich’s newest novel, “The Sentence,” I immediately fell in love with the story and the characters.

Tookie, and Indigenous woman living in Minneapolis, is sentenced to 60 years after being tricked by two women into committing a serious crime. She is released after 10 years, and begins working at a bookstore where her former middle school teacher works, the same teacher who sent her a dictionary while she was in prison.

In November of 2019, Tookie’s most annoying customer dies and begins haunting the bookstore whenever Tookie is there alone. Tookie survives the trauma of her incarceration and her childhood with a drug-addicted mother, but the haunting, and then the start of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd push her to her limits.

I loved all the characters, especially Tookie’s husband, Pollux, whom she calls her Potawatomi conscience. Pollux is a former boxer and tribal cop (who in fact arrested Tookie) and now works to preserve his culture, especially the spiritual aspects. He is quiet and gentle and completely in love with Tookie.

I also loved that nearly every character is a book lover whose life revolves around books. One proposes getting a Mount Rushmore-style tattoo on her chest of her favorite authors. And, since most of the characters work at a bookstore, they offer to their customers and to us, the readers, recommendations on current and classic fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. In fact, at the end of the novel, Erdrich includes “A Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books.” I pored over the list, looking for titles I’d read and titles that I want to read. I even made a copy of the list to keep.

The story is narrated by Tookie, except for two brief passages that Pollux narrates, both of them in the last third of the book. I was pleased to hear Pollux’s voice, and expected to learn more about Tookie, that perhaps she was not an entirely reliable narrator. However, I was disappointed. Pollux’s passages are too brief and offer no insight about Tookie. I fail to see how these passages fit the structure of the novel or add anything essential to the story.

Another flaw has to do with the climax of the story and how Tookie finally comes to terms with her trauma and herself. I won’t spoil it for you, but I’ll just say, I felt there was not enough foundation earlier in the novel about what would happen at the end.

Of course, I could be wrong, and it could simply be that Erdrich is avoiding a trope that she has become tired of in literature. Tookie says about reading in prison, “I found that I could not read just any book. It had gotten so I could see through books—the little ruses, the hooks, the setup in the beginning, the looming weight of a tragic ending, the way at the last page the author could whisk out of the carpet of sorrow and restore a favorite character” (p 164).

Despite these minor flaws, “The Sentence” is an excellent, moving book. We see the real trauma that Minneapolis residents experience after Floyd’s murder, the protests, the police violence, and the riots. However, we see it through the lens of Indigenous Americans, whose own oppression is mirrored by that of Floyd’s. Tookie says “…it seemed that around the central fact of any tragedy there swirled a flotsam of extrania like the twenty-dollar bill that led to the police call at Cup Foods, the broken taillight that led the police to stop Philando Castile, the hunger for eggs and a farm woman’s fury to defend those eggs, an incident that started the Dakota War, the let them eat grass phrase that has kept it in memory ever since…’ (p 273). Moreover, the prose is beautiful.”

“The Sentence” is a thoroughly enjoyable read. And I continue to port over Tookie’s Biased List as I mark off titles that I’ve read.

Blood and suspense fill pages of new works

The thing about being a hero is that first you must lose nearly everything, and then you must sacrifice whatever you have left. Park ranger Richard Sundstrum is that hero in Scott Johnson’s “Ungeheuer,” due out in April.

During a prolonged Central Texas drought, four young spelunkers find an underwater cave entrance in the river and inadvertently let loose….something. At the same time, Richard and his young son are camping near the river just two weeks after the death of Richard’s wife.

The pair’s trip is cut short when Richard is called in to help investigate an “animal attack” that killed all of the staff and diners at the Grist Mill restaurant. What follows is a grueling marathon of violence, gore, and death for the characters as well as the reader.

What sets this novel apart from other blood-fests is the structural complexity. Although the third-person narration gives us a relatively objective bird’s-eye view of the slaughter, Johnson alternates perspectives among the primary characters.  He often uses a sound effect to signal the reader that the action rewinds a few minutes and begins another character’s point of view.

The gruesome, heart-racing action will appeal to fans of the horror genre. However, the Central Texas setting and scenery, the suspense, and a few surprises will appeal to all readers.

Those who prefer ghosts to monsters will enjoy “The Hacienda” by Isabel Cañas, which releases May 3. Although it has been compared to Du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” it is closer to 2020’s “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Beatriz marries young, handsome widower Rodolfo to escape poverty and her cruel tia’s kitchen. She moves into his hacienda on a remote maguey plantation and soon discovers that no one else is willing to live in the house, and in fact, that the house doesn’t want Beatriz there either.

Young Padre Andrés tries to help Beatriz “heal” the house of the strange voices and apparitions but must hide his native powers from the Inquisition and his fellow priests. He must also hide his feelings for Beatriz.

This title was a fun, chilling read that transports the reader to 1820’s Mexico, just after the Revolution and the social turmoil that followed. Beatriz and Andrés each narrate alternating chapters, including Andrés’s flashbacks to his youth, and why he was banished from the hacienda by Rodolfo’s first wife.

Colson Whitehead’s latest, “Harlem Shuffle,” is no hero’s journey and offers nothing supernatural but it has plenty of suspense and not a little bloodshed.

Furniture dealer Ray Carney isn’t crooked; he’s just a little bent in a city where anyone who’s not probably isn’t breathing. Carney is happy with his sideline in radios and TVs that have fallen off trucks, and sometimes the odd piece of jewelry, when his cousin Freddie gets him involved in a hotel heist.

The heist puts Carney on the radar of the local mob as well as the local “bent” detective. Not long after Carney settles back into his old routine, he gets swindled by a Harlem banker, which of course requires Carney to exact revenge, just as his crook father would have done.

Whitehead approaches Carney with more than a little humor. When a “colleague” dispatches another crook who has come gunning for them, Carney rolls the body in a “Moroccan Luxury rug” and delivers it to the local body dumping ground. Near the end of the novel, when he and the colleague go to ransom cousin Freddie, the mob lawyer supervising the “deal” is seated in an office furnished with “Templeton Office’s new fall line.”

Whitehead’s graceful prose captures Harlem of 1950s and 60s: “This first hot spell of the year was a rehearsal for the summer to come. Everyone a bit rusty but it was coming back, their parts in the symphony and assigned solos. On the corner, two white cops recapped the fire hydrant, cursing. Kids had been running in and out of the spray for days” (p 21). 

The novel traces the mid-twentieth century changes to New York and its skyline as well as Carney’s maturity from small-time fence, to grudge-bearing criminal, to slightly-bent businessman. It is a fun and rewarding read.

Bad weather is great for good books

Although Texas ‘winter’ has many folks alternating between flip-flops and down jackets, there have actually been enough cold days and rainy days for me to hunker down under the blankets and plow through some really good books.

Non-fiction

The summer after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, sending 120,000 Japanese Americans who were living on the West Coast to prison camps despite their never committing any crime. Bradford Pearson’s book ‘The Eagles of Heart Mountain,’ focuses on the young people, whose educations were interrupted, some just before their senior year in high school, who were sent to northwestern Wyoming to a prison camp named Heart Mountain.

Some of these young men turned to their love of sports to alleviate boredom and the sting of racism and discrimination. This book traces the paths that lead to their incarceration and their triumph on the football field despite a lack of proper equipment and training field.

The first half of this excellent book details about 150 years of Japanese migration to the US and the blatant racism--by individuals as well as government policy--that led to the undeserved imprisonment of innocent Americans. The second half focuses on the resilience of the Japanese American community and how, even under terrible conditions, they never wavered from their love of their country, the US.

The title of Chuy Renteria’s latest, ‘We Heard It When We Were Young,’ suggests that the memoir is primarily about racism and discrimination. Actually, the memoir is about so much more. Yes, Renteria recounts instances of both “casual racism”—name-calling and teasing—and the uglier, more visceral absolute hatred that he and his Hispanic and Laotian friends faced. However, the most compelling aspects of this work are the fraught relationships with his parents and his sister, the violence that permeates every aspect of life for him and the rest of his small town of West Liberty, Iowa, and the eating disorder that resulted from a lifetime of trauma.

The structure of Renteria’s book is not entirely chronological. There is some moving back and forth among his childhood, adolescence, and adult years that is suggestive of how memories flow from one to another. The effect is natural and organic storytelling accompanied by the insights that develop after reflection and time and maturity.

Short fiction

Mewborn, North Carolina, is like any small rural town. The locals relax at Duck’s Tavern, celebrate the Shad Festival and reigning Shad Queen, gossip about their neighbors, and sometimes flee their hometown. 'Proof of Me’ by Erica Plouffe Lazure, which releases March 24, is a collection of linked short stories, all about residents or exiles of Mewborn.

Each of the book’s five sections deals with one family or group of Mewborners. The second section, ‘Stitch,’ which includes the title story, concerns 16-year-old Anna, mother of little Cassidy Penelope. After Anna’s mother, and only defender, dies suddenly, Anna tries to raise her daughter. When the girl is four, Anna drops her off at the family home with her older brother and sister and leaves for good. The rest of the stories in this section follow Cass through her childhood and young adulthood.

All of the characters are set adrift by forces they have no control over: absent or incompetent parents, perfidious lovers, life-changing illnesses, or a profound sense of insignificance. Their complexity and humanity and voice make it no surprise that ‘Proof of Me’ is the 2022 New American Fiction Prize Winner.

Crime fiction

When 15-year-old Oscar Dreyer-Hoff goes missing, his wealthy, prominent family claim that he’s been kidnapped. But the note left behind is cryptic at best and makes no demand for ransom. As Copenhagen police detectives Anette Werner and Jeppe Korner investigate, the mystery only deepens.

A body is found at the city’s waste incineration plant, and Oscar’s backpack is discovered at a dock near the family’s home by the odd caretaker at a fortress island in Copenhagen Harbor. A number of plot twists and no shortage of suspects make the book an interesting and enjoyable read.

‘The Harbor,’ the third installment of Katrine Engberg’s Korner and Werner series, is due out Feb. 22. Set in the perfumed and sunny Danish spring, Engberg’s book is not nearly as dark as the masterpieces that inspired the Nordic Noir genre: The Martin Beck series, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,’ and the Wallander books.

The detectives are fully-functional adults who are not alcoholics and don’t torture themselves with guilt of their failings. And although Copenhagen is realistically portrayed through the author’s use of actual places, there is very little criticism of the failure of the state to fulfill its promise of a livable world and a just society.

Although I would never wish for bad weather, I’m not going to complain much when it inevitably arrives and offers me an excuse to do nothing but work on the to-be-read pile on the night stand.

Latest Orphan X installment is a trip to the theme park

‘Can you save a bad man?’ is the question Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X asks in “Dark Horse,” the latest in the series, due out Feb. 8. And if the answer is ‘yes,’ then was the man really bad? These questions apply equally to the South Texas drug lord that Evan Smoak, aka Orphan X, agrees to help and to Evan himself.

Those who do not know the series will be caught up quickly in this seventh installment. Smoak was an off-the-books government assassin who left the program and is now pursued by his former trainers and handlers. He lives by his own 10 commandments and helps those who have nowhere else to turn.

Aragón Urrea is the patrón of Eden, Texas, and an elaborate, worldwide, high-tech drug and money laundering operation. His 18 year-old daughter has been kidnapped by a ruthless rival gang, and he is willing to give everything he has to get her back. And everything is just what Smoak asks of him.

The impossibly-wealthy, impossibly fit and fast-thinking Smoak is part Jason Bourne, part Batman. He has a multitude of identities and safe houses as well as nearly-magical technology readily available to him. His untraceable, unhackable phone has nanosuction backing that makes it stick to any surface he throws it at, so that he can watch a hologram of his phone call. Oh, and he MacGyvers a mask out of a plastic coke bottle and some trash so that he can enter a burning building to save some burning junkies.

Orphan X books are pure escapism, akin to a visit to the theme park. It’s no wonder that Hurwitz is a best-selling author. The prose is tight and the descriptions are detailed and quite good at creating the atmosphere of danger and desperation in South Texas and Mexico, where the story is set. At more than 400 pages, the book is still a quick read as it is loaded with action and suspense. The short chapters and alternating settings give the story a cinematic feel.

However, the conversation between Smoak and his protégé, Joey, I found grating. They are so cute that it’s annoying. But that is just a small drawback. She is, after all, a 16 year-old computer genius, maybe the most realistic character in the book.

The other characters are typical of the fantasy-thriller genre. Good guys, bad guys, innocents. Hurwitz tries to avoid this trope by making Smoak painfully aware that he is both good and bad. Drug lord Urrea is both brutal to those that violate his rules (rapists) and generous with his family and the townspeople that he takes a patrician responsibility for.

On the other hand, the villain, Mexican crime boss Raúl Montesco, is unnecessarily cruel and ruthless. He belittles his own son, holds women in a cage to be sex-trafficked, and feeds those who offend him (even accidentally) to his ‘pet’ lion. He is the ‘bad’ man, utterly unredeemable.

So, maybe you can’t save a ‘bad man,’ but you might be able to make a man that is both good and bad a little less bad.

‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ weaves history, myth into ‘paean to books’

Five characters living in three different centuries and four different places are all saved by a story. A story that allows them to “slip the trap” of their fear or misery. Anthony Doerr tells their stories in ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land,’ a book that he calls a “paean to books.”

The ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ in the novel is a 1^st century tale written by Diogenes that tells the story of Aethon, a foolish shepherd who leaves home in search of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fictional place where there is no pain and turtles walk around carrying honeycakes on their backs. On his journey he is turned into a donkey, a fish, and a crow.

Although there is no actual ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land,’ there was a 1^st century writer named Antonius Diogenes. Moreover, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of works that we know of but have been lost, some of them comedies about men being transformed into donkeys. Doerr uses this imagined tale to tie his characters together, even though they are separated by geography and time.

Konstance, 14 years old, lives aboard The Argos, a spacecraft launched 65 years earlier headed to a distant planet that is to be man's new home. Zeno is 80 years old and leading a group of fifth-graders in a production of ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ at the public library. Seymour is a young man who is intent on placing a bomb in that library. Anna is a young girl that works in an embroidery shop with her sister in 15^th century Constantinople. Omeir is a Bulgarian boy who is drafted by Sultan's army in their attack on Constantinople.

Each character is abandoned or outcast and each is saved by a story. Konstance is the last human left alive aboard the Argos. Zeno is a gay man in rural Idaho in the mid-20^th century; Seymour is autistic; Anna is an orphan; Omeir is born with a cleft lip.

Anna discovers a codex of ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ in an abandoned priory. She and Omeir escape Constantinople as it falls to the Ottomans. They view the book as a talisman that gives them luck in their escape and even heals one of their sons when he has a fever.

Zeno has spent years teaching himself ancient Greek and translating ancient works when a lost story, ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ is discovered in the Vatican library. Zeno finds joy in the ancient tales and is elated by the discovery. Seymour, regretful of his crimes, assembles Zeno’s work on Aethon’s tale into a book, ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land.’ In doing so, he finds some redemption.

Konstance, alone on the Argos, recalls the stories of the foolish shepherd that her father told her and searches the ship’s library for the stories. In doing so, she discovers a secret that leads to her escape.

What links all these characters is a story. A story that was once lost and has been found. A story that saves each of their lives. A story that allows them to “slip the trap” of their heartbreak or existential misery. A story that allows them to live inside of it for a few precious moments and be content, entertained, and remember the loved ones they have lost.

The alternating chronologies and main characters make this book compelling. And although it’s over 600 pages, you will find yourself finishing it in just a few days. The characters are endearing, especially Zeno and Anna.

Anna, who is so young and so fierce, who trades stolen wine for reading lessons, is willing to brave any challenge to keep herself and her sister alive. Zeno, the sweet orphaned boy who is both foreign and a “sissy,” volunteers for the army to honor his father, who died in WWII, returns from a POW camp to dutifully cares for his dying guardian, a selfish woman who offers him only shelter, never love.

Even six weeks after finishing the novel, I find myself still thinking about these characters and their moving stories.

This love-letter to stories and books is beautiful and enthralling, a masterpiece, and has been predicted to be in the running for next year's Pulitzer. If you love books, you will love this book.