Red Rising

As with so many other books being published these days, this is the first of an intended trilogy (now completed) by Pierce Brown. Darrow is a young (16) miner under the surface of Mars. He and his equally young wife, Eo, are Reds. That is the human race is now divided into social class by color. The Golds of course are at the top of the pecking order, over and above Grays, Pinks, Greens, etc., each of which has their special function in society. The Reds are miners. They live underground on Mars mining for a mineral that will one day terraform the planet and make it livable for the rest of humanity. They are not well treated by their masters, often going short of food, medicine and other essentials as they are driven to compete for these items by competing with other tribes of Reds to meet mining quotas. Except that this is all a lie. When Eo martyrs herself in order to spur Darrow to take up the rebellion, he instead attempts to follow her to a place beyond death. Instead he is surreptitiously subjected to a fake death and shown the truth, that Mars is already a habitable planet and that Reds are just being kept enslaved to support the other colors. He is transformed through excruciating surgical and psychological procedures into a Gold, with the idea that he will infiltrate, move into the highest ranks, and bring down the Oppressors. It's a compelling tale once you get into it, as he is selected for a rigorous and often brutal selection process where groups of Gold students compete against one another in a simulated world (a la The Hunger Games) to become Primus. Darrow will up-end the whole constructed and corrupt arrangement, making friends with other non-mainstream students and using unconventional tactics to build loyalty among his followers. He has a lot of hard decisions to make if he is to fulfill his mission and the inner conflicts are convincingly portrayed. Reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today. A complete list of characters is provided at Wikipedia.

Dark Matter

Blake Crouch seems particularly adept at writing books that people want to make into movies or TV series: this book has been picked up by Sony Pictures, his Wayward Pines trilogy became a #1 Fox TV series, and his Letty Dobesh books are the basis for the TNT series. He has written lots of other books as well. This newest effort is a mix of quantum physics-focused science fiction and a provocative exploration of what makes life meaningful.
Physicist Jason Dessen lives a less than extraordinary life, teaching physics at the college, husband to would-be artist Daniela and a 15 year old son, Charlie. On one ordinary Chicago evening, he heads out to the local pub to help a former colleague celebrate having won a prestigious science prize. But this Jason never makes it home that night. He is kidnapped, driven to an abandoned factory, and drugged. When he awakens, he is surrounded by people he does not know but who seem to know him and who are desperate to know what he remembers from an apparent months-long absence. Jason escapes and tries to figure out whether or not he is losing his mind. Meanwhile, back at the Dessen home, Jason--or someone who looks and sounds very much like him, we'll call him Jason#2--has come home 3 hours late and resumes the life that Jason #1 has just lost.
It turns out that, if Jason #1 had made different choices, he would have gone on to discover revolutionary possibilities for parallel universes and won the science prize. But he would have lost Daniela and never had Charlie. The man he would have been has now stolen his life. This is a story about the mind-bending aspects of "what if all the 'what-if's' actually existed?" but also about the essential questions of what makes us unique. If we are an accumulation of all the choices we make, how do we define that, hang on to that, recover that when it is lost? Here is an interview with the author on NPR. Worthwhile reviews from Kirkus, NYT, and The Guardian.

Station Eleven

This book by Emily St. John Mandel was highly recommended by my walking friend, Kathy F. and several other members of the short-lived fantasy/ sci-fi book group, and it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and numerous other accolades. It is indeed lovely writing. The premise is that a pandemic flu wipes out 99% of the world's population and we hear the stories of several of that small group left alive in North America. It is set primarily from Toronto down to the south end of Lake Michigan, with short jaunts to L.A. and British Columbia to fill in the characters' back stories. Two primary entities form the warp (weft?) of the connecting stories. The first is Arthur Leander, from a tiny island off the west coast of Canada who moves to Montreal, becomes an actor and then becomes a movie star. He marries 3 times, has one son, and dies of a heart attack on-stage while performing King Lear in Toronto, the same night the pandemic reaches N. America. His first two wives, his son, his closest friend Clark, and a child actress in the King Lear production, Kirsten, all have their own stories. The second is The Symphony, a group of traveling musicians and actors who travel in the post-pandemic world to surviving settlements along the shore of Lake Michigan performing classical music and putting on Shakespeare plays. Several characters, including Kirsten, are members of this group. The title comes from a tiny run of graphic novels created by Arthur's first wife, Miranda, about a space station/ planet which starts to break down when it passes through a worm hole, causing systems to malfunction and flood the planet. A group of survivors live in the settlement of Undersea and want to return to Earth and life as they knew it. You can see the connections to the "real" story, of course. It is a hopeful story in the end, although there is no end to the craziness, grief and loss--not just for people who died, but for an entire way of life.
Plenty of reviews available to fill in my short account: The Guardian, The New York Times, Kirkus, the Huffington Post, and The Independent.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

A memoir by J. D. Vance that does much to explain the mind set of a significant portion of the American population--the Scot-Irish immigrants to the Appalachians, who have become colloquially known as hillbillies. As always, when you look beneath the surface, the picture is infinitely more complicated and Vance spares no sympathy when calling out the dysfunctional and corrosive aspects of this culture. There is also no question that he loves the people he came from at the same time. His maternal grandparents joined a wave of immigration from Kentucky to the Rust Belt just after WWII, Ohio in Vance's case, looking for paying work and better lives. But they moved in such large numbers that their culture remained intact rather than being assimilated. They still often think first of violence as a way to solve problems, and blame others for their problems. Often fiercely loyal to family and country, they can also be abusive and embody the worst of learned helplessness mentality and behavior, including addictions and welfare dependence. Once exclusively Democratic, now they are largely Republican. Vance, a statistical anomaly for having "escaped" and become financially successful provides his personal and political (conservative) views about the problems facing this culture and America at large. Understanding this story offers insight into the current state of American politics. There is an excellent review in The New York Times, more at Kirkus and The Guardian, and this aptly titled article from the National Review, "What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals About Trump and America."

Dark Fever

Well, as an antidote to reading Orphan Master's Son, I dove into this supernatural fantasy thriller. Author Karen Marie Moning has written two series and this book is the first in the "Fever" series (Highlander being the other). The premise is that our protagonist, a carefree, 20-year old named MacKayla (or Mac for short) has her life turned upside down when her older sister, who has been attending university in Dublin, is brutally murdered. But when the Dublin police find no leads into identifying Alina's killer, this sheltered young woman from a small town in Georgia decides to take matters into her own hands. It's only weeks after the murder when Mac is able to retrieve a final disturbing message from Alina left on her cell phone:
“We’ve got to talk, Mac! There’s so much you don’t know. My God, you don’t even know what you are! There are so many things I should have told you, but I thought I could keep you out of it until things were safer for us. I’m going to try to make it home”—she broke off and laughed bitterly, a caustic sound totally unlike Alina—“but I don’t think he’ll let me out of the country. I’ll call you as soon—” More static. A gasp. “Oh, Mac, he’s coming!” Her voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “Listen to me! We’ve got to find the”—her next word sounded garbled or foreign, something like shi-sadu, I thought. “Everything depends on it. We can’t let them have it! We’ve got to get to it first! He’s been lying to me all along. I know what it is now and I know where—”
When Mac arrives in Dublin, she is horrified to realize that she can see creatures that no one else does, effectively looking beneath the glamour of the Fae and viewing the real monsters or beauties that they are. Mac is out of her depth and so grasps at the help offered by ostensible bookstore owner Jericho Barrons. Barrons is out to get the book Alina mentioned, the Sinsar Dubh, for his own purposes and he will use Mac to help him find it; whether or not she survives is secondary to him.
Mac is an interesting character, driven by love of her dead sister but tortured with (appropriately) self-doubt about her ability to deal with this crazy situation. She spends a little too much time worrying about her appearance for my taste, but that won't stop me from seeking out the next book in the series, Bloodfever. Additional reviews from Publishers Weekly, and from Booklist (reprinted below).

MacKayla "Mac" Lane is a small-town southern girl living a life of suntans and shopping. All that changes when her sister dies in Ireland and a cryptic message on Mac's cell phone raises disturbing questions about the nature of her sister's death. Mac follows the lead to Dublin and the strange life her sister led, on to the darkly dangerous book-dealer Jericho Barrons, and a burgeoning war with deadly Fae that humankind doesn't even realize has begun. Time-travel-romance maven Moning reshapes her Celtic lore for a radically different and engaging new dark fantasy series. Mac's first-person narrative is more than point of view; it's a true recounting of how a sheltered young girl grows to accept the role fate has dealt her. And while moments of sexual awareness hint that a relationship between Mac and Jericho could complicate matters in the future, wisely there is no full-blown romance here to distract from the complex introduction to Moning's new world. Nina Davis
Copyright © American Library Association.

The Orphan Master's Son

 Holy cow was this a tough one. If it had not been a book for my book group, I am not sure I would have finished it. This novel by Adam Johnson, which won the 2013 Pulitzer for fiction, is an absolutely harrowing journey into the lives of people living in North Korea during the tenure of Kim Jong Il. The perspective is predominantly that of Jun Do (an allusion to John Doe?) who is raised in an orphanage run by his father. His journey through the crazy machinations of politics has him initially kidnapping people from Japan or S. Korea and returning them to N. Korea, being part of a mission to the United States to retrieve something the Dear Leader says was stolen from him, and  finally being put on a fishing boat to monitor radio communications from other countries. When Jun Do becomes part of a cover-up for a fellow crewman's defection, he eventually finds himself in one of the notorious mining prisons, from which people never return. But fate plays an ironic twist when he encounters General Ga, who has come to torture Jun Do but gets killed instead. Jun Do puts on his uniform and assumes Ga's identity. Everybody in authority knows he is not really General Ga, but reality is what the Dear Leader says it is, and right now he has need for the continued existence of General Ga. So Jun Do, walks out of the prison, returns to the home and family of General Ga, and begins making plans for them all to escape. We also have a storyline from one of the official torturers who begins to see the insanity of the system but not in time to save himself or one of his colleagues.

     This is simply a nightmarish or, as The New York Times calls it, "Kafkaesque" existence where any accusation of disloyalty can end your life. It turns parents and children against one another, or colleague against colleague in order to secure one's own safety. Propaganda is ubiquitous and nobody is truly safe, however. As one character notes, “Where we are from, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.”
Johnson based his story on actual testimony from N. Korean defectors, although he said he had to tone it down in places because the reality would be too shocking. Adam Johnson is also an English professor at Stanford University; there is a biography from Wikipedia here. Additional reviews from The Guardian, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Telegraph.

Eagle Catcher

Having recently read a later book (The Girl with Braided Hair) by Margaret Coel set on the Wind River Reservation, I wanted to go back and start the series from the beginning. This book introduces "two intelligent, compassionate sleuths: Father John O'Malley, S.J., a history scholar and recovering alcoholic, exiled to an Indian mission on the Great Plains, and Vicky Holden, an attorney who, after ten years in the outside world, has returned to the reservation to help her people" (from the author's website).
The opening event is the murder of the tribal chairman of the Arapahoes at Wind River, and the immediate suspect is his nephew, Anthony, who was heard arguing with him the previous evening. Vicky takes Anthony's case while she and Father O'Malley undertake to discover who the real killer is. The motivation for the crime involves the early history of the Arapahoes when land was taken from them, and their current efforts to buy back pieces of that land through the profits from their oil (mineral rights). Of course Vicky and John make themselves targets when they start digging into past and present crimes against the tribe. Once again, this is well-written, tightly plotted, and informative, providing insights into historical and present situations and issues facing the Arapaho people. I would not hesitate to read more in the series.