The Familiar Dark

This book by Amy Engel is indeed dark and the darkness to which it refers is the darkness within each of us. In the case of our protagonist, 30-year-old Eve Taggert, that darkness runs deep thanks to an abusive and drug dealing, mother. But Eve has kept it in check these last 12 years for the sake of her daughter, the light of her life, Junie. When Junie and her BFF, Izzy, are brutally murdered in the wretched town park of Barren Springs, Missouri. Eve no longer cares what others think of her. And she turns to the mother she determinedly turned her back on for lessons on vengeance; for when her mother wasn't dealing out physical or emotional abuse, she was fiercely protective of her two children, Eve and older brother Cal. No one ever bothered either child due to her reputation for swift and terrible retaliation. Now all Eve wants to do is find the person who murdered her daughter and do the same thing. She feels no need to work with the corrupt sheriff or the parents of the other dead girl, Zach and Jenny Logan, who come from a different social class and, therefore, different world than Eve. She is emotionally supported by her brother and the cook and waitress at the cafe where she has waited tables since she was in high school. Her brother Cal is a cop, and a fair one by all accounts, but consistently warns Eve away from her inquiries. So Eve finds out on her own, through an informal network, that Izzy was seeing an older man, Matt. Matt is a key member of a drug selling operation run by Eve's physically abusive ex-boyfriend, Jimmy Ray. Eve will even turn to him to get what she wants. But it is none of the really dangerous people she confronts who finally, ultimately betray her.
This not a happy ending book. Kirkus says it is "a bleak drama of rural America that offers grim lessons but minimal hope."  Publishers' Weekly refers to the genre as "rural noir." But it is well-written with loving descriptions of the hidden green hollers and rolling rivers of the Missouri Ozarks. The Daily Herald offers a good succinct review of the plot as well as a glowing review.

City of Girls

I am a big fan of Elizabeth Gilbert. I was privileged to hear her speak at an author event in Bend. This is the 4th book of hers I have read (plus I watched Eat, Pray, Love) and I love her writing. That being said, this was not my favorite book she has written. I had several notes in the first couple of chapters and the last couple of chapters, and nothing in between.
In the Prologue I noted that I HATE the use of the work impact as a verb--it communicates nothing.
Chapter One:
p 3, "In the summer of 1940, when I was nineteen years old and an idiot..." Aren't we all. She remained an idiot for quite a while it seems.
p. 4, "...same shapeless wool skirts that looked as though they'd been constructed out of old sweaters..."  Love this description.
p. 4, "...some artistic girls with long and self-important hair, and some high-bred socialite types with profiles like Italian greyhounds..." Ditto.
p. 6, My own friends were moving forward with their lives, too. They were heading off to college, work, marriage, and adulthood--all subjecs that I had not interest in or understanding of. So there was noboydy around to care about me or entertain me." What a privileged--spoiled? being!
p.8, "...her hats were so big they required their own seats at the theater." (speaking of her colorful grandmother.
p.10, "It was a sleek, black Singer 201 and it was murderously powerful (you could sew leather with it; I could have upholstered a Bugatti with that thing!).  Speaking of the best gift she ever received--also from her grandmother.
p. 12, speaking of the death of her grandmother..."(my best friend, my mentor, my confidante)...That devastation might've had something to do with why I performed so poorly at college...Perhaps I had not been such a terrible student, after all, Perhaps I had merely been sad. I am only realizing this possibility at this moment...Oh, dear. Sometimes it takes a very long while to figure things out."

Chapter Two:
p. 13, "Anyway, I arrived in New York City safely--a girl so freshly hatched that there was practically yolk in my hair."

Chapter Four:
p.57, "...I didn't pay much attention to maids back then. I was so very accustomed to them, you see. They were nearly invisible to me. I just expected to be served. And why was that?...Because I was rich. I haven't said those words yet in these pages, so let's just get it out of the way right now: I was rich, Angela. I was rich, and I was spoiled."

Chapter Fifteen:
p. 200, "To listen to his singing," Billy diagnosed, "is to have the rare pleasure of envying the deaf." Speaking of Edna's husband.

Chapter Twenty-Two:
p.304, "I am an old woman now, As such, I have reached an age where I cannot stand the tears of young girls. It exasperates me to no end. I especially cannot stand the tears of pretty young girls....who have never had to struggle or work for anything in their lives....it makes me want to strangle them."

Chapter Twenty-Nine:
p. 405, "The field of honor is a painful field," Olive went on at last..."That's what my father taught me when I was young. He taught me that the field of honor is not a place where children can play. Children don't have any honor, you see, and they aren't expected to, because it's too difficult for them. It's too painful. But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person--a person without honor--might take....Of course, nobody is required to stand in the field of honor," Olive continued. "If you find it too challenging, you may always exit, and then you can remain a child. But if you wish to be a person of character, I'm afraid this is the only way." I am reminded of Edna telling her that "You will never be a person of the slightest significance." I think this was a turning point for the character.

Chapter Thirty-Three
p. 466, "...as I've gotten older: you start to lose people, Angela. It's not that there is ever a shortage of people--...It is merely that--as the years pass--there comes to be a terrible shortage of your people. The ones you loved. The ones who knew the people that you both loved. The ones who know your whole history." Reflections on mortality and friendship.

I guess I just never really liked Vivian very much for most of the book, or any of the other main characters for that matter, even though they were fully and beautifully rendered.
I won't try to summarize the plot. Others have done that better than I can. Reviews abound:
NPR, which uses the term "sockdolager" in its review--Wow!
The New York Times
The Washington Post, which pretty well sums up my experience, "Unfortunately, what should have been a mere 300-page novel became a 470-page tome. The best and worst thing that can be said about “City of Girls” is that it’s perfectly pleasant, the kind of book one wouldn’t mind finding in a vacation condo during a rainy week. In exchange for a series of diverting adventures, it demands only stamina from its readers."
The Guardian, which says "an eloquently persuasive treatise on the judgment and punishment of women, and a heartfelt call to reclaim female sexual agency. “At some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time,” says Vivian as she looks back on her life. “After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.”And I also sort of agree with this latter bit.
And, finally, Kirkus, which obviously loved the book, describing it as "A big old banana split of a book, surely the cure for what ails you."

Vinegar Girl

This is a retelling of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew" written by Anne Tyler. In this version, Katherine is a 29-year old still living at home after a brief attempt at college; she was asked to leave because she told one of her professors he was lazy. Her mother is long deceased and Kate cares for her absent-minded scientist of a father and her 15-year old younger sister, Bunny. It's already a thankless task to ride herd on Bunny with almost no input from her father, who clearly takes her for granted. When he begs her to bring his forgotten lunch to his lab one day, he seems very keen that she get acquainted with his assistant Pyotr.  Turns out that Pyotr's green card is going to run out in 2 months and Kate's father wants Kate to marry him--just on paper of course--so he can keep the most valuable colleague he's ever had. Kate is incensed, of course, but eventually comes around to helping her father out. There's a break-in at the lab on the day of Kate & Pyotr's wedding, but the ceremony--such as it is-- belatedly proceeds and Kate figures out where the missing mice are. The epilogue ties it all up in a tidy little package at the end. I found it uninspiring although other reviewers had more positive reactions: NPR, The New York Times, and Kirkus.

Books I Gave Up On

There's quite a long list. I have less patience these days with things that don't grab me, so, unless it's for one of my book groups, I read anywhere from 50-150 pages and then let it go.
Slammerkin by Emma Donaghue: slammerkin is an 18th C English term for a loose dress or a loose woman. Mary Saunders is raised in poverty and when her step-father throws her out of the house because of a rape pregnancy, she is taken in by a prostitute and learns the ways of the streets. When she gets sick, she goes into a religious institution for women who want to reform, works on her seamstress skills and then goes to work in a small Welsh town as an apprentice. Based on an actual murder. But I gave up before that happened.
Amnesty by Aravind Adiga: Danny, an illegal immigrant from Sri Lanka, is working as a house cleaner when he discovers a murder. If he reports it, he'll probably be deported.
Things in Jars by Jess Kidd: I actually read quite a bit of this book before giving up. I actually liked Bridie Divine, an unusual woman detective in the underbelly of Victorian London. She has been hired to find a 6-year-old kidnapped child. Evidence accumulates that the girl, Cristabel, is no ordinary girl but rather vicious type of sea creature. Bridie is determined to find the girl, even if she thinks Cristabel may be part of Sir Edmund Berwick's "collection" rather than his actual daughter. Bridie is assisted in her investigations by the ghost of a recently deceased boxer, Ruby Doyle.
Paul Simon: The Life (biography) by Robert Hilburn. Just read a couple chapters.
Naked Came the Florida Man by Tim Dorsey: Apparently this is the 23rd installment in the "Serge Storm" series so some people must like it. I couldn't get past the first few chapters of a road trip to take tombstone rubbings in the run-up to a hurricane.
Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Casiopea (yes, named after the constellation) and her impoverished widowed mom live with a brutal grandfather who treats Casiopea like a slave. On a day when the rest of her family are away, Casiopea opens a forbidden trunk in her grandfather's bedroom and accidentally fres the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who forces her to help him regain his throne from a treacherous brother. If they succeed, Casiopea can escape her miserable life; if they fail, Casiopea will die. Intriguing premise but the writing and storyline just didn't hold me. Nevertheless, she has some other interesting sounding fantasy and thrillers which I will investigate.

Red Dress in Black and White by Elliot Ackerman. 

Woman 99 by Greer Macallister. Although I liked the historical aspect of it, the protagonist, Charlotte Smith, just didn't engage me. She seemed flat and the plot device, to get herself admitted to an insane asylum in order to get her sister out, felt overdone. It was well reviewed by another author, Fiona Davis, who also talked about the use of such places to sideline inconvenient women in her book, The Address.

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

I had never heard of this author, Grady Hendrix, but he has had some best sellers in the horror genre and the premise of this book, that a group of southern housewives take on an ancient vampire who is preying on the local children, was too tempting to pass up. A group of fairly well-to-do  housewives in 1990's Charleston, South Carolina, surreptitiously enjoy a book club focused on true crime, happily discussing how serial killers get away with their dark deeds. One wife tells her husband she is attending a Bible study group. When a crotchety neighbor dies in a rather ghoulish fashion, a man claiming to be a distant relative, James Harris, moves into the woman's house. Patricia Cunningham is bored with her life as wife to a successful psychiatrist, caretaker for his demented mother, and mother of two teenage children, and she wishes "something exciting would happen around here." She does the neighborly thing and takes a casserole over to the new neighbor, but gets worried when he does not answer the door. She goes into the house to find him dead--she thinks--and gives him mouth to mouth resuscitation (having been a nurse in her earlier years).  He "revives" and tells her he has a medical condition that makes him sensitive to daylight and that his wallet with his identification has been stolen. Patricia agrees to help with paying some overdue utility bills and setting up a checking account with some money he "found" under the house. That night, he comes to return the casserole dish and is invited in to meet Patricia's family. Anyone who has read vampire stories knows the significance of that move. By the time Patricia begins to suspect that he is not who he claims to be and is, in fact, something very dangerous, the damage is done. Children begin disappearing and/or dying in a poor neighboring Black community, and Patricia does some sleuthing of her own, discovering James in the back of a van feeding on one of the children. She tries to convince her fellow book group members that they need to take issues into their own hands, but the women are co-opted by their husbands who have become bosom buddies with James and think the women are all hysterical over-reactors. Patricia's husband actually puts her in a mental hospital for a time and when she comes out, she keeps her head down. Meanwhile James has ingratiated himself socially and financially with the community, getting the men to invest in a new real estate development. Patricia discovers one night that James has come into their home and is feeding off her older daughter and this galvanizes her to try once more to plot his demise. The most religious member of the book club  believes her but thinks she can handles James on her own, given her strong faith in God. She is sadly mistaken. The rest of the the book group eventually agree to help Patricia in a desperate attempt to protect their children from this greedy monster. The book is a bit grisly at times but uses the device of under-values and disaffected housewives to good measure in setting up the tension in the story.
Kirkus considers this to be Hendrix's "best book yet." And USA Today highlights "incisive social commentary and meaningful character development" as well as the female bonding that make these women ultimately a formidable opponent to incipient evil. They warn, however, that this is a "proper horror novel" and not for the faint of heart.
READ this interview on NPR with Hendrix to learn the backstory for this book. It's very personal and thoughtful and will add to your appreciation of what he's written.

The End of October

Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction author Lawrence Wright has dived into speculative but well-researched fiction with what many reviewers (The New York Times,  The Guardian, Vox, Slate, The Atlantic) call an "eerily prescient" account of a global pandemic. CDC expert Henry Parsons is asked by the WHO to investigate a cluster of deaths in an Indonesian detention camp for gay men. Before Henry can even report back on the horrendous and highly contagious disease he encounters there, an infected man is on his way to pilgrimage at Mecca--the annual gathering of over 3 million faithful Muslims. Even the harshest measures are insufficient to keep people from returning to their homes after the outbreak, spreading the disease far and wide.
Henry is one of the people who needs to be working on understanding the virus in order to treat or prevent it, but is instead caught up in a worldwide travel ban, unable to return to his family in Atlanta or get access to the research and lab facilities he needs. Focusing mainly on the Middle East and the United States, Wright talks about the breakdown first of civility--neighbors don't help neighbors in a pandemic; they are afraid of them--and then of society, he paints a picture that seems all too familiar from today's headlines.
The New York Times says that what distinguishes Wright's book from a large body of pandemic based fiction is "deep, thorough research... In writing the novel, he interviewed scientists, epidemiologists, government officials and military officers. His understanding of world affairs, Middle East gossip, politics and governmental ineptitude is exceptional." And he weaves his story together with illustrative non-fiction; for example, he details "accounts of historical epidemics, descriptions of Russian cyber- and biowarfare capabilities, the story of the 1803 attempt to save the New World from smallpox..." (NYT)
NPR says of Wright's digressions into discussing pandemics throughout history that "we readers are currently in the market for exactly that: Every single fact a great reporter like Wright has learned about pandemics."
The Washington Post picks out a quote from the book that sounds like it could have come from Dr. Fauci's daily briefings: "Typically, with a pandemic, you have two or three big waves of contagion before it settles down and becomes the normal flu you get every year. That lasts till the next pandemic comes along. So if this one is like the 1918 flu, the really big wave will hit in October. But of course, we don’t know what this one will do.” Whether or not you think it is a good thing to imagine the outcome of a global pandemic while living in the middle of one is a personal decision. Even the author has mixed feelings. In an interview with The New Yorker, he says, “In some ways, I have to admit, I’m kind of proud that I imagined things that, in real life, seem to be coming into existence...On the other hand, I feel embarrassed to have written this and have it come out.”
I was engrossed and carried along by the story as well as the history and science. 

Lock Every Door

I was a little bit leery when I started reading this thriller by Riley Sager because I am not a fan of the horror genre. But it turns out that the dark forces in this book are altogether too human, motivated by the usual vices. Jules Larsen has not only lost her job but also her abode after she caught her boyfriend/roommate cheating; so she has been camping on her friend Chloe's sofa for weeks, answering endless want ads with no success. Then she gets an interview to be an apartment sitter in one of New York City's architectural icons, the Bartholomew. It also happens to be the setting for a book that her older sister used to read to her when they were little, Heart of a Dreamer; that was before her sister disappeared, before her parents killed themselves and left her with mountains of unpaid medical bills. In fact, the author of that book is currently a resident of the Bartholomew, although not particularly friendly. The pay for 3 months of work will clear Jules' most pressing debts and give her time to hopefully find a new job; and at least she will be off her friend's couch. The apartment in question is the 12th floor penthouse, facing directly on Central Park. She nicknames one of the building's gargoyles--visible outside a corner window--George. It all seems too good to be true. And it is. The Bartholomew has a bit of a tragic reputation--more than it's share of unusual deaths. When another apartment sitter in the building, Ingrid, tells Jules that she is scared, and that the apartment sitter who preceded Jules in her current apartment disappeared without a word, and then disappears herself, Jules is determined to find Ingrid. She begins to think some shady things are going on and doesn't know who to trust.  It may be that the Bartholomew is a little like the Eagles' Hotel California...you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave. It was a surprising twist of an ending. Not sure I would seek out any of Sager's other books, but it was an engaging tale.
Fellow book group member found this site about NYC's gargoyles, which play a role in this book:
https://convene.com/catalyst/new-york-city-office-building-gargoyles/
Kirkus was less than laudatory in its review; The New York Journal of Books offers an enthusiastically positive review and a comprehensive plot line than I have done here.