Migrations

“The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here.” So opens Charlotte McConaghy's debut adult novel, set in the near distant future. Our protagonist and narrator is a woman trying to make sense of a world gone mad and of her own self-destructive compulsion to wander. Abandoned early on by her father,  Franny Stone in turn abandons her mother when she wanders off at the age of 12. When she returns home, her mother is gone. Franny loves the wild spaces and the creatures that inhabit them, especially the birds and creatures of the sea. Over the years, as multiple species are driven to extinction by human greed, she undertakes one last migration of her own, to follow the only remaining flock of Arctic terns on their monumental annual journey from Greenland to Antarctica. She tags three birds during nesting season and then has to convince one of the disappearing number of fishing boats to take her south. She badgers Ennis Malone, captain of the Saghani, to take her onboard, against his better judgement and the opinion of his eccentric crew.  Franny promises that following the terns will lead them to the "Golden Catch" that has eluded them these last few years.

Franny's tortured history is revealed in flashback chapters and in her unsent letters to her ecology activist husband, Niall. But her obsession, now shared by Ennis, may be the undoing of them all. 

The book is rich in metaphor. For example, as The Guardian notes with regard to the terns' migration, "This journey is the longest migration undertaken by any animal – a complete crossing of the globe – and a feat that terns complete twice-yearly. The book uses this act of endurance, this instinctual movement, metaphorically: Franny too is driven to constant movement by forces she cannot control or understand, and is determined and driven even in the face of great adversity." They also comment on the thing I found most distracting,  the "book’s constant shuttling about in time, as well as the unreliability of Franny’s narration, the half-truths and silences with which she surrounds herself and everything she holds back from the other characters and the reader alike." If I were to re-read the book, I would keep a timeline of Franny's life on paper.

The New York Times chides that the novel veers into melodrama in the last half, but also concurs with my sense of how beautifully this book is written when they say, "this novel’s prose soars with its transporting descriptions of the planet’s landscapes and their dwindling inhabitants, and contains many wonderful meditations on our responsibilities to our earthly housemates."

 The Washington Post concludes, "In many ways, this is a story about grieving, an intimate tale of anguish set against the incalculable bereavements of climate change. There are many losses, but lives are also saved. Franny charts our course through a novel that is efficient and exciting, indicting but forgiving, and hard but ultimately hopeful."

 

Memory Man

I'm sure I must have read something by prolific bestselling author David Baldacci before, but don't seem to have posted anything. This book introduces a new series featuring Amos Decker. Decker still lives in Burlington, Vermont, where he was a star on the high school football team...the only one to ever get the chance to go pro. On his first outing as an NFL rookie, however, he is so savagely struck by an opponent's helmet that he loses consciousness, suffers several broken bones, and wakes up with a different brain. The trauma has caused him to remember every detail of anything he hears, sees, or experiences (hyperthymesia) and  to see colored numbers connected to certain events (synesthesia), becoming what is called an acquired savant. He goes to an institute that studies such mental anomalies as a way to help himself cope with his altered brain. Eventually he returns to Burlington, joins the police force and puts his perfect memory to work solving crimes as a detective. 

But then his world is knocked off its axis once again when he comes home one night to find his brother-in-law, his wife, and his daughter all brutally murdered. The killer is never found. And Decker cannot forget a single detail of what he saw, so he starts drinking to try and forget, which shortly ends his police career, and ultimately he becomes homeless. A year and half later, he has pulled himself together sufficiently to start taking on small jobs as a private investigator and earns enough to live in the Residence Inn. Seemingly out of the blue, a man walks into the police station and claims to be responsible for the murders of Decker's family, claiming that Decker disrespected him in a grocery store encounter. But Decker has no memory of the man. Then a horrific mass shooting occurs at the local high school and clues start to connect the earlier murders to the current perpetrator. Decker is brought in, first by the local police and then by the FBI, to try and help solve the crimes. Decker hooks back up with his former partner at the police department, veteran detective Mary Lancaster, and, against his better judgement, with a local newspaper reporter. However, everyone who comes close to Decker becomes a target for the killer; it's clear this is very personal. It's just that Decker cannot remember anyone he pissed off so badly that they would undertake such savage revenge. This book will keep you guessing until the end.

The Washington Post calls "this novel a master class on the bestseller because of its fast-moving narrative, the originality of its hero and its irresistible plot." Kirkus concludes that "Although the crimes and their perpetrators are far-fetched, readers will want to see Decker back on the printed page again and again."

American Spy

This debut novel by Lauren Wilkinson "was a Washington Post bestseller, an NAACP Image Award nominee, an Anthony award nominee, and an Edgar Award nominee. It was short-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, was a Barnes & Noble Book of the Month, a PBS book club pick, and was included on Barack Obama’s 2019 Recommended Reading List" (author website). NPR says,  "American Spy works on so many levels — it's an expertly written spy thriller as well as a deeply intelligent literary novel that tackles issues of politics, race and gender in a way that's never even close to being heavy-handed or didactic."  They go on to say that "Wilkinson doesn't shy away from the moral ambiguity of American adventurism in the 1980s, and neither does her unforgettable narrator, Marie, who tells her sons, 'One thing I can say for sure is that I don't want you to be moral absolutists. If what I'm telling you of our story means to you that the people it involves are either saved or damned, then you'll have misunderstood me.'"

The year is 1992, and it's the middle of the night when Marie Mitchell is alerted by an ominous floorboard creaking in her rural Connecticut home; she retrieves her gun from the safe under her desk and silently awaits the man who has come to kill her. In the struggle, she shoots him instead and, with her young twin sons in tow,  flees to the sanctuary of her mother's small farm on a Caribbean island. Here's the backstory that is gradually revealed in the book, as summarized by Kirkus:

"It’s 1987, and Marie Mitchell has hit the wall as an FBI agent. She’s patronized and marginalized by her boss, who relegates her to little more than recruiting informants (or “snitches,” as she derisively calls them) and filing “oppressive amounts of paperwork.” This is not how this idealistic (but hardly naïve) daughter of an NYPD officer hoped her life would turn out back when she and her sister, Helene, dreamed of becoming secret agents when they grew up. At this low point of her professional life, Marie is recruited by Ed Ross, a smooth-talking CIA official, to take part in a covert operation to undermine the regime of Burkina Faso’s magnetic young president, Thomas Sankara, a Marxist influenced by the example of the martyred revolutionary Che Guevara. From the beginning of her assignment, Marie is both wary of the agency’s reasons for taking down Sankara and skeptical toward Sankara’s leftist politics, though the closer she gets to Sankara, the less inclined she is to dismiss his efforts to improve his nation’s welfare. Nevertheless, Marie has another, more personal motive for accepting the assignment: the agent-in-charge, Daniel Slater, was both a colleague and lover of her sister, who fulfilled her ambition to become a spy but died in a car accident whose circumstances remain a mystery to Marie and her family. The more embedded Marie gets in her assignment, the less certain she is of what that assignment entails and of who, or what, she’s really working for. Falling in love with her target—Sankara, who in real life was violently overthrown that same year—is yet another complication that further loosens Marie’s professional resolve." Kirkus goes on to conclude by saying, "There’s an honorable, unsung tradition of African-American novelists using the counterspy genre as a metaphor for what W.E.B. Du Bois called "double consciousness," and Wilkinson’s book is a noteworthy contribution." Or as The Nation puts it, "Wilkinson does not graft the matter of race onto the spy novel but rather asks us to think about how being a minority is, in a sense, an act of espionage, a precarious state marked by shifting identities, competing loyalties, and a constant threat of violence." And the Washington Post notes, "...also striking is the novel’s deeper recognition that, to some extent, rudimentary tradecraft is something all of her African American characters have learned as an everyday survival skill. As Marie’s father wryly tells her on the day of her graduation from the FBI training academy at Quantico, “I’ve been a spy in this country for as long as I can remember.”

Part of the twisty tale leads us down Marie's path of discovery about who is really pulling the strings. Much of the book allows us inside Marie's mind and feelings as the story is largely told in a long letter to her two sons--"I'm writing this to give you honest answers to the questions I hazard to guess you'll ask while you're growing up. I'm writing it all down here just in case I'm not around to tell you."Their parentage, when revealed, will not surprise, but the ending will leave you hanging, not in an unpleasant way, but certainly with a sense of loss about not knowing the outcome.

High praise for the book abounds including The New York Journal of Books,  The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, and The Nation. The Nation's review offers the most comprehensive discussion of race vis a vis national and global politics.