Scythe

This is the first book in Neal Shusterman's "Arc of a Scythe" trilogy and it took home a Prinz Honor award. Set in a "post-mortal" world, disease has been conquered, pain has been eliminated, everyone is guaranteed a comfortable living, and death is a thing of the past. All human knowledge has been gathered in an AI called the Thunderhead, which manages all human affairs optimally. The main problem is that the population keeps growing faster than the Thunderhead can optimize production to support them. Hence the Schythes were created to randomly "glean" a certain number of humans every year. They must follow 10 commandments that are supposed to safeguard them from human follies, but it isn't working. And the Thunderhead has no jurisdiction over the affairs of Scythedom so it cannot intervene to correct the corruption that is eroding the moral order. Two teens, Citra and Rowan, have been selected to be apprentices to Scythe Faraday, one of the Old Guard who still believes that scythes should be compassionate and never want to kill. But a new cohort of scythes, led by Scythe Goddard, seek fame and relish killing; they have become infamous for massacres of dozens or hundreds of people at a time. Since all scythes still abide by a quota, in between their murderous events, they party. When Goddard's clan orchestrates a terrible verdict on the two apprentices, Scythe Faraday ostensibly kills himself to set them free, but Citra and Rowan's troubles are just beginning.

Shusterman raises all sorts of philosophical questions about what makes life worth living in the interspersed entries of the scythes' journals. Chapters are told either from the perspective of Citra or Rowan. Characters are well-developed and the ending was a satisfying one, so it was worth the read and I will eventually get to Thunderhead, the sequel. Kirkus's review concluded: "A thoughtful and thrilling story of life, death, and meaning." School Library Journal says, "A brilliant and gripping sci-fi thriller that acutely explores the consequences of worldwide immortality and asks readers to think critically about the nature of morality." And Publishers Weekly says the story "is guaranteed to make readers think deeply."

The Nature of Fragile Things

This book by Susan Meissner is set primarily in and around SanFrancisco in the year leading up and following the earthquake that destroyed most of the city in 1906. Protagonist Sophie Whalen, a young Irish immigrant desperate to escape the tenements of New York City, answers an ad for a mail order bride to a supposedly widowed man with a young daughter. When she arrives, she finds a charismatically handsome man who seems totally uninterested in her, but also his mute child of 5, Katherine (Kat) with whom Sophie falls in love. Sophie has never lived in such a nice house, with enough food to eat but almost no freedom. She is discouraged from making friends with the neighbors by her husband, Martin Hocking; most of the neighbors are wealthier anyway and only one shows interest in Sophie and Kat, although it is more of the condescending rich helping the poor sort of attention. Martin supposedly travels for his work as an insurance assessor and is often gone for days at a time, offering Sophie neither the name of his employer, or a schedule of where and when he will be gone. One night a knock at the door brings Sophie's world to an astounding implosion. A young pregnant woman, Belinda, is looking for her husband, having found Sophie's address in his coat pocket. When she sees Sophie's wedding picture on the mantel, she breaks down, swearing the picture is of her husband, James Bigelow.  Martin/James shows up before dawn the next morning and, when he finds Belinda there, he advances toward the women in a threatening manner. But the earthquake's first tremors start and the world is literally upended. Martin ends up at the bottom of the stairs and Sophie drags him to the kitchen, barely conscious as she, Belinda and Kat endeavor to escape the falling buildings and raging fires. Sophie discovers that Kat's mother is not, in fact, dead, but in a sanitorium in Arizona and she makes the painful decision to reunite the two. When Sophie institutes a missing persons report for her husband six weeks after the quake in order to cover herself, a whole new chain of events threatens to put her in prison. 

Publishers Weekly says "The plucky and principled Sophie (who is hiding a few secrets of her own) captivates from the first page, while naive Belinda and sensitive Kat are standouts. Ingeniously plotted and perfectly structured, this captivates from beginning to end." Booklist calls it "an ultimately uplifting story of strong women and found family."

Billy Summers

I have not read much of Stephen King's work, but this was a well constructed, heart-full interweaving of several stories that had me going to the end of the 783 pages. Billy Summers grew up poor. His mother was continually bringing home bad men. When one of them stomped his younger sister to death in a drunken rage, Billy grabbed the man's gun and shot him. Billy was eventually placed in a foster home, joined the Marines as soon as he could, and went to Iraq after being trained as a sniper. Now he makes his living killing bad men. He won't take a job unless he believes the target is seriously a "bad" person....like the man who killed his sister, Cathy. And Billy is not your ordinary assassin; he loves to read but he hides his light beneath a bushel basket of a "dumb self persona" when dealing with his potential employers. The New York Times' reviewer handily informs us that "Among the authors name-checked in its spacious narrative are Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Faulkner, Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, along with Billy’s own favorites, Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola." When he agrees to take on one final job with a big payout, his antenna immediately begin to suspect something is off. Nevertheless, Billy is a man of his word and he continues living in a small southern town under an assumed identity, posing as a writer with a deadline. In the process, he makes friends with his neighbors and their children, dates a woman from the building where his "office" is, fertilizes his lawn so it looks really nice, and starts writing a fictionalized account of his life. But the book gets less and less fictionalized as he gets closer to the present day. Billy is no fool and he knows he is being set up somehow, so he makes his own plans for escape after the target is killed. Then he becomes the target--with a $6 million bounty on his head. He risks his own safety by rescuing a young woman who is gang raped and she becomes his traveling companion and--almost and then fully--his accomplice in taking out one last very bad man.  

Publishers Weekly describes the book as a "tripwire-taut thriller."The Guardian says it is "his best book in years." Kirkus concludes "Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master. "

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent

I have been intending to read this book by Isabel Wilkerson for months now. It seems that every time there is a bookcase in view during the interviews on the PBS NewsHour, I see this book on the shelf. It felt like a "must read" and, when my book group agreed to read it, I was sufficiently motivated to plow through this very disheartening exploration of how badly humans are capable of treating one another. I will say that, being a highly educated and reasonably well-read person, I felt I knew a lot about discrimination, slavery, the rise of Nazism, caste in India. BUT there was so much here that I did not know. For example how "race" (skin color) became the basis of justifying dehumanization of enslaved Africans after they began to adopt Christianity and were, therefore, no longer "heathens." How the Nazis looked to American laws to build their own "legal" structures justifying the extermination of Jews and other non-Aryans. That a black man was lynched every 3-4 days between 1900 - 1940 ("Jim Crow" era). I could go on and on. I am including a picture of the library book I read, filled with so many post-it notes that I clearly should have bought the book so I could just underline all the things that stood out to me. 

Trump's election, which puzzled me and a lot of other people who felt that many working class white people were voting against their own interests, was actually an attempt to maintain superiority in the caste system of the U.S. Superiority based on anything as ephemeral as race is, of course, a fragile thing and requires the existence and enforcement of an underclass. She clarifies the distinction between racism, class and caste as she draws comparisons between slavery in the U.S., the caste system in India and the rise of Nazism in Germany. The book is extensively researched and filled with personal stories as well as history, and factual information. It is a tough go but I would have every American read this book to better understand what people of color have endured (and continue to endure) in this country.