Storm Child

Finished June 23

Storm Child by Michael Robotham

This novel is part of the series that features psychologist Cyrus Haven, who often works with the police. Evie Cormac is a young woman who Cyrus fostered and then gave a home to once she reached adulthood. She was found hiding in a hidden space when she was a child, with her captors and abusers uncaught. Evie knows parts of her past, but has not recovered all her memories. 

When she and Cyrus are on vacation at a beach and the bodies of migrant refugees begin washing ashore, Evie has a traumatic response. When she connects with the one teenage boy who survived, and learns of the deliberate ramming of the ship he was on, she becomes engaged with his story. 

Cyrus becomes part of the police investigation, but the police don't realize the reach of the people who are behind this event. When Evie becomes determined to push her own boundaries and dig into her own memories to find the truth, she may also put herself and Cyrus in danger. 

Joining them is a female lawyer, who is a bit of a rebel herself. She works for an organization who help refugees, and has had contact with at least one of the women on the boat that sunk. As she uses her contacts and skills to help, she comes closer to the truth, as well as to Cyrus and Evie. 

This is a topical story in more than one way, and I found myself needing to know what happened to those involved. It had some surprising events that led to a range of emotions as the plot unfolded. 

Moving and very well plotted, this book is a great read. 

Tomb of Sand

Finished March 26

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell

This book is about character, history, family and memory. It was the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, and the winner of the 2022 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, as well as awards for translations into other languages. It was the first novel translated from Hindi to win the International Booker Award. 

This is an extraordinary novel, that is rooted in the life of an eighty-year-old woman in India. Ma, as she is referred to, has lived with her eldest son Bade since before the death of her husband. Since that loss, she has shrunk into herself, spending much of the day in bed. When her son retires, he must leave his government house and move into an apartment, which he is renovating. 

After Ma goes missing on an unexplained nighttime outing, it is decided that she will live with her daughter, Beti, who lives an unconventional life as a writer. Never married, she's had lovers, and lives on her own in an apartment. Soon after Ma moves in, she starts to receive visits from an old friend, Rosie Bua, a person who is gender fluid, and who involves her in crafts and planning a trip to Pakistan. 

I just loved this book. It is so interesting, and the writing is beautifully done, with the story seemingly wandering off at times, but really giving us information that is important to the story, background information and information about relationships and important objects, such as canes and small statues. 

We also learn about birds that become part of the story, crows that live outside Beti's apartment window in the nearby trees. Trees that have their place in the plot. 

The novel describes Ma as a woman growing smaller, and Beti as a woman growing bigger, in an interesting way that the story evolves. The first chapter grabs you, gives you hints about what is coming, and doesn't let go.

A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you've got women and a border, a story can write itself. Even women on their own are enough. Women are stories in themselves, full of stirrings and whisperings that float on the wind, that bend with each blade of grass. The setting sun gathers fragments of tales and fashions them into glowing lanterns that hang suspended from clouds. These too will join our story. The story's path unfurls, not knowing where it will stop, tacking to the right and left, twisting and turning, allowing anything and everything to join in the narration. It will emerge from within a volcano, swelling silently as the past boils forth into the present, bringing steam, embers, and smoke. 

There are two women in this story. Besides these women, there are others who came and went, those who kept coming and going, those who always stayed but weren't as important, and those yet to be mentioned, who weren't women at all. For now, let's just say that two women were important, and of these, one was growing smaller, and the other bigger.

There were two women and one death.

Two women, one death. How nicely we'll get on, us and them, once we all sit down together!

Two women: one mother, one daughter, one growing downwards, the other growing upwards. One laughs and says, I'm growing smaller by the day! The other is saddened, but says noting when she sees herself growing bigger. The mother has stopped wearing saris now that she must stuff more than half the fabric into her waist and raise the hems of her petticoats a little higher each day. Does gradually growing smaller make you catlike, so you may slip through tiny cracks and escape? Puncture a border and slip right through? Develop a knack for near-invisibility?

This must be the reason that the mother was able to slip through to the other side of the border while the daughter was still fretting over how stuck they were. It's also possible that the smaller woman truly was innocent when she refused to confess to any crime of her part, be it regarding legal permissions, debates over names, or accusations of theft. 

Those who didn't understand her arguments considered her crazy, maybe even vicious. They suspected her of purposefully misleading.

She pointed out that men always get the high-quality dal and women just get leftover mash, don't they? Hmm? She spoke fearlessly. So? So does that make it right?

But if you stare at them fearlessly, will the border guards understand? You have crossed the border, they reprimand.

She chuckles. Anything worth doing transcends borders. Should I do nothing at all?

No, they retort, and no one is foolish enough not to know this. Even goats and cows know where not to stray. And your eyesight isn't so bad you can't see, so how can you be forgiven?

Who's asking for forgiveness? She roars with laughter and the growing-bigger daughter weeps. And is this all there is to see? Perhaps I too have seen a thing or two. Try seeing with my eyes for once. 

If she were to fall, she did not with for it to be facedown. Wherever the bullet came from, whenever it his, she would fall straight back and lie supine on the ground. Regally. Her eyes filled with sky.

Let me practise, she'd tell her daughter

The mother had started hiccupping all the time. She hiccupped and hiccupped and hiccupped. If the daughter had not been in such a state, she'd have grown suspicious as to whether these hiccups were real or fake. They won't stop with water; give me a slap on the back! the mother would command. If the slap isn't hard enough, then try a running kick, boom! Try it on my back or in my stomach or on my sides, and make sure I fall down, but on my back, eyes open, forehead facing up; then the hiccups will surely stop. It was a strange remedy, but the daughter did as the mother asked. She kicked and kicked, boom boom boom, and with this new game her mother kept falling over bam bam bam. After a bit of hullabaloo, observers would also burst out laughing--Can you beat it? This old lady's too much! But the mother told the daughter that she needed to be prepared.            

Anyway, long story short, what happened was this: a bullet did come flying towards her, but by then the mother had become an expert at falling backwards. A bullet came, punctured her body, shot through and out the other side. Anyone else would have sprawled facedown in the mud, but Ma flipped backwards like she was doing a somersault. She lay back on the ground in an attitude of victory, elegantly, faceup, as though she was reclining on a soft bed, the sky her coverlet. 

Those who consider death to be an ending took this to be hers. But those in the know knew that this was no ending; knew she'd simply crossed yet another border. 

So there's no harm in starting the story right here, that is, the way we're doing it right now.

You can see the way the story engages, draws you in, and makes you want to know the story for yourself.

The tone is light and a little amused, as if it is playing with us. She plays with many things here, and many borders, Highly recommended. 

This Is The Night Our House Will Catch Fire

Finished September 3

This Is The Night Our House Will Catch Fire: a Memoir by Nick Flynn

This memoir began with Flynn telling stories of his childhood to his young daughter. One story was about the night the first house his mother owned caught fire when he was seven years old. It was across the street from the fire station, and it had significant asbestos content, so although heavily damaged, it didn't burn down. Other stories are about the old man who lived nearby, the fear he instilled and the odd collections of things he had. He talks about the saltmarsh he crossed to get to school, and the world of books he lived in.

Alongside these stories to his daughter he talks about the trips he made back to his hometown with her, his marriage and the insecurities and communication issues that affect it, and his mother's death by suicide. 

The chapters here are short and dreamlike, as he tries to piece together his past and make sense of what are memories and what has been imagined. He examines how that fiery night has stayed with him and still affects him in many ways. The writing caught me and held me to the story, wanting to see what he learned, how he moved forward following his exposure of the past and the secrets he held onto. 

Reset

Finished August 31

Reset by Sarina Dahlan

This dystopian novel imagines a world after a major war that has killed off most of the human population. A man who was in space when it happened and had already dabbled in planned communities decided to find the survivors and bring them together in a utopian community of four linked cities in the Mojave Desert. To prevent future building of alliances and resentments, he devised a system to reset everybody's memories every four years. Children are created in medical labs and raised to adulthood, gaining education and having their skills assessed. This technical learning, whether it is scientific, literature, or arts-related stays with them through any resets, but long-term relationships don't exist and neither do any prejudices developed during that four years. 

At each reset, people are assigned names, jobs and housing, provided with food, entertainment credits and an AI to assist them. Everyone is vegetarian. Life is generally good, with no one homeless or hungry. Some resources are limited, such as water, but these are distributed equitably. They all revere the man who created this community, known as the Planner but have been told very little about the Last War to prevent such feelings arising again. 

But some people have dreams of their past, remembering things that brought them strong emotions, mostly around love, and they desire to remember more, to connect with the people that they loved so strongly, and resist the "Tabula Rasa" reset. Thus there grows a resistance of sorts, secretly brewing a potion that brings these dreams to the surface, reviving such memories. 

The inspiration for this utopia is the John Lennon song Imagine, and it is an anthem of sorts for people. 

This story follows a few characters. Aris is a scientist, a woman who only engages in short term relationships, and embraces the ideas of the community. One of her short term lovers, Benja, has dreams of a man he loved before, and wants to remember more and regain that love. He is an artist and seeks out the group known as Dreamers that try to bring their dreams back into memories. This obsession will take him into dangerous territory and draw in the leader of the Dreamer group Metis, who is also searching for his past lover. 

This is an interesting story about the issues with an ideal world, the problem of control versus individuality, and the nature of love. 

June

Finished August 23

June by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer

I had previously read Bakker's novel The Twin and really enjoyed it. This novel is set in two time periods, both on the same day in June. On Tuesday, June 17th in 1969, Queen Juliana stops in a town for lunch. She is on a tour of this part of the Netherlands, and has already visited other towns in the morning. She is accompanied by an artist who has been commissioned to make a sculpture of her, a woman who is also a sister of the Order of the Sisters of Charity. Also accompanying her is a woman who is a representative of the government and who briefs her on the places she is visiting, the people she is scheduled to see, and other pertinent information. The Queen would prefer the young secretary travelling in another car to be her companion and thinks about how to make that change. As she meets local dignitaries and steps outside the planned itinerary a couple of times, she notices things: the people that she sees along the roads she travels, the names of farms she passes, the manner and gestures of people, shops and vehicles, landscape and more. She is polite, but also a bit of a rebel.

Several of the people she notices or interacts with are also prominent in the June decades later. It begins with a woman lying in the straw in the loft of a barn. She is thinking about the past, both the long ago past and a more recent one, her fiftieth wedding anniversary. She thinks about how different the anniversary would have been if she'd had a daughter there instead of just three sons, how more pleasant it would have gone. Her three sons are gradually revealed to the reader, Klaas, married with a daughter of his own, Dieke, who plays a large role here; Jan, who lives in Texel and has not married, and who has a task he has taken on this day in the cemetery nearby; and Johan, who has been changed due to an accident he had several years ago and lives in a group home. As we gradually learn about the woman in the hay, why she has retreated there from her family, and learn about this habit of hers when she is upset and needs to think, we also learn about the event in 1969 that changed the family forever. 

The three sons have issues of their own and these are also revealed through both their own thoughts and actions and through her memories. We see the issues in their lives and how they react to them. Dieke has her own questions about what is happening on this day. Why is her grandmother in the loft and behaving in the way she is? What is her uncle Jan doing and why? We see her interactions with her parents and her own secrets. 

There are also two other characters featured outside the family. One is the town baker, a lonely man haunted by the past, and a woman recently returned to the town who has resentments, memories, and impulses of her own. 

There are so many subtleties here, and underlying stories. Even the animals have significance, the ones on the farm, the birds in the cemetery, the various dogs who appear. Also plants from trees to potted cactuses, have a meaning and play a role in what happens.

Looking through the book again after reading, I noticed more things, and saw deeper connections between the events that occur. On the surface, little happens in the book, and yet there is so much that is revealed on these days separated by time but linked in several ways. 

Marrow and Bone

Finished September 6
Marrow and Bone by Walter Kempowski, translated by Charlotte Collins

This novel was released in 1992 in German and only recently translated into English. The main character here, Jonathan Fabrizius, is a freelance writer who mostly lives on an allowance sent to him by his uncle who runs a furniture company. Jonathan lives in Hamburg in a room in an apartment. His girlfriend of six years, Ulla Bakkre de Vaera has a part-time job at a museum, a fascination with cruelties enacted and represented in art, and lives in another room in the same apartment. Their landlord is a older widow of a general that they have little interaction with.
Jonathan was born in 1945 as his mother and uncle fled East Prussia ahead of the Russian advance. His mother died as a result of the birth and her body was left in the small town that he was born in, with his uncle taking a young peasant woman who had lost her own child along on their flight to nurse the young baby. Jonathan's father, a Wehrmacht lieutenant had also died in East Prussia, on the Vistula Spit, when a bomb hit him.
As the book opens, it is 1988 and Jonathan receives a letter from a motorcar company offering him a trip to scout out a planned journalist event to launch a new vehicle. Jonathan would be writing the publicity article to draw the journalists to participate. The trip would be in East Prussia. Jonathan has never returned to the land of his birth, but this opportunity intrigues him with the possibility to see it. He would travel with a driver and a PR person from the motorcar company, and work with them to identify places to see and make note of.
As Jonathan decides to do this, he also holds back a bit from Ulla, not sharing with her this information until after he has committed, but there are also things that Ulla is hiding from him, and this is a turning point in their relationship.
Jonathan's experiences in East Prussia, his interactions with local people, the visiting of historic sites from churches to bunkers also lead him to make peace with his personal history of this place and the losses he suffered from the death of his parents.
Jonathan has an active mind, and we see his thoughts throughout as his mind wanders from the matters at hand and into reflection and supposition. I really enjoyed these thoughts and how varied they were and how he looked at his life and the world around him. Visiting a country that had been settled by Germans in the past, changed hands several times, and is now part of Poland is touched with the relatively recent history of the Second World War and the Nazi presence there. This too is a part of how the characters interact with the people as they visit this area.

Sorrow Road

Finished May 15
Sorrow Road by Julia Keller

This is the second book I've read in this series set in the mountains of West Virginia featuring prosecuting attorney Belfa Elkins. There are several stories going on here, one reaching far into the past.
In the 1930s, three boys took a ride in car that ended in tragedy. The incident was covered up, but never forgotten by them.
In the present day, a young woman visits her father in a memory care home, trying to get him to take responsibility for the pain and suffering he inflicted on her and her brother when they were young, becoming frustrated at his lack of reaction, but never giving up. Another woman, a childhood classmate of Belfa, has been visiting her father in the same home, and growing more concerned with his agitation. When he dies, she asks for Bell's help in looking into his death.
Bell's daughter Carla has been living with roommates in the city, but calls her and tells her she is coming home, the next day. Bell knows that somethings up, but she treads carefully in questioning her about it, and Carla already has a job interview lined up.
Bell is also considering her boyfriend and where she wants the relationship to go.
With so much going on, and winter storms creating dangerous roads, this book grabbed me and didn't let go.

White Rabbit

Finished December 3
White Rabbit by Kate Phillips

This is a story of Ruth, a woman in her old age. She has been married to her second husband for many years, but still looks back with longing at her first marriage. She was widowed young, and subsequently fell in love with a man who didn't live up to her ideals, and thus came to marry her current husband.
We are placed in Ruth's life over a day, and see all her regular habits from her sleeping arrangements, to her determinedly planned outings, to her predetermined meals. We see her relationship with her granddaughter Karen, her husband Henry, her cleaner Luzma and her young son Luis, neighbours, acquaintances, and random strangers she meets.
The book often ventures into the past, looking at Ruth's younger life, her mother Elizabeth, her first husband Hale, and her early friendships.
This is a book of relationships, of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and about growing old. A very interesting read.
The white rabbit of the title is a family game Ruth plays, with everyone she knows trying to say the phrase before Ruth does. It also comes up again in other ways as the book progresses.

Let's Get Lost

Finished March 25
Let's Get Lost by Adi Alsaid

This teen novel starts with a young woman, Leila, stopping at a small garage in Vicksburg to get her car, an old, red Plymouth Acclaim, tuned up before a major road trip. The mechanic is a young man about her own age, in his last year of high school. His name is Hudson. Hudson is a very skilled mechanic, who learned from his own father, and although not that experienced with girls, feels both drawn to Leila, and very comfortable with her. It would seem that she feels the same way, a connection neither can describe very well, but each feels. After the car is ready, the two continue the day together, despite Hudson having a major commitment the following morning.
As the two part, and Leila continues on her trip north to Alaska to see the Northern Lights, Leila takes Hudson's philosophical view to heart, and takes a less than direct route, open to new experiences.
The next person we see her connect with is a young homeless woman named Bree, who she picks up hitchhiking near Kansas City. Bree has a story of loss and rebellion, and is a major risk taker. When their escapades get them in trouble, Leila convinces Bree to reach out to those who care and reconnect. As Bree moves to the next stage of her life, Leila continues her roadtrip.
She almost literally runs into Elliot in Minneapolis, as he struggles with unexpected rejection, and Leila brings him insight into his situation, causing him to take more chances despite the possibilities of failure.
As Leila makes her way through British Columbia, she encounters Sonia, another lost soul, a young woman who's known love and loss, and struggles now with how to move on with respect for everyone she cares about. As their adventures take them back and forth across the border, they encounter some very interesting people, and each finds a way forward.
Leila's arrival at her destination finally brings her own story of loss to the reader. We see her connect with those around her, and know that she has people who care about her, even though she has lost a lot. We see her as she finds both what she was looking for, and less than that, and, returning home, learns that many of her instincts are very good ones indeed.
My niece, who read this after me, loved the book.

The Black Notebook

Finished September 8
The Black Notebook by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti

This novel is set mostly in Paris, with the majority of the plot done as the narrator looks back at a time in his life fifty years earlier. Jean was a young man, fascinated by Baudelaire and his mistress Jeanne Duval. As he walked around Paris, taking notes on the buildings, parks and other surroundings, especially their histories, he at times stopped at the cafeteria of the Cité Universitaire. It is there he met Dannie, a young woman who he developed a relationship with. He also met others: two relatively closely: Paul Chastagnier, a man in his forties who told Jean things and seemed to want to draw him into a closer acquaintance; and Aghamouri, a Moroccan man; as well as others he knew and talked to but wasn't formally introduced to.
Some of these people warned him against others in cryptic ways, not spelling out exactly what he should be wary of. Some took him into their confidences in a way that implied they trusted him more. Jean was young, but cautious, and his closest relationship was with Dannie. He went many places with her, met her often and didn't ask too many questions when he felt she wouldn't be open to sharing.
He wrote many things in the black notebook he carried everywhere with him. Names, phone numbers, observations, quotations, and questions. And he found that others were asking questions too, as a police detective brought him in and asked him about these people he'd met. Looking back decades later, he tries to piece things together as he tried unsuccessfully then, hoping the new information he has recently been provided will bridge some of the gaps.
Modiano has won many awards for his writing, including the Prix Goncourt, the Grand Prix National des Lettres, and the Nobel Prize in literature. This was my first book by him and I found it intriguing.

Austerlitz

Finished December 31
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

This is another unusual novel. Despite being over 400 pages, there are no chapters or even paragraphs to provide a natural stopping point when reading. The story is told by an unnamed narrator, and covers many years beginning in 1967 when he meets Jacques Austerlitz in Antwerp. The two strike up an acquaintance and meet several times again over the years.
In the early meetings they discuss architecture (Austerlitz is an architectural historian) and other impersonal subjects, but later Austerlitz begins to tell his story. He was raised in Wales by foster parents who gave him a new name and never discussed his history, but when his foster father dies while he is away at boarding school he is told his real name and reverts to it following school. He is mentored by one of his teachers and does well, and it is only after a sort of breakdown that he allows himself to investigate his past, discovering that he was sent to England in 1939 from the Czech Republic on a Kindertransport at the age of four. He gradually traces his parents back to their disappearances during the war, undergoing a couple more mental breakdowns as he does so.
This story then is a story of listening to someone else tell his story, and the reader is reminded of that many times. There are also many photographs and drawings throughout the book, each relating to the text where it occurs in some ways, but unattributed and undescribed specifically. Some are referred to in the text, but not all. This begins to make the book seem more than a novel, bringing in elements of memoir, and travel.

The Robber of Memories

Finished September 2
The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombia by Michael Jacobs

Jacobs has long had an interest in Colombia and the Magdalena River, but it was a chance encounter with an again Gabriel Garcia Marquez that pushed him to this journey to follow the Magdalena River from its mouth at Barranquilla to its source at Páramo de las Papas.
The book has another focus as well. Jacobs' father had died following a decline into dementia and his mother, who is Italian, is suffering from advanced Alzheimer's. Marquez also suffered from dementia as he aged. There is a doctor in Colombia, that Jacobs meets up with on his journey, that has worked with a group of people from a specific area suffering from a type of Alzheimer's and identified a gene associated with that type.
And there is the nature of Colombia's political history, where the rebels and paramilitaries have caused a type of memory loss in its citizens, who must survive in this uncertain environment.
Jacobs covers the river's history, the political violence and literary allusions to the river to begin. While a map is provided, I found it more frustrating than useful as it did not include most of the places he visited. This is a continuing frustration I have with books that include maps that don't relate well enough to the contents of the book itself.
He spends a fair bit of time in Barranquilla, where the river ends, beginning his stay with the Hotel El Prado, the country's first tourist hotel, which opened in the 1930s. He makes contact with Juan Alberto Montoya at NAVESCO which moves cargo along the river and from there to Hector Cruz at Naviera Fluvial Colombiana.
Before the actual river journey, he makes a couple of sidetrips. One is to the Boca de Cenizas, a hazardous inlet where the Magdalena reaches the sea. For this, his pilot is Alejandro Henao. Another sidetrip is to Mompox, which is on a disused arm of the river. One his way to Mompox, he stops in La Gloria where he meets the famous Cristian Valencia of Biblioburro. In Mompox, he is a subject of interest, first connecting with Nando, an optician, and from there to a dentist and historian, a poet, and including a visit to the local cemetery.
His river journey begins on a tugboat called the Catalina which is pushing barges upriver destined for Barrancabermeja. He has a new Colombian friend who will be his companion for the journey, Julio Caycedo. The captain of the tugboat is Diomidio Raimundo Rosales, who often calls for the author using "Migueleeto." Other crew include Alfredo, who is in charge of the large tanks on one of the barges, Juan Cano, a young pilot, and the cook Leiva. The tug has trouble near the end in getting much past Gamarra. There is a particular windy part of the river which is difficult earlier as well, the Pinellos, partly because of low water. Honda is as far as most previous travellers get on the river itself. When he leaves the tugboat, he switches to a chalupa, which is a small fast boat.
Along the way, he meets human rights activists, journalists, the afore-mentioned Alzheimer doctor, friendly taxi drivers, hippie hostel owners, accommodating farmers, and yes, FARC members.
An interesting journey, with interesting people along the way.

The Girl on the Train

Finished February 16
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

This thriller is worthy of its hype. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down and read it all in one day. Rachel is recently and unhappily divorced. She is living in a spare room at a friend's place, and she takes the train into London every morning and back in the evening, going past the house she used to live in with her husband Tom, and where he now lives with his new wife and infant daughter. A few houses down, another young couple lives, a couple that seems happy, and Rachel watches them, taking happiness from their seemed happiness, until one day she sees something that puts a lie to that happiness. When she sees a newspaper story a few days later indicating that the woman has been missing since the evening of the morning Rachel saw the scene that disturbed her, she feels she must find out what happened. She goes to the police, but they don't seem to take her information seriously, and so she approaches those involved.
Her renewed presence in the street upsets her ex-husband's new wife Anna, but Tom seems to want to handle it himself, asking Rachel a lot of questions that she isn't prepared to answer. As Rachel digs deeper, she begins to look at how others view her, and the unreliability of her observations and memories in their eyes. What truth is there in what they say she has wrong?
Rachel is an interesting character, damaged deeply by her failed marriage and still not recovered from that experience. As the book unfolds, we see what brought her to where she is now, and what inner strength she has to keep her questioning what is happening.
I can't recommend it highly enough.

Looking Back

Finished July 19
What I Was by Meg Rosoff
I've always enjoyed everything I've read by Rosoff, and this was no exception. This book has an elderly man looking back at the year he was sixteen. The year was 1962 and he was in his third boarding school, having been kicked out of the previous two. He has no real ambition and tries to keep to himself and do as little as possible, that is until he meets another young man, who lives alone in a hut on the beach. When he meets Finn, he finds himself drawn to the life Finn lives, simple, doing what he needs to survive and depending on no one but himself. He finds opportunities to escape from school to be with Finn as often as he can, and tries to keep the friendship a secret.
He takes chances and almost gets caught a number of times, and finally when Finn needs his help he must choose to expose the relationship to assist him. There are many themes here from the broad one of global warming and how it affects the environment to the narrator's own self-involvement. This was an interesting look at a turning point in a young man's life and how it determined the rest of his days.

Canadian Fiction

Finished February 9
The Letter Opener by Kyo Maclear
This novel is written from the point of view of Naiko, who works in the Undeliverable Mail Office in Toronto. Naiko's mother is Japanese and her father is Scottish. Her family think that the job is less than what she is capable of, and want more for her. Naiko's boyfriend, Paolo, is from Argentina. Naiko loves her work and feels a sense of accomplishment when she can bring an item together with its intended recipient.
Naiko becomes friends with a new co-worker, Andrei, a refugee from Romania. Andrei fled Romania with his homosexual lover, but they became separated in the escape and he has not seen Nikolai since. As there friendship continues, Andrei gradually tells Naiko his story, and when he suddenly disappears with no word to anyone, Naiko clings to his stories and tries to find the answers to his disappearance.
Naiko's own family issues also reflect here. Her parents separated years ago and her father moved to England. She feels distanced from him emotionally and has little contact with him. Her older sister is a successful journalist travelling overseas and making Naiko feel inadequate. Her mother has developed dementia and Naiko has made the decision to place her in a nursing home, visiting her regularly and trying to find a connection with her. Paolo wants more from the relationship than Naiko has been giving and she must deal also with his resentment at her fascination with Andrei's disappearance.
An altogether engrossing story of families, connections, memory and loss.

Another Canadian Novel

Finished October 27
Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani
With the success of her earlier novel, Deafening, I wondered if her new book would be as good, but it definitely is. This novel focuses on Georgina Witley, an 80-year-old woman. Georgina was born on the same day as Queen Elizabeth II and has been invited to help celebrate the occasion at Buckingham Palace. As her husband is dead, and her mother is very old, she has decided to go on her own, including driving to the airport in Toronto. Unfortunately she drives off the road into a ravine and is thrown from the car. Unable to move much due to her injuries she finds herself looking back on her life, singing old songs, and remembering the names of the bones in her body that she learned from her grandfather's anatomy book when she was a child.
As she follows her life through her family background, childhood, marriage and motherhood, she recalls family secrets, personal emotions and hardships. She also things about the Queen's life and its similarities and differences to her own.
George, as she is known to her friends, had a life dominated by the women in her family from her grandmother down to her daughter and has good memories with all of them. Her relations with the males in the family are both more difficult and less close, yet affected her life immensely. Her memories draw the characters clearly, showing heartache and resilience and ultimately at comfort with the life she has lived.
A wonderful book.