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The Stranger in the Woods, by Michael Finkel

Subtitled The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, this nonfiction book introduces us to Chris Knight, a man who spent 27 years living alone in a tent in the Maine woods. Not alone the way Thoreau was at Walden Pond, where he entertained guests and took his laundry home to his mother, but truly alone. In all that time, the only word Knight uttered to another person was a gruff Hi to a hiker he ran into.

Obsessed with avoiding discovery, or even another chance encounter, he never built a fire or walked in the woods when there was snow on the ground. When the ground was dry, he knew the woods so well that he could move through them without making a sound or leaving a sign.

In researching this book, Finkel sets out to answer the questions we can’t help but ask: Why would he choose such a life? How did he survive the winters in just a tent? What about food, medicine, etc.? No matter how much you cut back on that etcetera, you surely need a sharp knife, a candle or lantern, clothes to replace those that wear out.

We learn, often in his own words, how Chris broke into nearby cabins to steal food, clothing, reading material, and other things—only dire necessities and only cabins that didn’t have year-round occupants. People in the area told stories about the North Pond hermit, and it was during a theft that he was finally arrested.

Wondering why anyone would choose such a hard path, Finkel delves into the lives of solitaries, from the Desert Fathers and anchorites to solitary confinement in prisons. He reviews current thinking about the autism spectrum and goes further to consult scientists about a physical component.

One’s desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin, sometimes called the master chemical of sociability, and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.

Nurture always goes hand in hand with nature, and we learn that Chris’s family was compulsively private, living off the grid and having only minimal contact with neighbors. When 20-year-old Chris disappeared, driving away from his first and only job (one that he’d only barely begun), they didn’t report him missing or try to find him.

Finkel interviews Chris in jail and exchanges letters with him, thus giving us first-person accounts of Chris’s life in the woods. I can only imagine, having worked in one, how awful jail must have been for this man who had lived in silence (aside from natural sounds) for 27 years.

It’s a fascinating story, and one ripe for discussion. Was Chris lucky to be arrested before he aged to the point where he could no longer manage his survival? He was already slowing down. While he never took much, Chris’s thefts scared people and invaded their privacy; only once he was arrested did they return to not locking their doors. And what about Finkel himself? His pursuit of Chris in the face of the man’s reluctance to talk or meet with him borders on stalking. Or does it cross over? Is it okay because he’s brought us this incredible story?

While privacy ranks high on my list of moral imperatives, I have to admit that I’m grateful to know this much of Chris’s story. I make time to be alone, preferably among the trees, when I can. I’ve lived in a tent in the New England woods, though in a shelter with a wood stove in the winter. I would never do what he did, but a part of me understands it.

It’s possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

Have you read a story—fiction or nonfiction—about someone who has turned their back on society?

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The Quiet and the Loud, by Helena Fox

In this Young Adult novel, Georgia at 18 is barely holding it together. Taking a gap year at home in Sydney, Australia, before college, she keeps getting texts from her alcoholic father who lives in Seattle, Washington. He has been a danger to her for her whole life, but she feels duty-bound to help him. The story opens with a vivid flashback to one such occasion.

Her best friend Tess, also 18, has deliberately gotten pregnant, determined to become a teen mom, and assumes that Georgia will not only bring her smoothies and wait attendance on her, but will also help her raise the child. They’ve been best friends forever, so Georgia feels she must support Tess, even as her attention is being drawn in other directions.

Such as her rewarding part-time work teaching art to children, which offsets her friend Laz’s despair about the climate crisis. Her grandfather, who lives with them, may be losing his marbles, or at least his teeth, but adds comic relief with his relentless pursuit of elderly women.

Georgia’s mother is happily married to successful artist Mel, whose brusque demeanor hides a penetrating insight. She is the one who gifts Georgia with two successful coping mechanisms: kayaking and painting.

Suspense grows as we learn more about how her father’s alcoholism has affected her. As he spirals and Tess becomes mired in post-partum depression, 2019’s wildfires come ever closer, sending Laz into an apocalyptic frenzy and Georgia to the brink of despair.

I loved Fox’s previous novel How It Feels to Float, and am myself overly sensitive to loud sensory input, so I was eager to read this one. I was not disappointed. While the themes can be difficult, Georgia’s voice is a welcome companion.

Much of the writing is gorgeous, especially lyrical passages out in the kayak. And Georgia’s burgeoning feelings for her new friend Calliope are handled with grace and compassion.

Can you recommend a Young Adult novel that you’ve enjoyed?

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Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

Like Antonia in Alvarez’s Afterlife, Richard, a widower, has just retired from his career as a college professor in what was formerly East Berlin.

Perhaps many more years still lie before him, or perhaps only a few. In any case, from now on Richard will no longer have to get up early to appear at the Institute. As of today, he has time—plain and simple . . . his head still works just the same as before. What’s he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head?

Such transitional moments in our lives roll grief and possibility, loneliness and freedom into a turbulent mess. The first thing in Richard’s mind, however, is the calm lake on whose shore he lives, and the man who recently drowned there, his body never found. All summer everyone has avoided the lake: swimmers, fishermen, boaters. Nobody talks about it; they just stay away. It stays calm.

On a chance trip to Alexanderplatz, he doesn’t notice the African refugees staging a hunger strike there until he sees them on the news later. He didn’t notice them because he was thinking of the Polish town Rzeszów, which had a system of tunnels, essentially a second city underground, originally built in the Middle Ages where Jews took refuge when the Nazis invaded.

Moved by the refugees’ refusal to speak or give their names, the academic in Richard stirs to life: Here is a project! He decides to learn who these men are by interviewing them. Through Richard we hear their voices, their stories, and learn about what it is to be a refugee.

I loved Erpenbeck’s Visitation and looked forward to this novel. The beginning is brilliant. Her imagery and profound insight moved me deeply and had me marking page after page. However, the story slows as Richard starts tangling with bureaucracy and coaxing the refugees to talk to him. It’s a difficult tightrope for a writer: to reflect the tedium of the situation without boring the reader.

The story picks up again as we get to know the refugees individually, and as Germany’s bureaucracy begins to close in on them, narrowing their chances of being granted residence and thereby a work permit. As a lawyer whom Richard consults says, “The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense.”

Most members of my book club agreed that, while this was a challenging read, partly because of the pacing in the middle and partly because of the subject matter, it was also an important book to read. We all learned a lot, even those who already worked in refugee services. Those who read through to the end found it a worthy cap to the story, and were moved by the generous responses of the friends with whom Richard shared his stories of the refugees.

We talked about the symbolism of the drowned man. Like the Polish city, there are hidden things here as well as things we turn our eyes away from. When do you become visible? What do you have to do?

When you do become visible, as when Richard listens to the men and shares their stories with his friends, things do change—minds change.

I also found much here about communication woven into the story. Some have to do with the refugees’ struggle to learn German and Richard’s to learn some of their languages. Some have to do with how words are like borders: mutable signs, or written in sand, the way the boy from Niger learned his own language, lost when the wind blows.

The Italian laws have different borders in mind than the German laws do. What interests him is that as long as a border of the sort he’s been familiar with for most of his life runs along a particular stretch of land and is permeable in either direction after border control procedures, the intentions of the two  countries can be perceived by the use of barbed wire, the configuration of fortified barriers, and things of that sort. But the moment these borders are defined only by laws, ambiguity takes over, with each country responding , as it were, to questions its neighbor hasn’t asked . . .  Indeed, the law has made a shift from physical reality to the realm of language.

The border between life and death is here too: the chances that determine which side we will land on, the ghosts that cross over. Richard is sometimes nostalgic for the lost world of his childhood in East Berlin, before the wall came down. As one member of my book club noted, perhaps that early grounding in communal living makes Richard more open to caring about the fate of these others. Indeed, the novel calls out the weakness of capitalism: its callous disregard of the common good.

As Mary Oliver asked: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Here is one man’s answer.

What novel have you read that illuminates one of the great political issues of our time?

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Fortune Favors the Dead, by Stephen Spotswood

Fortune Favors the Dead

This witty, fast-paced mystery starts in New York City in 1945, with Willowjean “Will” Parker and her boss, famous detective Lillian Pentecost, investigating the murder of society matron Abigail Collins. Will has been Pentecost’s assistant and protégé for three years, the two having met when Will saved the older woman’s life with her knife-throwing skills.

Knife-throwing? Yes, at the time Will had been working as a roustabout in a traveling circus for five years, gaining some unusual skills. She’s the one telling this story, and her sassy, smart voice makes this a thoroughly enjoyable ride.

Pentecost, too, is unusual, and not just because she is a female detective at a time when women who stepped up during WWII are being forced into domestic roles while jobs are given to the returning men. She has multiple sclerosis, a progressively degenerative disease which at this point affects her stamina and gait but not her brilliant mind.

I loved both these characters before even getting to the story. Casting someone with a chronic disease as a major character is a rare and brilliant stroke. Plus, Will undermines all the stereotypes for women, not to mention circus workers, of the time. The duo quickly put me in mind of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, reimagined as women, but I love that Will is still a young woman, still finding her way in the world, unlike Archie.

On to the story! Abigail Collins is found in the locked study of her home during a big Halloween party at her mansion. She’s been beaten to death with a crystal ball, used in the séance held there, while seated in the chair where her husband killed himself a year before. Rumor holds that the ghost of her husband appeared during the séance, so many believe he is the murderer.

There are plenty of other, more corporeal, suspects. The psychic Ariel Belestrade has been on Ms. Pentecost’s radar for some time. Skeptical anthropology professor Olivia Waterhouse has also been investigating Belestrade for fraudulent practices and written her up in her most recent book. The psychic’s seductive power is brilliantly portrayed in some of the book’s most chilling scenes.

Even more complications ensue when Rebecca Collins, daughter of the murdered woman and a continuing frustration to her straight-laced brother, starts putting moves on Will, and Will finds herself responding to them.

Spotswood does a great job of bringing the period to life with details small and large, whether about circus life, nightclubs, or the mean streets of NYC. As a side note, the cover art boldly announces both its classic noir roots and Will’s unusual character. An intriguing cover will always make me look twice at a book.

For a fun read, you can’t go wrong with this cosy mystery with a bite to it. Will’s voice and personality alone are worth the price of admission. I’m looking forward to reading the other books in the Pentecost and Parker series.

Have you read a novel recently where you’ve been utterly charmed by the characters?

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A Woman Is No Man, by Etaf Rum

A Woman Is No Man

Rum’s powerful debut novel begins with an arranged marriage. In 1990, Isra’s family is eking out an austere living on the outskirts of a town in the West Bank, having been driven out of their home by the Israeli invasion, which they call the Nakba—the Catastrophe. They are delighted to marry off their 17-year-old daughter to the oldest son of an American Palestinian family who are looking for a quiet, submissive Muslim girl.

The marriage to a stranger doesn’t come close to Isra’s dreams of romance and adventure, but it has to be better than the constant beatings and verbal abuse from her parents. Instead, it is worse. Isra often has cause to remember her mother’s warning: “There is nothing out there for a woman but her bayt wa dar, her house and home. Marriage, motherhood — that is a woman’s only worth.”

Adam and Isra live in the basement of his family’s crowded Brooklyn home. Upstairs are his parents, Fareeda and Khaled, and his three younger siblings. Isra becomes, essentially, a prisoner in the house, where Fareeda watches soap operas while Isra does most of the housework and cooking.

As their Bay Ridge neighborhood has a large Palestinian population, the cultural norms are enforced. For example, only a prostitute would leave the house by herself, and Fareeda takes her only to homes of other women where Isra has to endure snubs from the other women for not having produced a male child. Thus, she is unable to develop social connections. Her plight illustrates the way self-blaming and cultural shaming add to the abuse of women.

Even as Adam takes to drinking and beating her, Isra understands that his lot is not easy either. As the eldest son he is expected to run his own convenience store, help at his father’s store, and then even help his spoiled younger brother set up a third store. She also taps a larger perspective.

The wounds of her childhood—poverty, hunger, abuse—had taught her. That the traumas of the world were inseparably connected. She was not surprised when her father came home and beat them mercilessly, the tragedy of the Nakba bulging in his veins… She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been battered themselves?

In a dual timeline, we meet Isra’s oldest daughter Deya, now 18. Isra and Adam have died, and their four daughters are being raised by Fareeda with the same strict rules. Even as her grandmother searches for a husband for Deya, the young woman wants to break free and go to college. Eventually an estranged family member reveals some jarring truths about the family’s history to Deya and encourages her to stand up for herself.

Despite the repressive, patriarchal culture portrayed in the story, several characters step up to say that such treatment of women, little more than servants who don’t even sit at the table to eat with the men, goes against the Koran and Islamic teachings that celebrate the role of women and enjoin men to honor them. We are told that the Prophet Muhammad himself said, “‘Observe your duty to Allah in respect to the women, and treat them well.’”

One thing that stands out to me is the role of books and reading in the story. For Isra, her sister-in-law Sara, and her daughter Deya, these are the tiny windows into the world and sole comfort in their severely restricted lives.

I’ve read several books recently that frame a main character’s engaging personal story in an explicit political framework: Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez; Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng; Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell; even The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble. In trying to understand how the authors manage to keep the politics from overwhelming the story, what I see is their intense focus on the main character’s experience.

Rum’s task must have been especially difficult given today’s Islamophobic prejudices and anti-Arab stereotypes. And it’s no wonder she found it difficult to make the men into rounded characters, because of the cultural norm that once the men leave the house, what they do in invisible to the women stuck there. And we only have the women’s experience.

It’s important to note that Rum describes their perception of their lives sometimes as simply brutal and other times in a more nuanced way, such as Isra’s recognition of the effects of their historical trauma on the men. I’m sure not all Palestinian families are like the ones portrayed here, but some are and I’m grateful to Rum for breaking the code of silence and letting us in.

Can you recommend a novel about Palestinian families?

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A Borrowing of Bones, by Paula Munier

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Former military police Mercy Carr and Elvis are veterans of the Afghanistan war, home now but unable to shake their habits, memories and wounds. Elvis is a bomb-sniffing dog, a Malinois or Belgian Shepherd which is similar to a German Shepherd, forced to retire due to depression after the death of his partner Martinez, Mercy’s fiancé.

They take refuge in Mercy’s cabin in rural Vermont where they have plenty of forest in which to run and hike, and Mercy’s beloved grandmother, a veterinarian, nearby. On the fourth of July weekend, they escape the fireworks and mayhem by hiking in a particularly remote area.

Then Elvis alerts that there are explosives off the side of the path. And nearby Mercy finds an abandoned baby and partially buried human bones. Her 911 call brings U.S. Game Warden Troy Warner and his partner, a Newfoundland named Susy Bear. The four of them try to unravel the mystery—Mercy leaping back into law enforcement mode and Troy reminding her that she is a civilian now.

They run into territorial disputes, including the attempts pf the state police chief to keep them out of the investigation, and hostile families on remote dirt roads who don’t try to hide their disregard for the law. The more they learn, the more they fear something terrible is going to disrupt the holiday festivities in town.

I chose this story because of the Vermont setting, and was rewarded with plenty of woodsy scenes to go with the intriguing plot. The characters also appealed to me, even the minor ones. Mercy and Elvis are sensitively drawn by the author, who avoids wounded warrior stereotypes to present realistic people. Munier also manages to handle big ideas like grief, patriotism and honor with refreshing sincerity. It’s a good reminder to me, as a writer, not to back away from concepts like these for fear they’ve been overdone.

Apparently there is a whole genre of mysteries with dogs, actually a subgenre of mysteries. The two dogs are certainly full-fledged actors in this story, and fully formed characters as well, not cutesy cartoons. Among the dogs in my life have been several German Shepherds and a Newfoundland, so I enjoyed this aspect of the story.

If you’re looking for a new series of mysteries, you might check this out. I know I’ll be looking to travel more trails with Mercy and Elvis.

t’s fun when a book has a dog who works as a character. One that comes to mind is Lessons in Chemistry. Can you recommend another?

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Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez

Afterlife

There are inflection points in our lives, moments when everything changes: What we thought of as our life now exists only as the past, and the future is about to begin. We meet Antonia Vega as she confronts such a moment.

A native of the Dominican Republic, Antonia came to the United States with her family and found herself teaching Americans about their own language and literary traditions. Now, not only has she retired from her work as a college professor, but her husband of over thirty years has died. “Who am I going to be anymore?” she wonders. As a woman with no profession, no husband, no children, she feels herself becoming invisible.

At the same time, she is haunted by words: those of her husband—a beloved doctor in their small Vermont town—and those of all the authors whose work she has read and taught over the years. She tells herself: “An afterlife? All she has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them. Otherwise the world is indeed depleted.”

The world has not done with her, though. She becomes embroiled in the problems of an undocumented worker on the neighboring farm, whose fiancé is being held hostage in Colorado by coyotes who demand Mario send more money. At the same time, her older sister Izzy is behaving more and more erratically, and her other two sisters rope her into their schemes to force Izzy to get help. Then Izzy goes missing.

As both situations escalate, Antonia questions where her responsibility lies. Unlike her big-hearted, activist husband, she lacks the appetite for self-sacrifice that most women have had drummed into them. She turns to questions from a Tolstoy story she used to teach: “What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?”

She reminds herself of the rampant individualism in her adopted country, that advises you to put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to help others. Yet she also conjures a saying her husband’s mother used when someone had a problem: “Let’s see what love can do.”

One of the aspects of this book that I most valued turned out to be these contradictions and how we manage to live with them. For example, the farmer next door (whom Mario works for) loudly complains about illegal immigrants, yet he secretly hires them because he can’t afford to pay the salary a citizen would expect.

The themes here fascinate me: the identity crisis caused by your world flipping over; the way women are taught to sacrifice their own needs and desires to those of others; the immigrant experience, not just in the first contact with the new culture, but what happens after a few decades of steeping in it. I was surprised by how much this short novel resonated with me. And of course I appreciated the Vermont setting.

I love all the lines from stories that swarm into Antonia’s thoughts, their sources mostly not identified. However, that can cause danger for the author, similar to the danger of using such a generous amount of Spanish, especially in the dialogue. As a former English teacher and devoted reader, I recognised most of the quotes and, though not knowing Spanish myself, I could figure out what was meant by the context. But that will not be true for everyone. One reader on Goodreads thought that these quotes were just the author trying to be a poetic and instead, sounding like “word salad.” Reasonable enough.

I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite part of the book: the four sisters. Every scene with them explodes with life and emotion and—oh, golly!—the dialogue! Alvarez so beautifully articulates the shifting dynamic between them: alliances forming and reforming, ancient injuries resurrected, fierce loyalties and unquestioned support. Most of all, a secret language that only those you’ve grown up with can understand.

Luckily, I consumed this story as an audiobook, masterfully narrated by Alma Cuervo. I enjoy physical books—I’d better, since they threaten to overwhelm my home—but there are times when an audiobook works better, at least for me.

While I seek out stories about people and cultures different from mine, I’m also interested in books about women and men in the later stages of life. There are many ways to define these stages: Shakespeare’s seven stages of man, Erik Erikson’s eight stages, Gail Sheehy’s Passages. Mostly I think about the four stages of life as described in ancient Hindu texts (the Student, the Householder, the Hermit, and the Wandering Ascetic).

Whatever stage of life you’re in, I recommend this 2020 novel by the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

What novel have you read that surprised you? How?

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The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd

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What a find! I love maps. I mean, I really love maps. Especially paper ones, the kind you have to fold just right. When I was young, they were both a vehicle for dreams of adventure and a way to comprehend the space around me. Once I understood the grid of Baltimore and the spider rotaries of Worcester, the storied streets of London and the plazas of Madrid, I could venture out with confidence.

I also love mysteries, so I was delighted to come across this novel in my local indie bookstore. My expectations soared so high that I should be reporting disappointment now. In fact, they were not high enough. I loved the maps, the tangled mystery, and the true story that seeded the novel.

Nell Young loves maps and once dreamed of working with her brilliant father in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Her even more brilliant cartographer mother died when Nell was a toddler. But Nell’s dream had exploded seven years ago in a disastrous argument with her father that destroyed the careers of both Nell and her then-boyfriend Felix. Now Nell works for a hole-in-the-wall operation that gussies up semi-historical maps with sea monsters and fake age spots.

Then she gets an emergency call from the New York Public Library.

Nell embarks on a quest to identify the monster behind a string of thefts and murder. In order to accomplish that, she must finally lay bare the secrets of the common highway map that caused the argument with her father and explore the mystery of her parents’ past. She forces herself to get in touch with Felix for the first time since that terrible argument; he is now working on a cutting-edge mega-map and might have technology that can help her.

Lately I’ve been thinking about goal shift—when I was an engineer we called it requirements creep—and how that can be a good thing in a story (though it isn’t in an engineering project). Writers know that what drives most stories is the protagonist’s push to achieve a goal, whether it’s destroying a ring of power or marrying your true love. However, often in a story, as that main character moves through adventure after adventure, their goal may change or may accrue related goals. For example, Frodo’s original goal was simply to hand over the ring to the Elves, not to go all the way to Mordor. Elizabeth Bennet’s original goal was to get her sister married to Mr. Bingley and to ignore the snobby Mr. Darcy.

Here, Nell’s journey grows tendril after tendril of secrets that must be unraveled, making for a delightfully complicated plot filled with surprises and satisfying shifts.

I often dislike novels with multiple points of view—different characters taking over telling the story—but here I found it worked well. For one thing, the change of voices is smoothly handled, usually by a new chapter. For another, each person in the team that coalesces around Nell has a piece of the story to tell, so having them tell it in their own voice is a clear and economical solution. We are never in doubt that Nell is the main character, no matter how much we may come to care about some of the others.

If you like a good mystery or maps or—even better—both, check out this book!

Have you read a novel about a map that you can recommend?

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The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble

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I dove into this 1987 novel, having long been fascinated by the way Drabble uses the closeup of individual lives to chronicle social history. We begin at a New Year’s party in 1980 with three longtime friends, now approaching midlife turning points, even as Britain itself enters a decade of change wrought by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cronies.

At the party Liz Headland, a psychologist, finds that her marriage to Charles, long tamed by child-rearing and busy careers, is falling apart. Alix Bowen is becoming disillusioned with her work as a teacher within Britain’s social-welfare network, feeling that the progressive fervor of the previous decades has not accomplished much. Artist Esther Breuer, pessimistic about the role of art in a changing society, contemplates leaving London for good and moving to Italy.

The three had met at Cambridge twenty-five years earlier, their social and academic success there promising brilliant careers. In a nod to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, they are “the crème de la crème” of their generation. However, at this point, Liz is the only one of the three to be financially stable, though even that might change with her divorce. Alix and Esther do piecemeal work and are often criticised for wasting their brains and for lacking ambition.

While wrestling with their own disappointments and demons, they navigate a society that is turning away from the socialism that has helped Britain recover from WWII, to a ruthless capitalism that rewards winners and ignores the suffering of losers.

In much of my reading over the last few months I’ve been looking at how writers balance the personal lives of their characters with the larger events in their world. In some cases, such as Sisters of Night and Fog by Erika Robuck, the correlation is obvious and inescapable. In others, such as Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, it is more subtle. Here I feel Drabble’s social context—miner’s strikes, social service cuts, a serial killer—sometimes overwhelms her characters’ lives.

I know from reading other novels by Drabble that her style is rather dense, with more exposition and fewer dramatic scenes than we are used to in today’s fiction. That’s okay with me—I search out these novels that call for a little more attention. I enjoyed the deep dive into the minds and hearts of these three women. The other characters are well-drawn and fascinating, not only within themselves but also how they interact with and affect Liz, Alix and Esther.

The novel is a wonderful portrait, not only of these characters, but of a decade whose changes are only now starting to lose steam. I found its paean to friendship between women equally fascinating, especially the way their bond survives even as each of them transforms in the course of the novel.

What novel set in the 1980s have you enjoyed?

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Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

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Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner receives a letter from his mother, who disappeared several years earlier. It has been opened by the authorities of course, and is covered with drawings of cats. Noah and his father, formerly a linguistics professor but now demoted to a janitor, live in a U.S. that shows what our current country could easily become.

A global crisis has lessened the country’s standing in the world, and in response, the government has created PACT, the Preserving of American Cultures and Traditions Act. The increasingly authoritarian government rigidly enforces PACT, indoctrinating children young, tolerating no dissent, and cracking down on any resistance. Because China is blamed for the crisis (sound familiar?), all east Asian people, even longtime citizens, are subjected to racial violence and discrimination.

Noah decides to find out once and for all what happened to his mother, a famous Chinese-American artist. He loves his white American father, yet wonders why the man allowed himself to be punished for whatever his wife had done. Noah isn’t even allowed to go by the nickname his mother gave him: Bird. It’s not hard to imagine the effect on a child’s identity when he loses the name he’s always been known by.

This is a fascinating story, part mystery, part thriller, part social commentary. Several choices by the author add to its power: putting current social/political tensions into a mostly fictional world, and concentrating the terrible racist abuse on Asians rather than people of color—not that it doesn’t exist now but not so blatantly and virulently—provides a little distance for the reader. We recognise them and can more easily appreciate how these fictional forces play out in today’s society. For example:

In Orange county a march protesting anti-Chinese bias spiraled into a clash with bystanders hurling epithets, ending with riot police, Tasers, a Chinese-American three-year-old struck with a teargas canister. For the officers, paid leave; for the protester, a full investigation into the family.

We can also see where our real world tensions could lead. More and more people are embracing the idea of an authoritarian regime, without actually understanding what that will mean for them. Like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, this dystopia is all too close to reality.

I love the descriptions of the protests in the novel. They are sometimes enigmatic and often playful, adding a touch of humor and reminding me of the Yippies’ protests in the 1960s. Most of them reference a phrase from a poem by Noah’s mother: our missing hearts. It’s a brilliant symbol, which accrues meaning as the novel progresses.

Even more, I love the role librarians play. I believe librarians are the smartest people around. They are my heroes. I appreciated Noah’s father and the sacrifices he makes to protect his family. I also liked Noah’s feisty friend Sadie. And I loved the way he used the stories and folktales his mother had told him when he was little. Through these characters, Ng delves into the power of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when people are silenced.

When are you ever done with the story of someone you love? You turn the most precious of your memories over and over, wearing their edges smooth, warming them again with your heat. You touch the curves and hollows of every detail you have, memorizing them, reciting them once more though you already know them in your bones. Whoever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?

Wondering why his mother left, where she is, and whether Noah will succeed kept me glued to the book. True, parts of it dragged; the emotional lives of the characters could have been more fully developed; and there were a couple of consistency problems near the end. Overall, though, it is a brilliant book, and a worthy follow-up to Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere.

What dystopian novel have you read that seemed disturbingly close to our world?