Legacy. Where have we come from and where are we going? In his novel titled, Greenwood, Michael Christie displays four generations of the Greenwood family and the island and forest legacy that connects the family members. We find love, loss, success, failure, and climate change. We find wealth and poverty, exploitation and stewardship. Christie plumbs the many different ways that we care for each other and our environment, and the ways we hurt each other and squander our inheritances. The prose is finely written, and the novel will appeal to those readers who are patient with frequent shifts in time periods, and a meandering way of getting to know the people and places. I was enchanted by this novel, the complexity of the characters, and the vivid life of the forest.
Rating: Five-star (I love it)
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Origin. The twelfth installment of the Sam and Remi Fargo series by Clive Cussler is a novel titled, Wrath of Poseidon. Fans of the series finally get to hear the story of how Sam and Remi met and fell in love and adventure. To deliver this backstory, the usual Cussler structure wraps around the Fargos telling the story to another recurring character in the Cussler family of action novels. Readers who enjoy the structure of these escapist novels are likely to enjoy this installment, boosted by the sweet origin story of these charming protagonists.
Rating: Four-star (I like it)
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Revived. Olen Steinhauer introduced readers to protagonist Milo Weaver and a CIA assassination squad called The Department of Tourism in a trilogy that ended in 2012. In a novel titled, The Last Tourist, Steinhauer has more to say about the tourists. Information is the lifeblood of spy craft. Milo Weaver has been running an enterprise called The Library which his father started within the United Nations. The Library provides client countries with sensitive information. Corporations are the real repositories of power in contemporary life, and Weaver finds himself challenged by a worthy corporate adversary. The action moves quickly in the novel, and by the time we arrive in Davos, all the pieces are coming together. Readers who enjoy thrillers are likely to enjoy this novel, whether familiar with the earlier ones or not.
Rating: Four-star (I like it)
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Alive. For many readers, 2020 has been a challenging year that has narrowed our travels and offered such repetition that days and weeks can seem indistinct. We can become attuned to things in our environment that in a “normal” year we might easily overlook. In the 59 poems in his collection titled, Whale Day and Other Poems, Billy Collins draws our attention to what seems ordinary and familiar. Thanks to him, we can laugh or wince as we look more closely at our surroundings. Fans will know that some of the poems will lead to laughter, while others celebrate the sheer joy of being alive in the places where we find ourselves at any given moment.
Rating: Four-star (I like it)
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Survival. There are nine well-crafted short stories in the collection by Daniel Mason titled, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth. Each story involves characters who find ways to survive in response to struggles. Mason excels at revealing a character’s state of mind that provides the roadmap to satisfying our curiosity about the lives of others. Mason takes readers to time periods and places that provide a vivid backdrop for his exploration of the core of what it takes for each of us to survive and thrive.
Rating: Four-star (I like it)
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Endless. For an immersive mediation on war, read Salar Abdoh’s novel titled, Out of Mesopotamia. From the perspective of protagonist Saleh, a journalist, we struggle to make sense of those who are engaged in what seems like endless war. With great skill, Abdoh can be poetic and authentic in the same sentence. We’re led into the darkness of war where we find some form of enlightenment about why we do what we do. Most readers will finish this novel somewhat weakened by proximity to the fragility of life.
Rating: Four-star (I like it)
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Satire. Readers who enjoy both political satire and literature are those most likely to enjoy Ian McEwan’s skewering of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Brexit in a novel titled, The Cockroach. With a nod to Kafka, McEwan spews invective with precision on Johnson and on the gullible people who believe what he says. If you need a good laugh, reading about reverse-flow economics will do the trick. To whatever extent McEwan wrote this novel to help us laugh at these crazy upside-down times, he succeeded with me, especially when his prose was so finely structured that the satire extended beyond politics to overwrought literary facades.
Rating: Four-star (I like it)
Click here to purchase The Cockroach from amazon.com.
