Category: Books

Maame, by Jessica George (St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages)

There’s a lot to like about 25-year-old Maddie Wright, the main character in Jessica George’s debut novel. Born in Ghana and living in London, Maddie is navigating her unique brand of young adulthood struggles, from low-key workplace racism to familial responsibilities and expectations. She is sweet and kind and very innocent, at times frustratingly so. But watching Maddie grow up and figure out who she is and who she wants to be is what Maame is all about, and it’s a charming journey.

In some ways, Maddie is forced to be more of an adult than many 25-year-olds; she’s taking care of her dad, who has Parkinson’s disease, and her mom, though still married to her dad, spends most of her time in Ghana running a hostel while Maddie and her dad live in London. Her mom is critical of Maddie and the fact that she isn’t as engaged in her Ghanaian heritage and customs as her mother would like her to be — yet Maddie is the one paying all the bills at home and sending money to her mom in Ghana, while her brother does little to help.

In other ways, though, Maddie seems younger than most women her age, and she knows it. That’s why she sets a goal to transform herself into “The New Maddie.” She makes a list of who she wants to be, which includes “drinks alcohol when offered, always says yes to social events, tries weed or cigarettes at least once (but don’t get addicted!), goes on dates, is not a virgin,” and so on.

Maddie gets the chance to work on these goals when her mom returns to London for a year to take over the care of her husband. Maddie moves out and into a flatshare with two women her age, both very different and seemingly more worldly than she is, which gives her a whole new opportunity to live her own life. At the same time, she starts a new job at a publishing house, and, of course, there’s suddenly a new guy hanging around. (Happily, though, romance is not a central plotline but rather a nonintrusive piece of Maddie’s coming-of-age puzzle.)

George expertly depicts both Maddie’s Gen Z traits and her innocence through her frequent Google searches. She Googles random things like “back pain in your mid-twenties” and gets mostly-useless answers from random people: “CC: ‘It’s all linked to the Government. … From a young age we’re told office jobs are the goal. Then you sit at a desk hunched over 9-5, 5 days a week for most of your younger years.’ LG: ‘Why would the government want a nation suffering from back pain?’ CC: ‘So we don’t take over.’”

Many of her questions show her uncertainty and lack of confidence, particularly in the social domain. Waiting to hear back from a potential love interest, she Googles “How long do guys wait before asking a girl out on a date?” (Some very realistic Google answers range from: “I spent four months getting to know my now-girlfriend before I asked her out on a date” to “One hour.”) George incorporates these searches sparingly enough that they’re not annoying and they add some relatability to Maddie’s character no matter how different she is from the reader. We can all relate to the frustration of such drastically diverse search results with no definitive answer from a source — the almighty internet — that is supposed to have all the answers. (Honestly, who hasn’t Googled “weird rash” and been led to believe it’s either totally normal or a sign of impending death?)

Maame covers all the bases of growing up with cultural barriers, without being heavy-handed or preachy. Despite Maddie’s sometimes cringy naivete, I was rooting for her all along. Her story is often funny, and always heartfelt and engaging. A

Hidden Mountains, by Michael Wejchert (Ecco, 256 pages)

Granite State residents are used to hearing about rescues — from the 180 or so people who have to be rescued from outside adventures gone wrong each year, to the seven loons trapped in lake ice in February. As such, there is an underlying debate about assumed risk and the escalating costs of rescue — not so much the financial cost, but the potential of injury and loss of life of those doing the rescue.

Into this conversation comes a compelling book by North Conway resident Michael Wejchert. Hidden Mountains — subtitled “Survival and Reckoning After a Climb Gone Wrong” — is a deep dive into a 2018 climbing accident in a remote part of Alaska, and its aftermath.

The people involved — two couples from Boston, ranging in age from 29 to 40 — were experienced climbers; the accident that befell Emmett Lyman was apparently just freakish bad luck. (In one analysis, “loose rock” was deemed the cause.) Out of the sight of his partner, Lauren, he fell about 30 to 40 feet, hitting his head so hard that his helmet came off.

Wejchert describes how Lauren intuited what happened: “She felt the rope [that connected them] come tight and knew that on the other side Emmett was falling, though she couldn’t see him. Rock and debris flushed down the snow gully to her left so forcefully that it caused a small avalanche. … Somewhere in this, ‘I heard a human sound,’ she recalled. ‘It wasn’t words. It was just a sound of … maybe surprise and dismay.’”

Although the couples had been trained in what to do in emergencies and were well-prepared and well-equipped, the situation was precarious, not just for Lyman but for all of them. Lauren, Lyman’s girlfriend, was still attached to him with a rope; they were on steep rock in a national park 90 miles from civilization, in territory not accessible by road. That was one reason they were there. The Hidden Mountains of Lake Clark National Park and Preserve are one of the most inaccessible places for climbers in the world; they expected to be the first humans to have climbed this particular mountain, which they dubbed Mount Sauron after the tower in The Lord of the Rings.

Lauren was able to text the other couple for help, and they immediately set out to find their friends, but they had to endanger themselves by descending laterally in emotional turmoil. The story of how they got to this point is harrowing enough; then comes the rescue by helicopter nine hours later — all the while, without knowing whether Lyman was alive or dead.

While there was news coverage of the accident at the time it happened, for those who are unfamiliar with the story Wejchert smartly structured Hidden Mountains as a thriller, and I won’t betray his efforts by saying what happened during and after the rescue. Suffice it to say the story raises challenging questions and endeavors to answer what for me is the biggest one: Why anyone would take up a sport that required (literally, for Lauren) a 10-page contingency plan that listed potential dangers (e.g. river crossing, sliding snow, falling rock, bears) for each day of the trip, based on the forecast and where they would be, and specialized insurance from a company that swoops in and rescues the likes of journalists caught in war zones. (That company, Global Rescue, is based in Lebanon, N.H.)

Wejchert, a climber himself, tries to make clear the allure of the sport, which draws so many adventurers to the White Mountains and elsewhere. He writes of “dreamy summits” and moving along “perfect alpine granite, thousands of feet of snow and ice and quiet looming beneath us,” of “plumbing the depths” of our personal limits. But just as honestly he writes of a friend who was nearly killed by an avalanche, of being asked if the risk of climbing is worth it and answering “no.”

Rock and ice climbing — “vertical movement” — doesn’t seem to be something people casually fall into, but more of an urgent calling. After going to a New York climbing area called “the Gunks” as a newbie, Emmett had said, “Oh my God. This is where I want to live. This is what I want to do with my life. And we just started climbing all the time.”

And one of his climbing partners, Alissa Doherty, had vowed to become a mountaineer — while she was in a convent — after reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. That book was about a 1996 climbing disaster on Mount Everest, so for people without the mountaineering gene, it’s hard to see how reading that would attract anyone to the sport.

And of course, Krakauer’s other masterpiece, Into the Wild, was about Chris McCandless dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness. It’s a certain kind of person who says “sign me up!” for both Alaska wilderness and remote climbing, and it doesn’t appear to be me. But the people who do sign up are fascinating people whose stories make for fascinating reading. And Wejchert, who is chair of the all-volunteer Mountain Rescue Service in North Conway and knew Emmett before the accident, was exactly the person to tell it. He does so with expertise and with heart. B+

Weightless, by Evette Dionne (Ecco, 245 pages)

Are doctors who lecture their patients about their weight “fat shaming” them or “following the science”?

That’s the question at the heart of Evette Dionne’s Weightless, an account of her life as a Black woman with obesity who has had multiple health problems over the course of her often size 22 life and is now diagnosed with heart failure.

Part memoir, part journalism, Weightless explores Dionne’s struggles to fit into a society that prizes thinness even as it now demonizes “fatphobia” to the point of purging the word “fat” from Roald Dahl books.

In many ways, America has gone all in on what is commonly called “body acceptance.” Plus-size models are a thing, even making the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. Most fashion designers offer extended sizes. There’s even a movement to help overweight women avoid being weighed at doctors’ offices (you can present a card that says “Don’t weigh me unless medically necessary”).

Despite all this, our culture “hates fat people,” Dionne says. “Whether it’s Netflix greenlighting a television show that glorifies losing weight as a form of revenge or airlines enacting policies that purposefully discriminate against fat people, the world believes that we must assimilate and become smaller — not that it should become bigger to accommodate us.”

Proclaiming “Fat people aren’t a problem that needs to be solved,” she catalogs a long list of problems that fat people need to be solved. These include the indignity of flying (needing seat belt extenders and sometimes having to purchase two tickets), the unceasing rudeness of strangers (on one flight she confronts someone who was texting insults about her) and the tendency of those in the medical profession to brusquely dismiss anything that’s wrong with an obese person as something that can be solved by losing weight.

“There’s a running joke around fat people that if you go to the doctor for a sore throat, they’re going to ask you to take a blood sugar test to make sure you’re not diabetic,” she writes. (I can confirm that happens even after death, having recently heard of a case in which “obesity” was put as the cause of death of a woman in her 60s who unexpectedly died at home.)

Dionne says she set out to write the book as a way of shining a light on the biases of the culture, to “shift how we individually and collectively understand the fat experience.” She says that fat people “want, need and deserve new stories.”

That may be true, but the experiences that Dionne describes here are in fact old stories. Anyone who has grown up overweight has stories about bullies; any obese adult has stories about not being able to fit in a carnival ride, or being rejected by a potential lover because of their weight, or getting an underhanded “compliment” about weight loss that feels like a punch.

Dionne writes movingly about her assorted embarrassments and outrage in ways that could theoretically help other people be more compassionate, but the reality is, the cruel people she describes aren’t the ones who would read this sort of book, unless it was assigned. Her audience, her tribe, are those who have walked in her shoes.

As much as I empathize with Dionne, having lived through some versions of experiences she describes, I found it difficult to embrace her premise, which is that “Weight discrimination is as serious and widespread as the issue of ‘obesity’ itself.”

The bulk of medical research suggests otherwise.

There are those who have argued that overweight people can be just as metabolically healthy as those who are of what doctors deem “normal” weight, or those who are underweight, especially if they exercise. But Dionne is not making this argument. In fact, from her opening page, in which she declares “I am in heart failure,” she establishes that she is not a healthy person, and her problems are not only physical; she also has battled extreme anxiety and depression.

She writes, in a chapter about wanting to become a mother, “There’s no doubt I will be a fat mother, just as my mother was a fat mother” and also, “I will be a chronically ill mother, who will often have to prioritize my own health needs above the immediate needs of my children.”

She also acknowledges the ways in which her life became easier after she lost some weight after becoming ill, but says that in some ways this made her sad.

“Whenever I discuss what heart failure has done and continues to do to my body … my feelings are cast aside as people gush about how good I look. ‘You’re beautiful now’ is a common refrain. ‘You’re so small’ is another. What I also hear is: heart failure might have cost you, but sickness has also granted you something more important than your aches and pains.”

There is heart-rending truth here, and much pain bravely revealed.

But the book would have benefited from a chapter in which Dionne considered the ways in which the doctors she dismisses might be right — that obesity, not weight discrimination, is the biggest problem for people who are seriously overweight, that in fact, her obesity might have been responsible, at least in part, for many of her problems.

That is not to say that cruelty is ever justified, and I personally think she should have “accidentally” spilled a cup of water or coffee on the texting guy’s phone. And no, no one needs a diabetes test when they visit a doctor for a sore throat. But there is some reasonable middle ground when the subject is obesity, or at least there needs to be. Right now, it’s all finger-pointing and name-calling even as Americans keep getting larger and sicker.

As likable as Dionne is (but for some revelations that are truly TMI), disappointingly, Weightless breaks no new ground. B-

The Moon Over the Mountain, by Atsushi Nakajima, illustrated by Nekosuke (Vertical, 56 pages)

The Moon Over the Mountain is the second entry in publisher Kodansha’s “Maiden’s Bookshelf” collection, which presents acclaimed short stories from Japanese literature in illustrated collectible volumes.

First published in 1942, “The Moon Over the Mountain” is the most well-known work by writer Atsushi Nakajima. The story is set in 8th-century China where a ferocious man-eating tiger stalks the roads at night. When a government official decides to take a perilous nighttime journey, he discovers there is more to this mad beast than meets the eye. The story is more introspective than action-packed, delving into emotions and ambitions people would rather keep buried.

The physical book is small, but the cover will draw a potential reader in. There is thoughtful design with some beautiful typography and a good preview of illustrator Nekosuke’s art style. The illustrations have a distinct mood to them with deep reds and blacks, reminiscent of journeys along unlighted roads in the dead of night. When there is contrast, it is in the vibrant hues of nighttime feline eyes. The stark contrast of red and white is a subtle representation of the story’s themes with red as the character’s animal nature versus white as human reason and morality. The human character designs themselves are androgynously delicate with large doll eyes and long flowing hair, and many of the pieces explore the melding of man and beast. They circle around each other like an ouroboros, never fully accepting or rejecting their opposing nature.

Some readers may find themselves confused when reading, thinking the art is an exact representation of the story, trying to match the words and the images together, but it becomes the artist’s interpretation of the themes of the story which may not mesh with what the reader has in mind. In that light, while the tiger is the heart of The Moon Over the Mountain, illustrator Nekosuke seems to have a penchant for cats as many illustrations feature all varieties of domestic cats. As the narrative progresses, it becomes important how the man-eating tiger came to be. The meaning would be different if it were only a common house cat yowling into the night, so having them featured almost feels like a distraction. Also hindering the presentation of the story is the porcelain beauty of the artwork, so detailed and unblemished it almost feels sterile. As the story progresses and the reader learns more about why the tiger prowls the roads at night, the perfection is unable to carry the weight of the character’s anguish.

There is also a layout aspect of the book that divides the writing from the illustrations. Some page spreads are completely devoid of art, and for a book of little more than 50 pages this is noticeable. The pages are not left plain white but are instead in bold colors of black and gold fitting with the tiger theme. This design choice keeps the text impactful, but it still feels like something is missing. The detailed illustrations using different patterns thematically repeat throughout the story, so it would not seem too far off to have some of those patterns run across the empty spreads, tying the text and art together.

Issues aside, what pushes the book into the worth-reading category is the story itself. The closest piece of writing to compare it to would be Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” The Moon Over the Mountain does not have the grotesque imagery of “The Metamorphosis,” but the human condition presented is equal in ugliness. Both have the existential theme of what it means to fall short of society’s and one’s own expectations of living a meaningful good life. A man-eating tiger is no hero, but in The Moon Over the Mountain he is no villain either.

Scanning through different book marketplaces there does not seem to be a lot of Atsushi Nakajima’s writings circulated in the United States, and rarely does such an out-of-the-way story get such a thoughtful presentation, making this version of The Moon Over the Mountain unique and worth delving into. B

— Bethany Fuss

Dinner with the President, by Alex Prud’homme (Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages)

Before this week, if you’d asked me to share a single detail of the presidency of William Howard Taft, I would have struggled to come up with anything other than that he was also a chief justice and was said to have gotten stuck in the White House bathtub.

The bathtub story isn’t true, so I only would have gotten one thing right.

But having read Alex Prud’homme’s delightful Dinner with the President, I can now riff on obscure presidents with the ease of Doris Kearns Goodwin. That’s because Prud’homme has figured out how to make American history fascinating: tell stories connecting it to food. If my old high school history textbook, The American Pageant, is still in use, Dinner with the President should replace it immediately.

Subtitled “Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House,” this is really a foodie’s guide to American history, and despite the suggestion otherwise, it’s not all about the meals served at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, Prud’homme, the great-nephew of Julia Child (and co-author of her autobiography My Life in France) takes readers from George Washington spooning mutton stew into his almost toothless mouth in Valley Forge in 1777, to Rosalyn Carter getting tense Israeli and Egyptian diplomats to mingle at Camp David in 1978 by putting elaborate desserts in different rooms, to the hearty homemade soups that Ronald Reagan shared at his California ranch with Nancy.

“Hardly frivolous, a meal at the White House is never simply a meal: it is a forum for politics and entertainment on the highest level,” Prud’homme writes.

Smartly, Prud’homme begins at “the dinner table where it happened” — the famous repast Thomas Jefferson arranged to soften tensions between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison as they fought over the structure of the new government. The underpinnings of the Compromise of 1790 were already in the works, but Prud’homme describes in mouth-watering detail the fabulous meal that significantly contributed to saving the still vulnerable republic. (It wasn’t just “sausage being made” as the Hamilton musical says.)

Jefferson, Prud’homme notes, had been the ambassador to France and was “a skilled host who understood how to use food and drink to build political consensus.” He was both a foodie and an oenophile, and presided over a multi-course meal that included truffles simmered in chicken stock, white wine and cream; beef braised in wine, brandy, tomatoes and herbs; a green salad dressed in wine jelly; and vanilla ice cream (a rarity at the time) in puff pastry — and of course several bottles of fine wine and Champagne.

The men could “barely look at each other” when the night began, but they stood no chance of remaining angry after a palate cleanser of meringues and macaroons; really, who could? Similarly, nearly 200 years later, Ronald Reagan dined privately with Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev to develop a friendly rapport two years before he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” at the Berlin Wall and the two men signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Not every administration gets the attention given to Reagan, Carter, Kennedy and the first presidents. Of 46 presidents, just 26 are featured, because they had the most compelling anecdotes, Prud’homme says.

And some who were included got short shrift: George H.W. Bush, for example, is allotted just four pages and a paragraph, some of it a tad disdainful, as Prud’homme chastises the elder Bush for his famous diatribe against broccoli (“Not only did Bush send a message to the children that vegetables are not important, but outraged broccoli farmers sent ten tons of their crop to Washington D.C. in March 1990”) and suggests his penchant for pork rinds and beef jerky might have been politically calculated to win working-class voters.

When researching this book, Prud’homme had ample resources, including his great-aunt’s 1968 TV special White House Red Carpet with Julia Child and detailed journals of the Founding Fathers. Curiously, it was more difficult to get information from recent White House occupants; no living president or former president or first lady agreed to talk about food, and Henry Haller, the chef for five presidents between 1966 and 1987, died while Prud’homme was writing the book, during the pandemic.

Regardless, the book is richly detailed all the way from Washington’s lodge at Valley Forge to Donald Trump’s 2019 fast-food banquet for the Clemson University football team, which won the NCAA championship that year and was fed Domino’s, Wendy’s and McDonald’s at the White House. While Trump was excoriated on social media, Prud’homme wrote, “The president had divined something primordial: we humans are wired to feel kinship with people who like to eat the same things we do.”

What then, should we make of Dwight Eisenhower, who once made a stew of squirrel meat, potatoes and beans on a camping trip; and Taft, who liked turtle soup and roasted possum?

Well, they were products of their time, and let’s be thankful that time has passed, and that the cold and hungry members of the Continental Army for the most part stayed loyal to Washington in that miserable winter of 1777 when they survived on something they called “fire cakes” — “patties of flour and water with a dash of salt, if they could find it, formed into sticky cakes, smeared over stones, and baked in glowing embers.”

The foodie history of America, in other words, wasn’t all wonderful when it came to the actual food. But Prud’homme’s account is as engrossing a history book as you’ll likely read. Also, there are recipes, including Andrew Jackson’s inaugural orange punch (which resulted in drunken revelers surging through his house), Woodrow Wilson’s morning health tonic (grape juice and raw eggs) and Abraham Lincoln’s gingerbread men, also called ginger crackers. Bon appetit. A+

Ms. Demeanor, by Elinor Lipman (Harper, 304 pages)

I’ve never before finished a book and thought, “That was delightful,” but that’s the phrase that kept running through my mind as I transitioned from the fictional world of Ms. Demeanor to the bleak reality of New Hampshire in winter. It was a bright spot in a string of cold, gray days, and it’s a step up from the typical beach read romance, with a unique plot, witty writing and fun, well-developed characters.

Protagonist Jane Young, a spunky, sassy lawyer, is under house arrest for public indecency, having been caught on camera by her nosy neighbor as she was enjoying an intimate moment with a coworker on her semi-private rooftop.

This house arrest leads to Jane meeting an amusing cast of characters, including cute, age-appropriate Perry Salisbury, whom she learns from her doorman is also under house arrest, also for a white-collar crime. (I said it was a unique plot, not necessarily a believable one — regardless, a nice change from the average fictional meet-cute.) I like that Perry is just a normal dude. In many chick-lit-type novels, the male characters who end up with the female protagonist are often portrayed as pompous jerks who eventually show that they have a kinder, softer side worth loving, or as friendly next-door-neighbor types (as opposed to an actual neighbor, a la Perry, who is neither annoyingly friendly nor a pompous jerk). He’s a great foil to Jane, pretty chill and tolerant compared to her less relaxed, quicker-to-anger vibes.

Lipman’s minor characters are well-developed and quirky. There’s Mandy, another building dweller Jane introduces herself to, because why not, being stuck there for six months, and there are Dani and Krzysztof, whom Jane meets because of their relation to the old woman who called the cops on her. Even Perry’s parents are hilarious, his mom especially, being all posh and snotty but also likable somehow.

This book features a lot of relationships of convenience. Jane and Perry’s relationship is transactional at first, starting with food — Jane is trying her hand at making food from the 1800s and posting her cooking videos on TikTok, and she agrees to make meals for Perry as well, which gets her a bit of a paycheck and helps him curb his fast-food habit. That quickly transitions to a friends-with-benefits situation.

Dani and Krzysztof, meanwhile, are looking for green cards through any means necessary so they don’t get deported back to Poland. They ask Jane to hook Krzysztof up with anyone she knows who might want to get married, like perhaps her twin sister Jackleen, who is saved from the absurdity of even considering that plan because when Jane mentions it to Mandy — a quirky woman who apparently has no qualms with marrying someone, anyone, because her biological clock is ticking — Mandy jumps on the opportunity.

Some of Ms. Demeanor’s plot seems to go off the rails at times. For example, there’s a possible murder situation that isn’t really resolved — but that didn’t bother me at all because a resolution wasn’t really the point. The whole cooking on TikTok thing, which Jane is doing because for some unknown reason her sister has been asking her to for years, was kind of pointless. Jane cooking for Perry would have made just as much sense without that, though it may be more that I don’t understand how people use TikTok. Like, she’s making very old-school foods while complaining about her current house-arrest situation — why would anyone care? But my teenage kids tell me it’s normal to follow random people doing random things. My daughter was just watching a total stranger getting ready for a first date while talking about the guy’s red flags. So, there’s that.

The easy, witty writing made me want to keep reading no matter which storyline Lipman was on. Plus, it’s a quick read with those deliberately short chapters that make a book hard to put down (just one more chapter, I thought many times). I think the readability is one of the reasons it’s so delightful. Sure, there’s no going back to read over gems of sentences; this isn’t Shakespeare by any stretch of the imagination. It’s fast-paced and fun and at no point trying to be a contender for a Pulitzer Prize. So if you’re looking for serious, this isn’t it. B