Category: Books

By Any Other Name, by Jodi Picoult (Ballantine Books, 544 pages)

Jodi Picoult does not shy away from heavy-hitting topics. In the same way that she tackles things like abortion in A Spark of Light, teen suicide in The Pact, school shootings in 19 Minutes, and Covid in Wish You Were Here, Picoult dives into the silencing of women today and throughout history in her latest, By Any Other Name.

Many of Picoult’s recent books have frustrated me with their strong political views and cultural commentary, not because I disagree with her, necessarily, but because I don’t want any author’s viewpoints shoved down my throat — put the topic out there and let me think about it. Also, I want my fiction to be a little more fictitious and a little less like I’m reading an op-ed in today’s newspaper.

By Any Other Name explores the history of repressed women in a way that mostly allows the story to do the talking. The book has two storylines: One harkens back to the 16th and 17th centuries and follows the semi-fictional life of a real woman, Emilia Bassano. Based on significant research, Picoult depicts her as a closet writer who is forced to be a lord’s courtesan for many years, then an abused wife for many more — all while writing poems and plays that an actor named William Shakespeare publishes for her under his name.

The second storyline takes place in modern day and follows Melina Green, a playwright who struggles to get her works produced, presumably because she is a woman. This is somewhat proven when one of her plays — about her ancestor, Emilia — finally gets published after its authorship is mistakenly attributed to her best friend, Andre. The irony here is that Andre is gay and Black and far from the cis white male stereotype that Picoult suggests dominates even the modern playwriting field.

Interestingly, given the subject, I felt that Melina and Emilia’s storylines could have been written by two different authors — Melina’s clearly by Picoult, where the moral of the story may as well be bolded, underlined and highlighted. (One of many examples is when Melina is talking to theater critic Jasper Tolle about why plays about “complicated, wholly realized women” don’t make it to the stage. When he says that she’s “painting with a very broad brush when it comes to what gets produced and what doesn’t,” she responds, “That is exactly the kind of thing a straight white man would say,” then waits for him to tell her she’s wrong — “which,” Picoult writes, “of course, would be proof of everything she was alleging.” Tell me, Ms. Picoult, how you really feel…).

Emilia’s story, on the other hand, seemingly could have been written by, well, any other name. Maybe this is a testament to Picoult’s ability to immerse herself in a different time period and develop a narrative based on thorough research, losing her own voice in Emilia’s in a way that she doesn’t with Melina, whose story is entirely fictional. With Emilia, it seems, all Picoult has to do is tell it like it is to get the point across (regarding Emilia’s forced relationship with Lord Chamberlain, she writes that Emilia “had been sold by her family, for her family” — no opinion there, just a fact that speaks volumes).

The difference in storytelling is somehow both fascinating and off-putting.

What I like about Emilia’s story: Emilia herself is a well-developed character whose strengths are best defined in her resilience and her intelligence; she uses both to get her writing in front of an audience, willing to forgo acknowledgment of her work in order to show her words to the world — and to make some much-needed money, as Shakespeare gave her a small portion of “his” earnings.

I also like Emilia’s secret friendship with Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, a well-known Elizabethan poet and playwright who was purportedly gay, a heavy drinker and a spy. Kit is rough around the edges but becomes a great friend to Emilia, adding an unexpected emotional arc and some comic relief. Meanwhile, Emilia’s secret relationship with Southampton is lovely and passionate and shows a spark of brightness that typically lies dormant inside her.

Emilia’s arranged relationship with Lord Chamberlain is not nearly as bad as it could be (as we see later, when she is beaten severely and often by the man she is forced to marry). She isn’t his mistress by choice, but Lord Chamberlain is a kind man, never controlling or cruel, and she benefits from both his wealth and the autonomy he grants her. She is, for those years, “a nightingale in the loveliest of cages.”

Melina’s story, by comparison, is more straightforward, specifically addressing her challenges as a female playwright. Her friendship with Andre is fun and quippy (at least at first), and her interactions with Jasper are intriguing. Her chapters are a breath of fresh, modern air, if you can get past the heavy-handed feminist commentary.

There’s a lot to like in By Any Other Name, but there’s also a lot going on — a lot of characters and a lot of scenes (if this were a play the stage crew would be marathon-level exhausted by the final act).

There were parts that dragged a bit and sometimes seemed redundant, especially in Emilia’s chapters. If I had been able to appreciate more of the Shakespearean references that Picoult weaves into those chapters — as notated at the end of the book — it probably would have enhanced my reading experience. But I’m a former English major who actually studied some Shakespeare (albeit more than two decades ago), so I have to question how much this will appeal to the masses.

By Any Other Name takes the often questioned legitimacy of Shakespeare’s authorship and makes a compelling case while weaving in a modern story that Picoult uses to show how far we’ve come as a society but also how far we have to go. It’s a long but worthwhile journey if you like strong female characters or you’re captivated by the idea that Romeo and Juliet may have been penned by a woman. B+ —Meghan Siegler

Meet the Neighbors, by Brandon Keim (W.W. Norton, 368 pages)

With all the studies and books published on animal intelligence in the past decade, did we really need another one? Well, yes, it turns out we did. Brandon Keim, a science and nature writer who lives in Bangor, Maine, has found a new twist on the subject in Meet the Neighbors.

Culling from copious research, Keim takes a Mr. Rogers approach to animal science, reporting his findings while strolling through “the everyday landscape of a suburban neighborhood” and pointing out the various animals residing there. While this may seem a sophomoric endeavor to some, he argues otherwise, saying that the central question of our time is “How might an awareness of animal minds shape the ways we understand them and, ultimately, how we live with them on this shared, precious planet?” In other words, until we approach animals as compadres in the struggle, we are getting them, and our own moral development, wrong.

Challenge him at your own risk: No less than Charles Darwin was a fan of the lowly earthworm, about which he wrote a surprise bestseller. (The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Actions of Worms is not quite as catchy a title as On the Origin of Species.) In this, Darwin’s final book, he wrote of earthworms, “they deserve to be called intelligent.”

Keim’s interest in the topic came from his realization that the birds he watched bathing daily in a local reservoir “were like locals at a coffee shop or the gym. They were my neighbors.” Since most Americans actually know little about their human neighbors, this might not be the best argument for learning more about squirrels and chipmunks.

A better argument comes from the quote by the writer and Whole Earth Catalog co-founder Stewart Brand, who said, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” When Keim first came across this quote, he said, it “grated” at him, but he came to accept the hard truth in it: that we all make decisions every day that affect the lives of other creatures, whether it’s something as simple as turning over a stone and disrupting a small colony of insects, or clearing a wooded lot for a house.

“But we could turn the phrase a bit differently than Brand,” Keim writes. “We might as well be good neighbors.” This involves questions with ethical considerations, such as “what do we owe so-called pets, or animals who are sick or injured? How do we live with predators whose presence is not always welcomed?” In attempting to answer these questions, Keim walks us through a brief history of animal rights, from Aristotle to Peter Singer, at times including nauseating detail about animal cruelty, and the challenges that remain. (For example: “the federal Animal Welfare Act exempts farm animals and most lab animals; the Humane Slaughter Act doesn’t apply to chickens or fish, who account for the vast majority of farmed animals.” And protections for wild animals mostly apply to endangered species.) This section feels a bit thin, coming so soon after the masterful treatment of the subject in Our Kindred Creatures by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, and Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals, earlier this year.

But when Keim resumes his neighborhood walks (which aren’t limited to where he lives now, but include other places he’s lived and traveled), he uses his own experience to explore animals that don’t get as much sympathetic treatment, as, say, dogs or elephants. He takes up the neighborly cause for rats and cormorants, waterbirds that are among the most hated birds in the world, with contempt for them going back to the biblical book of Leviticus. While he once hated the bird, Keim sees a flock and envisions them as “returning home after a day’s work” with family, friends and acquaintances and thinks about what stories they would communicate to each other. He talks to an ecologist studying the effects of pollution who adopted a deformed baby cormorant that he named Cosmos and who later became something of a minor celebrity because of their media appearances.

He also takes up a subject that gets too little attention: the cultural cognitive dissonance when it comes to animals that allows us to be entranced when a raccoon climbs an office building in Minnesota, becoming a social media star, and yet also considers that species a pest to be eradicated. The story Keim tells of a Canada man who raised and released a baby raccoon only to have the raccoon return two years later for a visit will cause you to reconsider hiring a pest control company — or at least any that don’t consider the animals’ welfare as well as the humans’.

Even the most ardent of animal lovers claim the right to kill animals in self-defense, but do we also have the right to kill them when they damage our property, invade our homes or generally fit the definition of “nuisance”? The law usually says so. But even when people try to deal with nuisance animals in a humane way — by trapping and relocating them, for example — that may turn out to be just a slower form of death.

The Canadian man who had raised the raccoon later went on to run his own “pest control” company with humane methods, and told Keim an amazing story about a client who had a raccoon living in a garage with a nest of babies. They couldn’t figure out how the raccoon was getting in or out until he one night watched the raccoon push the button that opened the garage door.

“As best as he could figure, she would go outside at night while the homeowner slept, then close the door when she returned in the morning’s wee hours, leaving her humans none the wiser.” It’s an astonishing story and bolsters Keim’s contention that understanding “the neighbors” makes us less likely to want to kill them, and more likely to want to find ways to live in harmony. B

Burn,by Peter Heller (Knopf, 291 pages)

Jess and Storey have been friends since they were kids growing up in a small town in southern Vermont. As adults, they maintained their friendship, in part by spending several weeks each year hunting off the grid. In fact, it was those trips that killed Jess’s marriage. His wife wasn’t happy with his lengthy absences to hunt and fish when he couldn’t make time to vacation with her.

Jess is still mourning the loss of his wife and dog, and clutching the prayer stone that Jan had once given him, when he joins Storey to hunt in north-central Maine one September. But his personal tragedy soon shrinks in the middle of a bigger one.

When the men try to return to civilization after more than a week off the grid, they find that civilization, as they know it, has vanished — the bridge they’d previously crossed blown up, no cell service, towns incinerated, the residents missing except for a few corpses.The second Civil War, it seems, has come to New England.

Burn is novelist Peter Heller’s take on a popular theme: the idea that America’s polarization could lead to secession and war, trivialized by some with the euphemism “national divorce.” There have been numerous fiction and nonfiction books exploring this theme, and a movie earlier this year.

But Burn is no made-for-Hollywood thriller that exploits the country’s tensions. It aims higher with a story that explores family, betrayal, secrets and friendship. The savage conflict is just an accelerant that elevates the stakes.

The story begins with Jess and Storey emerging from the woods to find a gory mystery: Where are the people who lived in the incinerated towns? Why were their cars torched, while boats at the marina were left untouched? And most pressing of all, who was responsible? The federal government, or militias, or a foreign invader? “Jess began to carry a stone in his gut he recognized as dread,” Heller writes.

The men, both in their late thirties, surmised that the violence was related to “secession mania” that had pitted Mainers against each other. “But no one had expected it to come to full-bore civil strife. They had discussed the risk while planning the trip and decided that what was happening in Maine was no worse than the stirrings of revolt in Idaho and the failed secession vote in Texas the year before. These were fringe minorities, vocal and passionate, but not a real threat.”

Storey — who lives in Burlington, Vermont, with his wife and two daughters — and Jess, who lives in Colorado — have no dog in this fight. But they also have no way to get out, once they realize that all the combatants seem to be shooting everyone they see on sight. Their primary problem is sheer survival as they try to figure out how to escape what seems to have become a war zone.

They scavenge food and coffee from boats, and camp deep in the woods, as they plot a way out. Storey grows increasingly worried about his family, while Jess ruminates on what he has already lost, and his teenage years, providing flashbacks into his pre-apocalypse life, in which he spent most of his time with Storey’s idyllic, warm family, feeling unloved by his own parents, who mostly seemed to care about books.

There is little time for contemplation, however, as the men have to keep moving. The danger they are in is underscored when helicopters appear without warning, firing on someone in a boat, and at one point the two friends have to fire on other men who are shooting at them; while both are experienced hunters, neither has ever shot at another human being, let alone killed one. And by means of a ham radio they come across, they are able to learn snippets of what is transpiring around them, from a Canadian broadcast in French.

All of this provides tension enough to sustain a whole book, but Heller surprises his readers with two turns of events — one in the present day, one in the past — that raise the stakes even beyond the hellscape they are navigating. The introduction of these subplots adds complexity to the men’s journey, and at one point threatens their friendship.

Full disclosure: I was already a Heller fan, having read 2012’s The Dog Stars, 2014’s The Painter and 2023’s The Last Rangers (and given each of them an A). But not every author gets better with age, and with the subject matter, I was prepared for Burn to disappoint. It did not.

An accomplished outdoorsman who grew up in New York, went to high school in Vermont and attended Dartmouth College, Heller’s writing is suffused with knowledge of nature and sport, and New England. In Burn, he uses the names of real towns, not fictional ones, which might be disconcerting to lovers of Maine, as the conflict widens. But it’s also interesting to see this sort of story, which a more predictable writer might have set in a southern state, play out where it does.

The problem with a book like Burn is that the reader is anxious to get to the end to find out what happens to the characters, but at the same time doesn’t want their story to end. Heller has not written sequels before, but Burn is deserving of one. While he delivers as satisfying an ending as possible in a story this bleak, we still want to know what happens next.

“Always leave them wanting more” is a phrase attributed to P.T. Barnum. Heller employs the tactic well. Still, I’d pay $50 cash right now for Burn 2. A

—Jennifer Graham

The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil (Viking, 312 pages)

If there is anyone who can envision how artificial intelligence will change our lives in the next few decades, it’s Ray Kurzweil, whose title at Google includes the words “AI visionary.”

Kurzwell has been working in the industry for more than six decades. So when he tells us that “the singularity” — the merger of humans with AI — is likely to occur by 2045 and will be “utterly transformative,” we’d best pay attention.

Building on his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil examines the developments in AI since then, as well as its impact on jobs, health, longevity, and the risks that technology poses. It’s widely believed that AI will soon pass the “Turing test” — the point at which AI’s response to questions is indistinguishable from humans’ — which Kurzweil expects to occur by 2029. That milestone, he believes, will launch us into the fifth epoch of development, connecting our brains with computers that “will allow us to add many more layers to our neocortices — unlocking vastly more complex and abstract cognition than we can currently imagine.”

Augmented in this way, the enhanced human brain will eventually “become more than 99.9 percent nonbiological” in two ways, Kurzweil says: “One is the gradual introduction of nanobots to the brain tissue itself. These may be used to repair damage or replace neurons that have stopped working. The other is connecting the brain to computers, which will both provide the ability to control machines directly with our thoughts and allow us to integrate digital layers of neocortex in the cloud.”

As AI is advancing even quicker than many futurists initially believed, it seems the digitization of the human mind will likely happen within the lifetimes of many people who are alive today. Kurzweil, who lives near Boston, is 76 and he believes he will live to see it.

“As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized human body at will: we’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them,” Kurzweil writes. “We will think millions of times faster, but most importantly we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.”

There’s another, controversial word for all this, which Kurzweil doesn’t use: transhumanism. And much of what Kurzweil envisions is dependent on nanotechnology, the development and implantation of nanobots, almost unimaginably tiny robots that could roam our bodies, repairing or removing malfunctioning cells. (To give you an idea of scale, there are more than 25 million nanometers in an inch; Kurzweil describes a nanobot as about the size of a human cell.)

While some forms of medical nanotechnology are already in testing on animals, the life-changing nanobots that Kurzweil is talking about don’t actually exist yet. He’s largely talking about what could happen, and the future may not be as rosy as he thinks.

He acknowledges as much in a chapter titled “Peril” in which he examines scenarios where AI doesn’t help us but leads to the mass extinction of anything carbon-based. He nods at Bill Joy’s famous essay “The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” published in 2000 in Wired magazine, and the “gray goo” theory, which posits that self-replicating nanobots that consume or otherwise destroy living things could wipe out the Earth’s biomass within a matter of weeks. Nanobots could also be used as military weapons, delivering virtually undetectable poisons to whole populations. But the technology can also be used for defense systems, and technology companies are taking these sorts of doomsday scenarios seriously and devising safeguards.

While Kurzweil is trying to write for a general audience, and largely succeeds, the book at times descends into college-textbook dryness when he explains various technologies. But he turns out to be a surprisingly engaging philosopher as he navigates the ethical issues surrounding AI.

A chapter titled “Who Am I?” examines subjective consciousness, or qualia, and the trouble with assuming AI can never acquire it, as well as the issues that arise as we get closer to “resurrecting” the dead with avatars or replicants created using photos and video, texts, interviews and other data about loved ones. (Kurzweil has done something like this with his own father, collecting everything his father had ever written, including love letters to his mother, and then using AI to have a “conversation” with his deceased father, or as he put it, his “dad bot.”)

Another question he delves into is how much of our essential selves we might lose as our body parts — even the brain — are rebuilt as Lee Majors was in the old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man.

Kurzweil recalls the thought experiment of ancient Greeks who pondered what happens when an old ship is gradually rebuilt using new planks. If the old planks are stored and then reassembled into a ship again, which is the original? The stakes are higher when it comes to human beings. “For most of us, it matters a great deal whether the person standing next to us is really our loved one or is just a Chalmersian zombie putting on a convincing show.”

For those of us who can live long enough to take advantage, Kurzweil assures us that “radical life extension is close at hand.” That may make you want to start exercising and eating right, or to take up drinking and smoking posthaste. Either seems a rational decision, given what is headed our way. B

—Jennifer Graham

The Cliffs, by J. Courtney Sullivan (Knopf, 369 pages)

When her ne’er-do-well mother dies, Jane Flanagan’s only inheritance is a dog named Walter, “an orange powder puff of a thing” that Jane was convinced her mother loved more than her daughters. She knew her mother had nothing of value to pass on, but “Walter was so much worse than nothing.”

Even in death, her mother caused Jane trouble.

In life, her mother’s drinking and other poor choices led the teenage Jane to hide out at an abandoned house, pale purple and creepy, that sat on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Maine. The home had been built in 1846 and it had the vibe of houses abandoned in zombie movies — dusty furniture, random toys, a collapsed railing, food expired decades ago that animals had gotten into. Still, Jane felt drawn to the house and didn’t feel she was breaking any laws by going into it to sit quietly or read: “It felt like honoring whatever came before.”

That’s how we meet Jane in The Cliffs, the sixth novel of acclaimed Massachusetts author J. Courtney Sullivan. A smart and conscientious young woman, Jane soon leaves the dumpster fire that is her family home, earns multiple degrees, travels and gets a great job and boyfriend. The purple house recedes in her mind.

Meanwhile, the house beckons another woman, Genevieve, who is the polar opposite of Jane. Married, moneyed and entitled, Genevieve convinces her husband to buy the house and to entrust her with its renovation as a vacation house for the family of three. Unlike Jane, she is not respectful of the home’s history; when a contractor she hired to install an infinity pool overlooking the ocean discovers a small cemetery, she has no qualms about disturbing the dead.

Not long afterward, Genevieve is shaken when she walks into her young son’s room and finds him conversing with a girl that he claims to see, but she can’t. And we’re off and running with what at first appears to be a classic New England ghost story. Only it’s not.

While there are ghosts in The Cliffs, and a psychic named Clementine who claims to connect Jane with her mother and grandmother, the sprawling story is primarily about human beings who are alive, or once were, and their legacies. Rich in history, it also delves into the lives of indigenous people who named the (fictional) town Awadapquit, and the ethical issues of living on their land. (“What does it mean to acknowledge that this land had been stolen, when no one had any intention of giving it back?” Sullivan writes.)

These are side stories that are so expertly woven into the narrative that they never feel preachy or pretentious.

As the story progresses, Jane returns to her hometown to help clean out her mother’s house, and also to escape fallout from an alcohol-induced humiliation that is also threatening her job and her marriage. Meanwhile, Jane’s friend Allison’s mother, who was a mother surrogate for Jane when she was in high school, is slipping into dementia, and Allison connects Jane with Genevieve, who wants someone to research previous owners of the house.

There’s more than one mystery here: In addition to the spirit that Genevieve’s son thinks he sees, Jane had been told by a psychic that she needed to get a message from a girl identified only by the initial “D” to her mother, assuring her that she is at peace.

Jane, who has a Ph.D. in American history, hadn’t wanted to meet with this medium at all — the visit was a gift, and she is highly skeptical of psychics in general, and bewildered as to why some random child would be connected in any way to her family.

“And by the way, why is it that dead people always come back to tell their loved ones, ‘I’m at peace.’? Why is it never, ‘This absolutely sucks, get me out of here,?’ Jane tells Allison when recounting the visit.

As in every human life, there is so much pain that the characters don’t see, much of it caused by each other.

“Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people,” Sullivan writes.

We also all have ghosts, real or not, in the sticky shadows of people who have passed and left their mark on us. The Cliffs is a study of family that is deeply affecting, even if you don’t care much for the learning about spirits, like why children are receptive to ghosts (it’s said that they see parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that older people can’t) and what happens at a real-life “spiritualist camp meeting” in Maine (renamed Camp Mira in The Cliffs, but which is actually called Camp Etna).

(Unrelated to spirits, but New Hampshire also has a couple of cameos in here — Jane sneaks across state lines to buy alcohol, and a pivotal event happens while one character is on a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough.)

Lots of dubious writers come to be “New York Times best-selling authors” through marketing campaigns and purchasing gimmicks. The Cliffs is fresh evidence that Sullivan is one by virtue of talent. It is an engrossing and deeply New England novel, with characters that will burrow into your heart. A

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, by Priyanka Mattoo (Knopf, 304 pages)

American women who chafe at the Sisyphean nature of household chores will adore Priyanka Mattoo’s grandfather.

A physics professor who once calmly shot a python in his house, he raised free-range kids at his family’s compound in India. If the children weren’t at school, “they were up to something, somewhere in the house, unsupervised,” and his household rules were simple, Mattoo writes: “study, don’t lie, and don’t embarrass the family.”

More importantly, Nanaji (“nana” is the word for the maternal grandfather in Hindi, “ji” the suffix of respect) insisted that the girls and women around him do no menial household work, believing “The only useful pursuits for a young woman were those of the mind.”

In her engrossing new memoir, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, Mattoo recalls another family story: Her mother decided to take up knitting as a teen and was working on a sweater when her father sternly asked why she was doing that. “Did all the stores burn down?” he demanded.

Nananji was not against work, just domestic labor, and as such, Mattoo’s mother, and indeed the whole extended family, became remarkably competent adults and “pathologically assertive women.”

“The Kaul girls — doctors, engineers, professors, and some now grandmothers — have no patience for wallflowers, or fools. They enter every unfamiliar room as though they own it. Greet each stranger as though they’ve been reading up.” She adds, “I’m not sure anyone on that side of my family knows how to whisper, and I’m happier for it.”

But despite this remarkably strong and loving family unit, Mattoo and her immediate family suffered the loss of their treasured family home in Kashmir, the region at the center of a bitter territorial dispute between Pakistan and India. The property was ransacked and destroyed by militants, and the family lost not just their physical center but also the decorative contents gathered from all over the world. It is these precious belongings that give the book its title. “Bird milk and mosquito bones” is a phrase Kashmiris use to describe things “so rare and precious that the listener should question their very existence.”

Mattoo’s writing is exquisite in exactly that way, and she builds this series of discrete and elegant essays on the scaffolding of her transcontinental search for home in the aftermath of loss. Her experiences are often exotic by American standards; she writes somewhat disparagingly of the homogeneity of the American experience:

“What a crazy place America is, where you can drive for three straight days and everyone’s still speaking English, and all were seemingly raised on the same episodes of eighties television. But they’ll tell me, in a lather, that the barbecue is dry here, whereas in another place it’s more … wet.”

She adds, “I stare blankly, feeling like an alien that’s landed on a well-meaning planet, one that believes that it is the beating heart of the universe.” She’s got a point.

But there are universal themes here, of longing and loss and the desire for connection. And this is ultimately a book about family, one that is frankly captivating. Here, for example, is Mattoo’s description of a family vacation: “ … we vacation hard, my family. Ideally three weeks, and always a home rental, never a hotel. We settle in like we own the place and have always owned the place. … In the places we stay, there is no turndown service, often no air-conditioning, and the elevator always breaks on day two.”

A “thinky” child, Mattoo is now married with children and lives in the United States, and “presents as American” but is always searching for connection with her home continent. When a music app recommends a song that she becomes obsessed with (“Pasoori” by Ali Sethi), she tracks down the artist, who is from Pakistan, and asks him to speak on WhatsApp (“official communication tool of the global diaspora”). She says, “I need to connect with the person who has made me feel this way.” She later connects with another Pakistani singer, who turns out to also be a medical doctor. “Our countries still bristle with tension — they might always — but I’m encouraged by evidence of this generation’s desire to create,” she writes.

Mattoo veers off delightfully into asides about her children and her childhood. Consider this opening to an essay titled “You Are My Life,” which may be the best start to a chapter I read this year:

“The only grudge I ever held was in nursery school, thanks to a tiny witch named Christina.”

Or this, from a chapter simply titled “A Toothache”:

“I had a terrible toothache the summer my great-aunt Indra was murdered, but that wasn’t the worst part.”

One of the most interesting essays involves Mattoo’s search for a husband, aided in part by her parents, who respectfully asked if she’d be open to them setting her up — a challenge since they were by then living in the United States, where there are about 400 Kashmiri Pandit families, in which there were about 20 “single, age-appropriate men.” Mattoo said OK, but she wanted someone who would make her laugh, to which her mother said, “Funny’s not important!” But funny was. She wound up marrying a Jewish comedy writer.

The book appears to have taken shape in Peterborough at the MacDowell Artists Colony, where the author was in residence in 2022, working on a book that was then titled “16 Kitchens.” That’s now the title of a chapter in Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, in which Mattoo talks more about her mother and the family’s experience of living in Saudi Arabia, where the weather felt like “being warmed up in a low oven.” The MacDowell team can be proud of this one. As can Mattoo’s Nanaji. It’s been a while since I enjoyed a collection of essays so much. A