Category: Books

All the Water in the World, by Eiren Caffall (St. Martin’s Press, 294 pages)

“Storms always came. They took things,” the young narrator of All the Water in the World says matter-of-factly, explaining what life was like before melting polar ice caps drowned New York City.

But in the early days of the climate apocalypse, the girl named Nonie explains, there was always a sense that things could be fixed, that the world could adjust to a new reality without cars, reliable electricity, airplanes, bananas — whatever disappeared next.

“Every year, the storms were bigger — moving the ocean up into the streets” and eventually moving Nonie and her family onto the roof of the American Museum of Natural History, where her parents had worked before the world shut down.

That living arrangement was safe until it wasn’t, when a “hypercane” — a monstrous hurricane with winds up to 200 mph — made even a rooftop in Manhattan unsafe, and Nonie and her people had to relocate even though it seemed that the whole world was under water. It wasn’t just their few belongings that they had to worry about, but the whole of history that had been contained within the museum and has now been painstakingly described in a handwritten logbook for future generations, if they exist.

Eiren Caffail’s debut novel was inspired by actual events: the struggle to save museum collections from the devastation of war.

During the siege of Leningrad in the second World War, Caffail writes, curators stayed in the Hermitage museum, eating paste to stay alive and caring for the art. “They belonged to the art and the art belonged to them and it was a sacred duty. But so was the vision of what it would be one day when the siege was over and the windows repaired and the museum alive again for everyone, for the world that mattered, the one they wanted.”

In All the Water in the World, Nonie’s parents work to save what they can of the museum’s collections, wrapping and hiding artifacts, hoping that they will one day again be treasured and displayed. Nonie herself contributes, making a “water logbook” and writing descriptions of the storms as they get bigger and bolder.

Unlike her sister, Bix, who is terrified of water, Nonie has “water love,” a gift from her mother, now dead. And so it’s Nonie who has to comfort Box as they climb into a birchbark canoe, once part of an exhibit of an indigenous civilization and now their only means of transportation as the water rises in the museum.

Four people — the sisters, their father and an entomologist from the museum — launch the canoe in terrifying conditions hoping to follow the Hudson River to a family farm they know used to exist to the north. Their journey at times is Walking Dead-esque — “Sometimes what looks like shelter is only menace,” Caffall writes — except the horror comes from the water, not zombies. Through it all, Caffall’s prose is gorgeous:

“The new sea coursed with lost things. Debris swirled and rose in the water — headphones, water bottles, flotillas of paper, broken birds, photographs. In the mud of the Park after a storm, photographs surfaced, bleached and peeling, evidence of lives in The World As It Was, lives that included trips in planes, cake with candles, people in fresh clothing with white teeth and no idea what was coming, a child on a three-wheeled bicycle, a newborn screaming with a red face faded pink, a man holding it, on the edge of laughter, eyes slapped wide, joy pouring out of his smiling mouth.”

As they progress through New England, the group meets sickness and death and new people, with more about the past revealed in flashbacks. In this landscape of sorrow and misery, it is an accomplishment for Caffall to close the story in a way that doesn’t end with utter destruction, like the movie Don’t Look Up. But she does so, like the parents kept Nonie and Bix going: “with hope thrown hard at the darkness.”

Caffall has published one other book, a memoir called The Mourner’s Bestiary, which weaves together her family’s struggle with a genetic kidney disease and the plight of animals affected by ecological change in the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound. Dystopian climate fiction is all the rage right now, but Caffall brings a thoughtful voice to the genre and is writing books that have value as books and not just as storylines for disaster movies.

The only part that didn’t work for me were the occasional excerpts from Nonie’s logbook, which, frankly, just aren’t that interesting, compared to the rest of the narrative, because the writer is 13. (Example: “Keller told me that ‘nor’easter isn’t a real weather word, and that at some point, there were so many storms that you could hardly call anything nor’easters anymore.”)

Caffall said it took her 11 years to write this book, and it shows. While some readers might wish for more of a disaster-movie plot, it was clearly not her intent to write that kind of a book. It’s not so much a climate novel as it is a climate meditation that just happens to have a submerged Empire State Building in it. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: All the Water in the World, by Eiren Caffall

Aflame, by Pico Iyer (Riverhead, 222 pages)

Pico Iyer is widely known as a travel writer, and he has traveled the globe for his books and essays, but some of his most meaningful experiences have been in a tiny room with a single bed, a chair and a desk and no distractions save an ocean view, nothing but “silence and emptiness and light.”

It is here, at a monastery in Big Sur, California, called the Hermitage, that Iyer has returned to repeatedly over the past three decades, once driving nearly four hours after his father died to sit in the stillness for two hours before driving back home again.

In Aflame, an unnerving title given the recent devastation in Los Angeles, Iyer writes lyrically and movingly about the gifts of solitude and quiet and why they matter, especially in a culture that seems determined to deprive us of them. And yes, he also writes about wildfires, inevitable because the setting is California, and death and suffering. But the title is a metaphor for burning in the heart, as well.

When Iyer tells one friend about his experiences at the New Camaldoli Hermitage, the friend replies, “You sound like you’re in love.” He answers, “Exalted, at the very least.”

The friend cautions him, “A love like that can’t last,” to which Iyer responds, “But it can leave you a different person, not always for the worst.”

This was an unlikely love story for Iyer, who is not a Christian or a member of any organized religious group and says he has an “aversion to all crosses and hymnals” because of having to attend chapel for 12 years in school.

But at the Hermitage he found transformative peace similar to what Admiral Richard Byrd found in the Antarctic, where the explorer made friends with stars and ice crystals, and the playwright Henry Miller, who happily lived alone in a rude cabin with no electricity or phone for three years.

But, as Iyer writes, “The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable.”

Although the website of the Big Sur hermitage is contemplation.com, the monks have work to do — when they are driven out by wildfires that threaten their home, they find similar jobs to do at the places where they evacuate.

Iyer himself is too much acquainted with fire: “I can still feel myself inside that oven, my mother’s cat panting and struggling to breathe in my lap. One minute we had been sitting in our family home, the next we were surrounded by walls of flame five stories high.”

That home was in Santa Barbara, and his mother was in Florida at the time, so Iyer had to call her to tell her that everything she owned was now ash. There are many such heartbreaking stories coming out of Los Angeles right now, but Iyer, having lived through such a fire and recovered, brings to the subject a stoic’s view: As painful as it was, the fire “did clear the way for many things,” he tells a friend. He recounts a Japanese poem:

My house burned down

I can now see better

The rising moon

True hermits are rare, and even those famous for time spent alone, like Henry David Thoreau, weren’t alone as people think. Even while living at Walden Pond, Thoreau visited his mother every Sunday, and “The title of his first talk at the Concord Lyceum was not ‘Solitude’ but ‘Society’,” Iyer writes. Being alone is not an end unto itself, but “the means to becoming a more useful member of society.”

But a little aloneness doesn’t cut it. As one monk tells Iyer, “You have to learn how to enjoy leisure. … But you can’t be leisurely for just half an hour. It’s only in the sixth half hour that things start developing inside you — and then you know you have another three hours to go.”

While not every day is bliss in stays that sometimes last for a month — there is rain, and there are rattlesnakes and occasional bouts of boredom — Iyer comes to understand that it is the learnings of silence, not the busy work of his career or any money in his bank account, that would be useful as his father came to the end of his life.
Still, a friend says to him, “I can’t believe you’re spending all this time with these old guys in hoods.” But those old guys in hoods are quite the sages. Once, Iyer walks in on one working in the kitchen, who says to him, “This bloody peeling of onions, it never stops!” Iyer assumes he is talking literally, but no: “It’s the inner onion I’m talking about. The invisible stuff!”

There is, as there always is, another fire, threatening the Hermitage. And then another.

“The sacred is not a sanctuary, I’m moved to remember; it’s a force field. In many ways a forest fire. You can try controlled burns or back burnings, you can walk towards the heat, but its power comes from the fact that it can’t begin to be controlled or anticipated.”

Aflame, released the week after the Santa Ana winds blew embers across the Pacific Palisades, is beauty amid those ashes, and those yet to come. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Aflame, by Pico Iyer

Sweet Fury, by Sash Bischoff (Simon & Schuster, 288 pages)

Check any list of the greatest American novelists and F. Scott Fitzgerald is likely in the top 10. Few of us escape high school without reading The Great Gatsby, but not all of us go on to read Fitzgerald’s next novel, Tender is the Night, published in 1934.

That puts Tender-illiterates like me at a bit of a disadvantage going into Sweet Fury, a debut novel by Sash Bischoff that revolves around a modern, feminist interpretation of Tender.

The disadvantage is not prohibitive — you can still follow the storyline, and might even emerge with a desire to visit (or revisit) all things Fitzgerald. But a fear of missing out might hang over your reading, since Bischoff admits she embedded Easter eggs — inside jokes or references — nodding to Fitzgerald and his work throughout the book.

The story begins with the clinical notes of a psychiatrist, Jonah Gabriel, who has agreed to take on a new client, a Hollywood star named Lila Crane who is about to play the role of Nicole Diver in a modern adaptation of Tender is the Night, directed by her lover. The star and the therapist have an immediate rapport once they discover that they both went to Princeton and were both fans of Fitzgerald.

Crane had decided to see therapy because of trauma she suffered in childhood. Her father was abusive and had an alcohol addiction, and he was driving drunk, with Crane and her mother in the car, when they collided with another car, killing the father.

“I want your honest opinion,” she says to Gabriel in their first session. “If someone has done something terrible to you, can you ever truly heal? Or will you always have a scar? Is there a way to erase the scar itself — and more importantly, erase that person’s power to hurt you again?”

Since Tender also involves alcohol abuse and a car wreck, Crane believes she might benefit from working out her own issues, which also, it turns out, include a past sexual assault. She enters therapy just as she becomes engaged to the man she’s living with, an A-list director named Kurt Royall, who is a powerful, attention-seeking man 18 years her senior. Her mother, not surprisingly, has concerns, even if Lila does not.

The story swivels back and forth between the therapist’s notes, Crane’s journaling and what is happening in real time as production begins on this new, empowering version of Tender. Crane is excited about the production because, as she tells Gabriel, “Our version of Tender isn’t another tragedy of the tortured white man. It’s a feminist story of healing, of reparations.”

From the first page, we’re swimming in a story within a story within a story — Tender is about a psychiatrist who falls in love with a patient, and much of that book derived from Fitzgerald’s relationship with his wife, Zelda, who had mental health issues that required psychiatric care.

But if you haven’t read the Fitzgerald novel, don’t go down the CliffsNotes rabbit hole like I did, as it will just leave your head spinning. Better to just read Sweet Fury on its own merits. That is, if you can get past the title and cover art — a silhouette of a nude woman’s body — that makes the book look like some sort of cringe bodice-ripper. (Honestly, if I’d been reading on public transportation, I would have hidden the cover, and I’m not sure if that makes me a prude or a literary snob.)

The publicity for Sweet Fury promises Gone Girl-like pivots and twists, and after a slow start these come fast and furious, making it difficult to talk about the last half of the book without significant spoilers. Let’s just say that more than one character is not the person they are set up to be; in fact, hardly anybody is.

Bischoff knows how to turn a phrase — my mind keeps returning to her description of an opulent wrap-around porch stretching into a “single, satisfied grin.” And she does an excellent job concealing the twists until their reveal; the story is well plotted and foreshadowing is light. She unpacks everything with sufficient depth at the story’s end.

If there’s a fault in these stars, it’s that Bischoff does not adequately convince us to love any of them as the story unfolds.

I never felt an emotional attachment to Lila, her mother, the scriptwriter, the therapist, the gay best friend or any of the myriad other characters. I read Sweet Fury as one watches the second season of a TV show you’ve never seen before, with clinical detachment. This is, no doubt, partly because I knew little about the book that was incessantly being referenced (even a cat is named Zelda — everything is Fitzgeraldized) but it’s also partly because, as I found out at the story’s end, much of what I thought I knew about these people wasn’t true. And you can’t love characters if you don’t know them.

That said, will I re-read it now to connect the dots I missed the first time? Yes, of course — somewhat grudgingly. And if I’d loved Lila Crane like I want to love protagonists, I’d probably read Tender is the Night, too. But at this point, that’s more time and energy than I want to invest in this particular fictional actress. At least until the movie comes out. B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Sweet Fury, by Sash Bischoff

The Cure for Women, by Lydia Reeder (St. Martin’s Press, 286 pages)

Given some of the past practices of medicine, bloodletting and leeches and such, it’s a wonder any of us are alive today. What’s even more disturbing is how recent some of these strange medical practices are.

Take, for example, the “rest cure for women,” a protocol of the 19th century in which women suffering from a raft of maladies — but mainly being thin and “short of blood” — were told to take to their beds, sometimes for months, where they were fed milk and raw eggs, and forbidden social interaction and “brain work.”

While many women were actively harmed by such treatments, there were far worse things done to women under the guise of medicine in that era, even by physicians ostensibly devoted to women’s health. The doctor credited with inventing the speculum, for example, once wrote, “If there was anything I hated, it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.” This physician was a showman in the vein of P.T. Barnum, performing operations in front of an enthralled audience, sometimes with the patients (often enslaved women) awake and screaming.

All this was occurring in a century in which smart and capable women were being denied entry to medical school because of the belief that they were not intellectually or psychologically equipped for the work, even though female midwives had been delivering babies for millennia.

The first woman to graduate from an American medical school, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, was admitted by mistake — her male classmates thought they were voting on her enrollment as a joke. Blackwell and her younger sister Emily, who also became a physician, are fairly well known today for their pioneering work improving the prospects of both patients and female doctors.

But Lydia Reeder argues that a lesser-known physician, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, also deserves history’s acclaim. In The Cure for Women, Reeder explains how Jacobi, a contemporary of the Blackwells, took on the established beliefs about women’s monthly cycles, which had been used as “evidence” of women’s inferiority, and refuted them with data.

The daughter of the New York publishing scion George Palmer Putnam, Mary showed her capacity for medicine at age 9 when, after discovering a dead rat in their barn, she asked her mother if she could dissect it. Her mother said no, and her father did not think medicine was a proper career for women, but he had published a book by Elizabeth Blackwell and so consented to let his precocious daughter work at Blackwell’s clinic.

Eventually Mary enrolled at one of the few educational opportunities available to her, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, but she left “after she discovered she knew more about medicine than most of her instructors” and went on to graduate from a medical school in Paris. In one funny anecdote, her father sent her money there for a dress — she had to plead with him for permission to use the money to buy a microscope instead.

Upon returning to the States with a medical degree, Mary found work teaching at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary and dedicated herself to evangelizing “a scientific spirit” among women. Unfortunately for modern sensibilities, that scientific spirit also included justification of vivisection, the dissection of live animals, which Jacobi would defend. It is, perhaps, the one area in which her thinking was not visionary, although it might have helped establish her as a serious medical mind at the time.

She went on to marry a widower, Dr. Abraham Jacobi, a leading pediatrician in New York, and shortly thereafter became pregnant and worked throughout her pregnancy — refuting in real time the prevailing thought that women were suited for domestic life and reproduction solely. She began conducting research to test and challenge views about women’s capabilities during menstruation, and also to counter prescriptions of “the rest cure” as well as other medical practices of the time. She was also an advocate of sports and physical activity — as opposed to rest — to improve women’s health.

Perhaps the best story about her is that she submitted a paper arguing that menstruation does not constitute “any temporary predisposition to either hysteria or insanity” to a prestigious Harvard University competition: the Boylston Medical Prize. Per the competition’s instructions, the entry was submitted anonymously. She won, beating out hundreds of men. The work was later published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons as “The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation” and was widely praised.

Even as Mary advanced professionally, she was lauded publicly for being an excellent housekeeper, and she had three children, and suffered the loss of two — a daughter who died at birth and a son who died at age 7 from diphtheria — a terrible loss for any parent, but especially for two doctors who could not help their child and who wound up blaming each other. The death, Reeder wrote, created a “fault line between Mary and Abraham that would, ultimately, never heal.”

Almost 20 years later, Mary Putnam Jacobi would diagnose a brain tumor in herself, and spent the last years of her life writing a case study on it titled “Description of the Early Symptoms of the Meningeal Tumor Compressing the Cerebellum, from Which the Author Died.”

Her life was clearly extraordinary and worthy of a biography, and Reeder’s treatment is more than comprehensive — to a fault, at times.

Going back and forth between history and inventive narrative, in which Reeder imagines what might have happened in a scene, was the wrong approach for a book about women devoted to science. Their imagined thoughts and actions — such as, “Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., paced back and forth in her drab Lower West Side apartment, stopping occasionally to glance through her parlor window at the blizzard swirling outside” — are simply unnecessary. The occasional asides into this literary construction serve no purpose other than befuddling the reader.

It is also a little odd that the central character of the book is not introduced in any substantial way until chapter 3.

The author is the great-granddaughter of a midwife who cared for women and children in rural Missouri early in the 20th century, at one point plunging her fingers down a child’s throat to remove a safety pin. That midwife, Ellen Babb, no doubt had as many fascinating stories to tell as Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, despite the vast differences in their economic circumstances and training. The Cure for Women is a tribute to both of them — and a thumb in the eye to the 19th-century male doctor who wrote, “I said I did not believe it was best either for the sick or for society for women to be doctors.”

B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison

Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison (St. Martin’s Press, 294 pages)

In 2013 Patrick Hutchison was despondent in Seattle, his dreams of becoming a writer going no further than composing marketing emails and doing other copywriting gigs. His twenty-something friends “were going off and doing ridiculous things like getting careers and advanced degrees, husbands, wives, kids, dogs, and other accoutrements of the heavy-responsibility genre.”

In contrast, Hutchison’s long-term plans “ended at knowing when the leftover Chinese food would go bad.”

One day the answer to his dilemma showed up on Craigslist: a listing for a decrepit 10×12 cabin in scenic Snohomish County, about an hour and a half drive away. The price: $7,500.

Despite not having $7,500 — or, for that matter, any handyman skills — Hutchison drove up to see the place and made an offer almost immediately. His memoir, Cabin, recounts the experience of making it habitable and in the process reinventing his life. It’s no Walden, the Henry David Thoreau classic, but it doesn’t aspire to be. It’s more a story of millennial angst in the internet age and the longing for competency, connection and meaningful work.

And, of course, nature. It wasn’t so much the cabin itself that seduced Hutchison as it was the land it was on, and the views.

“I knew people that had larger places to store their lawnmowers. Architecturally, it took inspiration from drawings of houses made by preschoolers. Box on bottom. Triangle on top,” Hutchison writes.

But it was nestled in an area that was thickly conifered, with mature trees and plentiful ferns, near the Skykomish River and an enormous waterfall that Hutchison says looked like something out of the Old Testament.

Not that the neighborhood was ideal. The street was ominously called “Wit’s End Place.” Other tiny cabins nearby were “charming in a dystopian sort of way,” and many were clearly abandoned. The driveway was basically a swamp. There was no electricity, cell service or plumbing. The closest wi-fi was at a McDonald’s 15 miles away. And there were spiders — so many spiders.

Nonetheless, Hutchison only saw its potential, both as a retreat and as an answer to incessant questions about what he was doing with his life. Fixing up a cabin in the woods seemed a pretty good answer to that. “At times, it felt like the cabin and I were partners in a sort of joint self-improvement project. When the cabin was all fixed up, maybe I would be too,” he writes.

Hutchison had friends who bought into his vision and were willing to make the trek and invest their own elbow grease to build a deck and an outhouse, among other projects. As such, this is no story of a self-made man improving his lot (literally and figuratively) in the woods.

While it’s true that Hutchison emerges as a different man at the end of the story, his cabin is not the do-it-yourself project that Thoreau’s was. Even the truck Hutchison used to haul stuff to the site was borrowed from his mother. It took a village and then some. But, to be fair, even Thoreau left Walden Pond every couple of days to eat a meal at his parents’ house and drop off his laundry, and the lot belonged to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Hutchison is genuinely funny and brings a light touch to his story of back-breaking work, particularly when it comes to his newfound infatuation with power tools. (In one scene he tells a cashier at a hardware store that he’ll also be buying a chainsaw and says he is “half expecting balloons to fall from the ceiling in celebration of such a rad purchase.”) At the same time, he is learning of the pleasures of old ways and old things, at one point bringing to the cabin a typewriter that had belonged to his late uncle, and realizing he had no idea how a typewriter worked.

There are, of course, challenges and dangers along the way, to include mudslides and falling trees. And Hutchinson, daydreaming of the cabin while he’s at his day job, doesn’t devote his whole life to the project — he is in and out of the woods while pursuing other adventures, including travel with a girlfriend who shares his distaste for the sort of life where you moor yourself to a job and a place.

He worries as the project progresses that the tiny cabin might be getting too comfortable, even in its simplicity. And 16 pages of color photos, which show the work and the results, do in fact make the place look like what has been called “cabin porn” — daydreams of a simpler existence off the grid with a wood stove glowing and light snow falling outside well-insulated windows.

These days you can buy a brand-new tiny house on Amazon for under $10K without all the work that Hutchison undertook. But his journey wasn’t about finding a place to live so much as it was about finding a reason to live, and in this his quest was like that of Thoreau, who famously wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life….”

Like Thoreau’s cabin, Hutchinson’s cabin will not be a permanent part of his life but serves as a stationary vehicle that transports him to a different way of being. Don’t look to Cabin for advice on how to restore a dilapidated tiny house or downsize your life, but as inspiration for going down the road less traveled, a well-oiled chainsaw in hand. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison

The Magnificent Ruins by Nayantara Roy (Algonquin Books, 448 pages)

When I start reading a book that I know I’m going to review I immediately start looking for words, sentences, passages to use as examples of good or bad or mediocre writing. In the first 20 pages of The Magnificent Ruins I wanted to mark up dozens of sentences, meaningful words put together thoughtfully, examples of sharp, witty dialogue.

Nayantara Roy’s debut novel follows Lila De, an Indian American who lives in New York City and is dedicated to her job as an editor at a publishing house. She came to America to live with her dad and stepmom when she was 16, leaving behind her mom and the rest of her extended Lahiri family, and had no plans to return to India.

But that changes when Lila’s grandfather dies and she inherits her family’s crumbling, palace-esque home in Kolkata, India. Upon her return, she’s thrust back into the world of her complicated family, including her mom, who angers quickly and will stop talking to Lila for the smallest of perceived slights, sometimes for months at a time, until her wounds are forgotten and she calls her daughter as if no time has passed.

“The first conversation would be stilted on my end, exuberant on hers. I would revel in a universe where my mother wanted me. Over time, she would begin calling regularly again. Those weeks would inevitably lull me, slightly tipsy from the largesse of her motherhood, into a maternal buzz. And then I would say something that would hurt her feelings, which always meant the punishment of disappearance.”

Her mom, along with her grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins, all still live in the house Lila has inherited, and none are happy that it’s been left for her — yet they’re genuinely happy to see her. In fact, all of the relationships in the family are messy and complicated, but their love for each other runs deep.

Throughout the book we see the juxtaposition of Lila’s experiences as an American and as an Indian. Before leaving for Kolkata, she visits her dad and stepmom and two half-siblings in Connecticut.

“My siblings were regularly hugged by my father, but he and I had the language of nods and unspoken affections that passed between Indian children born in the ’80s and their fathers. I dreamed of crossing over into the land of effortless holding and kissing that my siblings were citizens of.”

In a more American way, Lila goes to therapy every two weeks, something her family in Kolkata would never understand.

“Therapy felt like a shape-shifting myth across cultures. So acceptable in the Brooklyns and Manhattans of the world that it would be an aberration to not have a therapist, to not have problems. Everyone in New York was ravaged by their love affairs and debt and childhoods, by race and geography and loneliness. In Kolkata, people had fewer problems, because one did not talk about them.”

Those “New York” problems, as it turns out, are alive and rampant in Kolkata. As we meet the Lahiri family, we see these problems unravel slowly: domestic abuse, alcoholism, love affairs and all manner of generational trauma. And Lila isn’t exempt. Along with being a victim of these traumas, she’s at times a perpetrator, engaging, for example, in an affair with a married man — her childhood love, Adil — with seemingly little remorse.

It’s hard to be mad at her, though, given her complicated history with love. She seems to know what she “should” want — namely her American lover, Seth, who is also her star author and whom she openly refuses to commit to. That gets a little messy, though, when Seth comes to Kolkata in an attempt to win her over. (I appreciated that this plot twist supports Lila’s character development and doesn’t feel contrived like similar plot twists in romantic storylines often do.)

There are plenty of other storylines that support Lila’s main character development too, and I had some real feelings — good and bad — for many of Nayantara’s well-developed characters, like Rinki, a friend from Lila’s childhood who serves as a breath of fresh air outside of the Lahiri family.

Within the family, Lila’s grandmother is both loving and terrifying — not unlike Lila’s mom — and the relationship between her mom and grandmother is tenuous. Among other aunts, uncles and cousins, there’s the charming uncle Hari, his subdued wife Mishti, and their daughter Biddy, whose wedding is another plot point and gives the family something to talk about other than what Lila is going to do with the mansion.

Ah, and back to that pesky inheritance. Despite their love for Lila, the family fears betrayal, and Lila is forced to lawyer up to protect what is rightfully hers — even as she herself questions her grandfather’s decision to leave it to her.

The Magnificent Ruins is a beautiful, messy journey as Lila searches for her identity among two very different cultures and within a family defined by each other in the best and worst of ways. A- —Meghan Siegler