Category: Books

Penitence, by Kristin Koval (Celadon, 320 pages)

If former lawyer Kristin Koval’s debut novel, Penitence, were a court case, it would be called Potential vs. Execution. The main storyline has great potential, the writing itself is solid, and I wanted to keep reading to see the resolutions to the plot and various subplots. But getting there was often a slow, meandering journey that weaved back and forth between timelines and third-person points of view — and the resolutions that I kept hoping to find as I made my way to the end of the book never came to fruition.
There are two families at the heart of this novel, the Sheehans and the Dumonts, whose lives have intertwined in various ways for decades. The matriarchs of each family used to be best friends, and their kids were high school sweethearts, until an accident mired in questionable decisions broke them all apart. Another tragedy, decades later, brings them back together.
The story begins in rural Colorado with the murder of a 14-year-old boy, Nico, dead at the hands of his 13-year-old sister, Nora. Their parents, Angie and David Sheehan, request legal help from local lawyer Martine Dumont, the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian — who works as a criminal defense attorney in New York City and agrees to help with the case as well. So he flies back to his hometown, where Angie has remained all this time. Lots of memories dedicated to each of their points of view of what happened “back then” ensue.
Does it feel like I glossed over the fratricide? That’s what reading Penitence felt like — this major crime was overshadowed by chapters devoted to Julian and Angie’s past and the years-ago incident that changed their lives forever. Those chapters, to me, felt repetitive and boring; I kept finding myself trying to rush through them to get back to that small matter of fratricide.
In that storyline, Nora is pretty much mute, which seems like a convenient way for Koval to avoid answering The Big Question: Why did Nora kill her brother? Instead, we get a little bit of speculation about that and a lot of extraneous characters and side stories.
Angie’s mom, Livia, for example — she’s not a likeable character in the “back then” storyline, and in the “now” storyline she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s and barely knows who anyone is. I understand that this mother-daughter relationship is a piece of the family-drama puzzle that Koval has put together, but like many of the subplots, it was given too much space.
Koval wants us to “consider whether the worst thing we’ve ever done is all that defines us,” according to the jacket blurb and the numerous references to that idea that are littered throughout the book. And I appreciate that she wove together several storylines that allow for contemplation of that question.
But oh my god, give me some closure. I wasn’t looking for a happily ever after here, but I did want an ending that made the read feel worthwhile; instead, I felt frustrated. This would actually be a great book club choice, as I imagine opinions and debates would be intense.
There is one twist in Penitence that I didn’t see coming, and that was the highlight for me. But a “suspenseful, addictive page-turner,” as it bills itself to be? I think that’s a bit misleading — perhaps I would have enjoyed the book more if I had been expecting the slow burn that it is. Or perhaps it would have been more of a suspenseful page-turner if more attention were given to Nora’s crime: her motive (I wanted so badly to get inside her head!), how her case played out in the court system and how it affected her parents.
Koval writes in the Acknowledgements that she thought fratricide might “provide the right framework for a novel about forgiveness,” and she’s right. David and Angie react very differently toward Nora after the murder — she is their daughter, but she killed their son. David turns toward her, while Angie turns away. It’s fascinating, thinking about how people might feel in that tragic situation.
I wish Koval had stuck more closely to this framework, that the book had been more singularly focused on that crime and the aftermath. Penitence had the potential to be great, but ultimately there’s just too much going on. C+ —Meghan Siegler

Featured Image: Penitence, by Kristin Koval

Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler (Knopf, 166 pages)

Anne Tyler is one of America’s most beloved writers, especially in Baltimore, where many of her novels are set. Six of her books, including The Accidental Tourist, were adapted for film, and she won a Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons in 1989. As such, it’s a bit surprising that her latest, Three Days in June, landed in February like an out-of-season beach read.

Not that it’s not a good beach read. But coming from the keyboard of Tyler, one expects a bit more.

Set (of course) in Baltimore, Three Days in June is about a divorced mom getting ready for the wedding of her 33-year-old daughter. Gail Baines is an assistant headmistress at a private school who has just been informed that her boss is retiring and that she, at 61, is not in line to succeed her because she lacks “people skills.”

As her boss tells her, “All I’m saying is, to head a private girls’ school you need tact. You need diplomacy. You need to avoid saying things like ‘Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realize your daughter doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton.”

When the boss suggests that Gail might want to leave the field and follow her dreams, Gail wonders what that would be: “I am not the kind of woman who dreams of doing things.” Nor is she the kind of woman who gets her hair done, or who moves on from an answering machine. When she goes to a hair salon the day before the wedding, she will only allow the hairdresser to “pouf it out” a little bit — “just something to show I tried.”

Gail had been married to Max, an affable underachiever eking out a living teaching at-risk teenagers, and living in a “one-room apartment above somebody’s garage.” He is “fond of recounting his dreams and they were always interminable.” It’s initially unclear why they are no longer married — they are friendly enough when Max shows up at Gail’s house unexpectedly, carrying a elderly foster cat and needing a place to stay, as their future son-in-law turns out to be deathly allergic to cats.

There’s soon one more complication when their daughter, Debbie, shows up, fresh off a pre-wedding “Day of Beauty” where she had inadvertently learned something terrible about the fiance that puts the wedding in question.

This is the point at which, were this plot in the hands of a less accomplished writer, we could sigh and say, “hijinks ensue” and be done with it. Tyler is too smooth a storyteller to let us go, however, and we are too pleasantly invested in Gail (and the foster cat) to leave them alone with a wedding on the brink.

For much of the book, Tyler gives us an entertaining and humorous look at the rituals surrounding an American wedding. When meeting, for example, the groom’s mother, we learn that everything she says is “three degrees too vivacious” — “It seemed that she lived on some other level than ours, someplace louder and more brightly lit.” And Gail and Max reflect upon the ridiculousness of the rehearsal ritual itself (the same thing happening the next day, with “fewer et ceteras” and fancier clothes). It’s a pleasure to read her witty observations on these slices of life.

As Tyler finally gets around to revealing why and how Gail and Max broke up — a story not unconnected to the present tension — she is a master storyteller at work. There is no one better at crafting dialogue that breathes life into characters and puts them in the room with the reader. There are no wasted words here, either coming from the characters or in the narrative. It may be a beach read in plot, but it’s a finely tuned one, with enough heart to justify its release in February. The conclusion, while not a shocker, doesn’t feel contrived.

It’s worth noting that Tyler is 83, and she could be sitting by the shore, enjoying her fame and the royalty checks from her 25 books. Three years ago, she told People magazine that “For several years I thought, ‘The world does not need another of my books.’ What if people are saying, the woman doesn’t know when to quit?’” She continues to write, she said, in part because “I’m not wildly social and I have no hobbies.” Her fans, and they are legion, hope that she doesn’t pick one up. B+

Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly (Atria, 241 pages)

Spotify is in the news this month, having recently reported that 2024 was its first profitable year, with 675 million monthly active users and climbing. That made investors happy, but what are the costs? That’s the subject of music journalist Liz Pelly’s timely examination into the rise of the music streaming company, founded nearly 20 years ago in Sweden.

Spotify, of course, is the Godzilla of streaming services, eating the lunch of most of its competitors, although Apple and Amazon also have strong shares of the market. The business model sprang vaguely formed from the forehead of Napster, the digital music-sharing platform — notably illegal — that freed consumers from actually paying for music.

While today’s streaming services, of course, are not free, they remain a mind-boggling value. As Hua Hsu wrote for The New Yorker, “Adjusted for inflation, a monthly subscription to an audio streaming service, allowing convenient access to a sizable chunk of the history of recorded music, costs much less than a single album once did.”

Musical artists and their associated companies, however, have contended that the change has come at their expense, and it’s been a slog to get to the point where most everyone is satisfied. Count Pelly among those who are still pushing back against the changes that streaming has wrought.

Spotify’s goals, apart from making money, are ostensibly to make what Pelly calls “self-driving music” — the ability for a subscriber to “simply open the app, press ‘play,’ and instantaneously get the perfect soundtrack for any given moment or context, without having to search, click, or think.”

But in achieving this on-demand nirvana, Pelly argues that Spotify and other streaming services have helped give rise to a “dynamic of passivity” among consumers, who are spoon-fed what algorithms have determined they will like. Spotify playlists “worked as a flattening, making a scene that was previously sprawling and complicated into something commodified and palatable, cutting out many original voices along the way.”

At the same time, music has become background noise in modern life, and “it follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little financial remuneration,” Pelly writes.

These are all interesting cultural changes worthy of reflection, but Pelly comes to this book as a nuts-and-bolts journalist, not as a philosopher. She tracks the minutiae of Spotify’s ascent, which she was covering in real time, and reports with detail on the inner workings of the company, aided by both named and anonymous employees, some of whom have since left.

That sourcing adds, of course, to pervasive cynicism about Spotify throughout the book. Pelly and her sources are not dispassionate observers, but people with a take, and that take is that streaming, while great for consumers, is not great for artists, who are paid fractions of a cent per stream. And how big the fraction is is virtually impossible to figure out, given the many variants possible, which include the type of streaming plan (free, standard or family?) and even what country the consumer lives in.

“This is all to say: the digit on an artist’s royalty statement is much more complicated than a per-stream rate. And artists are almost always systematically shut out of any sort of transparency around the calculations creating their livelihoods,” Pelly writes, explaining how the digital age has led to a music labor movement.

To be fair, she notes, with every change in technology, the industry has had to adapt. In the 1920s the rise of the phonograph was seen with the same sort of concern that musicians have had about digital music. Musicians went on strike in the 1940s over LP records; they feared unemployment, believing that people were less likely to go see a live performance if they could hear the music in their living rooms. Of course, that’s proved not to be the case; witness Taylor Swift’s proceeds from her Eras tour.

Still, Pelly sees the problem of artist compensation as something all of us should worry about, even arguing that music, like libraries, should be seen as a “public good,” with public funding and protections. Some people in Europe are even arguing for what amounts to a universal basic income for musicians. In fact, that’s even been tried in Ireland, which experimented with a “Basic Income for the Arts” that gave 325 euro each week to 2,000 artists for three years. France has also experimented with a system that gave artists their own unemployment system, in order to make up for the irregularity of their work.

In her conclusion, Pelly asks, “What’s the ethical alternative to Spotify?,” which is not a question the average American consumer will want to entertain, and Pelly admits there are no easy answers. For those who are not inclined to worry about artist pay — or to consider that “our shared music cultures would be so much more compelling and diverse if so many [musicians] did not need to abandon the arts for jobs with health insurance” — Mood Machine may seem like so much hand-wringing, interspersed with sometimes mind-numbing detail on things like hyperpop and Discovery Mode.

Ultimately, while well-reported, Mood Machine is more a book for insiders than the general public. But insiders and struggling musicians will love it.

B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly

The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison (Dutton, 368 pages)

A 70-year marriage is unfathomable to most. After all, approximately half of all marriages end in divorce (not a myth, according to a recent Forbes article), and, logistically, you’d have to marry young and you’d both have to live beyond the average life expectancy to hit that 70-year mark. But if a marriage were to endure for 70 years — how?

The Heart of Winter by Jonathan Evison sheds some light on this as it follows Abe and Ruth Winter’s journey from college-age courting (very reluctantly on Ruth’s part) to 90th birthdays and end-of-life planning.

The book gets off to a slow start as Abe unenthusiastically allows his family to celebrate his 90th birthday. Evison does the reader no favors by naming dozens of characters up front: the Winters’ living children — Anne, Kyle and Maddie — plus their significant others and their kids and their kids and their pets, plus family friends.

It seems trivial to point this out now that I’ve finished the book and mostly enjoyed it, but the fact is that it almost made me put it down and not pick it up again — too many people to try to remember, plus dialogue that makes their grown children sound like teenagers, which adds to the confusion around who’s who. Meanwhile, Abe is lamenting that he’s still alive, making for a depressing start.

But get past the beginning and you’ll find the answers to that “how” question, laid out by Evison in shifting perspectives between Ruth and Abe, and shifting timelines between present day and various impactful years in their marriage.

The answers, it seems, are resilience, patience, perseverance and tolerance, a recipe of big words mixed with steadfast love.

From the moment they meet in college, it’s clear that Abe and Ruth are very different people, and Ruth does her best to avoid him at all costs. But Abe is enamored by her spirit and free will and eventually wears her down. They date, and before she can graduate Ruth gets pregnant. They get married, and Ruth is suddenly a stay-at-home mom with little use for her books of poetry and lofty ideals.

Ruth is not unhappy, but she isn’t exactly happy either. And so Abe, without Ruth’s knowledge, accepts a job and buys a farmhouse on Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride away from the hustle and bustle of Seattle and not exactly the kind of life Ruth thought she’d be living when she was deep into her studies of the liberal arts. But Abe is convinced she will love life on the farm, where she can garden and raise chickens and take care of the kids. She’s mad, really mad, at his presumptuousness but ultimately acquiesces, and another chapter of their life together begins.

Ruth does like living on the farm, as it turns out, at least for a while. But as Abe focuses on his growing business and ensuring his family is financially set, Ruth has moments of restlessness. Keep in mind that we’re exploring 70 years of life together, so of course life doesn’t always go smoothly. They experience a number of situations that could have ended another couple: Abe’s unilateral decision to move the family, the tragic loss of a child, a brief infidelity (Ruth), an even briefer exploration of sexuality (also Ruth), absentee parenting (Abe) and differing political views (Ruth’s views being “pseudocommunist malarkey” and “unreasonable optimism,” as far as Abe is concerned).

And through it all, Evison keeps bringing us back to present day, where they squabble like the old married couple they are.

“‘Minor inconvenience?’” Abe says to Ruth about the CPAP machine she insists he use. “‘You try strapping that contraption on! Every time I open my mouth, I’m like a human leaf blower.’

‘One of these mornings, you’re just not gonna wake up, you know?’

“Good,’ he said. ‘Then I won’t have to hear about it anymore.’”

They can joke at times, but they also have to face some harsh truths about old age. Ruth thinks, at one point while worrying about Abe falling in the driveway, “Everything was a high-risk proposition after eighty. To rage against the dying of the light sometimes meant shoveling the walkway or driving after dark.” (I love how Evison deftly references Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” here, subtly showing that Ruth’s love of poetry never fully dies.)

And, as Ruth undergoes an invasive procedure to save her life, she questions whether it’s worth it to keep fighting. “While she wasn’t without use, the world was hardly dependent on her participation.”

But Abe is not ready to try life without her, and his 90th-birthday thoughts of preparing for death turn into a steadfast need to be Ruth’s caretaker, despite their children’s misgivings. He drives through snow on city roads that terrify him to be with her at the hospital, and, with the deepest sense of love and commitment, brings her back to their farmhouse and tries his best to take care of her.

Like Abe and Ruth, I’m glad I made it past the beginning of their story. The Heart of Winter reminded me that love can last even through the darkest of times if your heart is in it. B+ —Meghan Siegler

Featured Image: The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison

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