Several people recommended this to me and my sense coming into it was that it was going to be a feel-good book I should love.  And there were some parts of it I did love.  The coming together of three adult daughters on the family farm where they grew up during the COVID lock-down was great. I loved the mother-daughter relationships and I found the mother's delight in having everyone home, even in the midst of the stress of the world falling apart, to be a lovely backdrop to her recounting of the story-within-the-story in which she talks about her young adult acting career and brief dalliance with someone who would go on to be a famous movie star.  

The book and I got off to a rough start, though, since it starts with the mother's sexual relationship with a local high school math teacher while she was still in high school.  He was also in a sexual relationship with her best friend and likely many others as well.  This is never really situated in the story as rape, although it is presented as problematic.  With that start to the story, I was put off and had a hard time coming back from that.  The rest of the books is surprisingly free of intimate violence, so it was an odd throw away at the beginning of the book that wasn't particularly related to the rest of the story, although I suppose it provided a general backdrop of the era in which it was not particularly uncommon for a 20-something high school teacher to be engaged in sexual abuse of teens. I somehow felt like the adult woman recounting the story could have done more to situate that part of the narrative in a modern understanding that it would now be considered rape.  For me, this really highjacked the beginning of the book and it took a long while for me to regroup and follow the story, which rather quickly moved on from there, but left me wondering when and expecting that this history would become relevant at some point later.

Ultimately, this is a type of "how I met your mother" story that is extremely well written and executed.  There were descriptions of interactions between the parents and children that directly mirrored some of my own interactions with my grown children, particularly around conversations about bringing children into the world, knowing how ecologically dismal the future seems.

I can see why this book is highly regarded and loved and, setting aside the child sex abuse content at the beginning that I was unprepared for, I think I can recommend it.

Recommend.

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Some lives are filled with tragedy. No matter how hard they work or try, they just cannot catch a break. This is an intergenerational story like that.  The themes of mothering, and the different ways someone can show up to be a mother​, are powerful and was heartwarming and resonated with me.  I love the unfolding of family secrets, hidden within the context of one mother whose acquired traumatic brain injury and related memory loss are at the center of the story.  Trauma at all levels runs through this book and how to hold that while moving through life, from car accidents to hurricanes, from unwanted babies to rape to unexpected deaths--some people's lives are like that.  Despite all that heaviness, this story is filled with the strength, resilience, and love that flows from mothering.  It is bittersweet and lovely and also heavy and heartbreaking.  

Recommend.

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There really is something I just love about a WWII resistance novel.  I have a number of favorite books in this genre, like The Nightingale and Beneath The Scarlet Sky. The story was an interesting series of unpredictable plot twists, but certainly explored concepts of family secrets, guilt, love, and betrayal in above average ways.  Some of the content felt unnecessarily graphic, but it is a novel about war and rape, so I can't say it was entirely out of place.  It didn't feel gratuitous exactly.  It is stripped of any real romance, really, the couples who are in love do not have happy lives and the themes of love are more focused on friendships and are tied in with guilt and loss.  It is not a light read, but the writing is solid and the story kept my attention and was in no way trite.  Overall, I liked it and would recommend it.

Recommend.
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Let's just start right out of the gate with this: I hated this book.  A lot.  Her trite, condescending advice about how to live life in a busy world by opting out of the kinds of things that I find make my life fulfilling really got under my skin.  Some examples that did not resonate with me:

***
She wakes up at 4:30 am three to four days a week to pray.

Every morning, she starts her day by drinking a full glass of water, which she sets out the night before for herself.

She wakes up her children every morning at 6:10 am and then goes back to bed for 10 minutes, which she calls her "million dollar minutes" to "visit and laugh with" her husband.  

She has created a "laundry automation that she has taught her children so that every Tuesday is laundry day.

Several times a year, she goes through the medicine cabinet and disposes of all expired medication.

She keeps her work and home life completely separate, not even checking her work email while she is not working.

Every Sunday, they have weekly family planning sessions with the children in which they all participate in decided what not to do that week.

When her husband's car broke down and his expensive, life-long dream car was magically available for sale right then, she was excited to say yes to him, even though it was out of their budget.

***
She tells us over and over how she takes care of herself physically. spiritually, and emotionally because of this morning routine and, wait for it, the system of journaling and calendaring that you can buy from her.  Her system includes saying no to public service and involvement, to connecting with community, and to basically doing anything that would interfere with her systems and the way she runs her family.  It wasn't just that she clearly benefits from other parents doing the volunteer work for the organizations it appears her children benefit from that bugged me, it was that she seemed to be smirking about how she had found a way not to get sucked into doing anything and the rest of us that do those things are somehow the ones who are missing out on the joy of not doing those things.  Now, I am the first to admit that I am overextended and lack the best boundaries, but this book reeked of the kind of sub-urban, wealthy privilege I just cannot stand. No, thank you.

​Not recommended.
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The foreshadowing in this book was a bit much.  The sense of dread and foreboding was painful. I didn't want to get attached to any of the characters because I just knew from the very beginning that no good was going to come to any of them.  I don't think it is a spoiler to say, this is indeed what happened.  I often love the storytelling technique where there are multiple, separate narratives that seem unrelated, but as the story progresses they begin to converge.  In this case, it took a very long time and in some cases it was hard to keep track of the many lives as they seemingly marched along parallel to the others until the very end.  

It is hard not to appreciate the complexity of the story or the quality of the writing and I can understand why this made this year's Greatest American Novels List by The Atlantic, but I didn't love it the whole way through.  Truly the agony of feeling that everyone was doomed made it very difficult for me to love the book.  I am not even sure what it was about the writing that gave me this sense, but for me it was a distraction to feel like while I did not know what was going to happen, I knew it would not be good.  Don't get me wrong, I generally hate a "happy ending," but this was taking the opposite too far.

All of this said, I cannot say I wouldn't recommend it.  Judah will possibly be thrilled with the Not Not Recommended it is thus receiving.

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This was not at all what I was expecting.  A deep dive into the CIA starting with WWII and continuing through the assassination of Bobby Kennedy was not on the list of things I would have picked up to read, like not ever.  But, this was fascinating.  It takes conspiracy theory and just doubles down on it, presenting tons of details that appear so well documented that it is hard not to start thinking that the deep state has indeed run the world for a very long time.

The book starts in the build up of Nazi Germany, when Allen Dulles and, to a lesser extent, his bother John Foster Dulles (for whom the DC airport is named) develop close connections to Hitler and his upper administration.  The graphic depictions of the Holocaust is a precursor to other atrocities throughout the book, but while it was not bedtime reading, the details of the horrors felt important to an understanding of exactly what these men knew about what was happening, when they knew it, and the opportunities they had to alter the course of the genocide.  As not only Nazi sympathizers, but as active friends and colleagues with the Nazi leadership, the CIA's founding fathers did not get off to a good start.  That this agency and the men behind it became so powerful as to run a shadow government, even after they let the agency is shocking.

I had no idea where the book was headed as I read it, so each new era was fascinating.  Some of the history I knew well, but other pieces were not things I had studied or were familiar with.  More than that, though, the book veers seemingly off course onto remarkably interesting tangents, such as the role race played in Castro's Cuba. So many side stories weaved together to provide the backdrop for the chapters on JFK's assassination. From McCarthyism and The Bay of Pig to Freud and Jung to race relations and the Cold War, this book packs a ton of topics into every chapter.

I wasn't sucked into the book in the way that I sometimes am where I cannot stop reading because the book often reads more like a dense text book than a best-seller, but I did get sucked into the book in the way that sometimes happens where I in the book's world even when I am not reading.  I definitely spent the last few weeks wondering which parts of what is happening now politically are the results of a new guard that is the legacy of the men portrayed in this book.   

On a side note, the number of gay men in the CIA and adjacent is fairly shocking given how many of them were also being blackmailed, pressured, or threatened because of their sexual orientation, not to mention the number of gay men do this to other gay men.  These storylines are almost glossed over, but are painful to think about.  I was also troubled by the author's references to pedophiles and the sexual abuse of boys in the same category.

On a second side note, if you google the book, the first hit is to the CIA website, but when you jump there, it says: "Page not found. CIA.gov has changed . . ."  I am so curious what used to be posted there.

​Recommend.  

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