This was an interesting enough story, but I found the premise (white teacher gets assigned to teach "disadvantaged" Black kids in the rural south) and the characters (the naive, but dedicated said teacher, the sage old Black woman, the young rich white guy struggling with his family's history of slave holding, and the variety of students) to be tropes without much depth.  The writing itself was fairly good and it kept my attention, but I did find myself continuing to wonder when the complexity and depth was going to show up in what could have been a nuanced piece because the premise and basic plot of the story had so much potential.  
​Not recommended.

For those of you who loved Stiff, here is a personal memoir that is as morbid and graphic as that was.  A memoir by a mortuary worker who is opposed to the commercialization of death, it is an interesting take on everything from donating your body for science to embalming to what to wear to the crematorium. Her backstory of having seen a child fall to her death when she was a child herself sets a backdrop for her complicated relationship with the fragility of life that was at times really rich and meaningful.  For me, it was just too detailed with respect to the processing (and smell and texture) of bodies.  Not recommended.

A friend mentioned she was going to read this and I was under the impression that it was a new Stacey Abrams memoir, so I decided to host a pop-up book group to talk about it.  I was so confused and surprised when I started reading and discovered that it was indeed a novel.  I actually had to go back after the first chapter and start over when I realized I needed a completely different frame of mind to read this book.  On the second go, knowing better what I was getting myself into, I was really drawn in quickly and really couldn't step away from the story.  A cross between DaVinci Code and a John Grisham novel, I loved the mystery and suspense.  I particularly loved the smart cast of characters and how it wasn't clear who had ulterior motives.  A major bonus was that the legal issues were actually realistic.  Unlike Grisham and so, so many other legal thriller writers, Abrams seems not just to have a law school grasp of basic concepts, but an understanding of how her never-tested-before legal conundrum (beginning with a Supreme Court Justice in a coma) might play out in the legal system, not to mention all the goings in families and law firms when dealing with incapacity or end of life decisions.  I learned from book group that the science in the book also was rooted in knowledge, which was pretty impressive given its complexity as well.  No, the plot isn't perfect, but for this type of novel, that is a bar too high.  I found the plot complicated enough to keep my interest--there are a lot of characters to keep track of, for example--but light enough to whiz through it without it being taxing.  A definite "recommend."

I had a hard time getting into this one. The backstory was painful and slow moving and it set up a set story that just didn't seem to follow at first, making it seem like the book wasn't really going anywhere new or interesting.  But, as the book unfolded, it was obvious that the details of trauma of the Holocaust experience for the characters was going to be integral to the complexity of those characters.  The characters in this story are complex and and flawed, but in a way that even when they are at their worst, I still rooted for them and wanted them to succeed. There is a lot here about how trauma and grief, both individual and collective, plays out for relationships.  All of this is done against the backdrop of the comic book industry, semi-professional magicians,  antisemitism, and the McCarthy hearings, which added a layer of historical fiction that really added to the story.

​Recommend.