Set in 1962 Ireland, this is a marginally interesting period piece that recounts the bleak existence of a small town second-generation doctor and his adult spinster daughter who "keeps house for him."  Living under the rigidity of the Catholic Church and a cloud of grief since the death of the doctor's wife and the daughter's mother, the first three parts of the story drag on with detailed descriptions of mundane events that I suspect "real" lovers of literature find beautiful and enthralling.  I got all the way to part four and realized that only about two or three weeks of time had passed in the storyline. 
 
By Part Four, a few things happen.  We meet another character, whose life is also dismal.  A young teen, his father is an alcoholic and his mother the kind of run down and sad that comes from a lifetime of being dependent on alcoholics. The poverty and pain of the story continues on until the Time of The Child.  At this point, well into the last part of the book, the plot seemed to begin.
 
Now, I am not saying the book isn't well crafted or that it wasn't at times informative of an historical period in a place that is often ignored, but I am saying that it was boring and those things weren't enough to pull me along.
 
Not recommended.

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Set mostly in Edinburgh, this is a layered book with a multi-generational story that unfolds when the mental health facility where Esme has been living for decades is being closed.  Her great-niece, who was oblivious to her existence, is the next-of-kin contacted and the story to understand Esme's -- and by extension the whole family's--life history unfolds.  With themes addressing intergenerational family dysfunction and the control of rebellious women, I found the book engaging and charming.

Recommend.
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​Following The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle, I was not expecting to find myself in love with another sweet read.  A more traditional coming of age story about a teenager leaving home and finding his way in the world during the Great Depression, I found this story about a boy trying to survive anyway he can and to outrun his demons (and his criminal background) entrancing. 

I have been hating on these imagined historical fiction books lately (like The Frozen River, The Postmistress of Paris, The Pull of The Stars, Take My Hand), but this one feels different.  Perhaps because it is based on a little known historical event that I know absolutely nothing about… Perhaps because it was an historical event that wasn't filled with the weight of sexual assault, war, the Holocaust, or forced sterilization… Or perhaps because it was just better written… For whatever reason, I found it was easier for me to suspend disbelief here and to just really appreciate the story of man and a boy driving a pair of giraffes from a port in New Jersey to the San Diego Zoo in 1938. 

I appreciated how their backstories were unfolded over time, without it feeling like the author was holding back critical information and how there was no secret agenda to the tale.  It was just good storytelling, well written, about what turned out to be an interesting adventure.
Recommend.

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This is such an unusual and sweet book.  In many ways, it is a classic coming-of-age story, with self-discovery and coming to accept one's place in the world, but what makes this story so, so lovely is that the protagonist who is discovering himself and goes on a quest of sorts is 65 and facing mandatory retirement from the postal service where he worked since he was a teenager. 

The characters in the book are richly developed, even the peripheral ones. The plot is unusual, with just the right amount of foreshadowing and unexpected turns.  The writing itself has a clip to it that is charming. It sometimes feels like it is meandering, but then sort of wanders back to the point with just the right amount of description and prose.  I ended up just really loving this book.

Recommend.
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In many ways this is a traditional masculine war novel. It is set in Leningrad during World War II, but I am not sure that I got the sense that the narrative was true to that era.  To be fair, I know very little about the Russian front in WWII, but there was something about significant pieces of the plot that seemed unlikely to be true and to a large extent it felt like another example of "historical fiction" that imports model progressive values into historical scenarios that I am not at all sure that people experienced at the time and that just feels like a erasure of actual historical experiences. 

​Here, it is a young woman posing as a boy and a Jewish boy pretending to be a soldier, both "hiding in plain sight," who just happen to come into contact again and again by people who step up to protect him that felt too much like a story about how many saviors there were in a time and place where we know that these types of heroes were few and far between.  The chances that they would come into contact with this many just ignores how unusual that probably would have been. And there were just so many little examples of this, like the way sex workers are treated with so much respect and compassion by the protagonist solider and his friend also felt so unlikely that I couldn't get into the story. There was something not just about the substance of these interactions, but the voice that just did not feel congruent with other writing from and about that era that I spent the entire book thinking about whether the book was researched and historical accurate and not about the actual story itself.  I found it distracting for this reason and just couldn't get into it. 

Not recommended.
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For a highly hyped book with rave reviews, I was shocked by how little I enjoyed this read.  I even went back and re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn thinking maybe I needed a more recent read of that book in order to appreciate it, but even after that, I was at a complete loss as to why this book is so popular.  The premise of the book is fine--the reimaging of the Huckleberry Finn story from the perspective of Jim.  But the execution of the story is confusing.  The plotting is problematic, the character development bland, and the writing style gimmicky. 

Just as a starting place, it is unclear whether this is supposed to be historical fiction or historical fantasy.  Most of the time, it seems like the author is genuinely trying to present an imagined history in which a slave could be exceptionally well educated entirely in secret and able to move between a facade of being uneducated in front of white people, but then seamlessly shifting to talking like an educated white person when no white people were around. While this seems like it might be an empowering retelling of history, I was just baffled because in other places the story was so far fetched, especially at the end, that it was more like historical fantasy.  And there was no way for me to see that ending as empowering, knowing the impact that outcome would have had in actual history for the slaves involved.

While this might just be my inability to suspend disbelief in order to enjoy a book and revel in an alternative narrative that could be seen as having a happy ending (and I will accept that this is perhaps a flaw in my reader skillset in general), this wasn't even what bothered me the most in this story.  What bothered me the very most was the portrayal of women and girls in this story.  Jim is supposed to be entirely driven by his adoration of his wife and daughter, but the Big Reveal at the end of the book  MAKES NO SENSE on the surface and was never explored in any depth.  SPOILER ALERT: In the telling of this story, he is actually Huck's biological father because he had a relationship with his mother, whom he grew up with, and which was always kept secret. Despite allusion to this by one random character earlier in the book, it is ignored until the very end and then never explained.  Was the wife that Jim was so committed to freeing aware he had a clandestine affair with his childhood friend, who was also his owner's wife? If his daughter was 9 and Huck was 13 and Huck remembers the fighting in the household when his mother died, was Jim in a relationship with both mother's at the same time? Obviously possible, but why is this never addressed? 

I have so many questions that are completely ignored because the sole purpose of women characters in this book is to be introduced in the context of their rapes.  Jim's reaction to Sammy's disclosure that she was being raped by her owner only makes sense in a modern context.  It is impossible for me to believe that Jim would have been shocked to hear that slave owners raped their slaves and his huge reaction to this revelation, resulting in reckless behavior that put at risk his ability to free his own wife and daughter, whom he was afraid were being raped, just didn't make sense. Could it have made sense?  Yes, it is possible, but it was never explored.  All the women were introduced in the context of their rapes (or sexual relationship with Jim, such as his wife and Huck's mother) and then written out of the story before anything of interest was said.

Do not recommend.
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This is another of the genre of historical fictions where the author finds an offhanded reference to a minor historical figure and then builds an entire imagined story around very little actual historical information---similar to what was done in Where The World Ends, which I also just read in preparation for my trip to Scotland.  This one is about an English woman who moves to the Scottish Highlands after the woman who raised her was killed for being a witch.  Corrag leaves her home and builds a new life as an herbalist and medic amongst the Jacobite McDonald clan in the late 1600s in the time leading up to the Glenco murder. 

The book got off to a slow start and I found the style of storytelling to be confusing as it jumped between time periods, but it sorted itself out after a while and came together.  It was reasonably engaging and told a more or less plausible story of an usual life.  It had some Outlander vibes but without the fantasy time travel and sex scenes.  This was a quieter, humbler book about a strong sassencha woman healer in the Highlands leading up to the Jaconite uprising.

Bonus points for mood and scene setting that match the tone needed for a winter trip in Scotland.

Recommend.
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Set in the 1700s, this historical fiction is set in the extremely remote St. Kilda on the island of Hirta in an isolated and rugged region of northwest Scotland.  The story takes place when a boat trip full of boy and a few men go hunting for a particularly coveted type of bird as part of an annual tradition.  They get stranded on what seems to be a small rock formation in the sea.  The dozen or so men and boys are hungry, cold, and homesick--left with virtually no resources whatsoever. 

As if the isolation, cold, and hunger weren't enough to endure, the fake preacher does serious harm as he tries to control the boys with fear mongering and shame, which is especially heartbreaking as the younger boys, who are maybe 9 or 10, are tormented by the separation from their homes and starting to lose hope of rescue.  His approach to imposing confession and attributing sin to the children is horrifying, especially when he insists on everyone shunning one of the children for seven days by not talking to him at all.  He also tells the youngest child that when they run out of birds to eat, they will start eating the youngest kids first.  The brutality of the story just keeps coming in waves, without the kind of breaks for meaning or connection that I would have wanted to see.

The story is reminiscent of Lord of The Flies in that it is a group of boys stranded on an island, but this is a significantly better book than that one. This is dark in a different way, as the adults do nothing to mitigate the stress for the children.

There is also a weird side story about one of the children whose mother has been secretly raising her as a boy because she was afraid to tell the child's father that she wasn't a boy when she was born. This fact becomes evidence while they are marooned and the whole way it is handled is just odd.  I have to think it isn't possible to know how that would have been handled in the 1770's, but the way the book portrays it just felt off.

Apparently loosely based on a true story, the ending is especially depressing.  I am pretty surprised it is classified as a children's book, too.

Do not recommend.

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A Holocaust novel, this book reminded me so much of the more well-known novel The Book Thief that I actually had to make sure that I wasn't misremembering that it was the same book--or at least the same author.  While The Book Thief was narrated by Death, The Little Liar was narrated by Truth.  The story is, of course, both incredibly depressing while also being a story of resilience for those who survived and it does a good job of highlighting the different ways the characters survived and what it cost them. I found the respect for the disparate impacts of trauma on different people to be relatively sophisticate and interesting. Some of the plot twists felt farfetched and the over-done theme of the non-Jews who, out of no where, stepped in to help was trite. The use of Truth as the narrator felt a bit gimmicky.  I had some sympathy for this, since it must be difficult to find a fresh way to engage with material this dark that will find an audience and yet I just found the narration scheme to be distracting.  I am likely in the minority in this respect, though, since I had a similar reaction to The Book Thief.  
 
Not recommended. 
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I understand that this nearly 1,000 page book is revered as brilliant and that the author has received the Nobel Prize for Literature for another novel.  I know that many intelligent people think the book is amazing. I, however, feel like it was pretty much lost on me.  I found it a slog, pedantic, male-centric, and frankly boring.  Yes, some of the historical pieces were mildly interesting, but I have decided that I do not find 18th century Poland particularly enthralling.  Sometimes, it felt like the descriptions would never end and that the plot was a very long ways away from the words I was reading.  Other times, some of the narrative would pull me in, particularly the portions that compared the Jewish protagonist's exploration of other communities. But, those parts were short lived and almost as soon as I realized I was engaged, the moment would be gone and I would return to feeling that this book was just too heady for me.


Do not recommend.

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