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The Safekeep: a Novel by Yael van der Wouden
Avid Reader Press/Simon and Schuster, 2024.
An unsettling novel "which explores repressed desire and historical amnesia in the Netherlands post-WWII." The Safekeep, a debut novel for author Yael van der Wouden, won among many awards, The 2025 Women's Prize for fiction.
The two main characters of the book, Isabel and Eva, are both related to the house, but the reader doesn't know this in the beginning. Isabel lives in the house and her brother brings his girlfriend, Eva, to live there while he is away. Isabel, who has vague memories from her childhood of moving into the house, which was fully furnished when they arrived, is very defensive of the house and its possessions. Not long after Eva arrives Isabel notices items have gone missing -- a tea cup, a spoon, a toy -- and she suspects Eva. When she confronts her guest, the tension between the women breaks and they fall into a torrid love affair. I have very mixed feelings about this novel and one is a very prudish reason -- graphic sexual scenes. I told myself long ago I didn't have to read books with explicit sex in them and yet I finished this one, feeling uncomfortable the whole time. (I told you it was a prudish reason.) I agree with the Women's Prize descriptive words about the book -- unsettling and repressed.
As it turns out, Eva was stealing the items from the house for a very good reason -- the items belonged to her and her family before they were arrested for being Jewish and deported to a concentration camp during WWII. Apparently that was a thing in The Netherlands, and probably elsewhere in Europe -- citizens would move into the Jewish homes after they were deported and take over not only the house, but the items left behind. And then, if any family members survived the camps and try to recover their home and possessions after returning from hell, the government demanded they pay back taxes before they were allowed to regain what was theirs in the first place.
It seems impossible that we are still learning new information about the atrocities done to the Jewish people during WWII, but here we are finding yet another injustice done to them, not by the Nazis but by their own fellow Dutch citizens.
My rating: 4 stars.
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The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
Pantheon, 2005.
In a near future, a woman is arrested and detained not for commiting a crime but for having a dream about a crime. Sara is sent to a retention center where she tries to prove her innocence but her initial 21-day stay gets extended due to ever-changing rules and regulations.
Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are. (Publisher)
My husband and I listened to the audio version of this book together and we both kept making comparisons to what is happening today to immigrants being rounded up unjustly by ICE agents and sent to detention facilities with no clear means of escape or help. I found it to be extremely depressing and had a difficult time even wanting to finish the book. Sara does finally make it out of the retention facility only to find her life has been irrevocably altered.
My rating: 4 stars
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The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Orbit, 2015.
The subtitle of this novel states: "Every Age Must Come to An End." The first sentence of the prologue reads: "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we?" And the opening description of the book by the publisher says: "This is the way the world ends. Again." So readers know before they even get to page two that this is an end-of-time story. The story that follows this opening follows a women, Essun, as she tries to find her daughter who was kidnapped by her husband after he murdered her son. Complicated? Yes. And that was the easy stuff to understand. As readers learn Essun's back story they also learn why the world is in such a mess -- and yes, it has to do with powerful people doing terrible things to each other and to the earth itself.
Winner of the 2016 Hugo Award for outstanding Science Fiction writing, this book also made the NYT list of best 100 books of the 21st Century. Both my daughter and I thought it would make a perfect audiobook selection for a family road trip but I am here to tell you, it was not. First the plot is super complicated as it moves backwards and forwards in time. There are also several POV sifts, even a section written in the second-person perspective which was both odd and off-putting. We didn't have a print copy of the book to consult when confused or when we needed the maps and other illustrations to guide us. To make matters worse, the first leg of our trip started in the evening and we got snarled up in an unexpected traffic jam which left us all grumpy and hungry, arriving at our destination over two hours later than expected. It wasn't the books fault, of course, we just weren't in the right headspace for a complicated books.
As I look at the reviews on Goodreads it makes me think I didn't read the same book as everyone who gushed about it with their 5-star reviews. The only other "not great" review was from another audiobook listener. Hmm. Maybe the format was the problem!? The Fifth Season is the first book in the Broken Earth series. I'm tempted to read on out of curiosity more than desire. If you've read the book and loved it, I want to hear from you. Tell me what you think. Thanks.
My rating: 3.75 stars.
At 468 pages in length (over 15 hours of listening time) this book qualifies for the Big Book Summer Reading Challenge.
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