Nonfiction Review: LONDON FALLING

Title: London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe

Chapter 1 snippet, Opening: 

After Zac Brettler died, his parents tried to decode the mystery of what happened to him, endlessly revisiting moments from his short life.

2nd snippet, page 25:

Education mattered a great deal to the Brettlers, as it did to their greater social milieu, in which families were quietly judged by other families over where their children went to school. Zac was old enough, and socially perceptive enough, to grasp this, and it must have stung. Eventually he found a place at another private school in London, called Mill Hill, and it was there that he started to change.

Summary: London Falling is the account of a family trying to make sense of the death of their nineteen-year-old son, Zac, when they discover that he had been living a double life. Prior to his death Zac had been pretending to be a rich Russian oligarch's son living alone in the city when he jumped into the Thames River. Was it a suicide or a murder? His secret life drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld which exists beneath the beautiful gilded city.

My thoughts: The book starts at Zac's death and then moves backwards to figure out what happened. The 2nd snippet needs a little context. Zac wasn't accepted to a very prestigious school where his older brother was attending. Joe, the older brother, was more academic than Zac, and it came as a blow when he was rejected. This is what must have stung. It was at the second school, Mill Hill, where Zac met rich children, some related to Russian oligarchs, and he started pretending he was one of them. 

Patrick Radden Keefe is a master at writing narrative nonfiction. He met the family several years after Zac's death and they gave him full access to all of the police reports and information the family had gathered. And he was able to do some independent research to add to their insights of what probably happened during the last minutes of Zac's life. He also gave the reader insights into all the money which has been flowing into London since Asians were expelled from Uganda in the 1970s and the break up of the USSR in the late 1980s, early 1990s. This information never became overwhelming or boring, however, based on Keefe's storytelling skills.

My husband and I listened to the audiobook this past weekend and both of us were fully into the experience. We both rated it with 5 stars. It is an amazing, eye-opening story. I highly recommend it.

Welcome to our first week as a combined Book Beginnings on Friday and Friday56 with a new name Friday Book Snippets. I am co-hosting this weekly blogging event with Olivia at Bemused & Bookish. You can link up at either of our sites but be sure to still visit and comment on other participant's blogs to increase our community.

Directions: Share two snippets (a sentence or short paragraph) from a) the book's opening and b) page 56 (or another page) from the book you are currently reading. No spoilers, please. 

True confessions: I usually listen to audiobooks so figuring out if a quote is from page 56 (or any page) is very difficult for me. I just try to add some interesting snippet from somewhere in the book and I don't worry about the page number. I encourage you to think outside the page 56 parameter, too. 

LinkUp:

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

-Anne

Review: THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND

Title: This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage

Book Beginning/First Line Friday snippet from the introduction:

If you grow up near Philadelphia, sooner or later you eventually end up at Independence Hall.

Friday56 snippet (from page 17, last page of preview)*:

Taken as a whole, the Philadelphia area yields a remarkably efficient tour of how, in a formal sense, the United States of America came to be. All the big characters are there: Washington, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Lafayette. So are the key moments--Declaration, Revolution, Constitution--that Americans have been debating for two and half centuries. But it wasn't the big-ticket places that really spoke to me...What stayed with me, after I departed for a long drive up I-95, were the instances in which ordinary people looked to the founding legacy and made it their own. 

        *I listened to the audiobook, so this will have to suffice for my Friday56 entry.

Summary: Beverly Gage, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, embarks on a series of thirteen road trips around the U.S.A. to highlight important moments in the country's history. Gage visits museums, roadside attractions, reenactment sites, even souvenir stores. Some of the places she visited are well known sites (Independence Hall) and others are much more obscure (spending the night in a missle silo turned into an AirBnB). She doesn't try to tell a sanitized story of only heroic moments but also uses her road trips to point out places and events that highlight our country's challenges and mistakes. The words of the Declaration of Independence that gave birth to a new nation in 1776 have been consistent touchstones over the years since, but various people and groups have embraced the Declaration and molded its powerful words to fit a particular viewpoint or support causes across the political spectrum. Gage shows that Americans can honestly face their history -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- and still love their country.

Review: Don and I were on our own road trip when we listened to the audiobook of This Land is Your Land, going on a virtual audio road trip around all regions of the US. Our destination was coincidentally also an historic site - Yellowstone, the nation's first National Park.

Beverly Gage is a history professor at Yale University in Connecticut. Last year she and two other professors joined together to teach a course titled "America at 250: a History." No doubt Gage was able to use information she gleaned to write this book to teach the class. Her writing style is very accessible and engaging. She is a good storyteller, often personalizing her experiences on the road. She usually traveled alone but her college-aged son joined her on several trips. He was accustomed to family trips with multiple mandatory stops at historical sites along the way. Gage explained how she was always taking notes about what she was learning. Since it took several years to make her thirteen road trips, she experienced some personal challenges along the way, like a car that was acting up and needing time off for cancer treatments. I especially liked how Gage engaged with her material. This is anything but a sterile, textbook-style account of what she discovered on the road.

Benjamin Franklin supposedly wondered aloud at the Constitutional Convention, whether the sun is rising or setting on our republic. In an interview for the YaleNews, Gage was asked for her conclusion on this same question. I love her answer so much I'm sharing it here:

The first conclusion that I reached is that this is a question Americans have been asking for 250 years. In some ways, that question is the national tradition.

I also discovered that it’s very hard to know in our own historical moment how to judge what’s happening around you. One of the things that history does is give us some measures against which to judge our own time. But you have to really know that history. It can’t just be a matter of assuming that things were so great in the past and now they’re so horrible. I am a real skeptic of the idea that we are living through the worst and most divisive moment in American history. I don’t think that is true. I think there are some very particular things that are happening in the U.S. that are quite concerning, quite alarming, don’t bode so well for the future, but I think it is a form of historical amnesia to think that our problems are so much worse than what the country and its people have confronted over time (YaleNews).

Gage also urged her readers to get off their computers and go out and visit new places around the country. Talk with the people. She feels much more heartened about the state of the nation since her trips. Don wished aloud at the end of book that everyone in America would read this book for the country's 250th birthday. It is true. One can love their country and acknowledge it has problems.

We both rated this book 5 stars.

-Anne

Very short reviews: I'M GLAD MY MOM DIED; AUTOMATIC NOODLE; WILD RESCUES; and more

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Audiobook, 6 hr. 26 min., 2022.

Jennette McCurdy, a Nickelodeon star of iCarly, started auditioning for acting roles when she was six years old. She did it because she wanted to please her mother, a wanna-be actress. She also went along with her mother's schemes to keep her thin by limiting her intake of food and weighing herself up to five times a day. By the time she was cast in iCarly at age 16, Jennette was struggling with an eating disorder, followed not many years later, with an addiction to alcohol. Lonely and self-conscious she also seemed incapable of having healthy friendships and relationships. All of this was caused, at least in part, to her over-intrusive, smothering, abusive mother. When her mother died of breast cancer, Jennette was eventually able to get to therapy and started addressing all of her issues.  Along the way she decided to quit acting.

My daughter listened to the audiobook, she said, in one big gulp, finishing the book in one or two days. She urged me to read it and I admit I was intrigued based on the title alone. As I started listening to the audiobook I realized something, however -- I had never heard of Jennette McCurdy, having never watched a moment of iCarly or its spin-off. I wanted to call CPS on the mother and wanted to slap the father for never standing up to that monster either. I'm definitely not in the demographic for this memoir and won't be recommending it to any of my friends. I'll let the younger generations read it without comments from me.

My rating: 4 stars.

 ______________________________________________________________

Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Audiobook-with-Don, 4 hr. 13 min., 2025.

When San Francisco starts rebuilding from the chaos of war and climate-related emergencies, a group of food services bots take over a ghost kitchen, rebranding the restaurant as a local hand-pulled noodle spot. The bots proudly start developing a good following until someone or something start review-bombing their feedback page. It the bots don't figure out what is going on quickly their new business will be destroyed before it has a chance to thrive.

Don and I went on a 13-day car trip. We spent a lot of time in the car listening to audiobooks. Automatic Noodle was what we considered to be a palette cleaner after we had finished two rather serious books in a row earlier. We both felt like the book was a little like ear-candy...not very high on plot, relatable characters or drama, maybe a little too high on technology and directed toward a younger set. But we liked it and thought it was sweet. The audiobook did provide the bridge we needed before be tackled another serious book.

Our ratings: Don - stars, me - 3.25 stars.

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Wild Rescues: A Paramedic's Extreme Adventures in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton by Kevin Grange

Audiobook-with-Don, 8 hours 6 min., 2021.

The subtitle pretty much sums up the book perfectly. Kevin Grange leaves his job as a paramedic in the LA  area to become a paramedic working for the National Parks, becoming a park ranger responding to medical and traumatic emergencies often in isolated and very rugged environments.

When Don and I were on a tour of Grand Teton National Park another couple kept raving about this book, having recently listened to it as they drove through Nebraska. By the time we were finished with the tour everyone, including us, were checking their phones to see if their library system had an e-source of the book. Ours did and Don and I started listening to it as we drove around Yellowstone. Kevin Grange is a paramedic not a writer but we enjoyed the situations he reported very much since many of them happened in spots we were visiting in real time. Clearly there is no limit to the stupid things people do or say in national parks.

The writing impacted our ratings. Don gave the book 3.5 stars and I was little more generous with 3.75 stars.

________________________________________________________

Moby Dick by Will Eisner, based on the novel by Herman Melville

Graphic novel, 32 pages, 2003.

Ha-ha. I read this whole 32-page version of Moby Dick while my husband took a shower. (In other words, it took 10 minutes.) After I was finished I thought to myself, "Well, that pretty much sums up the 800+ pages I just finished reading that took me a month to complete." The illustrations were very good but all I got was the story's outline.

It does leave out all the spiritual and psychological aspects of the original, which is really the good part. What does one expect in 32 pages?

My rating: 4 stars.

-Anne

TTT: Favorite Audiobooks for Road Trips

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Audiobooks for Road Trips (with Input from Don)

I'm off-topic today.

We are leaving on a road trip later this week. One of the things we always do on long trips is have plenty of audiobook choices for our listening enjoyment. If something doesn't work we can quickly switch to another book since we have lots of options.

When I discussed this list with Don he said the best audiobooks do something that the print version couldn't. Either it allows us to digest a book we wouldn't have read on our own or it benefits from the community experience, allowing us to discuss the topic or the plot as it is unfolding. Audio enhancements can bring aspects of the story alive and so do the narrators. If the book utilizes foreign words or made up ones (fantasy) they help with pronunciation or accents. So by and large, we the readers, liked the books better because we listened to them.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
This is the first book Don thought of when I mentioned my project this week. Barrett Whitener, the narrator of the audiobook, was brilliant. He had the Louisiana accent down pat and the comedic timing pitch perfect. I don't think we would have caught all the humor without the assist he provided. 13 hr. 32 min.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
This book won all kinds of awards for its production. It used 166 unique narrators, some of them famous, making it especially delightful to listen to. In my book club I was the only one who listened to it and the only one who liked it. I know it was because I listened and the other gals didn't. 7 hr. 25 min.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
The production of this wonderful book is why it is on my list today. Rocky, the alien creature, speaks to Ryland Grace in musical tones. They use those tones in the production. I missed that aspect of the story in the movie where they went straight to the interpretation. 
16 hrs. 10 min.

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green
I can picture where we were on our road trip to California while we were listening to this book -- Lake Tahoe! John Green narrates his own book and the essays are all interrelated, many having to do with the COVID lockdowns which we were experiencing right at that time. We talked and laughed and relistened to parts. It was a fantastic listening experience. 10 hr. 42 min.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
This book is long, 626 pages, and the plot unfolds in four different timelines. Don and I both enjoyed the book because of the assist we gave each other. When one of us was confused, we'd stop and discuss what was happening to bring the other person up to speed. Marin Ireland and Simon Jones shared narration duty. 14 hr. 52 min.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Another tome of a book, 639 pages. Likely neither of us would have read this alone. We had the benefit of a long trip and time to enjoy it together. And, boy, this is a good story. 26 hr. 20 min.

James by Percival Everett
Language was a really big deal in the story. There were lots of instances where, James, the black slave who is educated and can read, has to speak in the slave dialect to not draw attention to his education. This was a perfect book to listen to for all this code switching. 7 hr. 49 min.

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench, with Brendan O'Hea
Dame Judi Dench is interviewed by Brendan O'Hea and the two talk about all the Shakespeare roles she played while in the Royal Shakespeare Company. A voice actor, Barbara Flynn, was used for the parts that needed to be read out since Dench now has vision problems so she can no longer read. 12 hr. 5 min.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
We debated whether to add this book to the list but Don, who references this book probably more than any book we've listened to together, won out. He felt the form of having Saunders essentially teach the reader what makes a good story followed by one of the many narrators of this audiobook, read out a whole short story by one of four Russian authors as examples to make his point, was so effective. 14 hrs. 45 min.

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

The main character, Lionel, had Tourette's Syndrome, and has dramatic verbal tics. "Frank Muller’s narration is nothing short of astounding. He gives Lionel’s Tourette’s persona a distinctly different voice and makes the lightning transitions from voice to voice with never a slip. Somehow he manages to make Lionel not a sentimental sideshow, but a fully human character you like right away. In less capable hands this might have been a disaster, but with the consummate skill of this audio superstar it becomes an achievement unlikely to be equaled--by him or anyone else." (AudioFile) We laughed our way through this book. I'm not even sure if readers of the print version would find these outbursts funny or not. 10 hr. 9 min.

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz
A late addition to the list after a short discussion with Don. Listening to this book was like listening to someone talking to another person on the phone. You only hear one side of the conversation yet you can usually figure out what is going on. It is an immigrant story and very timely for what is happening in the country right now. Lest you think we only listen to long books, here is a short one. 6 hr. 17

Here we are. Partners in life, partners in listening.

-Anne

"Audiobooks with Don"--Review: CORELLI'S MANDOLIN

It was the day before we were leaving for a vacation to Mexico and my husband, Don, realized the e-book he was currently reading wouldn't last him for a whole week of resort-living. He asked if I had any good books lying around the house that he might like. I shoved Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières into his hands. So what if the book, one of my favorites, was published in 1994? As Ann Patchett reminds her readers, "If you haven't read it, it's new to you." After a week in Mexico, Don hadn't made much progress so we found the audiobook at our library. From that point forward he consumed the book by reading a few pages in bed each night and listening to most of the book in his truck as he ran errands around town during the day. If I was with him in the vehicle, which was often, I would join him in listening and was immediately reminded how much I liked this story. At one point, let's say about 100 pages in, he turned to me and asked why I hadn't recommended the book to him before. Clearly he was enjoying it a lot. I reminded him that I first read Corelli's Mandolin in 1995, long before I was in the habit of making reading suggestions to him...and everyone else.

The story is set on Cephalonia, a Greek Island, and though it covers a timeline of fifty years, the majority of the story takes place during the years of WWII occupation, first by the Italians and then by the Germans. Nicci Gerrard, writing a review for The Guardian newspaper in April 1994, describes the book this way:

Captain Corelli's Mandolin is an emotional, funny, stunning novel which swings with wide smoothness between joy and bleakness, personal lives and history, between an hour-by-hour narrative riddled with meals and walks and cuffs and courtship and a decade-by-decade sweep through the years. It's lyrical and angry, satirical and earnest.

The book is full of a cast of quirky characters. beginning with Dr. Iannis and his daughter Pelagia. He is the only doctor on the island and also a wannabe historian, painstakingly writing out the history of Cephalonia from ancient to modern times. Pelagia, the heroine of the story, wants to be a doctor like her father despite that being nearly impossible for a woman of the time. She falls in love with a local fisherman, Mandras, who is a sweet and gentle boy who often swims with dolphins. The two get engaged just a few days before he is drafted and sent off to fight in the Greek army. When he returns home a year later, he is not the same person, changed forever by the horrors of war. When the Italian army arrives to occupy the island, their commander is Captain Antonio Corelli. He is not a stereotypical army officer. His first love is music and his mandolin. Soon after arriving on the island he organizes a group of a cappella singers from his garrison. The men all sing together each morning as they are pooping in the open latrine. When a German officer greets him with the traditional "Heil Hitler," Corelli salutes back with a "Heil, Puccini." Clearly he is more of a clown than a serious fascist. When Corelli is billeted with Dr. Iannis and his daughter, his aide Carlo Guercio, his loyal sergeant, picks up the captain everyday in the jeep and runs interference for him. Carlo is a huge Italian man carrying an equally huge secret inside him. Early in the story Carlo philosophizes that the history of war is "the propaganda of the victors, when it should consist of the anecdotes of the little people who get caught up in it."

After Mandras disappears to fight with other Greek partisans, Pelagia finds her heart turning toward Antonio Corelli, wooed initially by the beautiful music he makes on his mandolin. Their love story is both funny and sweet, one only possible during the time of war. The Italians and Greeks got on very well especially considering one was the conqueror and the other the conquered. Friendships and love affairs sprung up all over the island. These relationships, especially between Pelagia and Antonio, greatly interested me the first time I read the book not long after it was published in 1994.

This time around, however, I found my interest captured by what I called the interlude chapters -- chapters which explored a theme, like the church or Il Duce, in depth. The chapter, "A Pamphlet Distributed on the Island, Entitled with the Fascist Slogan 'Believe, Fight, Obey'," was especially fascinating to me because it outlined the life of Benito Mussolini and what a terrible person he was even before he became head of the Fascist party in Italy. As we listened, Don turned to me and asked if it reminded me of of anyone today? Could it be Trump? The similarities were both gauling and frightening.

I asked Don if he would write a brief review of Corelli's Mandolin for this post. He, after all, read the whole thing and I only got snapshots of the book this time around (and the bonus -- he is a very good writer!)

-Anne

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"War is hell." -- General William Tecumseh Sherman

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." -- Carl von Clausewitz

Many descriptions of war have been attempted through the ages. Louis de Bernières' Corelli's Mandolin may have added several more, but most poignantly he captures the complex human experience that war is being trapped in circumstances beyond the immediate control of the people most directly affected. As a retired Army officer and veteran of a deployment to Iraq, I will say that most soldiers don't gleefully go into combat zones to advance righteous values, in defense of hearth and home, or out of allegiance to the flag on their uniform. Rather, they have sworn an obligation to serve and -- as part of a team -- they will fight for the men and women by their side so that everyone can go home when it's over. In Corelli's Mandolin, we encounter soldiers from Italy, Germany, Albania, Greece, and Great Britain all caught up in the dire consequences of political aspirations and failures, while just trying to survive and find some joy and beauty in the middle of the ugliness.

As the narrative shifts between the various central characters, each wrestles with the consequences of their initially noble decisions (caring for a widowed father, joining the army, opposing the monarchy, etc.) as the world serves up unimaginable grief, deprivation, and isolation. And in the middle of all this misery, we have the delightful, yet agonizing love story of Corelli, the musical Italian army officer, and the Greek doctor's daughter, Pelagia. Clinging to hope of all the good times that will come "after the war", the two manage to grow deeper in love despite the odds being severely against them. 

Many years ago when Anne first read Corelli's Mandolin, she copied this passage in a Valentine's Day card to me:

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that is is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because that is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passions. ...That is just being "in love," which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found we were one tree and not two.

I was part of the way through the book, when I happened upon that card and recalled the many times we have mentioned how entwined our roots have become over the 45 years we've been together. When I reached this passage in the book as Dr. Iannes describes the difference between being in love and real, lasting love, I was reminded again of our fortunate accident.

Reading Corelli's Mandolin after all these years gave me new insights about the occupation of Greece during WWII. But more, I got an important reminder that in the midst of any and all circumstances, the best thing you can do is choose love.

-- Don

Nonfiction review: REPLACEABLE YOU

Mary Roach is at it again with her 2025 book: Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. I say "at it again" because this is her eighth science book, all of which have dealt at least in part with the workings of the body. As the title suggests this book examines human parts which can be replaced (or at least attempts have been made to replace.)

While I was casting about trying to find some way to approach this review, I ran across a hilarious article by Sadie Stein in the NYT (Sept, 8, 2025) called "Ten Icky Things Mary Roach has (Unfortunately) Brought to My Attention." Se uses examples from all of Roach's books. I decided to copy the format and give you ten examples of things I learned by reading Replaceable You. I'm not sure how gross or icky they are but I would generally say that reading a Mary Roach book is not a squeamish person. Maybe you'll feel this way about the examples I use. Here they are in no apparent order:

1. An old-fashioned method of dealing with cataracts is called "couching", which pierces the attachment of the clouded lens and pushes it down in the eyeball. The poor person still can't see well, since without a lens we cannot focus. 
2. Neovaginal care in transgender women is an ongoing challenge often requiring nontraditional cleaning. It also involves daily (or more) dilation to keep it from atrophying. 
3. Unfortunately ivory is a very good medium for replacement joints. I say unfortunately, because it might work well for us but it is deadly to the elephant. 
4. In the 1800s skin grafting experiments were done with dogs. They would graft the skin of a live dog to the the burn victim. It was hard to make the dogs lie still for the required weeks it took to see if the graft would take. Ha!
5. Mary Roach thought she would spend a night in an iron lung to test out what it was like to have a machine breathe for you. She lasted 7 minutes.
6. A surgeon once used a man's middle finger to replace a penis after cancer. I have no idea how that was supposed to work and the images it evokes are pretty hilarious.
7. In the name of science, Roach had an operation to have hair follicles transplanted onto her leg to see if they would grow hair. She'll do anything for science!
8. If a human heart is removed from a body, it still may continue beating for several minutes, sometimes up to 10 minutes. It reminds me of frog experiments in junior high science class.
9. Oddly and coincidentally, a very famous orthopedic surgeon was named Dr. Saw.
10. George Washington's teeth were not made of wood. He had several sets of dentures made for him. They were made up of a combination of human and animal teeth, and probably ivory.

I listened to this audiobook with Don and I'm pretty sure he enjoyed it more that I did. I don't usually consider myself squeamish but for some reason I reacted that way during several of her episodes of rogue doctors or badly executed experiments involving body parts. I would have to go into my head and sing "la-la-la" to myself so I would stop feeling queasy or lightheaded. Quite a few of her examples were so detailed and over my head that my mind would wander off and suddenly Don's laughter would bring me back to the listening task at hand. We had a much better experience together listening to her other books Gulp and Grunt. So I guess what I am saying is I learned a lot from Replaceable You but it is not my favorite Mary Roach book.

My rating -- 3.5 stars; Don's rating -- 4 stars.

-Anne

Nonfiction review: MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Scribner, September 2025.

Arundhati Roy's memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, tackles her writing career, India's turbulent politics, and a reckoning with her larger-than-life mother, Mary Roy. It covers the author's rocky childhood, her break from her mother and life as an architecture student, the stardom that followed the publishing of her first book, The God of Small Things, and finally how she settled into her role as a reporter and activist for social justice causes all around her beloved India and how she reunited with her mother.

I became a Roy fan back in 1997 after I read The God of Small Things. The story, about two young twins and the caste system in India, captured my imagination. The book won the Booker Prize that year and catapulted Roy into instant fame. Everyone read her book. Everyone wanted another, including me. We were all in for a long wait since she didn't publish another fiction novel for twenty years. When The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was published in 2017, I remember reading an article about what Roy had been up to in the intervening years. She'd turned her attention from fiction to all kinds of people's movements throughout her country. All of her passions are included in the book: displaced villagers, Indian occupation of Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Maoist insurgents. Her second novel was a lot. With explanations of multiple causes and two main storylines curling around each other, all set in an exotic land (to us) on the other side of the world, few women in book club had patience for this book. But I did. I loved Utmost Happiness as much or more than Small Things. I felt like I WAS in India, the writing was so descriptive. 

My husband, who listened to the Mother Mary audiobook with me, commented the book should have been not just Arundhati's memoir but her mother's, too. We figured out that was the point. Mary Roy was such a dominating figure in the author's life that their stories were all tangled up together. Mary, who started a school for girls in their village, Ayemenem, ruled the campus as the queen bee. But whenever she got frustrated by one of her students she would take that frustration out on her daughter or son, not the offending student. Arundhati could never seem to escape her mother's wrath, even when she was a model student. 

Arundhati recounts that after publishing her first book, Mary saw herself as the protagonist in the story. In one scene the twins are being shoved back and forth from one parent to the other with one parent saying, "You take them, I don't want them." Mary wondered how Arundhati remembered that from her childhood. Arundhati said she thought it was fiction and didn't remember such a thing happening to her, but it actually had. She had internalized this ambivalence her mother felt toward her from the beginning.

After the dust settled from the fame that followed winning the Booker Prize, Roy decided to see where life would take her, instead of sitting down and trying to write another novel. She found herself in all corners of India -- trying to help villagers who were doomed to lose their ancestral homes from the flooding caused by a huge dam project; marching around the jungle with Maoist insurgents; nearly getting shot in Kashmir. She spent a night in jail on a contempt of court charge because she wouldn't apologize after being cited for criticizing a judicial ruling and leading a demonstration at the supreme court. Whenever she would talk about differences between gender roles and expectations she would repeat a line said to her earlier -- "Because it is India, my dear." Roy, who narrated the audiobook, said this phrase with such an affected, snobby accent, Don and I found ourselves laughing and repeating the phrase every time we'd hear it.

In December of each year I attempt to uncover the best 50 books published that year by doing a "Best Books Roundup." This past year, 2025, Mother Mary Comes to Me was at the top of my list. (See list here.) This surprised me because it is nonfiction and delighted me because I've loved Roy's novels so much. I immediately added the book to my TBR. When the audiobook came available from the library I invited my husband to join me in listening to it. Now he is a fan of the author, also. Listening to Roy narrate her own life's story was such a treat. The story is so wrapped up in the setting it was appropriate to have the story read by an Indian and why not the author? Now Don wants to read her fiction, once again using the audiobook format. If you haven't read any books by Arundhati Roy, I recommend you start here with this memoir. Her novels are very complex and knowing their back story will likely help you understand aspects of each novel's complexity.

Both Don and I rated the book with 5 stars.

-Anne

Review: SO FAR GONE

Title: So Far Gone by Jess Walter

Book Beginning/ First Line Friday quote:

A prim girl stood still as a fencepost on Rhys Kinnick's front porch. Next to her, a cowlicked boy shifted his weight from one snow boot to the other snow boot. Both kids wore backpacks. On the stairs below them, a woman held an umbrella against the pattering rain.

Friday56 quote: 

Technology, as he saw it, had finally succeeded in shrinking the globe, so much so that every news story felt dangerous and personal, every war a threat to his family, every hurricane, firestorm, melting ice cap a local disaster, the seas boiling up around them, every cynical politician and legal maneuver part of the same rotten fabric -- and half the country somehow seeing it exactly the opposite way.

Summary: Seven years after a fight with his son-in-law, which caused Rhys Kinnick to move to a cabin in the woods off the grid, his grandchildren show up on his doorstep. Rhys barely recognizes them. Their mother has disappeared, and they need a safer place to stay than with their father, who has taken up with a Christian Nationalist militia. Rhys’s cabin has no electricity or indoor plumbing is not exactly the type of place to raise children, but he is determined to try. He'll do whatever he needs to for these sweet kids.

But when the militia members, from the group the father is mixed up with, show up and kidnap the children, Rhys realizes he'll have to re-enter the world (and get a cell phone.) With the help of a bipolar retired detective and his caustic ex-girlfriend, Rhys reluctantly heads off on a madcap journey through the rubble of the life he left behind to rescue the kids and locate his daughter, their mother.

Review: My first book of 2026, Worth Fighting For, was a serious collection of essays about how Christian Naturalists are warping Christianity and what concerned folks, like me, can do about it. As I read through the essays I got more and more weighted down by the increasing realization of how bad things are in our country. By book's end I wanted to go to bed and pull a blanket over my head. Something which was meant to be helpful made me more discouraged than ever. 

Next I picked up a fiction book by a favorite author, Jess Walter, called So Far Gone. Within a few pages I realized that Christian Nationalists also populated the pages of this book but every time the topic was mentioned I found myself laughing. Jess Walter has a way of making his readers laugh, rather than cry, at the absurdities of our current situations. 

So Far Gone is set mainly in Eastern Washington around the city of Spokane, where Walter lives. The Christian Nationalist's compound is set in the panhandle of Northern Idaho, right across the stateline. Nearby in the NE part of the state is the Spokane Indian Reservation, where another part of the story takes place. One of the reasons I enjoy reading Jess Walter books is because he always sets them in my state, often mentioning places I've visited. 

The main character, Rhys Kinnick, was a journalist writing for the Spokane newspaper focusing on environmental issues. As the newspaper downsized, Kinnick lost his job and his identity. Instead of sticking around and trying his hand at something else, he retires to a cabin in the woods built his grandfather and does little to improve it and he completely unhooks himself from technology which he views with skepticism (see quote from Friday56). Living in such isolation seemed good at first, perhaps Rhys would finally find time to write the book he has been researching for years. But the isolation grows to the point Rhys is almost a hermit, even losing touch with his only daughter and grandchildren, until that fateful day when they show up on his porch steps. Walter knows what he is writing about since he began his writing career as a journalist, writing for the Spokane-Review newspaper. In an interview about this book, Walter said being a journalist "made me more outward-looking than I would have been otherwise. Journalism allowed me to look at systems and institutions, and to now take fictional characters and put them into worlds that I covered as a reporter. So, for me, I think it really opened my eyes to what my fiction should be about."  As a reporter he covered the Ruby Ridge Standoff, also in Idaho, in 1992.  He certainly brought a journalist's eyes and skills as he crafted this story.

So Far Gone is full of dark humor which propelled the story through its darker parts. Since I've read several of Walters other books --Citizen Vince, Cold Millions, Beautiful Ruins, The Financial Lives of Poets -- I knew this about his books. I also knew that nothing terrible, terrible would likely happen. Good. What a relief. Humor without horror. There is enough "terrible, terrible" in the world right now without having to confront it on the pages of books, too. Don listened to the audiobook with me. It was narrated by Wil Patton, another favorite. Don was completely invested in the story. I think he laughed harder than I did and he clearly admired Walter's writing style. Both of us remarked how refreshing it is to read a book set in our state. (Apparently, this is theme in our family! Ha) We talked a lot about the way fiction can often have a bigger impact on readers than nonfiction, perhaps because the packaging makes the bad news more palatable -- as So Far Gone did for me compared the book of essays on a similar topic.

Here is one of the funniest quotes I remember from the book. Don and I both thought it was so funny, we had to rewind the audiobook to hear a few more times before we were ready to move on and then we kept repeating it to each other for the rest of the day:

“As a journalist, as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency, Kinnick realizing that the asshole ceiling was much higher than he’d thought, perhaps half the country. Whatever the number, it was more than he could bear. Especially when they were in his own family.”

So Far Gone has it all -- great writing; vivid settings; a mystery (where is the daughter?); quirky characters; timely satire about socio-political, religious, environmental, and technological issues; dark humor, and a unique plot. Don and I both recommend this book to you. 

We both rated the book -- 5 stars.

_______________________________________________

Review: SUNRISE ON THE REAPING

Title: Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games #0.5)

Book Beginning quote:

     "Happy Birthday, Haymitch!"

     The upside of being born on reaping day is that you get to sleep late on your birthday. It is pretty much downhill from there.

Friday56 quote:

     So don't feed the nightmares. Don't let yourself panic. Don't give the Capitol that. They've taken enough already.

Summary: It is the Quarter Quells which means there will twice as many tributes competing in the Hunger Games this year. Twenty-four in all. So when Haymitch Abernathy is selected to represent one of the four from District 12, he isn't really surprised. This is his story.

Review: Back in 2008 I became a Hunger Games fan. I was a fledgling teen librarian at the time and I was thrilled to find a book kids were really excited about. To a small degree the series became like that generation's Harry Potter. I wasn't blogging at the time but by the time Catching Fire came out a year later I was, so I did a combination review of books. Read it here. Over the next several years I re-reviewed both of the books once more (Hunger Games here; Catching Fire here) and had many more mentions of the books in my blog when I created several different lists of favorite/most popular books in the library. In 2010 when we were preparing to receive the third book in the series, Mockingjay, I was thrilled and created an announcement post. (Read it here.) I ordered three books to arrive the day it came out in August 2010 so my daughters and I could all read it at the same time. Here we are doing just that:

Me and my college-age daughters reading Mockingjay the day it arrived in August 2010.

And here is my review of Mockingjay written just five days after the launch of the book.

Fast forward ten years to 2020 when Suzanne Collins published the fourth book in the series, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I was retired by then so I have no idea what kind of reception the book got in the library. Were teens familiar with the series anymore? I didn't know. My younger daughter, who was home with us for COVID lockdown, and I planned to read this one at the same time but my older daughter hijacked my copy of the book before I could get to it. Not together, but the three of us all read it eventually. I didn't like this prequel, considered #0.0 in the series, as much as the originals. (Read my review here.) For one thing I thought the book was too long and could easily have been published as two books. And I realized I didn't feel the need to know how President Snow got started with the Hunger Games. I am realizing just now as I type this, perhaps I didn't like this book as well because I didn't like the COVID lockdowns and had a lot of trouble settling down with books in general that whole year. Not the book's fault, but COVID's? Hmm.

Proof that the series was popular with teens in my library. Hunger Games and the two sequels (at the time) were all in the top ten for circulations in my library over the eleven years the school was open. I created this list on the last day of school in 2016.

Knowing I was so ambivalent about The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I hesitated getting very excited about the fifth book in the series, Sunrise on the Reaping. You'd never know this, however, since I went ahead and preordered the audiobook to arrive the day it was published in March. In fact, I let both of my girls listen to it on my Audible account first. Then I kept putting off listening, finally resolving to listen to the book before year's end. I finished it in the nick of time, on December 26th. And here I am reviewing it almost a month later. Dragging my feet again. My last review from books read in 2025.

To say that I was delighted with Sunrise on the Reaping is an understatement. I felt like I was back in 2008-09, reading Hunger Games and Catching Fire for the first time. I was just as enthralled with the story and horrified by the whole premise of the games. Exciting parts were exciting and the backstory was the best of the whole set. But here is my favorite part, which was very different than the other four, Sunrise on the Reaping was stuffed full of poetry. The book almost sang for it. In my opinion it made the emotions of story more amplified. A good deal of the poetry was from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven". I recognized it. But a lot of the poetry went unattributed in the audiobook like the snippet below was from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence". I looked it up. And I imagine a good deal of the poetry was written by Collins herself.

"A truth that's told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent." --William Blake

It was on the point of the poetry that Don, my husband who listened to the audiobook with me, and I diverged on our review of the story. I loved it, he not so much. Or to be more precise, he didn't care for the way that the book's narrator, Jefferson White, read the verses of "The Raven." He read with a definite beat, almost like a drum beating out the rhythm. I interpreted this as the beating of Haymitch's heart or the drumbeat going on inside his head. A picky detail but it lost a rating point for Don. I gave the book a 5-star rating, he gave it 4-stars.

As you can see from this disjointed and long-winded review, I have had a lot to do with The Hunger Games over the past seventeen years and have loved most of those moments, especially those shared with my family. Do I need another sequel/prequel? No, I'm satisfied with where the story let us off at the end of Sunrise on the Reaping. Will I read another sequel/prequel if another comes along. Yes. Yes, I will. I'm a fan, remember?

 

Now it is your turn to share what you think of the Hunger Games series or tell us about the book you are currently reading... comment and link up below.

Nonfiction Review: ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS

Title: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

Books Beginnings quote:

Friday56 quote (from page 22, the last preview page):

Summary:

On Oct 25th, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet was viewed over 10 million times. 

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture which has occurred for Black, brown, indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse. (Publisher) 

Review: This National Book Award recipient has much to digest within its pages. Clearly the author is frustrated beyond words at the world's seeming disregard for the plight of the people in Gaza. But he places the lion's share of blame on progressives and left-leaning people who give lip service to being horrified by the atrocities in Gaza at the hands of Israel, yet take no action to go along with their words and objectively support Israel's right to exist and self-defense. Conservatives don't bear the brunt of El Akkad's disdain because they are who they say they are -- hard-liners, racists who generally hate anyone who is brown-skinned, reflexively supporting Israel no matter what. I guess he is saying the right has no answers and he doesn't expect their help. Since I'm a progressive, I felt chastised as I read. But it was a wakeup call, too. I'm glad the book received the award so it will receive some attention and hopefully wake up a bunch of us "slacker left-leaning progressives" (and hopefully others) with this call to action.

As Don and I discussed after finishing the audiobook, he was more critical ranking it with 3 stars. His biggest complaint was how the book -- he called it a long opinion piece -- called us out for our apathy without many constructive suggestions of ways to help. Call our congresswoman? She's a Democrat and her party isn't in power? Then what? 

As we listened we found ourselves going back in time since the book was clearly written during President Biden's term. The book was already in the publishing stages when the 2024 election went to Donald Trump. We couldn't help wonder whether the author has any different feelings toward the Biden administration's approach to Israel's war on Gaza since things have certainly gotten no better under Trump. There was no postscript to the audiobook to answer this question. One thing so many people don't seem to understand about politics: when you are frustrated by the party in power (especially one you largely agree with) and kick them out, the other side is going to be worse. At least Democrats have been advocating for a two-state solution and self-determination for Palestinians for decades. Trump and his acolytes only want tough talk in support of Israel, and want to raze Gaza to redevelop the coastline with luxury resorts for the rich and powerful. 

Clearly there are no easy answers and this conflict has been going on for thousands of years. Sigh.

The audiobook was narrated by the author, El Akkad, which I really appreciated. A bit about the author is probably warranted: Omar El Akkad was born in Egypt. He and his family were forced to leave their home due to the politics in the country. His father relocated the family first to Qatar for a few years. When he was 16 his family moved to Montreal, Quebec, where Omar finished high school. Eventually he got an entry-level job at the Globe and Mail newspaper and worked his way up to an investigative reporter. Often he received assignments because he was a Muslim or because he was an Arab, as if he would be the only one to understand the issue. Now he and his family live in Portland, Oregon.

Our ratings: Don -- 3 stars; Anne -- 4 stars.

Challenges: Nonfiction November and Novellas in November (for short nonfiction, 208 pages.)

-Anne