Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Summary from Goodreads: The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal–an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

I really liked Sea of Tranquility – but not quite as much as Station Eleven. I remember that one as feeling very rich in world building, but Sea of Tranquility feels like it’s a little too stretched in time. The Olive sections, though, were superb, clearly drawing little snippets from perhaps the author’s own experiences as a writer, who is also a mom with a small child on book tour. The structure of the book was also an interesting one. I thought it was nested in sections like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, based on the sections as listed in the Table of Contents. And it is…but it’s also a little different, so that was fun, too.

Sea of Tranquility also has time travel as a plot device and….ugggghhhh. I still don’t like it as a thing. It’s too unwieldy. But I did appreciate what Mandel was trying to do with it, because it did at least connect up the time loop (maybe not quite as well as it was done in This Is How You Lose the Time War, which was superb, but I think she did a great job). I also managed to pick up a couple of crossovers with her previous books – apparently, all Emily St. John Mandel books take place in the same universe, so little bits of prior books seep into the new one. But I don’t think they’re integral to the plot, so if you’ve never read any of Mandel’s books, you don’t lose anything in the reading. The cross-over bits are very much more like Easter Eggs.

Sentence level though – just fantastic. She could write a grocery list and it would be an intriguing read.

Dear FTC: I had to buy my copy at the store (it does have VERY pretty blue-sprayed edges) since we didn’t get physical galleys and anyway I needed the extras for Book Club since I lead it.

One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle

Summary from Goodreads: When Katy’s mother dies, she is left reeling. Carol wasn’t just Katy’s mom, but her best friend and first phone call. She had all the answers and now, when Katy needs her the most, she is gone. To make matters worse, their planned mother-daughter trip of a lifetime looms: two weeks in Positano, the magical town Carol spent the summer right before she met Katy’s father. Katy has been waiting years for Carol to take her, and now she is faced with embarking on the adventure alone.

But as soon as she steps foot on the Amalfi Coast, Katy begins to feel her mother’s spirit. Buoyed by the stunning waters, beautiful cliffsides, delightful residents, and, of course, delectable food, Katy feels herself coming back to life.

And then Carol appears—in the flesh, healthy, sun-tanned, and thirty years old. Katy doesn’t understand what is happening, or how—all she can focus on is that she has somehow, impossibly, gotten her mother back. Over the course of one Italian summer, Katy gets to know Carol, not as her mother, but as the young woman before her. She is not exactly who Katy imagined she might be, however, and soon Katy must reconcile the mother who knew everything with the young woman who does not yet have a clue. 

BN Book Club is back in person at my store! Whee!

I didn’t love One Italian Summer, maybe a 3.5 star read but not quite a 4 star. I was interested in this exploration of one person’s grief (how I managed to read two novels about grief, one after another, I don’t know, not-great planning on my part), with a woman who seems not only to be best friends with her mother, but also seems to have let herself be subsumed by her mother in some ways. Katy almost can’t function without her mother telling her what to wear, where to eat, what to pack, and where to go (and even, whether she and her husband should have children). I really liked the idea that a woman who looks like Katy’s mom could help her process her loss in some way. Also, the descriptions of the food in Positano, my god did it make me hungry!

However, when the idea that the woman who looks like her mother turns into an actual timeslip of 30 years in the past and she IS Katy’s mother, Carol, it takes all consequences off the table. Completely. She sleeps with a guy who is not her husband, and yet when her actual husband appears near the end of the book everything is all fine and dandy and their relationship fixes itself. She has a fight with Carol which appears not to impact the timeline? The timeslip is almost like a get-out-of-jail free card in some ways. This is why I don’t like time-travel as a device.

But it was really, really nice to sit down with the core group of regulars who came to our Book Club meetings prior to the pandemic and see them all for the first time in two years. I really missed that.

Dear FTC: I had to buy my copy of this book from my store since we didn’t get any physical ARCs for the BNBC and we decided to do this in-person before I could get a DRC downloaded from Edelweiss.

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

Summary from Goodreads:
After losing everything, a young boy discovers there are still reasons for hope in this luminous, life-affirming novel, perfect for fans of Celeste Ng and Ann Patchett.

In the face of tragedy, what does it take to find joy?

One summer morning, twelve-year-old Edward Adler, his beloved older brother, his parents, and 183 other passengers board a flight in Newark headed for Los Angeles. Among them is a Wall Street wunderkind, a young woman coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, an injured vet returning from Afghanistan, a septuagenarian business tycoon, and a free-spirited woman running away from her controlling husband. And then, tragically, the plane crashes. Edward is the sole survivor.

Edward’s story captures the attention of the nation, but he struggles to find a place for himself in a world without his family. He continues to feel that a piece of him has been left in the sky, forever tied to the plane and all of his fellow passengers. But then he makes an unexpected discovery–one that will lead him to the answers of some of life’s most profound questions: When you’ve lost everything, how do find yourself? How do you discover your purpose? What does it mean not just to survive, but to truly live?

Dear Edward is at once a transcendent coming-of-age story, a multidimensional portrait of an unforgettable cast of characters, and a breathtaking illustration of all the ways a broken heart learns to love again.

Dear Edward is a very moving and well-crafted novel about the trauma of loss. Napolitano balanced the alternating storylines – the narrative of the flight itself and Edward’s life after the crash – very well. It’s one of those few novels where the two storylines are fighting one another. We know that the end of the “flight narrative” will end in a crash, there will be few surprises so it serves to fill out Edward’s narrative moving forward. The descriptions of how grief feels, how one carries around trauma like that are spot on. I’d never read Napolitano’s books before but this one makes me think about picking up the others some day.

I think this might be a hard book to read for someone who has experienced a sudden loss like Edward’s or has PTSD but Napolitano doesn’t use the story of the crash as spectacle. There are no gory descriptions and only 3-4 pages of description of the crash itself near the end.

Dear FTC: I read a galley of this book provided to the book club leader (me) at my store.

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

Summary from Goodreads:
Be careful who you let in.

Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am.

She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them.

Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.

In The Family Upstairs, the master of “bone-chilling suspense” (People) brings us the can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.

The Family Upstairs is fine. But it does some things that annoy me.
1) rotating narrators, two in 3rd person present and ONE in 1st person present who was clearly set up as the “unreliable” character and telegraphing a lot of what this character did in the 3rd person timelines.
2) too much foreshadowing; we know stuff is going to get bad/nuts because it’s a domestic thriller so ending almost every 1st person chapter with some sort of cliff-hanger or foreshadowing statement caused me to guess every, single plot twist about two chapters before it happened (I am Dido, I have read all the Agatha Christies).

It’s plotty and reads quickly. This was my first introduction to Lisa Jewell and it will probably be my last for some time.

Content warning: domestic abuse both in reference and on the page; reference to abuse of a cat; use of abortifacients (with a bonus combo of slipping it into someone’s food/drink)

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley from the publisher via Edelweiss since I’m the book club leader at my store.

The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

Summary from Goodreads:
The New York Times bestselling author of The House Girl explores the lives of four siblings in this ambitious and absorbing novel in the vein of Commonwealth and The Interestings.

“The greatest works of poetry, what makes each of us a poet, are the stories we tell about ourselves. We create them out of family and blood and friends and love and hate and what we’ve read and watched and witnessed. Longing and regret, illness, broken bones, broken hearts, achievements, money won and lost, palm readings and visions. We tell these stories until we believe them.”

When the renowned poet Fiona Skinner is asked about the inspiration behind her iconic work, The Love Poem, she tells her audience a story about her family and a betrayal that reverberates through time.

It begins in a big yellow house with a funeral, an iron poker, and a brief variation forever known as the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town. Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that stretches before them, the Skinner siblings—fierce Renee, sensitive Caroline, golden boy Joe and watchful Fiona—emerge from the Pause staunchly loyal and deeply connected. Two decades later, the siblings find themselves once again confronted with a family crisis that tests the strength of these bonds and forces them to question the life choices they’ve made and ask what, exactly, they will do for love.

A sweeping yet intimate epic about one American family, The Last Romantics is an unforgettable exploration of the ties that bind us together, the responsibilities we embrace and the duties we resent, and how we can lose—and sometimes rescue—the ones we love. A novel that pierces the heart and lingers in the mind, it is also a beautiful meditation on the power of stories—how they navigate us through difficult times, help us understand the past, and point the way toward our future.

Well, I liked it. Or, I at least like it better than last month’s Book Club selection. The women of the family were all interesting and Joe, well, Joe I wanted to kick down the nearest flight of stairs. I’m not quite sure the author delivered on her premise, that when we fall in love with the right person everything works out. Also, she finked on Fiona’s poetry, giving us only a hint about her work (for a book that pulls off the narrative plus the invented poetical works, see AS Byatt’s Possession).

What I really could have done without was the frame narrative, which was jarring whenever I would come back to it. We had enough of the omniscient narrator from the future, the frame narrative could have been easily cut.

Read for the BN Book Club (and this time finished more than 2 hrs ahead of the meeting 😂).

Dear FTC: I read a paper galley of this book from the publisher provided for the BN Book Club discussion leader.

The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict

Summary from Goodreads:
She was beautiful. She was a genius. Could the world handle both? A powerful, illuminating novel about Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Kiesler is lucky. Her beauty leads to a starring role in a controversial film and marriage to a powerful Austrian arms dealer, allowing her to evade Nazi persecution despite her Jewish heritage. But Hedy is also intelligent. At lavish Vienna dinner parties, she overhears the Third Reich’s plans. One night in 1937, desperate to escape her controlling husband and the rise of the Nazis, she disguises herself and flees her husband’s castle.

She lands in Hollywood, where she becomes Hedy Lamarr, screen star. But Hedy is keeping a secret even more shocking than her Jewish heritage: she is a scientist. She has an idea that might help the country and that might ease her guilt for escaping alone — if anyone will listen to her. A powerful novel based on the incredible true story of the glamour icon and scientist whose groundbreaking invention revolutionized modern communication, The Only Woman in the Room is a masterpiece.

Well, I finished it in time to lead the Book Club discussion last night (we had bad weather, one person came so we’ll try for a make-up date next week). I’m extremely lukewarm on this book. While Hedy Lamarr herself is a really interesting historical figure, I found this fictional account of her life as a married woman in Vienna and her subsequent work in Hollywood to be shallowly drawn and rather simplistic. Bloodless, really. So much was beautifully described, especially the houses and clothes and jewels of Lamarr’s married life, but glossed over the violence of living with a possessive, abusive man. I also wished that the plot spent more time on her life in Hollywood and her scientific inventing, since it came so late in the book. The novel reads easily, though.

Dear FTC: I read a paper galley of this book provided by the publisher for the Book Club leader.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Summary from Goodreads:
The Carls just appeared. Coming home from work at three a.m., twenty-three-year-old April May stumbles across a giant sculpture. Delighted by its appearance and craftsmanship–like a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armor–April and her friend Andy make a video with it, which Andy uploads to YouTube. The next day April wakes up to a viral video and a new life. News quickly spreads that there are Carls in dozens of cities around the world–everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires–and April, as their first documentarian, finds herself at the center of an intense international media spotlight.

Now April has to deal with the pressure on her relationships, her identity, and her safety that this new position brings, all while being on the front lines of the quest to find out not just what the Carls are, but what they want from us.

Compulsively entertaining and powerfully relevant, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing grapples with big themes, including how the social internet is changing fame, rhetoric, and radicalization; how our culture deals with fear and uncertainty; and how vilification and adoration spring from the same dehumanization that follows a life in the public eye.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a really fun and readable debut SF novel (if you follow me at Goodreads, it really didn’t take 3 weeks to read, I read it twice because I lead the Book Club discussion at work).  Hank Green wrote a story which one the surface is about First Contact but far more about how social media “fame” and punditism is a really slippery slope. I enjoyed a lot of the plot call-backs in the novel (Chekhov’s gun got a workout). I did have a few issues with the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” aspect of the main character, April May, i.e. she’s pretty but doesn’t try, thin but also doesn’t try, can hang with the guys, etc, etc. It felt very overdone and also made her seem like Alaska’s sister (if you like John Green, you’ll like Hank’s writing style).  The ending generated the most discussion in the group.

Dear FTC: I had to buy a copy of this one because the review copy didn’t show up by release day and I needed to get it read.

Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

Summary from Goodreads:
A bewitching new novel of family and self-discovery from the best-selling, award-winning author of A Spool of Blue Thread.

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother’s sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother, yet the prospect is dimming. So, when Willa receives a phone call from a stranger, telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot, she drops everything and flies across the country to Baltimore. The impulsive decision to look after this woman and her nine-year-old daughter will lead Willa into uncharted territory–surrounded by eccentric neighbors, plunged into the rituals that make a community a family, and forced to find solace in unexpected places. A bittersweet, probing novel of hope and grief, fulfillment and renewal, Clock Dance gives us Anne Tyler at the height of her powers.

After reading Clock Dance twice, it falls somewhere between a 3 and a 4 book for me. I’d never read Anne Tyler before – she has a very nice writing style – but I wasn’t super-jazzed by the actual story of Willa and her life choices. She was so blah in the space between Chapter 1 and maybe the last 20 pages. I’m pretty sure my favorite character was Airplane, the dog.

However, I was the bookseller leading our Book Club discussion last night and I was intrigued to hear from others about this book. A number of participants were older women (50-60+) who are or had been married who had decided opinions about Willa’s marriages and how she related to her husbands and sons. Some sympathized with her, some did not. Some felt she was trapped, some that she was too comfortable and inclined to accept the status quo. I think Clock Dance is very much a novel where your mileage may vary, depending on your situation.

Dear FTC: I read a digital galley and a paper galley from the publisher.