Patti's Pages

SCAFFOLDING by Lauren Elkin

2026-10-28T03:00:00.000-07:00

Anna, a psychoanalyst in her late thirties in Paris, is in a holding pattern after a miscarriage, while her husband, David, is working in London. She meets a neighbor in her twenties, Clementine, who is involved with a group that is pasting feminist slogans all over the city, and the book basically treads water for 140 pages. Then a not-so-surprising revelation stops Anna in her tracks, and we switch to a different couple, Henry and Florence, who apparently occupied Anna’s apartment in the late 1960s. The novel then devolves into a bunch of extra-marital affairs, inscrutable psychoanalytical theory, and lots of untranslated French, although the author does translate the feminist slogans at the end of the book. The middle section just fizzles and is basically unfinished, I think, although I could have missed something. After one particularly maddening conversation between Anna and Clementine, Anna makes this observation on page 371:

“There was still so much to talk about. I was left frustrated, as if there were soap left on my skin and the hot water had gone.”

I love this analogy, but, really, a great book requires a whole lot more than great writing.

YOU DREAMED OF EMPIRES by Alvaro Enrigue

2026-10-26T14:59:30.299-07:00

I think this is supposed to be reimagined history with a heavy dose of humor, but it did not work for me. It is basically about the meeting of Cortez and Montezuma, but it is very hard to follow, partly because the setting can change in a heartbeat. One minute we are reading about the Spaniards in a temple, and the next paragraph is about Montezuma’s sister/wife in the palace. Then we switch back to the Spaniards or to the translator who goes AWOL. Much confusion stems from the unfamiliar Aztec names, amplified by the fact that the author sometimes refers to characters by their names and sometimes by their titles. Cortez has two titles—one Aztec and one Spanish—and is also known, in our English translation, as the captain general. Some of the names of lesser characters are translated into two lines of English. There is some almost funny stuff here, such as when the Spaniards get lost in Montezuma’s labyrinthine castle and try to follow the kitchen smells to avoid going in circles. One of the Spaniards almost gags on his lunch, due to the odors exuded by the Aztecs, but I can’t imagine that the Spaniards smelled much better, especially since their most important personal hygiene task was cutting their toenails. Anyway, here’s a priceless line from page 128:

“In Mexico, authority has always flowed from the smack of a flip-flop.”

I’m not even sure what that sentence means, but I do know it’s not the only intentional anachronism. Montezuma, portrayed here as being obsessed with hallucinogens and the Spaniards’ horses, sways to the beat of a T.Rex song.

REJECTION by Tony Tulathimutte

2026-10-25T14:48:19.619-07:00

This may not be my least favorite book ever, but it’s close. These linked stories are about angry people who, despite their efforts, are experiencing rejection in a major way. To be clear, this is not a novel. Some stories are sad, some are surprising, and some are just absurd, with characters that are more like caricatures then real people. One character has a fantasy so outrageous that I can almost imagine it as a pornographic cartoon. I concede that some characters have very unfortunate physical characteristics, causing their mental health to suffer and leading them to wallow in self-pity. Social media plays a large role here, and the lingo, acronyms and texting shorthand kept me from understanding everything that happens, and I didn’t bother to investigate further. Identity is a major theme, and in one story the protagonist refuses all labels as far as ethnicity, gender, whatever, refusing to be pigeonholed and ultimately being resigned to a life online. If this book is supposed to be funny, I missed the point. If I am supposed to empathize with these offbeat characters, I have to admit that I could not warm up to them or even feel sorry for them as social outcasts, and I could not wait to be done with this book. I have obviously aged out of this type of literature.

HEADSHOT by Rita Bullwinkel

2026-10-21T03:00:00.000-07:00

The title could refer to a professional photograph, but that’s not the case. Here we are talking about boxing but not just blows that result in a black eye or bloody nose. Here the author is getting into the minds of eight teenage girls who are competing in a national boxing tournament at a rundown gym in Reno. One girl was on duty as a lifeguard when a young boy drowned, and her negligence still haunts her. Another girl recites the value of pi to umpteen decimal places under her breath while she is boxing. One wears weird hats, such as a raggedy coonskin cap, as a scare tactic. Another is a 15-year-old whose quarterfinal bout is against her 17-year-old cousin. The lives of these girls are almost as compelling as the fights themselves. The book dissects each bout from quarterfinals to final but primarily from inside both fighters’ heads. As another reviewer noted, this novel does not depend on dialog, as it has none. Also, the outcome of each match is almost moot, especially as far as these girls’ futures are concerned. In fact, the author gives us a glimpse of each girl’s adult life, especially her career as it relates to their teenage selves, which, in every case but one, has nothing to do with boxing. I loved the format of this book, especially the tournament brackets which helped me keep straight who competed against whom. The problem for me is that, unique as this book is, there is no real drama, no protagonist, and no real plot that you can sink your teeth into.

WE WERE THE UNIVERSE by Kimberly King Parsons

2026-10-19T15:45:24.854-07:00

Breast-feeding a four-year-old seems weird to me, but what do I know? So does lying to your therapist, but I don’t think therapy was really Kit’s intent anyway. I think she goes to therapy to placate her well-grounded saintly husband, Jad, who tolerates her unpredictable behavior. The heart of the story, though, is Kit’s grief over the untimely death of her sister, Julie, who had problems with drugs and alcohol. Kit and Julie were very close, parenting each other from childhood due to the lack of supervision from their mother, a nurse of sorts who took care of her patients but not her daughters. Now that Kit is a mother and wife, she has had to give up two of her favorite pastimes—casual sex and hallucinogens. The loss of these activities forces her to continually relive her past, which just makes Julie’s absence all the more painful. Kit, Julie, and their poor excuse for a mother are just not characters that I could warm up to. Kit may not have succumbed to drugs and alcohol to the extent that her sister did, but she’s definitely off-balance in other ways—panicking at the grocery store checkout or wandering off to a bar and a dog park without her phone and wallet while her toddler is at gymnastics. Jad remarks late in the book that he loves Kit but that she scares him. No kidding.

WHAT KIND OF PARADISE by Janelle Brown

2026-10-18T14:33:36.089-07:00

I am pretty sure that faking one’s own death does not happen nearly as often in real life as it does in novels. Like amnesia, I find it to be sort of a cheap plot device for allowing a character to gain a whole new identity. Anyway, here we have a teenage girl, Jane, who lives off the grid with her father. She is so isolated from the outside world and so dependent on her father for everything that she apparently has a case of Stockholm Syndrome, in that she is complicit in her own captivity. However, when she discovers that he has been lying to her about a number of things, she plans her getaway, but her naïveté makes her escape quite precarious. To me, this is more of an adventure novel than a thriller, and the plot is completely preposterous. Still, it’s an enjoyable read as long as you are not expecting a literary masterpiece. Jane is a fairly engaging protagonist, as long as you can buy into her blind fealty to her paranoid anarchist of a father, and I had a significant problem with that. Her judgment is tainted by her father’s disdain for technology and authority, but her moral compass is intact, sort of. And the behavior of her supposedly dead mother is just off-the-charts weird. She takes the cake in the self-preservation department.

LAND by Maggie O'Farrell

2026-10-14T03:00:00.000-07:00

I seem to be reading a lot of books these days with gratuitous magical realism. This is another. Once again, I don’t really see that it contributes anything to the storyline. This novel’s other fault is that it is supremely dreary. Tomás, the father of three children, is an Irish cartographer during the years after the famine. He works for the British “redcoats” to have money to supplement his family’s meager farm income. When the book opens, he is mapping a remote peninsula, with his ten-year-old son, Liam, as his assistant. There Tomás encounters a magical pool that alters the trajectory of his family’s future. His backstory is pretty bleak, but then so is the rest of the book. The narrative eventually focuses on his sons and two daughters, Enda and Rose. The other son, Eugene, is a good worker but never speaks, and we are never told why. I don’t know if the author set out to take issue with Catholicism, but she does so very effectively and somewhat emphatically. A viscount’s son may be the most evil character in the book, but the local priest is far from being kind and compassionate, especially when he is trying to perform an exorcism on Tomás. Of course, I guess if you’re trying to destroy a demon, you may overlook the fact that you’re killing its host. I appreciate a good epic family saga, and that’s what we have here. I just wish it were a little less depressing.

AFTER YOU'D GONE by Maggie O'Farrell

2026-10-11T15:09:43.115-07:00

Three generations of characters and a bouncy timeline make for a challenging but enjoyable read, even though the prologue begins with an attempted suicide by Alice, the main character. We gradually learn her story from her reflections while in a coma, as well as third-person narration that often changes abruptly in both perspective and time period. The author relies on context to get us settled into the right situation, and it works OK, although I didn’t really love having to wrap my head around what has happened and what is yet to happen in each scenario. The crux of the novel is an epic love story between Alice and John, but why Alice tries to kill herself is a story that unfolds slowly, along with a family secret that has been withheld way too long. Some parts of the novel are extremely romantic and other parts on extremely heartbreaking. Frankly, I could have done with more romance and less heartbreak, which is actually more like soul-crushing grief. Still, this is a book I always looked forward to resuming, partly because questions remained unanswered until the end but also because Alice was such a delightful and lovable character. I wanted the best possible outcome for her.

THE VULNERABLES by Sigrid Nunez

2026-10-07T03:00:00.000-07:00

Full of reflections on writing, aging, and a lot of other stuff, the main plot of this novel involves a young man, an older woman, and a parrot, all inhabiting a Manhattan apartment during the Covid lockdown. The older woman, a writer, is the first-person narrator who is pet-sitting the parrot full-time while a visiting doctor occupies her own apartment. Then the previous pet-sitter, a young man whose wealthy parents have thrown him out, returns to resume taking care of the parrot. The narrator is none too happy with this sudden intrusion, as she has developed an affinity for the parrot herself. This unlikely threesome forms the core of the book, but the narrator’s musings fill the majority of the pages and are full of anecdotes that may or may not support the narrator’s opinions. The young man has mental health issues but is a kind soul who lives in the present without much concern for the future. How these two bond with one another—and the parrot—makes for a sweet story in an “uncertain spring,” to quote the first sentence of the book. Gallows humor is needed in times like these, and here are a couple of examples from this novel that contain more than just a grain of truth:

p. 142: “I like that Alan Bennett said, For a writer, nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people, because, however dreadful, it may be of use.”

p. 143: “And nutty epitaphs: I know not everyone is unhappy about this.”

FAREWELL, AMETHYSTINE by Walter Mosley

2026-09-30T03:00:00.000-07:00

Here’s another convoluted installment in the Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, Los Angeles private investigator, series. Of course, a beautiful woman must be part of the cast, and here it is Easy’s client, Amethystine. Her ex-husband, Curt, has gone missing, and it doesn’t take long for Easy to find his dead body. The next question is why was he killed and by whom. Another missing person is Easy’s cop friend, Melvin, whose disappearance may or may not be linked to Curt’s murder. As usual, there are so many characters and so many twists and turns that it’s difficult to keep up with who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Of course, some, like Easy’s longtime friend Mouse, straddle the line, straying into doing bad things for good reasons. Fearless Jones, who stars in another Mosley series, makes a cameo appearance here as well. Amethystine herself may not be entirely innocent, for that matter. I would like Mosley’s work a lot more if the plot were not so intricate, but there’s no denying he has a way with words and has his finger on the pulse of the pitfalls that plagued Black people in 1969. Easy may have escaped Louisiana, but he is still walking a tightrope in order not to piss off the white chief of police in L.A. And I don’t usually take much note of the dust cover, but the purple lettering is perfect for a title that includes the name Amethystine.

BLONDE FAITH by Walter Mosley

2026-09-27T14:49:37.854-07:00

Easy Rawlins, private investigator, is back on the job in 1967 Los Angeles. Life, however, is not easy for Easy as he endures racism everywhere he goes and laments that his ex-girlfriend Bonnie is about to marry someone else. Three man have gone missing, and Easy sets out to find them. His longtime nefarious friend Ray “Mouse” Alexander is being sought by the cops for the murder of Pericles Tarr, who is also missing and not necessarily dead. Christmas Black delivers his eight-year-old daughter to Easy’s care without so much as a note and then vanishes. In order to locate these three missing persons whose disappearances are certainly linked, Easy calls in a lot of favors from his many colorful acquaintances and banks a few more. The breezy writing style and dialog belie the seriousness of the subject matter, making it difficult for me to immerse myself in this book. Easy is at times his own worst enemy, especially when it comes to his relationships with women. To say that he is depressed is putting it mildly, and his sobriety is constantly challenged by the craving for a drink to drown his sorrows. I want to root for Easy, and certainly he is a top-notch investigator, but his personal woes make this novel a definite downer.

INLAND by Tea Obreht

2026-09-23T03:00:00.000-07:00

As historical fiction, this book is a worthwhile read. Camels as conveyances for supplies and mail in the mid-nineteenth century? That was news to me. One of the two main characters in this book is a camel driver during that time, but he is also a murderer on the run. His timeline eventually intersects with that of Nora, a wife and mother in Arizona in the 1890s. Her husband has been missing for three days, leaving her in desperate need of water but at times too proud or embarrassed to ask for it. For me, Nora is the more intriguing character, but she makes some bad decisions with dire consequences. She is also a prolific liar, stating at one point that lying is just as easy as saying nothing. Many of her lies are cover-ups for cowardice, and in one case she admits the truth to her almost-lover, who spills the beans. Living with her and her three sons is Josie, an orphaned distant relative, who also is harboring a whopper, and, ironically, Nora threatens her with a beating in order to drag the truth out of her. Nora also berates Josie for her claimed ability to contact the dead, while Nora herself carries on conversations with her dead daughter, who is generally available to offer advice. In other words, Nora is a supreme hypocrite. She may be admirable in her strength, referring to herself as a “hard woman,” but I found her exasperating. I am OK with that type of character in a novel, but here I felt that the storyline moved along a level plane, without enough highs and lows. This is a pleasant enough read, but suspense is in short supply.

THE MORNINGSIDE by Tea Obreht

2026-09-20T14:13:47.271-07:00

Sil and her mother are refugees living on an island that has been partially destroyed by flooding. News comes in the form of an anonymous radio correspondent called the Drowned City Dispatcher. When Sil’s Aunt Ena passes away, Sil’s mother slips seamlessly into Ena’s job as their building superintendent for the Morningside, a high-rise whose penthouse is occupied by a mysterious woman with three huge dogs. Sil’s mother also moonlights as a salvage diver, and there is plenty to salvage. While Sil’s mother is very secretive about their past life, Ena has regaled Sil with magical tales, and Sil feels compelled to investigate to find out if they are true. She enlists the help of Mila, another young girl who lives in the building, and Lewis May, a former superintendent of the building who dubs Sil “Snoopy.” The problem with this book is not the writing, the characters, or the dystopian plot; it just moves along too slowly. I think I dozed through some important pages and then had to reread them after I finished the novel. Also, a strand of magical realism permeates the novel, and I am generally not a fan, although some authors handle it better than others. Here it just robs the climate change warning of the seriousness it deserves.

MY FRIENDS by Hisham Matar

2026-09-16T03:00:00.000-07:00

On a lark, Khaled, a Libyan student at the University of Edinburgh, and his friend Mustafa travel to London to participate in an anti-Qaddafi demonstration at the Libyan embassy. Shots are fired from the embassy into the crowd, and both young men suffer gunshot wounds. Both survive, but the rest of the book pretty much chronicles the after-effects of this event, which actually did take place in 1984. Neither Khaled nor Mustafa can return to his studies, because fellow Libyan students will rat them out. Nor can they return to Libya, as their identities may be known to the Qaddafi regime. Their only choice is to remain in England with asylum status, too fearful of censors to tell their families what has happened. A third man, Hosam, a writer whom Khaled knows by reputation, joins the storyline after a chance encounter with Khaled at a hotel. Reading this, I was concerned about the fates of these three men, especially Khaled, who narrates the story in first person, but I would say that this novel is more educational than enjoyable. The author presents a poignant picture of three men in exile, and it’s especially heartbreaking, given that Khaled is so young—just a teenager--at the beginning. He navigates his unexpected life courageously and without dwelling too much on the what-ifs.

FIRE EXIT by Morgan Talty

2026-09-13T15:38:15.894-07:00

Charles is the adult son of white parents but was raised by his white mother and Penobscot stepfather on a reservation in Maine. Since he has no Penobscot blood, Charles lives just the other side of the river from the reservation, where he can see the home of his daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s mother, Mary, has raised her daughter to believe that she is the daughter of Mary’s Penobscot husband. Charles is obsessed with having his daughter know that he is her biological father. Mary, on the other hand, is adamant that this knowledge will upset Elizabeth and jeopardize her standing in their Native American community. However, Elizabeth seems to have inherited mental illness—depression—from Charles’s mother, Louise, who now also suffers from dementia. Unfortunately, there is just not enough here to make for an engrossing novel, and I was not invested in Charles or any of the other characters. His two friends, Bobby (an alcoholic) and Gizos, whose lie during their childhood made Charles a pariah, are not exactly paragons of virtue. I would have liked Elizabeth’s story to have been a little more fleshed out, but that is not possible since the book is told from Charles’s perspective, and he is very much in the dark about Elizabeth’s life. Charles is a good soul; he’s just not very remarkable.

ENORMOUS WINGS by Laurie Frankel

2026-09-09T03:00:00.000-07:00

A woman becoming pregnant at 77 years old seems far-fetched, but maybe it’s possible if a cancer drug she took in her forties also extended her fertility for a few more decades? Pepper finds herself in this unlikely position after becoming sexually involved with Moth, a man who lives next door to her in a senior living facility. What follows is partly a jab at anti-abortionists who won’t make an exception for a septuagenarian. Pepper makes a valid point that they are obsessed with saving the fetus’s life, whether it is viable or not outside the womb, with no consideration for the mother or even for the baby’s welfare after it is born. Except for these fanatical right-wingers and the paparazzi, the characters in this book are all good people with Pepper’s best interests at heart, especially a delightfully irreverent Episcopal priest. The big question here is whether or not Pepper will carry her baby to term, and, if she does, will mother and baby both be healthy. However, there’s one big unforeseen calamity that throws Pepper into a different sort of jam with potentially disastrous consequences. Don’t expect great literature here, but some hilarious quips are bound to elicit at least a chuckle.

BEAR by Julia Phillips

2026-09-02T03:00:00.000-07:00

Sam and her older sister, Elena, are barely scraping by on San Juan Island with their dying mother. Sam is serving coffee, soft drinks, and packaged snacks on a ferry that operates between the islands and the Pacific Northwest mainland. Elena works at the local country club and has been the primary breadwinner for years, especially during Covid, when Sam was unemployed. Sam lives for the day when they will be able to sell their rundown home, which sits on prime real estate, and move to the mainland. She basically eschews all relationships except family, while Elena secretly stews with frustration over the role she has had to assume. Then a grizzly appears at their door and terrifies both of them. However, Elena sees the bear as a welcome distraction and begins to relish additional encounters, while Sam begs her to recognize the danger. This is not just about an unhealthy infatuation with a predatory animal, since the bear’s presence drives a wedge between the sisters. The author does a great job of creating mounting suspense, as Elena becomes increasingly irrational about her enchantment with the bear, while Sam refuses to accept that her sister has gone off the deep end. Of course, the big overriding question is whether the bear will ultimately be true to his nature or continue to behave as if he were Elena’s pet.

PLAYGROUND by Richard Powers

2026-08-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

Todd and Rafi are two very smart guys who meet in high school and bond over chess. They remain very close friends in college, even after a woman enters the picture. Then their paths diverge as Todd becomes addicted to software development and later founds a social media company that incorporates an idea provided by Rafi. Todd becomes fabulously wealthy and begins developing AI, while Rafi’s great love is literature. A totally separate storyline is that of Evelyne, whose father throws her into a pool with an early aqualung prototype. This event propels her into oceanography, and her sections of the book are mind-boggling descriptions of the world that exists at the bottom of the sea. Most of the earth is water, so that we land dwellers have no concept of the vast and mostly unexplored depths of our planet. This fact is so obvious and yet so underappreciated. Anyway, the ending of this novel was so puzzling to me that I had to read some other reviews and then reread a portion of the ending. Todd provides some italicized narration addressed to an unknown entity, and I have to admit that I find italics annoying to read. However, the difference between Todd’s narrative and the narrative in normal type is important to an understanding of the novel, and I missed that distinction entirely. This book deserves a reread.

PINK SLIME by Fernanda Trias

2026-08-24T15:11:40.984-07:00

The title refers to the nickname of Meatrite, a mystery meat product that is providing sustenance to a region in the midst of a pandemic, caused by red algae on the ocean. When the wind blows, its deadly spread of the algae forces everyone to stay indoors, including the unnamed narrator who is taking care of a boy named Mauro with an eating disorder. His syndrome causes him to be eternally hungry, and the narrator cannot leave him alone, as he will eat anything he can get his hands on, including inedible items like cotton balls. Mauro’s wealthy parents leave him, along with a hefty supply of food, at the narrator’s apartment for months at a time. Although the narrator tells her mother that she plans to move to the safety of Brazil, she lingers, possibly for the sake of Mauro, possibly in order to continue to visit her ex-husband, Max, who has been exposed to the red wind but had a chronic rather than an acute fatal response to it. In fact, all three characters are lingering—Mauro in the narrator’s care, Max in the “Clinics” where he is not well enough to leave, and the narrator, who is stuck in a stasis that is not sustainable. This novel belongs to the genre now dubbed “cli-fi” for climate change fiction. Rain is non-existent, and only when the fog rolls in is it safe to be outside. Power outages are frequent, and phone service is spotty. Water doesn’t seem to be an issue, so thank heavens for that, but this is a world that is becoming uninhabitable. The fish are dead, and the birds have disappeared. This scenario does not seem that farfetched.

HOW I WON A NOBEL PRIZE by Julius Taranto

2026-08-23T15:35:40.243-07:00

The Rubin Institute is a haven for researchers, scientists, and professors with skeletons in their closets. Helen, a very talented physicist whose specialty if superconductivity, does not have a sketchy past, but her mentor/collaborator is now a persona non grata as far as Cornell is concerned. In order to continue her research, she and her husband, Hew, relocate to the island where the Institute is located. Hew’s liberal political slant makes this move really distasteful for him, and his and Helen’s marriage becomes somewhat rocky. Helen suspects him of having an affair with a woman who was raped by one of the Institute’s residents, while she contemplates her own affair with her father’s favorite author. I am not a physics person, and I found that the narrative having to do with Helen’s work was way over my head, but I learned something in the process. I enjoyed the marital strife aspect of this book as well, since I could definitely see both sides of their argument. Hew thinks that Helen should be more appalled about the crimes that the Institute’s residents have committed, whereas Helen contends that she really cannot do anything about it. In any case, the concept of banishing misbehaving intellectuals to an island where they can continue to be productive without being policed or held accountable is intriguing but also alarming.

BURN by Peter Heller

2026-08-19T03:00:00.000-07:00

Jess and Storey, both in their thirties and best friends since childhood, are hunting moose in Maine when they start encountering town after town that has been burned to a crisp. Their own lives are obviously in danger as they gather snippets of information, from a Canadian radio station no less, about what is going on. Soon their duo becomes a threesome, and Jess finds that his primary reason to survive is to protect Storey and Collie and get them all to a safe haven. Fortunately, Jess and Storey are rational, resourceful, and compassionate, but when both factions in a civil war are unwilling to negotiate with strangers, self-preservation becomes their number one objective. Interleaved within this tale is Jess’s backstory, particularly his relationship with Storey’s family, including an incident that he has never had the courage to share with Storey. Given that they may not make it home from this trip, Jess is not sure that he wants to carry this burden to his grave, but Storey, too, has secrets of his own. Their life-and-death journey, however, is the main reason to turn the pages. No one writes a better adventure thriller than Peter Heller, and this novel is no exception.

THE LAST RANGER by Peter Heller

2026-08-18T14:01:18.940-07:00

Ren Hopper is a Yellowstone enforcement ranger with lots of heroic skills and lots of regrets. He couldn’t prevent his wife’s suicide nor his mother’s alcoholism, and he may have ruined the life of a grieving young man. The main villain here, though, and the object of Ren’s constant ire, is humanity in general, who largely have no respect for wild animals. They are either hunting them for their pelts or putting themselves in danger for a photo op with a predator. Ren does what he can to rescue these latter foolish ones, despite wishing he could just leave them to a grisly fate, but the poachers are a threat to animals of both the two-legged and four-legged variety. Heller’s The Guide is a better thriller, but this book has more heart and soul, as Ren has to consider the motivations of hunters and vandals before he throws the book at them. He also has to outsmart them by being one step ahead of them, and that’s sometimes a tall order. The author may wax eloquent a little too often about the natural beauty of Montana, but these moments of serenity are an occasional respite from the many emergencies Ren has to address. However, it’s Ren’s vacillation between compassion and rage that makes his story so gripping.

THE GUIDE by Peter Heller

2026-08-17T14:37:37.679-07:00

Twenty-five-year-old Jack is still grieving the death of this best friend when he accepts a job as a fishing guide at a VIP resort. His first client is a famous singer named Alison, although he has never heard of her. Soon they become wary of the whole operation, as some of the other clients are not fishing and come to breakfast looking pale and unhealthy, as opposed to how normal they looked the day before. Spa treatments don’t usually have such a negative effect. Alison and Jack team up to discover what is going on behind the scenes, particularly at a compound next door whose owner fires shots at trespassers. Clues abound, and we readers may catch on a little sooner than Jack and Alison do, but once they start stirring the pot, mayhem erupts. This book is a fast read, particularly since it is difficult to put down and not particularly intricately plotted. I love Peter Heller thrillers, and this one is no exception, even when he waxes poetic about his love of nature. I particularly enjoyed the dynamic between Jack and Alison and her ability to hold her own when the going gets tough. She’s not too shabby with a fly rod, either, so that Jack admires her for all of the above. She also has a pretty good voice, which Jack barely gets the opportunity to enjoy, what with all the other excitement.

THE ORCHARD by Peter Heller

2026-08-16T14:55:21.853-07:00

This is my least favorite Peter Heller book, and it is not his usual adventure story. In fact, it seems to be three characters in search of a plot, plus a slew of Chinese poetry. This is just not my thing, although I love Heller’s writing style and his three lovable characters here, unencumbered by a storyline. Frith and her mother, Hayley, have decamped to a remote Vermont cabin to live off the land and off the grid, although Hayley still translates ancient Chinese poetry as a side hustle to bring in some real money. Otherwise, they are struggling to make ends meet by selling apples and maple syrup. Rosie, a neighbor with a phone and the usual conveniences, becomes a welcome fixture at the cabin and sort of an adopted family member. Firth narrates this story from her adult perspective as she reflects on her unconventional childhood. I kept waiting for something to blow up this idyll, but what finally happens, although fairly monumental, isn’t sudden or unanticipated and doesn’t really disrupt the calm atmosphere of the novel to a significant degree. I just needed more—a jolt of some sort or a trajectory toward something unexpected.

THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES by Julia Alvarez

2026-08-11T15:14:47.402-07:00

Alma Cruz has enjoyed a successful literary career in the U.S., but now she has inherited a piece of land in her homeland—the Dominican Republic. She returns there with plans to create a cemetery for all of her unfinished stories, and she literally buries the manuscripts. However, these stories, particularly the ones about her father and about Bienvenida Trujillo, refuse to be silent. Alma hires a neighbor woman, Filomena, as caretaker and as a listener for the buried stories, which are narrated in this novel alongside those of Alma and Filomena. I guess this is OK as far as magical realism goes, but it didn’t quite work for me. Bienvenida Trujillo was the ex-wife of the murderous Dominican dictator, and apparently there is scant info about her life after the marriage ended. Alvarez paints a complete but obviously somewhat fictional portrait of her that is one of the highlights of the novel, possibly second only to Filomena’s backstory. Also, there’s a possible link between Filomena and one of the storytellers, but we never find out for sure. That connection was the nugget that held my attention through the latter part of the book, but the author just left me hanging. Afterlife is still my favorite Alvarez novel, by far.