Review: My Year of Running Dangerously by Tom Foreman

I started running when I was 36. I ran consistently for about two years and then I slowly stopped running, getting consumed by the demands of raising three children. I only started running again at the age of 52. That 14-year gap turned out to be a big one and coming back to a sport I'd only ever been thoroughly mediocre at was decidedly not easy. But it's been rewarding. So, when I saw Tom Foreman's memoir, My Year of Running Dangerously: A Dad, a Daughter, and a Ridiculous Plan, I was curious to see how his journey paralleled mine. It diverged in many ways but in the ways that matter, it felt similar and made me smile.

Foreman is an Emmy winning CNN Correspondent whose daughter asked him to run a marathon with her. Well into middle-age, he hadn't run since school, although he had been a pretty accomplished runner back then. As parents do, when your child invites you to participate in their life, you jump in with both feet, happy for the connection this gives you. Foreman has to carve out training time around his busy career, checking in with his daughter away at college, sharing the joys and agonies of training for a marathon. And in doing this, he rediscovers his love for running, continuing to run long after his shared marathon is over. In fact, he then moves on to train for an ultramarathon (a race beyond the 26.2 mile marathon distance and often run on trails of varying degrees of difficulty). The book captures the vagaries of training, how aging affects a runner's body, the overwhelming time commitment required to run these long races, and it does it all with humor. The portions around Foreman's daughter's request to her dad and their shared race are just the hook of the story and they end earlier in the book than might be expected given the subtitle, but Foreman's writing is engaging enough to keep readers going. Training can be (and is) monotonous and repetitive but there are enough differences on each run to make reading about his long runs and the running life he is living fun. Foreman is honest about all aspects of endurance running (my own running partners are probably very tired of my dissertations on poop), from the physical to the emotional, and while I can't know if he's convinced anyone to try this crazy sport, I can say that he certainly kept the attention of this late middle-aged runner who has only just begun to dip her toe into the ultra world. If you're a runner, you'll probably enjoy this, even if you have no intentions of ever running an ultra, and if you're not a runner, it's a revealing look into the life and mind that drives one such man.

Review: Going Zero by Anthony McCarten

Thrillers are generally too thrilling for me but I have a really hard time giving books as Christmas presents without checking them out myself so if I think there's any chance I can safely read a book (I'm a coward who suffers from nightmares so the bar is fairly high--or is it low?), I will before I gift it. Anthony McCarten's Going Zero sounded thrilling but not over the top scary thrilling so I decided to risk it. And let me tell you, it was an adrenaline ride but it turned out to be terrifying and makes me want to move into the woods far from any technology (including this computer)! I think my son will love it for sure.

The government and a tech company have teamed up to beta test some incredibly sophisticated spyware called Fusion. They've recruited 10 people, 5 cyber security experts and 5 regular citizens, to try and go off the grid, to evade capture for 30 days. If the Fusion team captures all 10 people in that 30 days, the CIA will partner with them on bringing this technology into the government's surveillance arsenal. If the recruits stay at large, they will receive $3 million untaxed dollars. Tech founder Cy Baxter has a very personal reason for wanting to prove his technology will work and he's excited to show off all it can do in preventing criminals from hiding and perpetrating their evil, certain that the advanced surveillance and intrusions into citizens' private lives is both worth the cost to freedom that might occur and that the new lack of privacy will not actually be lamented by anyone. Boston librarian Kaitlyn Day is one of the regular people recruited to "go zero." Once the project is underway, she and her nine fellow subjects have a two-hour head start to disappear off the grid before the Fusion people start tracking them. In theory she should be one of the first, if not the first person picked up. But Kaitlyn has far more riding on staying at liberty than anyone, including the reader, knows. Thus commences a very high-tech cat and mouse game.

This is a work of fiction. (Maybe.) The amount of tracking that a tech company can already do on everyday people (do you carry a cell phone with you, do you shop in stores with theft prevention videos, do you drive down roads with traffic cameras, and more) is complex enough but what McCarten has described here goes beyond that without ever straying out of a very believable realm. And that is truly terrifying. The story is more than just the chase though, eventually delving into Kaitlyn's reason for joining the test, Baxter and his partner/girlfriend's reason for developing Fusion in the first place, the perils and pitfalls that such extensive, personal information would give the government, not to mention a private company, and into Baxter's very character and moral code. Are we going to surveil our own citizens like Russia and China? Are we already doing so without civilian knowledge? What do we have to lose or gain from such? This novel asks those questions within the framework of a very suspenseful story. Kaitlyn remains an enigma for a much longer time in the novel than Cy does and while the other characters, both the others "gone zero" and the government and Fusion employees, in the novel provide interesting side notes, none of them are dwelt on for very long. The book is fast-paced and a one sitting read and it will certainly make you reconsider the vast amounts of personal information you willingly hand over to the government and private entities daily even as you wonder what they've collected that you haven't consented to. Recommended for thriller readers and others who are willing to sacrifice some sleep over the scary implications for our own world.

Review: Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser

We all know the Cinderella fairy tale, the Disney version if not the Grimm’s version. So, we all know that Cinderella's stepmother is a monster, her stepsisters are spoiled and hateful, and that she is only rescued from her life of servitude by her Prince Charming. But that story is wholly from Cinderella's perspective. What if her stepmother had a chance to tell her side of things, reaching all the way back to her own childhood and to the series of life decisions that brought her to marry Cinderella's father. What if she wasn't a monster? Rachel Hochhauser's enchanting novel, Lady Tremaine, takes this very premise and not only makes it come to life, it also takes the Prince Charming and "happily ever after" ending and turns it on its head in surprising and satisfying ways.

Lady Ethelreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley is out hawking on royal lands to try and find game so that she, her two daughters, and her stepdaughter Elin will have a meager portion of meat in their stew. Surprised at this illegal endeavor by a stranger, she hies back to the once gracious home, now crumbling, where she and her daughters try to maintain appearances. Advantageous marriages are the only things that offer them any hope of rising out of the poverty into which they've sunk since Ethel's second husband died. Once at home, she discovers a royal messenger delivering an invitation to a ball designed to find the Prince a wife. The invitation is only for her stepdaughter Elin though, not Ethel's own daughters, a circumstance that she must remedy. The only way to get her daughters included will force her to come face to face with her past and ultimately to confront what her stepdaughter means to her.

These are not the familiar characters from the fairy tale. Ethel is not perfect, nor does she attempt to whitewash her mistakes, her occasional pettiness, or her pride. She does, however, offer explanations for her decisions, understanding that sometimes women don't have a good choice in front of them, they just have to choose survival, whatever that looks like. Elin, the Cinderella character, is sheltered and adored by her father and even after his death, she has no desire to see that stepmother Ethel's requests reflect their straitened circumstances and the reality of an all-female household without male protectors. She spends her days spouting platitudes she's read in a book from her late mother's collection and generally wafting about without contributing to the family. She is naive and innocent but also infuriating and willfully blind. And she has never allowed Ethel to forge much of a relationship with her, keeping her at arm's length. Ethel's daughters, Rosamund and Mathilde, understand the reality of their lives and pitch in as they can with the skills that gently bred young ladies possess. They are normal girls though, sometimes resentful of Elin's ability to rise above or ignore requests and angry that she is allowed to get away with such behavior. When Elin captures the attention of the handsome Prince at the ball, it seems as if the Bramley family's lives will change significantly for the better, even if not through the daughter that Ethel would have chosen, but just as the women's characters are different from the fairy tale, so too is the Prince's. So the story is far from over.

This is a completely engrossing tale centered less on "happily ever after" than on the demands that society makes of women, the social strictures that handcuff them, and the ways that they must make their own lives and rescue themselves. Hochhauser's writing shines in this reimagining. Ethelreda is recast from one-dimensional villain to a fully realized, flawed but fierce and human character. The twists and turns of the plot elevate this far above a simple morality tale. Ethel's primal mother-love for her daughters drives her actions at every turn. Her desire to protect them, to ensure their futures, to grant them the happiness that was so fleeting in her own life is absolutely uncompromising. This may have started out as a Cinderella retelling, but it ended up a tale of resilience, determination, and family with a surprising villain. Lady Tremaine is dark, twisty, and compelling in the best possible way.

Review: Prom and Prejudice by Elizabeth Eulberg

While my now adult daughter was culling her bookshelves at my house, she put this one in the giveaway pile. Now, there was no way I could part with a Pride and Prejudice retelling without first reading it myself. I do love Pride and Prejudice like every other white girl English major in history and while this was cute enough, it didn't have the bite of the original to elevate it beyond simply rehashing the story.

Lizzie Bennet is a junior at the very exclusive Longbourn Academy, a boarding and finishing school for girls in Connecticut. She is a gifted pianist and it is this talent that won her a scholarship to Longbourn. The other students are awful, ultra-rich, entitled little snots, with the exception of her genuinely sweet and kind roommate Jane Netherfield and the other scholarship student, Charlotte Lucas. Lizzie endures brutal bullying (for instance, someone throws a milkshake on her simply because she is "poor" and she has her non-designer label winter coat stolen at a party, among other incidents) but she endures because this school is the place for her to be to further her musical education and eventually pursue a musical career. When the book opens, Lizzie is headed back to school for second semester, the semester where all of the girls are eagerly anticipating the spring prom, the biggest, most important social event on the Longbourn calendar. Jane is excited because Charles Bingley is back at Pemberley Academy, the boy's school, after a semester in London. With him is his standoffish friend Will Darcy. From there, if you know the original, you know the story.

Eulberg has stayed incredibly faithful to Austen and in this case a few deviations might have added a bit to the story. The character development relies entirely on the reader knowing the original novel, the dialogue can feel stilted and unrealistic for teenagers in the 2000s, and occasionally it has to try quite hard to bend a modern day story starring teenagers to the plot of the original (hence the idea that a few deviations might have been to its benefit). It's kind of cute and fluffy but, in the end, rather flat, lacking all of the nuance that makes Austen sing.

Review: A Good Animal by Sara Maurer

Sault Ste. Marie, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, is probably best known for the Locks, which allow freighters to move from Lake Huron to Lake Superior and vice versa. And while much of its economy does revolve around shipping and the lakes (and the tourism the latter brings in), it is also surrounded by vast tracts of farmland, so a good portion of its population works the land rather than plying the waves. I have spent every summer of my entire life not too far from the Soo so finding a book set in a place I know so well was a nice surprise and I happily chose it for my summer book club. While we are all more attuned to life on the water than farm life, we all appreciated this debut novel and the way that it captured the heart and soul of the people of the area.

Everett is seventeen and heading into his senior year of high school. He wants to follow his father into sheep farming. It is just who he is, without question. Despite the toughness of the life, he is eager to earn enough money to start his own herd and make his own decisions about the sheep. His pay from summer haying and his winnings from the county fair should enable him to finally do so. His dreams are sent a bit sideways though, first when his sister discovers that her pet show sheep is destined to be slaughtered for meat unless Everett buys it for her, and second when a new girl, Mary, moves into town with her Coast Guard father. Mary has no intention of putting any roots down in Sault Ste. Marie and Everett can't imagine himself living anywhere else. Being teenagers, their being at odds about what life looks like after graduation will become a problem for future them as they live completely in the present.

Maurer has created a book that captures the UP and the people living in it beautifully. Yoopers really are their own unique people and this novel displays them sympathetically and honestly. It's a well wrought coming of age novel, a heartbreaking tale of first love. Hard life lessons, mistakes, and a very tough ending that comes slightly too quickly, although not unexpectedly, are realistic. There is no doubt that Everett, who narrates the novel, is firmly of the soil where he was born. He is sweet and empathetic but quiet and reserved, unused to sharing his feelings out loud. That he can't imagine Mary wanting something different from what he wants and that they don't discuss most of the decisions they do make, marks him very definitely as a teenage boy, still learning about life while trying to make very adult decisions. He sees his own parents' loving marriage and imagines he will have something similar with Mary, without truly understanding everything his parents had to overcome and do to make the contented life they have. Mary, who is only seen through Everett's eyes and so is more inscrutable, is biding her time until she can leave her apathetic father and this small Midwest town although she cannot help but be drawn to Everett, who loves with his whole heart, even as everything about his farming life bothers her. The farm life itself, with all of its brutal realities (there are some gruesome scenes of death), is carefully drawn in its totality. The writing is descriptive and vivid. There is a sadness and a hearkening back to the past that weaves through now adult Everett's recounting of 1995-96, the telling of a year that shaped him forever. If an abundance of farming details don't bother you as a reader, this deliberate and heartbreaking tale of growing up and becoming an adult, with all the joys and diappointments attendant on that growth, is worth the read.

Review: Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

This book has been on the best seller list (or lists) for about a thousand years now. I had no intention of reading it, even when people I knew started gushing about it. It just didn't really appeal to me. And then my book club chose it so I was obligated to read it. I really wish they hadn't because my instinct about how I'd feel about it was spot on. I hated it. I'm so baffled by what others see in it and am sorry I spent precious reading hours on this "emperor has no clothes" book.

An elderly man named Theo arrives in a smallish southern city called Golden. He offers no reason for coming to this place, doesn't give his last name or any information on who he is, but he settles into the town quietly, staking out a favorite park bench and frequenting the local coffeehouse. When he sees a series of pencil portraits of local people for sale on the walls of the coffeehouse, he decides that he will buy them and gift them to the people who are the subjects of each one. As he gives the portraits to the people, he learns about them and their lives, he eventually connects with the artist, and he ingratiates himself in the daily life of the town folks, like the bookseller and the man from whom he rents his apartment (and who is the only person with whom Theo shares his identity and his reason for being in Golden).

The premise sounds heartwarming enough but the execution moves beyond heartwarming and straight to saccharine treacle. Every person this genial old man gives a portrait to instantly offers him their innermost thoughts and feelings, telling him personal and private information about their lives without reservation. The only person who doesn't happily accept the gift is a woman whose abusive boyfriend intercepts the letter and the portrait. The instant acceptance and lack of skepticism about this man, and the immediate opening up of the recipients strains credulity more than a little. The characters Theo meets are all simple, uncomplicated, and flat, caricatures rather than complex human beings. His secret is telegraphed long before the end of the book, making the revelation anticlimactic. The tales of the portrait people went on far too long, making this reader incredibly tired of the boring inhabitants of Golden. The writing was overly descriptive, to the point of being florid, and repetitious. OK, we've got it, there are ninety-two portraits. You don't have to keep repeating this fact. (But there actually aren't only ninety-two as Asher, the artist, replaces the portraits with others as they sell to Theo.) There is a lot of heavy-handed Christian theology in here as well, despite no mention of this in the blurb, which seems dishonest in the marketing of the book (and the author had a large hand in the choice of marketing so this can be laid at his feet rather than the publisher's). The Theo character is alternately presented as a Jesus figure and as a saintly disciple, neither of which felt comfortable even in an obvious parable such as is presented here. There is only the slightest hint of a plot with the bulk of the book being long philosophical, Christian-coded conversations between Theo and the people to whom he's giving the portraits. In the end, the only thing I liked about this book was that other people (including my entire book club) liked it and felt that it offered them hope for the future (I don't see it, but this is what they told me). As for the book itself, it was poorly written, one dimensional, and far, far, far too long. I cannot recommend it.

Review: Good People by Patmeena Sabit

This is one of those books that's hard to talk about. Yes, the subject matter is tough. Yes, it asks the reader to do some thoughtful work. But mostly it's hard because so much of what you could say would give too much away. It is a great book to discuss with others who have read it, to compare impressions on, to examine deeply in community; and it is absolutely worth doing this with. Sabit has written a masterful novel that I want to talk to everyone about.

The Sharaf family immigrated to Northern Virginia from Afghanistan. Father Rahmat worked incredibly hard and became very successful financially. Father, mother, and four children (two older and two younger) tried to abide by the expectations of their Afghan Muslim community while striving for the American Dream. Oldest daughter Zorah, in particular, appeared to be the embodiment of what they could achieve in this country, until something went wrong.

The novel is told in a sort of Greek chorus of narrators, short interviews with people who knew (or didn't) members of the Sharaf family. Community members, family friends, school friends, a lawyer, law enforcement, the media, neighbors who didn't really interact with the Sharafs, and more form the core of the story and shape the reader's perceptions of who the family was and what they would be capable of. Notably, the voices the reader doesn't hear from are the Sharafs themselves. Everything in the book is speculation or opinion, based sometimes more and sometimes less on facts. Certain of the interviewees are supportive of the family and then later in the telling, their telling changes tenor. Everyone speaking about the family comes to the situation with their own perspective, their own axes to grind, their own jealousies, their own misunderstandings, their own moral stances, and their own prejudices. And still, with all the tellings but without the Sharafs, the complete truth of what happened remains undiscoverable.

Sabit has written a completely engrossing novel, one that forces us as readers to look at our own previously unexamined prejudices, to consider how we make decisions, what are our preconceived assumptions and whether they are open to change, and how much indisputable information do we require, especially in this climate of viral social media and rampant misinformation, before we pass judgment. This is a novel about the power of public perception, both within the community (are the Sharafs "good Muslims") and in the greater American society. Were the Sharafs too American? Were they not American enough? And who gets to decide? The slow doling out of information and the rising tension of what happened and how the larger public responds to it is presented incredibly skillfully as readers confront the role that racism and identity play in the coverage they are reading, especially as this is the only information from which they as readers can determine the truth. The chapters are short and the pages turn quickly as the reader races to try and discover first the terrible thing that has happened and then the truth of that occurrence. Too much reading about the book will spoil the effect of the sparingly doled out information so I implore you not to research this book very much. Just read it blind. Gulp it down. And then try to reconcile your opinion of the truth with *all* of the facts presented. I'm here if you want to talk about it once you turn the last page.