Review: Where Waters Meet by Zhang Ling

Mothers and daughters are a special relationship. But what daughter can fully know who her mother was before she became a mother? This lack of knowledge is complicated even more when the mother doesn't share her past, keeping secrets from her daughter. Zhang Ling's newest novel, Where Waters Meet, explores a daughter's search for her late mother's past, a search that will change her view of her mother and alter herself in the process.

Phoenix's mother Chunya "Rain," has passed away unexpectedly at the age of 83. Rain has lived with Phoenix for her whole life, even after Phoenix married, and her death has devastated her daughter. After discovering her mother's memory box, brought with her from China to Canada, Phoenix has more questions than answers about her mother's life, especially since Rain had been suffering from dementia for the last several years. Reaching out to her Auntie Mei in China, she is told that the stories must be told in person. With her easy-going husband's blessing, she flies over to China to uncover the missing pieces that shaped her mother.

The novel is told in several different formats: third person narration in the present, Phoenix's emails home to George once she lands in China, and a manuscript that Phoenix is writing about her mother but written as if it is Rain's memoir. The story of Rain's life is full of hardship and tragedy, running as it does through the Sino-Japanese War, WWII, and the Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists. Each time something seems to be looking up, history flip flops and there are additional horrors to live with and through. Ling has seamlessly woven the twentieth century history of China into Rain's life, exposing the horrors perpetrated on the common people. The leaps into the past are not handled chronologically as Auntie Mei recounts things out of order to Phoenix, not only leaving room for additional information to come later but making the story turn back on itself, winding along, much as a river meanders through a landscape. This can come across as a bit disjointed to the reader but works with the nature of memory and a long gone past. Phoenix's desire to know her mother's past and what she learns remakes her own memory of her early life in China, changing her perception of her mother from a woman who coasted along relying on others to a strong woman taking charge when she could and making decisions for Phoenix's future over her own. The ending of the novel is quite abrupt and unsatisfying after everything that went before, but over all, the novel combines an intriguing premise with history that we don't often read about in the West. It's a novel of loss and resilience, relationships, secrets and truth, wrapped up in a family saga complicated by history.

Review: The Family Fortuna by Lindsay Eagar

I've never really been a fan of circuses, real or imagined. I definitely don't search them out in my reading but so many people love books about them that I keep trying them despite knowing that they are likely to be a miss for me. Unfortunately, that is the case here. I found Lindsay Eagar's The Family Fortuna slightly off-kilter, slightly disturbing, and honestly, slightly boring.

The Family Fortuna is a traveling circus that travels the West. Arturo Fortuna is the patriarch of the family and ringmaster but youngest daughter, Avita, is the headliner and star of the entire spectacle. She is a monstrous, feathered and beaked girl whose snarling, chicken slaughtering show terrifies and thrills and rakes in money. She delights in being able to inspire fear, horror, and nightmares until she sees a young man who does not gasp at her theatrics. He is an artist and he might just see her inner person, beyond the freak of circus hype, so she helps him get a commission to paint new posters for the show. She is convinced he will expose the truth of her humanity. What he shows her is other people's perception of her, which pushes her to find a way to become the person she wants to be, all while there are crises, large and small, financial and personal, brewing in the circus as a whole.

This YA novel is incredibly character driven, to the point that it is almost plotless. Avita and her search for freedom and an authentic sense of self are the main focus. There are occasional shifts to other characters, emotionally abusive, narcissistic father Arturo; long-suffering, superstitious and religious Mama; older sister Luna, who is the silvery, stunning goddess who rules over the kootchy girl tent; and older brother Ren, who is a little person (non-performing) and the circus' frugal accountant. The chapters from the other characters are so few in number that they seem like interruptions to the story and don't truly serve to fully flesh those characters out. There is an antique feel to the whole story, and a feeling that the reader shouldn't look beyond the illusions or too closely at the peeling paint in the shadows here. The writing is filled with florid descriptions, similes, and metaphors in the way that a circus barker or ringmaster might exaggerate in their patter but it comes off as slightly ridiculous and strange on the page. Those who enjoy circus-set stories might like this overly long novel far better than I did; I just wasn't drawn into the grotesquerie.

Review: Meredith, Alone by Claire Alexander

What do we need to have full lives? Do we need other people? Can we find contentment in isolation? Meredith Maggs, the main character in Claire Alexander's debut novel, Meredith, Alone, isn't too sure of the answers to these questions as she tries to figure out how to live her life, to expand it, and to take care of herself at the same time.

Meredith hasn't left her house in over three years. This is not a COVID story. It talkes place in 2018-2019. Meredith used to leave her house but now she cannot bring herself to go outside. She lives alone with only her rescue cat Fred for company. The only people she sees in person are her best friend and her friend's children when they come to visit her every week and the grocery delivery boy. All of her other interactions are online: her therapist and a chat support group. Even her work is remote, allowing her to cocoon herself away and not confront the trauma that keeps her prisoner in her home. But she wants to try to take baby steps back into the world, to make connections, as evidenced by Meredith allowing Tom, a volunteer with Helping Hands, to come into her house, work on her jigsaw puzzles with her, and get her to open up the tiniest bit. It is also evidenced by her growing online friendship with Celeste, a woman she meets through her chat support group and to whom she herself is a great support. Meredith alone can find the courage to brave the outside world but Meredith is not alone in any sense of the word as she faces her past and her fears.

Chapters are headed with a tally of the number of days Meredith has stayed in her home in the present or with a year from the past. The present moves linearly but flashes from varying times in the past are inserted in between the present chapters, slowly revealing what has made Meredith panic at the thought of the outside world. The pacing of the whole book is deliberately slow, mirroring Meredith's stuttering progress, panicked setbacks, and determined resets. Meredith as a character is endearing and the more the reader learns about her, the more her kind heart shines through. Alexander does not minimize mental health issues here, nor does she make them disappear unrealistically. Instead she has created a heartwarming, hopeful story about the people who have your back no matter what, who push you just enough to be helpful and supportive. As Meredith faces her demons, readers will cheer for her healing.

Content warnings for sexual assault and child abuse.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

The Future Future by
Adam Thirlwell.
The book is being released by FSG on October 17, 2023.

The book's jacket copy says: A wild story of female friendship, language, and power, from France to colonial America to the moon, from 1775 to this very moment: a historical novel like no other.

It's the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. And meanwhile men are inventing stories about her--about her aff airs, her sexuality, her orgies and addictions. All these stories are lies, but the public loves them and spreads them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in society.

This is a world of decadence and saturation, of lavish parties and private salons, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. It's also one ruled by men--high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, crimes against women, and, above all, language. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth, and beauty.

Fantastical, funny, and blindingly bright, Adam Thirlwell's The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

The Woman at the Wheel by
Penny Haw.
The book is being released by Sourcebooks Landmark on October 3, 2023.

The book's jacket copy says: Inspiring historical fiction based on the real life of Bertha Benz, whose husband built the first prototype automobile, which eventually evolved into the Mercedes-Benz marque.

"Unfortunately, only a girl again."

From a young age, Cäcilie Bertha Ringer is fascinated by her father's work as a master builder in Pforzheim, Germany. But those five words, which he wrote next to her name in the family Bible, haunt Bertha.

Years later, Bertha meets Carl Benz and falls in love--with him and his extraordinary dream of building a horseless carriage. Bertha has such faith in him that she invests her dowry in his plans, a dicey move since they alone believe in the machine. When Carl's partners threaten to withdraw their support, he's ready to cut ties. Bertha knows the decision would ruin everything. Ignoring the cynics, she takes matters into her own hands, secretly planning a scheme that will either hasten the family's passage to absolute derision or prove their genius. What Bertha doesn't know is that Carl is on the cusp of making a deal with their nemesis. She's not only risking her marriage and their life's work, but is also up against the patriarchy, Carl's own self-doubt, and the clock.

Like so many other women, Bertha lived largely in her husband's shadow, but her contributions are now celebrated in this inspiring story of perseverance, resilience, and love.

Review: Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge by Helen Ellis

Helen Ellis is pretty reliable for the reader looking for light and oftentimes relatable humor. She is the person who you'd like to have as a friend because her filter is a little askew but not malicious. I've read a collection of her quite entertaining, definitely offbeat short stories (American Housewife) and several of her generally enjoyable essay collections (Southern Lady Code is my pick for the best) so I was looking forward to Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge: Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage.

These short essays, many of which are a result of settling into her NYC apartment with Lex, her husband of twenty years, during the pandemic, are mildly humorous but not quite as laugh out loud funny as I'd hoped, maybe because I'm the long time inhabitant of a similar marriage. Ellis is quite candid about her life with her husband and pokes fun at him and, more often, at herself throughout the collection. Her gentle hyperbole makes for heartwarming and appealing storytelling. She's quirky, finding humor in the mundane, and looking at things just a bit slant, writing about her husband's (and her friends' husbands) snoring and all the failed solutions for it, learning to tend plants and turning their apartment into a jungle during the pandemic, her particular and exacting instructions for their cat sitter, using stickers--which she adores--to commemorate her sex life with her husband, her views on death, and more.

There is much to enjoy here and it is a quick read but ultimately it didn't make me laugh out loud and I forgot a lot of it as soon as I closed the book. To be fair, this might be because I come from a family filled with our own brand of crazy (for instance, my youngest once told me that when he was home alone every sound was a serial killer, and his ever empathetic sister questioned why it had to be a serial killer since they only had to kill him, we claim gifts and other items of interest belonging to others by asking if we can have whatever it is on that person's "last day," and like Ellis, my parents have debated who can be trusted to be their "plug-puller" at the end of life--spoiler, it's not my sister or me but our husbands, which probably tells you more than you need to know about us, and my father has requested that his ashes be spread over the ever malfunctioning septic field because he's spent so much time up to his knees in it in life that he might as well spend eternity there too) so Ellis and her friends and family's brand of crazy is less entertaining kookiness and more just everyday, normal daily life to me. Most people think she and this book are outrageously funny. Me? I think she's moderately amusing in this collection and wonder (not really) if we're distant branches on the same, not right family tree. That said, most readers will get a lot of chuckles out of this light and easy read.

Waiting on Wednesday

This meme was hosted by Breaking the Spine and is meant to highlight some great pre-publication books we all can't wait to get our grubby little mitts on. I'm choosing to continue the tradition even though she has stopped.

All You Have to Do Is Call by
Kerri Maher.
The book is being released by Berkley Books on September 19, 2023.

The book's jacket copy says: Chicago, early 1970s Who does a woman call when she needs help? Jane.

The best-known secret in the city, Jane is an underground women's health organization composed entirely of women helping women, empowering them to live lives free from the expectations of society by offering reproductive counseling and safe, illegal abortions. Veronica, Jane's founder, prides herself on the services she has provided to thousands of women, yet the price of others' freedom is that she leads a double life. When she's not at Jane, Veronica plays the role of a conventional housewife--which becomes even more difficult during her own high-risk pregnancy.

Two more women in Veronica's neighborhood are grappling with similar disconnects. Margaret, a young professor at the University of Chicago, secretly volunteers at Jane as she falls in love with a man whose attitude toward his ex-wife increasingly disturbs her. Patty, who's long been content as a devoted wife and mother, has begun to sense that something essential is missing from her life. When her runaway younger sister Eliza shows up unexpectedly, Patty is forced to come to terms with what it really means to love and support a sister.

In this historic moment when the personal was nothing if not political, when television, movies, and commercials told women they'd "come a long way, baby," Veronica, Margaret, and Patty must make choices that will change the course of their lives forever.