Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier

Recently the Beagle Women’s book group read and discussed Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. Not everyone in the group loved the book as much as I did, but wow, did I love it! Every year we choose a classic to read and this year we chose Rebecca, first published in 1938. The narrator of Rebecca is never named except as Mrs. de Winter. While working as a companion for an older woman vacationing in Monte Carolo, our narrator becomes acquainted with Maxim de Winter, a widower. Instead of departing Monte Carlo with her employer, the narrator heads for the de Winter home, named Manderly, and marries Maxim. She quickly feels inadequate in the shadow of Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca. The writing is atmospheric and the tension at the end is amazing. A number of filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, have put Rebecca on screen. Our book group had an excellent and in-depth discussion of this book.

How to Say Babylon
Safiya Sinclair

For many, reading is a way to expand their experiences and enter worlds not their own. And, oh my, does that happen with How to Say Babylon!
Many think of Montego Bay as an exotic cruise ship stop with beautiful beaches and luxurious resorts. For Safiya Sinclair, Montego Bay was where she was born and raised, and her life was a world away from its stereotype.
Her father, a reggae musician, was a strict Rastafarian who felt threatened by what he called “Babylon,” the secular world outside his home. He was particularly concerned about the purity of his daughters. He insisted they and their mother wear long skirts covering their legs, hair in dreadlocks, no jewelry or make up. While her mother lived in accordance with her husband’s dictates, she introduced her children to the worlds of nature and books.
Books, poetry, and her education eventually provided a path for Safiya to escape her stifling and patriarchal upbringing. Now a noted poet and associate professor of creative writing at Arizona State University, she has written a powerful and beautiful memoir (she is a poet, after all!)
While this book will have wide appeal, I think it will particularly touch women interested in the many forms of patriarchy and those who have successfully challenged them.

Read Ann’s review in Youth Yak.

Profiles in Ignorance
Andy Borowitz

Author Andy Borowitz, a well-established writer for New Yorker Magazine, storyteller, comedian, and first ever winner of the National Press Club’s humor award, has chronicled in this book, what appears to be an alarming slide over the precipice of ignorance by some of the country’s most prominent politicians. The author clarifies his understanding of the word “Ignorance” as it comes directly from the dictionary definition: “the lack of knowledge, education or awareness,” noting that ”Where once leaders had to hide how much they didn’t know, in the last fifty years, cluelessness has become an asset for many.”

 Borowitz divides his discussion of this phenomenon into what he terms “the Three Stages of Ignorance: Ridicule, Acceptance and Celebration,” using these categories to frame how the country arrived at the current state of apparent reverence for being ill- informed,” where ignorance has become preferable to knowledge.”

With the advent of recent candidate debates and the promise of more to come in the next year, this might be a good time to pick up this book and give it a read. While there is nothing funny about the current situation of approaching the brink of shutting down the Federal government, readers may find themselves laughing at these documented examples of political leaders from both sides of the aisle as Borowitz leads us through this examination of actual American history.

Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Incredibly lush and atmospheric, this modern novel captures the classic gothic literature aesthetic with its setting of a crumbling, moldy manor whose occupants are steeped in mystery. Noemi is a rich young woman who is plucked from her life of glamorous dresses and parties when her father forces her to visit her cousin Catalina after she sends them a frantic and confusing letter asking for help. Noemi has never been to her cousin's remote new home, called High Place, where she has lived sequestered with her in-laws ever since she wed her husband, Virgil. This manor resides in the mountains of Mexico and the misty, cool atmosphere and dankness of the house seem to have caused Catalina to grow sick with tuberculosis. Noemi wonders if there is more responsible for her cousin's withering and delirious countenance. This novel is a slow-burn where Noemi gets ample time to explore this setting, so unlike her vibrant home in the city, experience confusing dreams and bouts of sleepwalking, and try to puzzle out what is happening to her cousin and the other occupants of High Place. A perfect read for those who enjoy the works of Edgar Allan Poe and decrepit old houses that serve as a facade for long-held family secrets. I read this book feverishly over the course of two days and could not put it down. 

Mister Magic
Kiersten White

Val has lived happily on a ranch that is off grid for 30 years when the death of her father and his subsequent funeral brings old friends and their buried secrets out of the woodwork. These friends are shocked to find that Val has lost all memory of her younger years and their time together as stars of a children’s TV show called Mister Magic. Seeking answers, Val follows this group that is set to record a reunion podcast. Val learns that the show is still steeped in mystery for many of her friends, and she uncovers just as many questions as she does answers. Why are there only five members gathered now when they remember a sixth member while filming? Why can no one find any clips of this show that ran for years and which people across the internet can recall in vivid memories? Who and where is the titular character, Mister Midnight? This novel is more on the darkly whimsical, existential, and abstract side, with much of the plot serving as an allegory that you will have to read (or listen to on Libro.fm as I did) to figure out for yourself. 

The Skull
Jon Klassen

This enchantingly illustrated book is a retelling of traditional folklore that is perfect for those children (and adults) who don’t shy away from the more macabre side of fairytales. Otilla has run away from her home and winds up alone in the woods until she stumbles upon a seemingly abandoned house. The sole inhabitant turns out to be a friendly disembodied skull that greets Otilla and invites her into his home. Otilla learns that the skull is afraid of an unwelcome visitor that comes nightly, and she must use all her bravery to help save them both.

The Idiot
Elif Batuman

This quirky, funny novel is appropriate for the start of a school year. Selin, a second-generation Turkish American, is heading off to her freshman year at Harvard. She knows she will be assigned an email address but has no idea what that means. So I thought she’s an idiot who has been deprived of basic knowledge about America… but no, it’s 1995 and email is just beginning. She dives into the new medium and starts an inexplicable, intense email correspondence with the mysterious Ivan. 

Selin isn’t an idiot in any typical definition of the word. She’s taking esoteric courses at Harvard after all. But Selin has a unique way of viewing everything and everyone, including herself. She honestly answers “I don’t know” to the oddest questions. 

Skimming through the blurbs on the book, I find myself agreeing with everything. Especially this by San Franciso Chronicle: “humor so dry it calls for olives.”

Neruda on the Park
Cleyvis Natera

This novel addresses gentrification from the point of view of those frozen out of their homes. The Guerreros family came from the Dominican Republic two decades ago and has become integrated into their neighborhood. Luz, the daughter, is a young attorney on the way to the upper echelons of New York’s legal community. Her father is a cop who wants to retire back to “home” someday. But Luz’s mother wants to stop the construction of a high rise that is driving the gentrification. She becomes especially adamant about it after she suffers a fall. Her plans and her internal life are shocking. A novel for those interested in the realities of urban immigrant life.

The Bride Wore Black
Cornell Woolrich

Woolrich was a seminal figure in noir mysteries. Many of his books, including Rear Window, were made into films. The French director Truffaut filmed The Bride Wore Black.

The tone of the novel is somewhat like Maltese Falcon. The plot reminds me a bit of BBC’s Sherlock series. Spoiler alert: a man at his engagement party is murdered by a beautiful woman he’s never met, for no apparent reason. She immediately disappears. This is but the first of a series of mysterious events.

The tone is set in the dedications: “To CHULA and Remington Portable No. NC69411 in unequal parts.” The identity of CHULA is unknown, but Remington is a typewriter.

The Care and Management of Lies
Jacqueline Winspear

The story begins in England during the idyllic summer of 1914. Two young women, school friends who have just graduated from a private girls’ school, are embarking on lives seeming to sharply diverge; one girl into the politically fraught world of women's suffrage, and the wider world of social change, and the other into the more traditional role of farmer's wife. Both friends see the other's choice as somehow having missed the mark and being wrong-headed. They begin drifting apart, just as Europe itself drifts into the chaos of World War I. Preconceptions about the meaning of relationships and gut-wrenching change in the wider world are the themes Winspear explores in this well written and believable tale of maturation and resolution. No literary clichéd glitz and glamour here, but you feel able to sit at the kitchen table and have the story's life go on around you. That's a rare feeling for a reader.

Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese

When I began reading Verghese's latest novel, Covenant of Water, I was so impressed with it that I ordered Cutting for Stone, before I had even finished. In neither was I disappointed! Cutting for Stone is the epic story of two brothers born co-joined at the skull. They were the children of an English surgeon and an Indian nurse, both serving in an Ethiopian charity hospital in the 1950s. Ethiopia is a country often mentioned throughout history, but about which very little seems to be known. Most of the images I have of Ethiopia are of starved women and children, or more recently, pirates. I was pleased to get an overview of some Ethiopian history as context. You'll also learn a good deal about hospitals, and the politics and economics of running them, both in the third world, as well as here in the U.S. All of this, in addition to some exceptional storytelling, as well as really fine writing.