The Night Watchman
Louise Erdrich

I’ve been SO excited that this book is a Pulitzer winner! I’ve also been anxious to discuss a Louise Erdrich book with the Beagle Women’s book group! I admit, when I started reading The Night Watchman, it took me a bit to get into the story—I think because the cast of characters is so big. It was well worth sticking with and I’m SO glad I did! This has been one of my favorite reads this year. Louise Erdrich’s grandfather was a night watchman (which is exactly what it sounds like…basically, a guard) as well as a local/tribal political figure. During his lifetime, he was instrumental in squashing the United States’ intent to eliminate his tribe. The Night Watchman is a novel that is based during and around that history in the 1950s. While much of the novel is based on historical fact, the author fleshes out the community with great characters. One in particular is Patrice (who would rather not be called Pixie anymore thank you very much), a young woman who is working at a local factory. When her sister goes missing, she goes on a harrowing adventure to track her down and bring her home. She’s also in the time of life when questions about love, romance, and sex loom large. Wood Mountain is a local boxer with a very tender heart who does what he can to help Patrice and the community. The families and friends of Patrice, Thomas the night watchman, and Wood Mountain make for a rich, interesting, complex story. I highly recommend this one!

Once There Were Wolves
Charlotte McConaghy

Inti Flynn is in Scotland to reintroduce wolves to the countryside in the hope that reforestation will follow. A simple statement but a complicated undertaking. But Inti and her twin, Aggie, are used to complicated lives. They spent their childhood shuttling between their mother, a police officer in Australia, and their father, a Canadian naturalist. Inti shares her father’s passion for the natural world. Trauma which is slowly revealed has left Aggie unable to speak, as well as suffering from severe depression.

As Inti and her team work with the wolves, they face opposition from local farmers, who fear the wolves will prey on their sheep. Inti acquires a horse, longs to rescue a woman she suspects is being battered by her husband, and in spite of herself, begins a relationship with the local police chief.

The story moves quickly and contains emotional and physical violence. It also has deep love and great tenderness. The language is beautifully lyrical. The novel has some themes in common with Migrations, McConaghy’s first book, but tells its own story—and what a story it is!

Read a Q&A with McConaghy.

Damnation Springs
Ash Davidson

OSHA was signed into law on December 29, 1970, but by 1977 it still hadn’t affected the work of loggers in redwood forests along California’s coast. Rich came from a long line of loggers and, in his early 50’s, had lived longer than any of them. He dreamed of a better life for his young son, Chub, and secretly spent the family’s savings on the down payment for tract of land with huge redwoods that he planned to harvest and use to secure his family’s future.

But life is complicated for Rich and his wife, Colleen. People in their community are just scraping by, living under the dictates of the area’s only employer, the Sanderson Timber Company.

Colleen, who desperately wanted another child, had had eight miscarriages. As a midwife, she was aware of other women in the area whose children have been born with serious birth defects.

Outsiders have begun protesting the use of herbicides by Sanderson Timber Company, which has always been considered innocuous. One of the protestors is Colleen’s old boyfriend, and his presence is disruptive both in the community and in Colleen’s marriage.

Damnation Springs is told from the perspectives of Rich, Colleen, and Chub. It portrays a community whose traditional way of life has caused great damage to the environment as well as to their own health. As that way of life is threatened, there seem to be few alternatives. The relationships of people in the community are complicated. They care for one another, but they also betray one another.

On one level, the book is a great story about people we come to care about. On another level, issues related to stewardship of the earth have only intensified in the years since the setting of the book. Read it for the story. Be challenged by the issues it raises.

Lightning Strike
William Kent Krueger

The latest book in the beloved series featuring Cork O’Connor is a prequel. In Lightning Strike, we see Cork in the summer of 1963, when he was a 12-year old boy. His life revolves around hanging out with his friends, his paper route, and working out his relationship with his dad, Liam O’Connor, the sheriff of their small town of Aurora. After Cork discovers a body hanging from a tree in an abandoned lumber camp, Liam investigates what seems to be a suicide. Cork, stunned by the death of a man he knew and respected, begins an investigation on his own. As is typical of this series, the characters are fully realized and multi-dimensional. Krueger shows us the tensions between town folk and the people living on the reservation, even between people of good will. Above all, this book sensitively captures Cork as a young adolescent—curious, passionate, caring, and still innocent in many ways. After reading Lightning Strike, you just may want to re-read the series, looking for ways the young Cork grew into the adult you’ve known for so long.

The Madness of Crowds
Louise Penny

I recently spent time with an old friend, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, and his colleagues, family, and friends in the remote village of Three Pines. It was shortly after the pandemic, and everyone was adjusting to the return to “normal” life. Normal life for Gamache involves investigating murders, and of course there was a murder to investigate. It was related to a troubling lecture by a visiting academic, espousing a divisive idea which was abhorrent to Gamache, but appealed to some people. Passions ran high on each side of the issue. But, as in every Gamache book, the investigation only provides a starting point for a character whose humanity is both deep and appealing and whose life is grounded in reflection and literature. There is also gentle humor in the book and cultural references Boomers will appreciate. No spoilers here, but if you’re already acquainted with this series, you’ll want this book. If you have yet to meet Gamache, start at the beginning with Still Life.

Owls of the Eastern Ice
Jonathan Slaght

This book is a combination of the familiar (the University of Minnesota, the Bell Museum and the Minnesota Raptor Center) and the exotic (field research into Fish Owls in eastern Russia.) The author spent parts of five years in remote areas of Russia searching for and monitoring Blakiston’s fish owls, an endangered species.

Slaght’s accounts of the birds themselves and his experiences studying them are fascinating reading. Blizzards, the dangers of the spring thaw, nearly impassable roads, rituals around the drinking of vodka, and locating fish owls in the wilderness were among the challenges he faced.

Slaght was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and his study resulted not only in a doctorate and information about the fish owl, but a conservation plan designed to protect them. The book won the Minnesota Book Award for memoir and creative non-fiction in 2021.

I listened to the book on libro.fm, and highly recommend it.

The Saint Patrick’s Day Hero
Doug Mayfield

On St. Patrick’s Day 2010, a mass shooting takes place at Lathrup College in the fictional town of Chambliss, Minnesota, killing fifty-seven people. Professor William Kessler is considered a hero and becomes a local celebrity for his actions on that day. However, William harbors a secret that leads him to reject that description.

Following the shooting, William suffers a breakdown and struggles to regain some sense of normalcy in his life. Just as things appear to be improving, William stumbles onto evidence revealing that Lathrup College is withholding information regarding the shooting and a situation that may have caused unnecessary loss of lives. He is faced with a difficult decision that will affect the lives of many.

I read The Saint Patrick’s Day Hero in record time. It is a mystery, but it is also a love story. Yes, there’s romance, but also the love of family and friends. Guilt and redemption are also key themes. As a Minnesotan, I enjoyed Mayfield’s references to familiar venues and activities. I would not hesitate to recommend this book. 

Frontier Follies:
Adventures in Marriage and Motherhood in the Middle of Nowhere
Ree Drummond

This book is full of laughs about a city girl marrying a rancher in Oklahoma. They have two girls and then two boys. Ree writes about day to day happenings and says this is both a love letter and a laugh letter. Between laundry and getting the kids to all their activities, Ree has managed to write a number of cookbooks and has a cooking show called Pioneer Woman on the Food Network. From snakes to skunks, this collection of true incidents will help you get through the dog days of summer.

Cold Betrayal
J.A. Jance

The story opens in rural Bemidji MN! Betsy, 80 plus years, lives alone with her dog Prince. One night she wakes, hearing the dog whining. Betsy discovers all the burners on the stove have been turned on. The sheriff thinks she probably has dementia. She calls her granddaughter, Athena. Athena says she'll call in Ali Reynolds to investigate. My husband recommended this mystery and I was not disappointed.

The Weight of a Piano
Chris Cander

This novel is a portrait of two different women from different times and places. Through a very beautiful piano, their lives become intertwined. The story shows how art and music can bring together those who have suffered grievous loss. Having had a piano in my life since the second grade, this story resonated with me. I loved the very satisfying ending. If you feel your reading is in a rut, try this very different and intriguing book

Parakeet
Marie-Helene Bertino

Reading this book is like looking at a surrealist painting, or maybe taking a hallucinatory drug. It opens with a bride who has come early to the hotel where she is to be married, because her husband wants her to “decompress” because “of late” she’s been a bit of a “nightmare.” (Quotation marks are from the book.) Her deceased grandmother appears in the form of a parakeet, one that shimmers and cannot fly or eat, but can offer advice and ruin the wedding gown with droppings. The novel jumps around in times and places, and the times and places do not adhere to the laws of physics. Halfway through I considered giving up following it all and almost quit reading Parakeet; three-quarters of the way through I decided to read it twice as I wanted to understand; in the end I breathed out and felt that it made its own strange sense and that I loved having read it. If you like a challenge, this one’s for you. It’s a wild ride to an ending that isn’t easy to predict but feels just right.

Turbo Twenty-Three
Janet Evanovich

This is a Stephanie Plum novel, the perfect way to cleanse your brain-palette between books like Parakeet and The History of Love. You are not required to think. Stephanie Plum and the cast of characters never change. Well, ultra-cool Cuban Ranger’s business has skyrocketed, but Stephanie’s still tempted into steamy situations with him despite her bad-boy-turned-cop boyfriend Joe. Everyone else from her hamster Rex to her ex-ho' sidekick Lula and her put-upon parents stay just as they are. There is no arc of character development. There will be light sexiness and some violence, but always mitigated by comedy like that you find in Laurel and Hardy or a roadrunner cartoon. In the first chapter of Turbo Twenty-Three Stephanie and Lula sort of stumble on a corpse: frozen and covered in chocolate and nuts.

For a good time with no challenges, pick up any Stephanie Plum from One for the Money to Look Alive Twenty-Five. I haven’t read all of them, but enough to be confident that they’re all the same, and great fun.

The History of Love
Nicole Krauss

This is a beautiful and important book, with a challenging structure. I almost gave up on it after a few chapters because I was confused, but by the end I loved it. It’s about writers and the impact their work can have. A book is written by a Jew in a Polish village just as the Nazis are taking over. The book is about his love for a girl named Alma. Decades later and half a world away, a girl named after the book’s Alma, goes searching for information because she thinks it can save her mother from life-long grieving for her lost husband. The novel skips among several characters and timelines and is all very complicated. However, in the end you are greatly rewarded when you experience the way the plot lines come together.

People of the Book
Geraldine Brooks

For those of us fascinated by the early making of books, People of the Book is a continuation of stories about these first repositories of thought, beyond that of memory. Not long ago, the act of reading and writing was seen as something near magical. We can still see vestiges of this attitude in our contemporary story telling. For instance: the frequency of a 'book of magic or spells' appearing, or the feeling that sacred texts are divinely inspired. Surrounding the creation of books there have been, and still are, customs and prohibitions.

In People of the Book, Hannah Heath is a book conservator of international reputation. She is engaged to stabilize a rare handmade Jewish Haggadah (book of prayer), unique among its kind. As Hannah works on the book, she discovers evidence of the book's history and travels over its 500+ years of existence. The book itself has changed physically with age, just as the people who came into contact with it changed. And Gentle Reader, that's an often overlooked meaning/intent of a book.....it's an 'engine of transformation' Quite magical really!

All Passion Spent
Vita Sackville-West

Henry Lyulph Holland, first Earl of Slane, is dead at the venerable age of 99 years. "Gathered to his fathers,” the papers proclaim as they recount the long list of his estimable career's accomplishments. Meanwhile, quietly, his widow sits near the foot of her husband's deathbed, casting back in her memory, over the seventy years of her married life as dutiful wife, hostess, mother, supportive spouse of her husband's career, homemaker, society's ornament, moon to her husband's brilliant shine. But now she sits determined to begin the recovery of the self-directed life she abandoned, due to the pressures of a "society marriage.” This is much to the consternation of her three children.

What stunned me most was Sackville-West's delicate understanding of Lady Slane's well-mannered determined, re-emergent self. Sackville-West (at 39 years old) astonishes the reader with a sensitive portrait of an 88 year old self-aware woman. Do you wonder how to age gracefully? Here's how it's done!

Into The Blue
Robert Goddard

Harry Mosley Barnett is the caretaker of the Villa Navarkhn, in Greece. The villa is owned by a wealthy member of Parliament, Alan Dysart. A young woman named Heather Mallender comes to stay in 1925, to recuperate from a mental breakdown. Her sister has recently been killed by mistake, in an I.R.A. bombing. Harry and Heather become friends, with maybe the hint of possible romance, so Harry thinks. While on a mountain hike, Heather disappears. How is it possible? Of course Harry is suspected, and suddenly this book becomes a Master Class in Betrayal, "which always leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.” Betrayal and the Past, "which is not only always with us, it is us, the cause and context of our every action. What we do is prompted by what we believed a minute or a year or a century ago.” I love Goddard's writing!