Tag Archives: book review

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

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I decided to go ahead and read Heaven by Mieko Kawakami this summer while I was at it, and, wow, this is a heavy, but, of course, excellent book. It is such a departure from the much more distanced and gentler narrative in Breasts and Eggs, which I also read and wrote about a few weeks ago.

I’m not sure how I missed this, but there is a heavy portrayal of bullying in Heaven, and I don’t think that’s a spoiler, but I do think it actually does need kind of a big “trigger warning” splashed across the front of this book because it.is.intense.

However difficult this book may be, it is excellent, as Kawakami is proving herself (to me) to be an excellent writer–excellent pacing, character development, and a deep emotional landscape.

As an aside, this book is also much shorter than Breasts and Eggs, but my copy also included an excerpt of Breasts and Eggs at the end, and I’m not quite sure why this choice is being made because the current version available of Breasts and Eggs is also an elongated version of the original, but I just wanted to add here that this length of book–just Heaven–is a great length, and I think Kawakami works really well within this frame.

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

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E.B. White is obviously untouchable as a writer, and that was my sense this time through Charlotte’s Web too. I read this as a child (or had it read to me). I also have vague memories of struggling to get through it while reading it on my own as a child. I probably tried too young.

Here’s the well-worn copy that we read.

This book works on a fairly pleasant surface level, but of course it’s dealing with more challenging questions of life and death too. Death is mentioned, but for my very young children, these details seemed to be glossed over.

Between this and Stuart Little, I have to say that I prefer Stuart Little, which goes a bit deeper into the subtleties of human nature. Still, Charlotte’s Web is a must read in childhood, and older readers might like returning to this as well, as it offers one of the most poignant and well-paced denouements of all time.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

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What a great book! As you know, I normally do not read in this genre, but Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel was exceptional. I even found myself slowing down at the end to savor the final events.

Too often I find that “sci-fi,” if you can call this “sci-fi,” lacks emotional depth, is too self aware, too clever, too focused on an overt plot. (I know sci-fi lovers will argue about this with me all day long.) But, I’ll always be impressed when an author can bring it all together in the writing–emotional depth, development, and beauty.

This is a book that examines the “simulation theory,” and the meaning in life, by jumping through eras of time. Each era is described with sparse, but powerful language. I recommend it!

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

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Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami delves into a modern, urban female experience. The main character navigates the big questions women must face and the relationships they must navigate. Kawakami leads the reader through these issues without defaulting to any oversimplifications. The opposite, actually. Each question and relationship is as complex as real life. This book feels almost memoiristic, as I imagined Kawakami as the main character. (I’m prone to doing this though.)

The main character, Natsu, comes from poverty and brings herself out of that slowly as a novelist (the most unlikely of stories!). This character’s life leads her away from her family roots (in a sense) and complicates her relationships with her now very small extended family, not that these relationships are ever uncomplicated.

Her past (experiences with poverty and loss) also complicate her relationships and her abilities to be in a romantic relationship and to create a family of her own.

The book is strange. Natsu is confused. There is tragedy and there is triumph. It is nuanced, and that is true of the human experience, and in this case, it’s focused especially on the female experience.

I read that Breasts and Eggs was once published as a novella and then was expanded into a longer novel, which is the version I read. Through most of the book, I found myself wishing that this was two separate books, but then again, I love a good, short, digestible read. However, now that I’ve reached the conclusion, I do think extending it into one long book is defensible.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

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For the first half of this book, I felt myself impatient with the main character, Lucy. I am so hungry for a female lead who is not so passive, who knows her own mind. However, the writing was good enough that I suspected this all too common characterization of female leads was going somewhere meaningful, and I was right. I also grew to appreciate the spare writing style and the diary-entry style that she uses to develop a consistent sense of voice and theme throughout.

Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea is a great book worth reading. Although this history seems so very recent, Strout’s book helps me recall just what the early days of the pandemic were like and the politics surrounding that time.

Even more interesting to me were her characters and the subtle insights she develops through the book to help the reader see just how they came to think and act like they do. None of this life gets wrapped up in a pretty bow, and Strout’s work reflects that not uncomplicated reality.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

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A literary classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is, indeed, an epic work of staggering genius. I thought I had read this book in college, but realized I hadn’t once I got started. Perhaps I only read an excerpt. While I have read several books with plenty of AAVE (African American Vernacular English), especially Alice Walker, I think this book had more dialogue and more AAVE than anything I’d ever read before. Much like reading Shakespeare, the text was challenging to get in to, but once I found my pace, the language became rich and beautiful–full of great humor and the depths of human emotional experience.

There’s not much more that I can say about this book that hasn’t already been said. It fell out of preference for several decades, but was revived in the 1970s by Alice Walker and has been a canonical text in Literature classes ever since. Much has been written about it, and rightly so.

Lightening Flowers by Katherine E. Standefer

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On one hand, this is an engaging memoir/work of nonfiction. Threaded throughout the book is an underlying love affair with in Jackson, WY. Since I’ve spent so much time in that area over the past eight years, I reveled in the familiar landscapes and people.

However, this book does something more important, in that it offers a deep and scathing and entirely human critique of the healthcare crisis in the US. Standefer’s life-altering medical condition is traumatic enough. However, the lack of access to the healthcare she so desperately needs adds a new layer of trauma, perhaps even worse than the medical condition itself, which required months of phone calls, arguments, moving to new states, establishing residencies, and various other loopholes that were only moderately effective, but disorienting and life altering.

Even with “good insurance,” I spent nearly a year arguing over about $20k in medical bills, after my first birth. I ended up paying cash for about half of that bill. However, what should be memories of a beautiful first year as a mother are somewhat marred by the horrible healthcare system we have in this country and the hours I wasted on the phone fighting for payment.

Now, several years later, I get shaky and cold every time I have to deal with a health insurance company. Before a procedure, doctors will tell you to check with your insurance. Insurance will (usually) give you correct information, but always with the caveat that it not a guarantee of payment. So, what good is it anyway?

Standefer tells an engaging story, but there is also an important social message conveyed through the story. This is the kind of writing that can create social change, and we need more of it.

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

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What can I say? I thought this was a novel going in, so immediately it defied expectations. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is a book of *essays* by Ann Patchett. Before reading this book, my knowledge of Patchett was only vaguely that she’s a well-known female author. (I’m putting “female” in there for political reasons.)

These essays are good and follow the style of, some of the women I’ve read lately: Anne Lamott, Jane Smiley, Nora Ephron, etc. There’s an easiness and confidence in their voice and tone and especially in Patchett’s. Lamott perhaps is more questioning. Smiley a bit more interested in story, and so forth, but these women all seem very much a part of second wave feminism, confidently taking up spaces and stories.

I don’t fully relate to this confident and in control tone, but sometimes I do. These stories are worth reading. The writing is solid. Patchett marks an important time for female writers and perfectly captures a moment (okay, many decades) of women gaining and stage and gathering their voices.

It’s a great title too, am I right?

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

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Ok, wow, this book might be a little too on the nose. I definitely identified with certain aspects of it. Overall, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is a good book, written by a objectively talented writer.

I read some short stories by Smiley in undergrad, but I hadn’t ever returned, until now. This book is about a farming family and the challenges they face as they try to navigate what to do with the land as the patriarch ages, an incredibly complicated and tough challenge. Smiley does an amazing job of navigating people’s natural fears, jealousies, ambitions, trauma, heartache, and more, with nuance. In fact, I found myself reading her bio, wondering if she had a rural background. Her understanding of, for example, how women cook food just felt so very rural midwestern and real. However, it appears that she grew up in the suburbs, which is baffling because she knows this world so well. According to her bibliography, she’s written other rural texts too. Maybe she has grandparents who were farmers.

I do have a critique of the book, and it’s one I would like to ask her about. [Spoiler ahead] In the book, a pretty shocking level of abuse is revealed. While I think this is valid subject matter, the abuse is so stunning that it reaches the point of distraction, from the narrative, from some other purposes, etc. I believe it was Hemingway who advised that an author should start the story after the beloved character dies, and I wondered what this book might be like, better perhaps, if this abuse remained an undercurrent that the author never fully revealed. The sexism and mind games alone were enough to warrant the characters’ complex emotional landscape. I just think it might’ve been more interesting to leave out the more overt stories of abuse, letting it subtly infuse the scene, without letting it completely taking over, and letting the more nuanced, but no less interesting dramas, have more emphasis throughout.

Olivia: A Novel by Dorothy Strachey

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In one of her books, Elena Ferrante references Olivia, a novel published anonymously by Dorothy Strachey in 1949, and so I read it next. It is a slow short novel that burns brightly at the very end. I wondered why it’s not a more well-known book, but I think the subject matter and age difference between “Olivia” and her teacher are key reasons. At times it felt like somewhat of a reverse Lolita. Interestingly, this novel was written several years prior.

In the end, while I don’t necessarily recommend it as your typical light read, I do think the book has literary merit on the grounds that it seems to capture a Freudian influence and understanding of the world. Many books and authors were doing something similar at the time, and it, no doubt, had an impact on art today.