fathers

Book 46 for 2024: “What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez”, Claire Jiménez

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The Puerto Rican Ramirez family lives on Staten Island. The book begins years after one of the three daughters, Ruthy, disappears at the age of 13 while on her way home after her school track practice. Twelve years later while watching TV, Jessica, the oldest daughter, sees someone on a reality show who looks like Ruthy. The woman on the TV has red hair like Ruthy and the same birthmark mole. Jessica tells her younger sister, Nina. They concoct a plot to go to the reality show site and bring Ruthy (if she is really Ruthy) home. They avoid telling their mother, Delores, who has never ceased struggling over Ruthy’s disappearance. Delores discovers their plot and insists on not only joining them, but also bringing her older Pentecostal friend who frequently falls into spiritual spells on the floor at church. Eventually, they all head to Boston where the show is located and all kinds of turmoil occurs.

The novel is told from the viewpoint of each sister and their mother, providing endless details about their Puerto Rican culture, their jobs, their views, and how they feel about each other, all done with dialogue. Sometimes it is loving, sometimes snarky as it deals with their experiences with racism, sexism, family secrets, and violence. As a reader, I, too, wanted to know what happened to Ruthy. Definitely worth the read.

Book 43 for 2024: “A Stranger in Olondria”, Sofia Samatar

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As a person who diligently never fails to finish a book I start, it is difficult to admit that I have finally failed to finish a book. I made it to Book Five and quit. Having already happily read two of this author’s other books, this failure comes as a surprise.

In this fantasy novel, the narrator’s quest to find the body of an illiterate girl from his own country (he has wandered far in search) whose ghost haunts his dreams became less and less appealing. Not sure why because I generally like fantasy novels. This novel does raise some interesting questions:

-Are burial/cremation practices so sacred that one must follow what is considered sacred in one’s culture or risk exile?

-Where is home?

Book 42 for 2024: “These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901, Arizona Territories

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This fictional work is based on the life of the author’s great grandmother. Written as a diary with specific dates, the narrator is not yet a teen when the novel starts. Her parents are wanderers, always looking for a better, new place. Sarah’s character is that of a tough, pioneer girl and then a woman. She can ride horses, shoot to kill, manage a ranch, do whatever it takes to survive. Much of it includes a rather accurate portrayal of life in Arizonan territories as well as Texas at the time including the prejudices of many of the white inhabitants toward the Spanish speaking people already there, fights with Apaches, and the hunt for Geronimo. It is not just the story of her own life, including her relationship with the Army Captain whose job initially is to protect a wagon train, but also portrays other people living in the Southwest during that time period.

I read this as part of a book club. Reactions to the book varied widely from those of us who thoroughly enjoyed the book to at least one person who insisted it is poorly written and viewed it as a romance novel. The rest of us did not. She used an audio book edition. After her descriptions, it appears the audio book does not correctly follow the book itself and is poorly done which may have contributed to her view of this work. I borrowed this novel from the public library and it was obviously well read because it was not in the best condition.

Book 39 for 2024: “The Return”, Hisham Matar

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This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. The subtitle, “Fathers, Sons, And The Land In Between” indicates a bit of the subject matter–how sons and fathers relate, but in this case it is a tale of horrible grief and suffering when Matar’s father is arrested and imprisoned in the notorious prison of Qaddafi in Libya. For decades Matar tried to find out what happened to his father. There is no record of his death and no one knows what happened to his body. The book details the lives of his family and their search for news of, hopes he might be alive, and what happened to Matar’s father. To this day no one knows. In 2012, 22 years after his father’s kidnapping when Matar was 19, he returned to Libya to try to learn more, met with uncles who had also been imprisoned, some for 20 years. This is the tale of his family’s suffering and hope. It also relates in detail the horrors of Qaddafi’s reign, what happened to many in his most notorious prison, and the resilience of so many who managed to survive, including close relatives of the author.

Note: After Qaddafi fell, there was hope for a new, unified government. However, as of the present, Libya is ruled by two rival administrations and is a divided country.

Book 36 for 2024: “The Storyteller of Marrakesh”, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya

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A striking, foreign, young couple appear one evening in the Jeema of Marrakesh. The woman’s incredible beauty fascinates the observers. Suddenly, they disappear. Hassan, a traditional storyteller, invites those who observed the couple to tell what they saw and knew on that night as he presents his own stories to the crowd at the Jeema. His brother, Mustafa, has confessed to the crime of their disappearance, telling everyone he loved the woman whom he hardly knew. He is imprisoned for their disappearance. However, nearly everyone acknowledges that he had nothing to do with it. This novel presents all the different views of the couple, their disappearance, and what it means. Often observer stories contradict each other, raising the questions of what is truth, whose truth is factual, how can we know what is true and how do we define love. Hassan is determined in his quest which takes the reader through all these stories, Hassan and Mustafa’s childhood, the mysteries of the Sahara, and much more.

Book 35 for 2024: “Woman of Interest: A Memoir”, Tracy O’Neill

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In 2020, the author, Korean, adopted as a child, nearly 30, decides she needs to find her biological mother before her mother dies. Finding few leads, clues, she hires a private detective who disappears. Then she takes the task of investigating on her own. This book details her investigation, her long relationship with a Serbian furniture mover, life with the parents who adopted her, and her career as a writer, plus going to South Korea to meet her biological family.

Her writing style is a bit different and somewhat rambling. However, for those who have experienced the same sort of search, this book provides details on how to go about finding “the lost”.

Book 33 for 2024: “Three Daughters of Eve”, Elif Shafak

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Shafak is a popular Turkish writer. One of my all time favorite books is her novel about the life of Rumi.

“Three Daughters of Eve” takes place one evening in Istanbul in 2016. Peri, one of the daughters from the title, is on her way to a fancy party when a thief snatches her purse out of the back seat of her car which is stalled in traffic. She parks the car and chases him through back alleys. As she fights him for her purse, an old photo falls to the ground. It portrays three young women and their university professor. This photo jars her mind, takes her back to her time at Oxford University when she was a student there in 2000-2002, her childhood in Istanbul in the 1980s and 90s, and her life. She thinks back to her life with her two friends, Shirin, an adventurous Iranian young woman, and Mona, a devout Egyptian Muslim who word a headscarf out of choice. And then there is the famous professor Azur, whose class on God either makes students hate or love him and the scandal that caused Peri to return to Istanbul.

Until her daughter, who was in the car and eventually chases her mother down in the alley, sees the photo, no one, except her husband, seems to have known Peri even went to Oxford. Her daughter mentions it at the party while everyone is arguing about East and West and politics and who has the most money and how they acquired it. Peri tries to deflect questions, changes the subject, and keeps remembering her past: her parents, a father quite irreligious, her mother a devout Muslim, their endless arguments and hostility, her brothers, her childhood and her stint at Oxford.

Through the story of Peri’s life, this novel explores personal identity, East-West history and politics, the meaning of marriage and friendship.

Book 31 for 2024: “Tender”, Sofia Samatar

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This book contains 20 fantastical and dystopian short stories. I found them fascinating with topics ranging from selkies to ogres to ghouls to jinns to witches (in this case positive ones). The settings range from US to Africa to a settlement in outer space (the story “Fallow”). Divided into two sections, Tender Bodies, Tender Landscapes, these stories address human frailty, anger, greed, extreme religions and how humans treat each other (both good and bad) and what might occur in the future if people do not behave better. “Fallow” is a sort of handmaid’s tale where instead of being on Earth–which has been basically destroyed–a group of extreme religious folks have made a place for themselves on another planet after escaping Earth. If anyone from Earth accidentally shows up, they are in big trouble unless they become just like the people already there. Otherwise, they do not kill them–that is wrong–but just sort of let them slowly die. These stories, both brutal and lovely, display an incredible imagination.

Book 29 for 2024: “The Covenant of Water”, Abraham Verghese

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I waited for more than a year to get this book via the library. It stayed on the best seller lists for months and months and has been translated into more than twenty languages. It is the saga of one family from 1900 to 1977. The setting is the Kerala area of India (I have been to India but not this area). It is unique compared to much of India in that Christians, Muslims, and Hindus live in relative peace with each other. Unlike the more arid parts of India, this is a place dominated by water which is a major theme in the book. Several of the main characters in the book suffer from an inherited Condition, as they refer to it. In every generation, at least one person dies from drowning.

The book begins with a 12 year old girl being married off to a 40 some year old widower. She has to travel far from her family via water. He is kind and patient but unlike her, who loves the water, he will travel many extra miles to avoid even traveling by water. He is terrified of water because he has the Condition. Eventually, she becomes the family matriarch, Big Ammachi. This is her story and the story of her descendants, the Christian community in Kerala, and the fate of one British man who remained in India after independence. It is also the story of the progress of medicine (Big Ammachi’s granddaughter is determined to become a doctor and find what causes the Condition) and how one family experiences many hardships to further future generations.

The author, Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford, details this fictional family’s history for several generations in 715 pages. It sounds daunting but I kept reading because I wanted to know what happens to all the people. At the same time, I found this to be one of the saddest books I have ever read. Due to the Condition and leprosy, for which there was no cure at the time, many people’s lives are horrendously affected. I did learn a lot about medicine and medical advances, how leprosy destroyed lives, Kerala and, much to my amazement, that many Christians in Kerala continued to follow the Hindu caste system.

Book 25 for 2024: “The Spoiled Heart”, Sanjeev Shasta

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The main character, Nayan Olak, is a Sikh whose parents immigrated to England. He has worked decades first on a factory floor and then later risen through the ranks of his union. Encouraged by others, he decides to run for head of the union when suddenly a young woman of the same ethnicity decides to run against him. She will do anything to beat him including using an unfortunate argument between them to accuse him of all sorts of misdeeds.

In the meantime, a woman, Helen, who left town under mysterious circumstances years ago shows up with her young adult son who is recovering from the aftermath of another unfortunate misunderstanding. Helen works for home health but refuses to take care of Nayan’s dementia ridden father. He cannot figure out why since she willingly takes care of others. He becomes obsessed with her, helps her son who becomes a sort of substitute for Nayan’s son who was killed along with Nayan’s mother in a fire many years previously. The police never determined who started the fire even though they knew it was arson.

Tragedies ensue as this story about race, misunderstandings, secrets, and relationships progresses. It also demonstrates the power, for better or worse, of misunderstood words and actions.