book reviews

Book 43 for 2026: “Déy”, Edwidge Danticat

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Another finalist for the National Book Award, this novel focuses on one Haitian in Miami and her family. But more than that, it focuses on the effects of being in a mass shooting event. Magnolia is a realtor in a mall out shopping for a birthday present for her daughter, Zoe, when she hears gunfire. Along with many other shoppers, she runs and hides in a restaurant. Traumatized, eventually she manages to find her car and drive home. Once there, she does not tell anyone about the shooting, not her daughter, nor her husband who is now living separately from her at her request. For several days, she secretly goes to her computer and researches what happened at the mall, the dead, the living, the one person who saved others at the expense of his own life. She still tells no one that she was there. Because she is behaving a bit differently, people ask her about it and finally just think she is stressed about about her job and her mother who has mental health issues, still living in Haiti and undergoing emergency surgery. Magnolia begins to worry that she is becoming like her mother. She is also worried about the gangs getting closer and closer to where her parents live in Haiti and their home, which her father built himself after selling their farm and investing everything in the house.

Eventually she does tell her husband she was at the shooting; he is horrified that she has been suffering and told no one. Her half brother from an affair her father had calls to say that her mother has survived the surgery but it is no longer safe where they live. With all these events the novel focuses on love and whether it can help a person protect family and self. What wins out in the heart? Optimism or fear? The title, Déy, comes of the Haitian creole word for mourning to focus on the importance of sharing grief rather than holding it in, the importance of family ties as well as the task of living between two cultures.

Book 42 for 2026: “Paradiso 17”, Hannah Lilith Assadi

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I decided to try reading some of the finalist books for The National Book Award. This is the first one on my list. I could not stop reading; it’s touching, lyrically written, and timely. Although this is a novel, it is based on the life of Assadi’s father. Like her father, Sufien, the central character, a Palestinian, was driven from his home in the 1948 Nakba. One day the soldiers just show up and tell the whole family they must leave, abandoning the property that has been in their family for hundreds of years and their house with the blue door. This is the story of the rest of his life, first at a tent camp in Syria until his father finds a good job in Kuwait. As the oldest child in the family he and his father decide he should study abroad–he is brilliant at math. He gets a Visa and goes to Italy to study, runs out of money because father loses his job, starts running a rug shop, meets the person who becomes his best friend for life, Bernardo, a very wealthy Jewish guy trying to escape his mandated life in NYC.

Eventually, Bernardo has to go back to NYC and convinces Sufien to do the same. At times homeless, other times living off money Bernardo gives him, and finally finding that his love for driving can help him make a living, he becomes a taxi driver. Then at a club–he tends to drink alcohol too much–he meets the woman who will become his wife, a Jewish woman whose father owns a factory in Brooklyn. Finally, he feels called to the West, to the Arizona desert, where he lives the rest of his life. The two stay together and have a daughter who attends Columbia University, the place Sufien dreamed of attending but could only go there and wander around and visit the library.

This is the story of a man’s life, a man who, driven from his original home, keeps looking for “home”, a place he feels he belongs. It raises the question of what is home, what does home mean, where and what is it. And to quote Dante, the book begins, “You shall leave behind all you most dearly love, and that shall be the arrow first loosened from exile’s bow. You shall learn how salt is the taste of another man’s bread and how hard is the way, going down and then up another man’s stairs.”–Paradiso canto 17.

Book 36 for 2026: “Supersaurio”, Meryem El Mehdati

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Several weeks ago I wrote a post about young people and asked if the problems they are having are global. It is this novel which caused me to ask that question. The author lives in Gran Canario, the largest of the Canary Islands which is the setting of this novel. The novel is written in first person from the viewpoint of Meryem, a twenty-five year old young woman who at the beginning of the novel is still living with her parents because she cannot afford a place of her own. She has a college degree and speaks multiple languages but cannot find a good job even close to what she thought she would be doing at twenty-five when she was younger. She is unhappy and disappointed.

She acquires an internship with Supersaurio, the largest super market chain in the Canary Islands. She finds the work boring and tedious. She cannot stand her boss, a woman 20 or so years older, a woman who will not even look at Meryem when she is talking to her and who never bothers to learn to pronounce Meryem’s name correctly even though Meryem explains repeatedly. Nevertheless, Meryem endures, produces excellent work and never complains–at least not at work. However, as she informs the reader endlessly, she hates her job, feels her colleagues look down on her, and nothing is going ok. To pass time she writes fiction about her work mates, tries to find a nice guy to date, and because she needs the money, keeps working.

As the novel progresses, her life does sort of get better and she adjusts sort of, but you have to read it to find out.

I kept thinking the same thing over and over–how is her life different from that of a lot of young people in the US? Meryem seems to think it is because of where she lives at least in part and because the island is dependent on Spain and tourism, but are these the real causes?? Do a lot of young people in Europe and other places in the world feel as she does, struggle to “make it”?

Book 35 for 2026: “Warlight”, Michael Ondaatje

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Many will know this writer from his Booker Prize winning novel “The English Patient” and many have seen the movie even if they did not read the book.

“Warlight” takes place mostly just after WWII but is a totally different angle than any other WWII novel I have read. The scene is England, actually London and locales nearby. Two teenagers, a brother and sister, have their seemingly ordinary life totally upended when their parents announce they are leaving them with the man who lives in rooms at the top of their house. The two teens refer to this man as The Moth. The teens, Nathanial and Rachel, begin to think The Moth and his friends may be criminals given their strange goings and comings. They still go to school. Nathanial finds some jobs via The Moth and meets a girl at one of them. Her brother is in real estate. Nathanial and she hang out and have adventures in the empty for sale houses. The brother and sister do discover that their mother worked with The Moth during the war. Otherwise, they know little.

Eventually, their mother returns with no explaining about where she was or what she was doing. They never see their father again and have no clue what happened to him. Rachel is so angry about this that she has little to do with the mother and only sees Nathanial occasionally. Years later Nathaniel acquires a job where he is able to discover who his mother really is, what she had been doing for years, and what happened to her and others with whom she was close.

This novel reveals how little we sometimes know about others, the effects of their secrets, and how behavior good or bad leads to consequences often unexpected.

I’ve read several of the author’s novels and always find them complex and enlightening, sometimes revealing worlds about which I have little or no knowledge.

Book 32 for 2026: “Together Tea”, Marjan Kamali

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The previous book I read is the author’s most recent novel. This one is her first novel published in 2013. Like the Lion Women novel, this one tells the story of Iranian families. When the novel begins in 1996, an Iranian couple who have lived in NYC for decades are trying to find a man for their daughter to marry. Well, the mother is, not so much the father, who is a successful doctor. He has adapted very well to the US, is into self help books, optimistic and enthusiastic. Although she has a job she likes, she misses Iran.

Part II begins in 1978 when their children are younger–they have two older sons and a younger daughter–and the Shah’s power is crumbling but its sequence is in question. Some of their relatives suddenly become so religious that they hardly recognize them. Then the revolution occurs, their daughter’s school has become all girls with mandatory hijab. Then the Iran/Iraq war occurs and the grandmother is killed by an Iraqi bomb while out buying pomegranates. They cover their windows with aluminum foil so Iraqi pilots cannot see the lights in houses. Finally, in desperation they leave for NYC after medical colleagues the father knows in NYC help them find a place there. While studying to take the test for his US medical license the dad works in a pizza parlor making pizza.

Then back to 1996, the daughter, Mina, decides she needs to visit Iran even though her father does everything he can to dissuade her. Mother, who still misses Iran and her family there, decides it is ok if she goes too. This part of the novel relates their visit to Iran, Mina’s reconnecting to her best friend who never left, how people there manage to live double lives with parties, Western clothes, and alcohol at home, but hijab and conservative behavior in public, including avoiding the morality police.

Like her other novel, this one is a good way to learn recent Iranian history while learning about Iranian food, family, friendship, love, and every day life.

Book 26 for 2026: “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”, Kiran Desai

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By an author whose previous novel won the Booker Prize, this novel was long listed for the most recent Booker Prize. Although 670 pages long, it did not take me as long as I expected to read this because I found I kept going because I wanted to know what was going to occur. It is the tale of two families and two young people, both of whom have studied and lived in the United States. The background city for both families is the Indian city of Allahabad. The two, retired, family patriarchs get together frequently to play chess even though their families are sometimes rivals for status and influence.. The two do not live far apart and all the older family members know each other, including those who have moved away to Delhi and other places. The youngest members do not know each other and accidentally meet on an overnight train. At that point they do not know that their two grandparents had tried to match make them in an arranged marriage. Later, this becomes an embarrassment.

Sonia wants to become a novelist and is attending college at a small liberal arts college in New England where she becomes involved with a famous but cruel artist who becomes obsessed with her and whose influence she has become unable to escape, initially literally and later psychologically. Sunny lives and wants to stay in NYC to escape the overbearing influence of his mother and the violence between her and the two brothers of her deceased husband.

Not wanting to reveal all the complexities of the lives of these two young people who come to love each other but whose lives keep tearing them apart and the challenges they face as they try to make sense of their lives, I will simply say this is a novel I recommend. The reader learns a lot of about Indian culture and its variances, about the huge differences among different parts of India, e.g. Goa and Delhi, but also how universal family and personal struggles really are.

Book Four for 2026: “Playground”, Richard Powers

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Another intriguing novel by an author who has won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. Initially the four main characters do not seem to have any interactions with each other. 12 year old Evie’s life is changed forever when her father, the inventor of the first aqualung, makes her submerge in a pool to prove it works. She becomes one of the world’s most famous divers and oceanographers. Ina, an artist, grew up in US naval bases all over the South Pacific and eventually finds herself at a university in Illinois. Rafi, a genius black child, is pushed by his dad to apply to a private Jesuit high school where he meets Todd, a rich kid whose whose family provides scholarships to the school. The two become best friends in spite of different interests. Rafi loves literature and Todd loves computers. They bond over a thousands of years old Chinese game with which they become obsessed. They become roommates at the same university where Ina is a student. The three become best friends.

Decades later all these lives become intertwined on an island in the South Pacific–Makatea in French Polynesia, an island where the harvesting of giant phosphorus deposits nearly ruined it while furnishing the rest of the world with fuel to make planets grows faster and better and feed the world. Because of Evie’s obsession with the sea, I learned enormous amounts about the ocean and the varied animals that live there, some of which I had never heard of before. Because of Todd’s obsession with computers and his invention of an AI game, I learned a lot about how gaming works and how people become addicted. For Rafi, the agony and anger of often being the one left out, the one seen as the smart Black kid, and the only one in many circumstances affect how he views the world and himself and where life eventually takes him. From his character I learned new things about literature and how books and writing affect people and their relationships.

I could not stop reading this book. Years ago, when it first came out, I read the author’s novel, “The Overstay”. While the topics and characters are totally different, in some ways this novel reminded me of that story, of how our lives are often intertwined in all sorts of ways we never expected.

Book Two for 2026: “The Hounding”, Xenobe Purvis

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This recently published book is one of the latest in a bookclub to which my grandson belongs. Although an historical novel based on the reporting of an actual event in 1701, much of it applies to today’s world. In 1701, Dr. John Friend reported to the the Royal Society of England about a “rumuor spread” which discussed a report that young girls in the Oxfordshire country side had “been seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs.”

Five sisters live with their grandfather on an affluent farm in the country. Due to the recent death of their grandmother, they go around dressed in black as was the custom. Because they stay to themselves a lot, roam freer than most girls, they are often looked upon with suspicion by the villagers. One man, who ferries everyone to and fro over the nearby river, has issues with women and loathes these girls because he thinks they are too independent and views them as defiant and thinks they ridicule him because they do not chat with him when they use the ferry. He also has a severe drinking problem and spends all of his free time in the village pub. He is about to be married to a local woman but has severe anxiety over this because he thinks his new wife might try to boss him around.

Most of the men in the village spend their evenings drinking in the pub and often resort of fights and various forms of violence when issues arise. They see this as manly behavior. They view with suspicion any man who does not behave as they do. The woman, Temperance, who serves them hates alcohol and goes so far as to wear leather gloves so the alcohol will not touch her hands. She is one of few in the village who does not believe in rumors and supports rational behavior.

Everything goes awry when during a severe drought, the river dries up, the heat overcomes everyone, and Pete, the ferryman, insists he has seen the five sisters bark and turn into dogs and incites fear in many in the village. It seems to matter little that the two young men who work for the girls’ grandfather, proclaim that the girls are perfectly normal and none of this is true.

This novel raises various issues that continue as issues hundreds of years after the above incident:

-What does it take to make a man? What characteristics define real manhood? Is manhood defined by violence or kindness and compassion?

-How much freedom is okay for women? How much independence and who determines this?

-When is drinking ok and how much? Should people stop people who become violent when drunk?

-What happens to a neighborhood, a society, when people start to believe all sorts of stuff that is not true? Can it be stopped and how?

Determination

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People tell me I have a lot of determination. If they know about it, they use this example: I just finished my 659th day of walking at least 10,000 steps per day never missing a day. My average is over 13,000 but it was higher until the rain came. It forced me to dance, jog, and run in place inside my house, not exactly a fun endeavor.

Three years ago as part of a Story Circle Network class, I read about book written by a woman who read a book per day for a year in order to help her deal with her grief over the loss of young family member who died too soon. I figured if she could read a book a day, surely I could read a book per week. First year I made it, second I fell one short, and in 2025 I read 53 and reviewed them all on my blog.

Today, I finished book one off 2026: “We Are Green and Trembling” by the Argentinian writer Gabriela Cabezon Camara. It won the National Book Award for translated literature. A sort of fantastical, historical novel, it portrays the life of a real person, Antonio de Erauso. Now identifying as a man, he writes letters to his aunt who is the prioress of a Basque convent. When a small girl, his parents placed her in the convent hoping she would someday replace the aunt as head of the convent. To flee the narrow confines of such a life, she escapes and disguises herself as a man. Through his narration and letters to his aunt, he tells of all his adventures, including working as a mule skinner, then becoming a conquistador in South America among other endeavors. At the time of the novel, he has escaped the military captain for whom he fought and rescued two native Guarini girls from enslavement along with two monkeys. The smallest girl and the monkeys were in cages and near starvation when he rescued them. Pursued by the military they escaped, they now reside deep in the jungle aided by the natives who live there.

Through this novel, the author manages to criticize colonialism, the tyranny of strict religious beliefs, the treatment of women, and the horrors inflicted on native peoples.

Books 47-49 for 2025: See below

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Three books but since one was tiny, “The Strange Library” by Haruki Murakami, and two might not count since I did not read all of them?? At first I thought the Murakami book might be a children’s book until I arrived at the end; it definitely is not a children’s book. This young boy goes to the library to check out books like he usually does and finds a different woman at the circulation desk. She gives him some odd instructions about where to find new books after he returns the books he has already borrowed. He has to walk through a sort of maze, meets some very strange people, and various unpleasant events occur. And the end is terribly sad. The book is short, with a fold up cover and illustrations of all sorts on every other page. The back cover is sort of like a mandala.

Then I tried to read “Yellowface” by R.F. Kuang but only managed to get half way and quit. This is highly unusual behavior for me because if I start a novel, I finish it no matter what. In this case, reading about a woman who steals a dead friend’s unpublished novel and makes it her own which becomes a best seller and then whines when she is attacked because she is white and the friend is Chinese and some question whether is she committing cultural appropriation and is this ok. There is also a lot about the intricacies and unfairness in the publishing industry with so much detail that I gave up. Do I feel guilty? A little.

The third book is “Cheating Death: The New Science of Living Longer and Better” by Dr. Rand McClain. I read most of this nonfiction book, picking and choosing the parts that seem most relevant to my own life and health. I highly recommend this book because it gives useful advice about supplements that can help with sleep, arthritis, diabetes, etc. instead of using some of the usual NSAIDs and some prescription drugs. However, he is not anti-many popular medicines like metformin, for example, so this is not an anti-prescription medicine book. There is a very informative chapter, “Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy”, that details the pros and cons and suggests certain foods to eat, e.g. cruciferous vegetables, to counter some of the negative side effects. This book is useful in many ways. He also discusses some cutting edge therapies that are not available to most people but might be of interest to those searching for what is new and innovative regarding aging.