Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng: I grew up in a suburb similar to the Shaker Heights setting of this (also in Ohio, though Cincinnati instead of Cleveland; ours was not a planned community like Shaker Heights, and I think it was slightly more conservative/less self-congratulatory about being progressive, but maybe I just didn’t clock that attitude as a kid…) just a couple of years after Ng, so the references all hit. The plotting is good, though a little predictable – I say that as someone in general awe of successful plots, since that’s the hardest element of writing for me. Now I’m watching the series on Hulu, which is…okay.
Recursion, by Blake Crouch: My initial thought about this was “It’s so fun!” but I grew a bit weary of the premise and the spinning off of that premise as the book went on. It was still fun in the end, though the writing was really uneven – sometimes decent, other times sounded like it had been written by subpar AI. I will NOT dare to wade into questions of “what makes a novel a genre book/what makes a novel literary fiction” (okay, I’ll dip in a toe…marketing, in large part), but – I’m going to transgress here – I think I was expecting it to be more literary (I see from looking at a few reviews that it really wasn’t marketed as such, so if we’re using different measurement devices for different genres, I was probably judging it by the wrong rubric). I did like the premise, but it’s hard to sustain something like that.
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell: This blew me away to the point where I’m not sure I can even type about it without either sobbing or laughing one of those uncontrollable laughs that often crosses over into crying. It’s an amazing story, with an ending that hits perfectly, but the writing on a sentence level is even more phenomenal. All of Russell’s images are genius, but I was particularly taken by her skill with verbs. Incredibly deft and clever without ever feeling cheap. Swamplandia! is absolutely singular, but the prose and setting brought to mind both Geek Love (and in the acknowledgments Russell notes Katherine Dunn as an influence) and Barry Hannah. I haven’t read either of Russell’s short story collections, and having those in my future makes me as happy as anything has since quarantine started. I’m beside myself with feelings.
Dopesick, by Beth Macy: I read Dreamland (also about the opioid crisis, and very compelling and well done) two years ago and wondered initially if this would feel at all like a retread…but the first review I found for Dopesick noted that it was published in 2018, while Dreamland was from 2016 and pre-Trump. Okay, sold – but ultimately I’m not sure it made much of a difference. Dopesick is a more region-focused look at the epidemic, and doesn’t delve at all into the more removed origins of heroin (which Dreamland does in depth). Dreamland was definitely much more compelling to me, but there’s certainly room for more than one book and angle.
Freshwater, by Awaeke Emezi: I’m not sure if I saw this on a list of recommended books or if it was something I clicked on while scrolling through the “available now” Kindle offerings of the Brooklyn Public Library, but I started it late at night (early in the morning, technically) and stayed up later than was advisable reading the first 1/3 of it before falling asleep with the Kindle resting against my hand. I don’t want to say too much about it because I think the experience benefits, the way certain movies do, from not having too much information going in. The opening is elliptical but not hard to follow or piece together; the writing is sharp and poetic. Two points of fascination: on their website, Emezi describes this as an “autobiographical novel” and I wonder to what degree they mean; the name Awaeke is eerily close to “Awake.” Emezi has another novel coming out in August, so that’s something for me to look forward to.
