The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka: Before I read the first page, this reminded me of Yannick Murphy’s This is the Water, which also takes place primarily in a local swimming pool, from an unusual perspective (second person for This is the Water, first person plural for The Swimmers), in which the pool is a metaphor or vessel for exploration of the rifts in the community. There’s a panoramic quality to both of them, a distance. In some ways that made it harder for me to engage at first- there are recurring characters but no one stood out as a main character (handled differently, I could imagine the pool itself being the main character), and it felt more like a study than a story. That shifted around 50 pages in (which is significant – the book is only 130 pages) and from there everything took off in a masterful way, and then everything that came earlier took on greater meaning.
Clean Air, by Sarah Blake: I can’t help comparing this to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which was, even among his movies, quite ludicrous. Fortunately, there’s no pretense of “something incredible and amazing will be revealed” that turns out to be ridiculous instead of interesting – here, the premise is clear from the start: hyper-pollination causes massive health problems for humans, in an ironic twist on what one might expect to cause climate apocalypse. It’s also a better play on COVID than I’ve seen in almost any book that’s come out post-pandemic. A minor thing that annoyed me: there was a fair amount of over-narration, description of every mundane thing. “I peed. I wiped myself” etcetera. The protagonist’s daughter is written so well, though – I don’t even mind when children in books are a little unbelievable (people in books are often a little unbelievable), but an absolutely spot-on four-year-old is a delight to read.
My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite: I’m sure it’s considered very wrong in some spheres to be unable to suppress hysterical laughter while reading about murder, but in my defense this is satire and also hilarious. Did it stick the landing? Not really, but I recommend it with no reservations anyway.
The Latinist, by Mark Prins: Given that I took Latin for six years in middle and high school (and went to the Ohio Junior Classical League state Latin convention for five of those…a literal toga party in which adolescents were unleashed in the ballrooms of a conference hotel to compete in certamina and art contests and take Latin tests for ribbons), I was predisposed toward this. Not at all disappointed – it’s somewhat similar to Possession, though without the historical timeline, and the academic and literary discussion is thoroughly impressive. I’m almost finished with it and…I don’t really know why it’s categorized as a “crime thriller” unless that’s a spoiler or we’re (deservedly) taking professional undermining as crime now? It’s not a spoiler – it’s in the first few pages – for me to say that plots like this one, which involving professional sabotage, are the hardest for me to handle (on TV sitcoms, it’s someone borrowing something and then the thing getting lost/stolen in a series of unfortunate and avoidable events – this is near-constant on Seinfeld), especially when it’s an older man attempting to hamstring a younger woman’s success.
And…now having finished the whole novel, unfortunately the ending does not work at all and detracts from the book. No regret in reading it as what came before was so compelling, but ugh.
The Unseen World, by Liz Moore: I really admire writers who can cross genres so deftly (I’ve also read Moore’s Long Bright River, which is very much a literary thriller), though the two Moore novels I’ve read are united in being, ultimately, about parenthood. This unfolded as a mystery in its own right, and was even more mysterious to me because I had inadvertently seen (and subsequently tried to forget) a spoiler for the novel, which I then badly misremembered into something that doesn’t happen at all (and I’m not sure what the actual spoiler, if there even was one, was).
