Life changes in Nairobi
~ A Change in Altitude, by Anita Shreve ~ Patrick (from Chicago) and Margaret (from Boston) meet and fall in love, and after 2 years together – “married five months” – move to Kenya. Paul is a medical man who...
Books
Blood and Money
~ Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. By John Carreyrou. Elizabeth Holmes was just 19 when she started her company in 2003. She had a squad of major-league cheerleaders — senior professors at Stanford, angel investors,...
Dangers of oversimplification
~ How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position, by Tabish Khair ~ A very erudite and charming little novel from beginning to end. ,Our unnamed narrator-protagonist is not unlike the author himself, a South Asian who lives in...
Same difference?
~ The Grammarians, by Cathleen Schine ~ This clever, original, entertaining novel follows a pair of very unusual people. Many of us, growing up, were fascinated by twins. Imagine another person with the same appearance and shared entirety of experience...
70-year slog
~ Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner ~ This novel has an ambitious goal: to tell the story of a woman from her birth in the 1940s to her death around 2016, and to reflect the events and changing mores of...
“Champor-champor” culture
~ The Woman who Breathed Two Worlds, by Selina Siak Chin Yoke ~ This novel rather grew on me. At first, the sentences read rather flatly, pedestrian in their construction, and even the local cadences of the non-English educated (or...
Appalachian Miseries
~ Sugar Run, by Mesha Maren ~ Jailed for life for murder, Jodi is startled to find herself released at the age of 35 after 18 years in prison. She heads straight to southern Georgia to find Ricky, the young...
Predictable Gothic
~ The Silent Companions, by Laura Purcell ~ Having read Purcell’s The Corset, perhaps my expectations for the same fine read in The Silent Companions were to set me up for a little disappointment. The novel takes place in three...
A Turbulent World
~ Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh ~ This review of Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island will be brief, lest it turn into a rhapsody. One on hand, there is the temptation to go on at length heaping praise endlessly on the...
Predators and Enablers
~ Catch and Kill, by Ronan Farrow ~ This remarkable book outlines and details the investigative journalism that led to the exposure of decades of sexual abuse by Harvey Weinstein, and his eventual arrest. Ronan Farrow’s name and history are...
Engaging kopitiam reading
~ Sarong Party Girls, by Cheryl Li-Lien Tan ~ “Not say the States is very near, you know.” (translation: That is not to say the US is close to Singapore.) p145 “You see, ang mohs in Asia, step one is...
Dues must be paid
~ The Invoice, by Jonas Karlsson ~ An intensely Scandinavian book (in translation by Neil Smith) where the protagonist who is never named, is surprised one day to receive an invoice of 5,700,000 kroner. His life is much too small...
Different but not alienated
~ A Taxonomy of Love, by Rachel Allen ~ This is a young adults novel, but reads so well that this genre classification is of no relevance. That said, classification is on the title of this novel, and is a...
Anatomy of a Jury
Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question is a difficult novel to categorize, especially at its start. A 52-year old woman in Florida becomes a member of a 6-person jury on a murder case. (Apparently, in Florida, the storied 12-person jury...
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