Britt-Marie Was Here

I last encountered Fredrik Backman's work in A Man Called Ove, and with Britt-Marie Was Here, he clearly establishes it that the former was no one-off: the latter is equally as masterful and lovely.

At its most elemental, Britt-Marie Was Here is a book about the human condition. Birtt-Marie is quirky and fastidious and has led a quiet life as a homemaker; now at 60, she's made the first really big decision of her life in looking for a job. The book opens, in fact, with her at an employment agency, displaying her quirks in all their glory, equal parts irritating and endearing. (To the reader. To the employment agency staff, I think it's safe to say endearing is not the adjective of choice.)

Ultimately, Britt-Marie lands a job as caretaker of sorts at the recreation center in a largely neglected community where the soccer-mad children's most fervent wish is to reconstitute the local soccer team, which is easier said than done given that their field has been sold and their coach has recently died. Like Ove, the resulting stew is the best mixture of hilarity and poignancy, peppered sharply with wise observations on life's bittersweet choices.

So much of the book, in fact, is about choice, and what it means to make choices, and the events that  seemingly innocuous choices set in motion, and the interconnectedness of it all. In a year of many great books, this might be the greatest I've read yet.

Five stars.

Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

Between Spillover, Dark Star Safari, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, and the Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, I felt I had a well-rounded sense of the dangers that might lurk around the corner of any number of African countries, from the hazards of travel to militants, terrorists, and thugs to your run-of-the-mill, mind-numbingly-terrifying, bleed-from-every-orifice-as-you-lay-dying disease. Not that I expected to encounter any of these scenarios on my own African foray, of course.

In any case, the title of Tim Butcher's travelogue says it all: a terrifying journey through [one of] the world's most dangerous countries. Is Somalia more dangerous than the DRC? Syria? Yemen? It hardly seems to matter. The man spent months traversing the bush, battling bad water, deadly mosquitoes, and the logistics of traveling through a country where nature has reclaimed all but the largest of roads. Everything - everything - is in short supply and everyone lives in near-constant fear of what or who is around the next bend - most of all the feared mai-mai fighters whose ability to vanish into the bush is as troubling as their violence and tactics.

So why, one might ask does Butcher undertake this adventure? Ostensibly, he seeks to retrace the steps of nineteenth century explorer/adventurer H.M. Stanley whose own voyage down the Congo River ultimately led to the country's nearly-century-long experience with the brutality of colonialism, first as King Leopold's personal possession and later as a Belgian colony. More tangibly, it seems that retracing Stanley's route may have been the germ of the idea, but that once seeded, Butcher could not let it go - as an international correspondent who'd covered his fair share of combat zones and front lines, this journey became one more way to test himself and his mettle, mental as well as physical. To which I say, bully for him. It's hard to imagine anyone else mad enough to entertain such a journey (I mean, even Paul Theroux stuck to the overcrowded and rattletrap "taxis" and "buses" in Dark Star Safari), but it makes for a fascinating backdrop for the history and politics that Butcher deftly incorporates.

Four stars. 

American Princess: A Novel of First Daughter Alice Roosevelt

“I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” 

I was familiar with one of Teddy Roosevelt’s more memorable lines, as well as his own back story (death of his wife and mother on the same day, subsequent abandonment of his two-day-old baby, followed by remarriage to a woman who wasn’t exactly crazy about her rambunctious step-daughter, and even Alice’s Pacific tour), but American Princess provides a far more in-depth look at Alice Roosevelt, from her days living in the White House to her days visiting it during the Kennedy years.

This is historical fiction at its finest, with the characters finely drawn from letters, diaries, newspaper clippings, interviews, and other source materials that allowed Stephanie Marie Thornton to create a detailed portrait of the life, loves, and legacy of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. (For what it’s worth, I previously knew about the womanizing husband, but not Aurora Borah Alice.) 

Thornton's work is fast-paced and lively, not unlike Roosevelt Longworth herself, it seems, and she manages to imbue all of the characters with a complexity that is undoubtedly true-to-life. (Case in point, I found Teddy himself much more sympathetic in this work than in any previous book I've read about him.) American Princess is beautifully written, and the scandals and hijinx are as readable as any tabloid, while being the heart and soul of a work with a true literary feel. This is historical fiction, but - and I mean this is all the best ways - it's sometimes difficult to discern where the truth stops and the fiction begins.

Five stars.

Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries

Tim Anderson is a gay southerner who finds himself drifting after college and decides the cure for his ennui is a stint in Japan. A former English major, Tune-In Tokyo is the resulting memoir documenting his time teaching English in and around Tokyo.

This is not the finest book about Japan I’ve ever read, but it provides a unique perspective on life there, and particularly on the business of the ubiquitous English schools. (I know of ex-pats who’ve made a veritable fortune teaching English, so the demand is certainly there!) Anderson has no desire to go full-native, a la Jake Adelston and Tokyo Vice, but anyone who is familiar with the in, outs, and many quirks of Tokyo will find much to relate to in Anderson's work. 

3.5 stars

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

I picked up Kim Michele Richardson's The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek because I had heard of the blue people of Kentucky, whose skin was blue as the result of a rare genetic condition (methemoglobinemia, as I learned in this book). I was intrigued that Richardson's protagonist had this disorder, and was not disappointed.

So. 

Cussy Mary Carter is the last of her (blue) people, widely feared and ostracized, though accepted for her role of carrying books to the isolated homesteads that dot the hills of Kentucky. She is a librarian with the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, one of FDR's New Deal programs. Through her route, she comes to know her patrons - fire watchers, coal miners, moonshiners, the teacher of a one-room school, a chicken thief, and a mysterious stranger recently returned from building the Hoover Dam. All share a similar hardscrabble existence, scratching out a living, some literally, from the deep coal pits, where bosses have less regard for men than for mules (there are definitely echoes of The Devil Is Here in These Hills). 

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is incredibly well-researched, well-written, and beautifully constructed. Richardson captures the essence of Appalachia and the Great Depression; perhaps more impressively, in Cussy, she captures the loneliness and fear of being the last of her kind and creates a main character who the reader can't help but root for as she carries her books and hope into the hollows.

Five stars.

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old brain scientist when she experienced a massive stroke to her left hemisphere in 1996. Remarkably, after years of intensive rehab, she fully recovered, and has written My Stroke of Insight to provide, well, insight, into the experience of both the stroke itself as well as the recovery.

The opening pages are slow going; even after a half-dozen neuroscience reads, I still find the detailing of neural activity centers dense and often dry. However, once Taylor transitions from the science to the memoir (i.e., what it felt like to have the stroke and how she recovered), my reading enjoyment rapidly increased. There was not much here that I found terribly new (a signal to me that perhaps I'm free to lay off the neuroscience, at least until the next big breakthrough in the understanding of the brain), but Taylor did reinforce that the traditionally-held limits on brain plasticity are only that - traditionally-held limits, and that her own brain plasticity far exceeded what she might have expected...and as a 37-year-old.

I also appreciated her articulation of the types of tasks that came more easily versus those that were a sapped her strength and energy. The closing chapters focused primarily on aspects of mindfulness, and I admit to skimming those in the same way that I skimmed the opening neuroscience. This is not a bad book by any means, but it is one that a personal interest in the subject matter is, IMHO, crucial to fully appreciating.

Three-and-a-half stars.

Almost Sisters

Like the Unhoneymooners, Almost Sisters is a work of fiction that has me questioning everything I thought I knew about my taste in books. Generally, my preferences run to non-fiction and historical fiction, with a bit of mystery writing and a dash of the classics. Almost Sisters is decidedly none of these - it even has, horror of horrors, more fantasy Con and gaming references than I could shake a stick at - and yet I really, really enjoyed it. It ended before I was ready, and I wondered if Joshilyn Jackson had set it up for a sequel.

Leia Birch Briggs is 38, single, and famous in the world of comic book illustrators, where she is one of the best. Almost Sisters opens with her discovering that, after a few too many tequilas at one recent ComicCon, she is also pregnant by a Batman whose features she can only vaguely recall. He was black, though, of that she is certain, which means she'll have to tell her conservative, southern family that not only is she pregnant with a stranger's child, but the baby will be biracial.

Her plan to share the news goes awry when her stepsister's marriage implodes on the same day that her 90-year-old grandmother's Lewy body dementia becomes very, very public to mroe or less the entire town of Birchville, Alabama. Leia's grandmother is Birchie, and she is the reigning Birch, the last Birch residing in the town her forebear's founded. The combination of events sends Leia directly to Birchville in the company of her 13-year-old niece, Lavender, where together they must convince Birchie and her equally elderly BFF to decamp for assisted living.

And then mayhem ensues. Lavender meddles in Leia's life. Leia meddles in Lavender's life (and by extension that of her stepsister and brother-in-law). And Birchie and Wattie share secrets they will stop at nothing to keep. The skeletons in the closet aren't all metaphorical.

Five stars.