Gone to Soldiers

I won't go as far as the LA Times, which declared Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers "the most thorough and most captivating, most engrossing novel ever written about World War II," but certainly this epic novel is heroic in scope and well worth the time it takes to read the 750+ pages.

Piercy has created an entire cast of characters - ten separate narrators - and has given each of them a unique voice, compelling story, and impressive cast of supporting characters, in additional to intricately and believably linking together many of their stories, often in ways such that the characters themselves may not even realize they are linked to one another. In other words, like life.

Most, but not all, of the narrators are Jewish, some living comfortably in the U.S. while struggling to come to terms with what is happening to their relatives in Europe, others struggling daily under the heal of the Gestapo, watching in horror as friends, neighbors, family disappear, wondering when they themselves will be rounded up and departed.

From the jungle-covered islands of the Pacific, to the horrors of Auschwitz, to the factories filled with women churning out planes and tanks, and the halls of bureaucracy and secrecy in London and DC, Piercy explores the war from all angles. The final product is a carefully-crafted, thought-provoking work, admirable for what the author has done, as well as what she has written.

Five stars.

We Hope for Better Things

I absolutely devoured this book. Undoubtedly, I am somewhat biased because the book is set in Michigan and so, in many ways, simply feels like home. More than that, though, I am in awe of the way that Erin Bartels essentially writes three separate stories about distantly-related women living in different times (the 1860s, the 1960s, and today) but in the same house (in Lapeer) and deftly weaves them together.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I frequently complain about books that have even two parallel storylines because too often one or the other suffers. Bartels manages all three beautifully, so that the reader reaches the end of We Hope for Better Things with an equal appreciation for all three. What's more, she doesn't insist on tying up every possible loose end for the sake of offering up a clean resolution by the closing pages. Her book is like life: beautiful and messy, warm and heavy, seldom with easy answers.

So, Elizabeth Balsam is an investigative reporter for the Free Press when an elderly gentleman contacts her out of the blue to return some old photos to an equally-elderly relative, Nora, that Elizabeth didn't know existed. Elizabeth learns from other relatives that Nora, in fact, may have a touch of dementia and, down on her luck and out of options in Detroit, Elizabeth agrees to move into Nora's remote farmhouse to determine whether Nora can remain on her own. Once there, she becomes fascinated by the history of the house and her family, particularly Mary, who presided over house and farm in the midst of the Civil War. Slowly, as Elizabeth and Nora get to know one another better, Elizabeth pieces together the stories of her family's history.

But not all of it. As I said before, Bartels doesn't wrap everything up and tie it with a bow. There's an acknowledgement that after so much time and so many generations, some of that history would be lost, and what hasn't been lost may still be distorted. In the end, she allows her reader to fill in the blanks, or not, all of which makes for an outstanding work of fiction.

My only criticism is that, as best I can calculate, Bartels's dates are slightly off. I'm just not convinced that Nora is quite as "elderly" as she's made out to be, and I'm also having a bit of difficulty with the math that would have have Nora's grandfather, George, born in the 1860s. Not impossible, but enough to set me to calculating more than one, with pen and paper, how these characters were all related and when they appeared to be born. In the grand scheme of things, though, that is but a minor quibble.

Five stars.

Turner House

One of my goals this year is to read more broadly, from a wider cross-section of authors, settings, and time periods. Regular readers of this blog will know that, in faction, I skew heavily toward the historical, and when I deviate into the present day, the result is usually disappointment. Not so with Angela Flournoy's Turner House, which I gravitated to because of its setting - Detroit.

Charles "Cha-Cha" Turner is the oldest of 13 children, all of them born and raised in Detroit to parents newly up from Arkansas. (Cha-Cha, in fact, spent his earliest years in a shotgun house there, but the other 12 siblings were all Detroit-born. But I digress.) As the oldest, Cha-Cha is long accustomed to looking after his younger siblings and, since the death of his father, to being their patriarch. His trouble is his haint. The haint, a ghost-like spirit, first visited him as an adolescent living on Detroit's east side. It's left him along for decades, but has returned now, and is driving Cha-Cha mad. The timing couldn't be worse, as he and his wife have become full-time caretakers to his live-in, elderly mother, his youngest sister is going through her own crisis, and the family must decide whether to short-sell their beloved, but now unoccupied, family home.

In Turner House, Flournoy has given the reader much to love. She has created a bevy of characters - thirteen siblings, their parents, their children, and so on - but has wisely focused most of her attention on a manageable handful of them, so that the reader is neither overwhelmed, nor wondering, where a character came from or when and why they were dropped from the story. Not only do her characters truly resonate, but so do the troubles they face. Cha-Cha's haint is unique to him, but can also be symbolic of so many mid-life crises. Flournoy's writing is often amusing without being laugh-out-loud funny, and she sustains the same tone throughout the book.

Ultimately, it's easy to see why Turner House was a 2016 National Book Award finalist.

Four stars.

Detroit: An American Autopsy

Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff is a fascinating and incredibly disturbing look at the dysfunction that is Detroit. Living in Michigan, I already had a pretty good sense of how broken - and broke - the city is. After all, the city made news several yeas ago by asking schoolchildren to bring their own toilet paper to school, since the district couldn't afford it anymore. And then there is the Kwame Kilpatrick sideshow: enough said. For anyone who hasn't become familiar with the downfall of one of the nation's formerly great cities, LeDuff does a great job of breaking down the problems that have plagued the city since...the 70s? The 60s? The 1860s? Obviously there's no shortage of material here.

All-in-all, I thought the first half of the book was stronger than the second, which delves more into LeDuff's personal history and feels more like a memoir than an exposé. This is a pretty quick read and well worth the time for anyone who wants to begin to understand how so much can go so wrong and whether the same thing might happen to other great cities down the road.