fiction

Dear Life, by Alice Munro

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Having recently reread Munro’s first collection of short stories, I was eager to read this, her last. Much is unchanged: the stories are still mostly set in small towns in rural Ontario; many are about women struggling for agency in a conservative culture; and there’s a lot of leaving and returning home.  

What has changed is the depth, a willingness to take on even darker themes, and even more complex characters. “Pride” and “Corrie” feature characters with physical disabilities, exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and class. In other stories, such as “Amundsen” and “Haven,” men inhabit their male privilege without apology, leaving the women in their lives to piece out a life from whatever’s left.

Some of the stories explore aging: a character beginning to experience the onset of dementia (“In Sight of the Lake”), a couple choosing where to end their lives (“Dolly”). Other stories are from a child’s viewpoint. “Gravel” in particular is interesting because the first-person narrator seems to be telling the story of loss and memory as a child. Only later do we come to understand that this is a grown woman looking back.

Whatever their ages, Munro’s people exhibit what one reviewer called “bravery, steadiness and stoic grace.”

As an author, my biggest takeaway from this collection—and indeed from Munro’s entire oeuvre—is to trust the reader. I’m one of those people who likes to fix things. An engineer in my day job, I’m always on the alert for a solution, so I still struggle to remember to ask a distraught friend if they want potential solutions (with a risk analysis of each) or a listening ear. As a result, I sometimes find myself explaining too much to forestall a complaint of I don’t get it or Why did the character do that?

Munro seems to have no such qualms. Much is left unexplained in these stories, leaving some people disgruntled, as a glance at Goodreads shows. What she’s really doing is leaving openings for us as readers to bring our own experiences to the table. Like white space in a poem, these openings encourage us to engage with the story. They force us to interpret for ourselves the actions and motivations of her characters.

At times she is more direct: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.”

The story that fascinated me most was “Train,” about a soldier returning from the war who, nearing his destination, jumps off the train and walks away. It reminded me of Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years which begins with the protagonist simply walking away from her family on a Delaware beach, a scene which has stayed with me for 28 years.

“Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window. What are you doing here? Where are you going?”

When you walk away from one life, what do you walk into? I imagined him there, holding on for dear life and then letting go.  

The last four pieces are different. She says, “The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.”

I found them interesting in their own right, seeing the seeds of many stories. As writers, we do take bits of our experience and transform them as only one tessera in the mosaic of a story. We get some hints of her creative process when she describes a neighbour’s house in rural Ontario “… that we would never visit or know and that was to me like a dwarf’s house in a story. But we knew the man who lived there… Roly Grain his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.”

The choice of what four things to write about also intrigued me. They are a reminder that it’s not necessarily the obvious events, like marriage or having a child, that change and shape you. It could be the small, seemingly trivial events that have made you into the person you are. And thus her choice of subject matter over the course of her career comes into focus: the moments that make a life. And thus life itself. “So immense an enchantment.”

If you were to choose four incidents from your early life that most affected who you are today, what would they be?

Radio Free Vermont, by Bill McKibben

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Subtitled A Fable of Resistance, this is the story of radio personality Vern Barclay’s mission to persuade Vermont to secede from the U. S. Seventy-two years old and dismayed by the speed, greed and corruption that have taken over the country, Vern wants to remind Vermonters of all the things they value that are being lost, not just the slower pace of life, but also local food and the strength of community: Vermont’s “free local economy, where neighbors make things for neighbors—and so they actually bother to give them some taste, body, and character.”

He and his accomplices, the young computer specialist Perry Alterson, his pal Sylvia and an Olympic athlete named Trace, come up with various pranks to drive their point home, starting with a protest at the opening of the first Walmart that backfires, spewing raw sewage into the store. Vern also has hosts a podcast that Perry has set up to use over a dial-up connection to foil their pursuers. The podcast’s motto is “Underground, underfoot and underpowered.”

For Vern, this is more of a thought experiment than a serious endorsement of secession. He mostly wants people to wake up and notice that some good things are slipping away. Still, it fits with the push for secession coming from states like Texas and California.

Humor isn’t that easy to write these days. No matter how much you exaggerate what’s happening in this country, reality shocks you by going even farther. Yet McKibben pulls it off. This zany story is full of fun and surprises, but never quite loses touch with the real world, or a possible version of it.

The satire is softened by the characters who are forthright but pleasant, stubborn but polite. I loved seeing a resistance movement that is not only nonviolent but also positive. It’s focused on building a better future, not just tearing everything down, and demonstrating how to take action, in a friendly way of course.

Funny and thought-provoking, I hope this novel from McKibben is the first of many more. It’s a departure from his many nonfiction books, starting with The End of Nature, in form if not in theme, and must have been a hoot to write.

Have you read any of Bill McKibben’s nonfiction books? Try this novel!

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell

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In my book club’s choice for this month, Lucrezia de’ Medici, third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este, step out of Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” and are brought to life by the author of Hamnet.  When her older sister dies suddenly, Lucrezia is forced to take her place in the politically important marriage with Alfonso. Only 16, she is married to him and carried off to Ferrara in 1560. A year later she is dead, rumored to have been poisoned by her husband.

That much is true, though today historians think she died of tuberculosis. O’Farrell expands the story, creating a rich tapestry of the time and a deep dive into a sensitive young woman’s experience. The narrative alternates between the last few months of Lucrezia’s life when Alfonso has removed her from the castello to a remote fortezza, and the fuller story of her life leading up to this ending.

During her childhood in Florence, Lucrezia leads a limited life, confined to the nursery area where she feels different from her many siblings, older and younger. Imaginative and artistic, she has a rich inner life. And she’s a fierce child, pushing against restrictions and yearning to see the tiger her father has had imported for his personal zoo in the lower reaches of the palazzo.

Since we know from the historical note at the beginning that she will die, the suspense that powers the novel—jacked up every time we return to the threatening fortezza—comes from wondering why it must come to that and whether she is able to resist in any way. Even in the other sections, there are hints and warnings, such as her learning about the Trojan War and how Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia after pretending she is to marry Achilles.

O’Farrell’s luscious writing pulled me in. I felt the prick of hairpins in Lucrezia’s hair, the stiff material of her gown. The “sweet, cloying smell” of lilies in her chamber came to me as did the “waterfall of noise” that “crashes down on her” when “[t]he gates creak open” and the glare in her eyes as she steps out of the palazzo where a carriage waits to take her to her wedding.

After the wedding, she and her maid are carried off to a villa in rural Tuscany. “They travel along a wide road, on either side of which are rows and rows of fruit trees—Lucrezia could, for a while, make out branches heavy with the round curves of peaches and perhaps the tear shape of lemons. But now it is too dark to see anything at all.” Meanwhile, Alfonso has been called back to Ferrara to deal with an emergency: his mother and oldest sister refusing to give up the new, forbidden Protestantism.

Some people in my book club considered the portrayal of a noble woman such as Lucrezia objecting to a political marriage to be an anachronism. Marriage at that time was considered a transaction, especially for rulers. Women such as these were raised knowing that marriages would be arranged for them based on political and/or economic benefits. Instead, this story projects modern-day women’s expectations of personal agency and a loving marriage on both Lucrezia and Alfonso’s sister Elisabetta, who is dallying with one of the guards.

Since I’m also reading Phillipa Gregory’s magnificent nonfiction book Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History, I’ve learned that some women did rebel against being subjugated and treated as property, even during this period. Therefore, I didn’t find it hard to believe that, out of all the women in the book who made no complaint about their arranged marriages, there could be a child such as Lucrezia, raised in  isolation and temperamentally different from her siblings, who would find it a terrifying prospect. Nor that Elisabetta, with all the dissension and rebellion within her own family, might give in to the attractions of a handsome guardsman.

I do agree, though, that many—most?—historical novels feature women and sometimes men whose modern sensibilities are at odds with their time period. I assume this is a necessary adjustment to attract the attention of modern readers.

One drawback of being exclusively in Lucrezia’s point of view is that her interest in and understanding of the other characters is limited. Thus, we don’t get to know them very well. I did find Alfonso interesting, with his combination of ruthlessness—necessary for anyone trying to rule in such embattled times—and aesthetic awe of the castrati’s music, not to mention his rare whimsy. I would have liked to know more about Lucrezia’s maid Emilia, too.

The way O’Farrell orchestrates verb tenses captured my attention. Most chapters are in present tense, some, such as the one about the tiger, in past. And there’s even at least two sections in future tense. Usually, as is normal, the past tense is used for memories and flashbacks in present-tense sections, but now and then it is the past perfect. These are not errors, I believe, but a subtle way of capturing the multiple currents of time that swirl around us.

My book club discussed the ending at length. Some found it ambiguous and, indeed, came up with a few different interpretations. I won’t go into that, of course, but would love to hear what you thought of it, if you read the book.

Do you enjoy historical fiction based on the lives of real people? Why or why not?

Dance of the Happy Shades, by Alice Munro

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Hearing of Munro’s death sent me back to this, her first book, winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1968. One of my favorite authors, Munro wrote short stories exclusively, forcing her to master the art of compression. Even these early stories demonstrate—to my delight—the kind of concise writing we expect in poetry. Munro is lauded for capturing the life of small towns in rural Ontario, drawing on her experience of growing up in one such town where she was born in 1931. As Hermione Lee writes in the New York Review:

Munro’s “real life” ingredients become enormously familiar to us: the childhood in the fox farm on the edge of town, the mother with incurable Parkinson’s, the studious girl reading her way out of the country into university, the expectations for young women in 1940s and 1950s provincial, conservative, colonial Canada; the early marriage and motherhood in Vancouver, the condescending young husband, the adultery, the divorce, the deaths of her parents, the returns home.

Yet even when I come across some of these familiar details, each story feels new to me and each character a new and different person. She establishes the new character immediately, sometimes by starting in media res, sometimes by giving her an unmistakably original voice.

Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on . . . “The Time of Death”

Now that Mary McQuade had come, I pretended not to remember her. It seemed the wisest thing to do. She herself said, “if you don’t remember me you don’t remember much.” “Images”

Setting and mood, as well, are deftly established with just a few sentences. Here, the narrator has returned to her hometown for a visit and is sitting on the steps with her sister Maddy in the quiet night.

At 10:30 a bus goes through the town, not slowing much; we see it go by at the end of our street. It is the same bus I used to take when I came home from college, and I remember coming into Jubilee on some warm night, seeing the earth bare around the massive roots of the trees, the drinking fountain surrounded by little puddles of water on the main street, the soft scrolls of blue and red and orange light that said Billiards and Café . . . “The Peace of Utrecht”

This story also illustrates why I value Munro’s work so highly. The tangled relationship between the two sisters, one who stayed to care for their aging mother and one who left, is the fire smoldering between lines laying out the events and memories, the encounters and discords. No story I’d read before this one truly captured the roiling emotions and testy skirmishes between sisters that I’d experienced. Munro is someone who gets me. Was.

Stories, such as “Boys and Girls” where the narrator rejects her mother’s homemaker-in-training chores to join the boys doing far more fun farmwork, speak to me childhood. Others could have been written about my life as a young mother. “The Office” begins:

The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt. It was simple but audacious. I went into the living room where my husband was watching television and I said, “I think I ought to have an office.”

Girls and young women populate the stories in this first collection. I’ve read many of her later stories, which only get better, and now am looking forward to reading her last two books.

Have you read Alice Munro’s work? What is your favorite story?

The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

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I’m always thrilled to stumble across an inspiring story based on real events, a story that’s been lost to history. In 1865, the Civil War is over, but freedom has only worsened the lives of former slaves. On the Montgomery Plantation, twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo carries the trauma of her years as a slave: her mother being sold away, her father lynched, and beatings that have scarred her back and soul.

She hates, with all her being, and cannot find room in her heart for love, even for William, the older preacher who loves her. Still, she knows he is a good man and agrees to marry him. She knows what she wants: to make real her vision of a Happy Land where people can live freely and be treated with respect. She envisions a cooperative community, where everything is shared so that all can prosper.

When events make it impossible to stay on the plantation, Louella and William lead a group of former slaves to find a place to settle and build their community. They travel for months, encountering dangers and surprising succor in the post-Civil War South, eventually settling in the Carolinas. Louella and William are appointed Queen and King of Happy Land. It thrives, growing to 500 families, but internal friction develops and threatens all they’ve built.  

Miller’s fictionalised version of this true story captures the drama of Louella’s terrible journey from hate to love. The injustice and outright abuse can be hard to read about, but will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with slavery and Reconstruction. Another aspect that can be off-putting but not unexpected for someone of the time is Louella’s devout Christianity. While no doubt historically accurate, Louella constantly excusing injustice by saying that God has His ways or hoping God would hear her need seemed to take all the air out of the story.

Luckily she often speaks her mind and finds creative ways to accomplish her goals. Such parts kept the story moving. By having Louella take the lead and speak her mind, Miller shows us a complex character. Each of the characters—and there are a lot—is fully depicted as an individual.

Given the egalitarian nature of Happy Land, I was uncomfortable with the titles of king and queen, especially since they were used as day-to-day nomenclature, i.e., referring to King William or the King and Louella likewise. Of course, this is one of the dangers of using real events for a novel. The author shouldn’t go against the actual historical record.

Having just read Erasure, a novel of how the public and the publishing industry only want and will only accept one view of The Black Experience, I appreciated this portrait of a harmonious and loving marriage as well as that of a thriving community.

The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

The book’s language is fairly simple; in fact, I wondered if it wasn’t a Middle Grade or Young Adult novel, though the traumatic violence rules out Middle Grade. However, it’s an easy read and an immensely valuable addition to our understanding of the time and also of what one woman can accomplish. She had a dream, and she made it come true.

What novel have you read that was based on real events?

The Quiet and the Loud, by Helena Fox

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In this Young Adult novel, Georgia at 18 is barely holding it together. Taking a gap year at home in Sydney, Australia, before college, she keeps getting texts from her alcoholic father who lives in Seattle, Washington. He has been a danger to her for her whole life, but she feels duty-bound to help him. The story opens with a vivid flashback to one such occasion.

Her best friend Tess, also 18, has deliberately gotten pregnant, determined to become a teen mom, and assumes that Georgia will not only bring her smoothies and wait attendance on her, but will also help her raise the child. They’ve been best friends forever, so Georgia feels she must support Tess, even as her attention is being drawn in other directions.

Such as her rewarding part-time work teaching art to children, which offsets her friend Laz’s despair about the climate crisis. Her grandfather, who lives with them, may be losing his marbles, or at least his teeth, but adds comic relief with his relentless pursuit of elderly women.

Georgia’s mother is happily married to successful artist Mel, whose brusque demeanor hides a penetrating insight. She is the one who gifts Georgia with two successful coping mechanisms: kayaking and painting.

Suspense grows as we learn more about how her father’s alcoholism has affected her. As he spirals and Tess becomes mired in post-partum depression, 2019’s wildfires come ever closer, sending Laz into an apocalyptic frenzy and Georgia to the brink of despair.

I loved Fox’s previous novel How It Feels to Float, and am myself overly sensitive to loud sensory input, so I was eager to read this one. I was not disappointed. While the themes can be difficult, Georgia’s voice is a welcome companion.

Much of the writing is gorgeous, especially lyrical passages out in the kayak. And Georgia’s burgeoning feelings for her new friend Calliope are handled with grace and compassion.

Can you recommend a Young Adult novel that you’ve enjoyed?

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

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Like Antonia in Alvarez’s Afterlife, Richard, a widower, has just retired from his career as a college professor in what was formerly East Berlin.

Perhaps many more years still lie before him, or perhaps only a few. In any case, from now on Richard will no longer have to get up early to appear at the Institute. As of today, he has time—plain and simple . . . his head still works just the same as before. What’s he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head?

Such transitional moments in our lives roll grief and possibility, loneliness and freedom into a turbulent mess. The first thing in Richard’s mind, however, is the calm lake on whose shore he lives, and the man who recently drowned there, his body never found. All summer everyone has avoided the lake: swimmers, fishermen, boaters. Nobody talks about it; they just stay away. It stays calm.

On a chance trip to Alexanderplatz, he doesn’t notice the African refugees staging a hunger strike there until he sees them on the news later. He didn’t notice them because he was thinking of the Polish town Rzeszów, which had a system of tunnels, essentially a second city underground, originally built in the Middle Ages where Jews took refuge when the Nazis invaded.

Moved by the refugees’ refusal to speak or give their names, the academic in Richard stirs to life: Here is a project! He decides to learn who these men are by interviewing them. Through Richard we hear their voices, their stories, and learn about what it is to be a refugee.

I loved Erpenbeck’s Visitation and looked forward to this novel. The beginning is brilliant. Her imagery and profound insight moved me deeply and had me marking page after page. However, the story slows as Richard starts tangling with bureaucracy and coaxing the refugees to talk to him. It’s a difficult tightrope for a writer: to reflect the tedium of the situation without boring the reader.

The story picks up again as we get to know the refugees individually, and as Germany’s bureaucracy begins to close in on them, narrowing their chances of being granted residence and thereby a work permit. As a lawyer whom Richard consults says, “The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense.”

Most members of my book club agreed that, while this was a challenging read, partly because of the pacing in the middle and partly because of the subject matter, it was also an important book to read. We all learned a lot, even those who already worked in refugee services. Those who read through to the end found it a worthy cap to the story, and were moved by the generous responses of the friends with whom Richard shared his stories of the refugees.

We talked about the symbolism of the drowned man. Like the Polish city, there are hidden things here as well as things we turn our eyes away from. When do you become visible? What do you have to do?

When you do become visible, as when Richard listens to the men and shares their stories with his friends, things do change—minds change.

I also found much here about communication woven into the story. Some have to do with the refugees’ struggle to learn German and Richard’s to learn some of their languages. Some have to do with how words are like borders: mutable signs, or written in sand, the way the boy from Niger learned his own language, lost when the wind blows.

The Italian laws have different borders in mind than the German laws do. What interests him is that as long as a border of the sort he’s been familiar with for most of his life runs along a particular stretch of land and is permeable in either direction after border control procedures, the intentions of the two  countries can be perceived by the use of barbed wire, the configuration of fortified barriers, and things of that sort. But the moment these borders are defined only by laws, ambiguity takes over, with each country responding , as it were, to questions its neighbor hasn’t asked . . .  Indeed, the law has made a shift from physical reality to the realm of language.

The border between life and death is here too: the chances that determine which side we will land on, the ghosts that cross over. Richard is sometimes nostalgic for the lost world of his childhood in East Berlin, before the wall came down. As one member of my book club noted, perhaps that early grounding in communal living makes Richard more open to caring about the fate of these others. Indeed, the novel calls out the weakness of capitalism: its callous disregard of the common good.

As Mary Oliver asked: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Here is one man’s answer.

What novel have you read that illuminates one of the great political issues of our time?

Fortune Favors the Dead, by Stephen Spotswood

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Fortune Favors the Dead

This witty, fast-paced mystery starts in New York City in 1945, with Willowjean “Will” Parker and her boss, famous detective Lillian Pentecost, investigating the murder of society matron Abigail Collins. Will has been Pentecost’s assistant and protégé for three years, the two having met when Will saved the older woman’s life with her knife-throwing skills.

Knife-throwing? Yes, at the time Will had been working as a roustabout in a traveling circus for five years, gaining some unusual skills. She’s the one telling this story, and her sassy, smart voice makes this a thoroughly enjoyable ride.

Pentecost, too, is unusual, and not just because she is a female detective at a time when women who stepped up during WWII are being forced into domestic roles while jobs are given to the returning men. She has multiple sclerosis, a progressively degenerative disease which at this point affects her stamina and gait but not her brilliant mind.

I loved both these characters before even getting to the story. Casting someone with a chronic disease as a major character is a rare and brilliant stroke. Plus, Will undermines all the stereotypes for women, not to mention circus workers, of the time. The duo quickly put me in mind of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, reimagined as women, but I love that Will is still a young woman, still finding her way in the world, unlike Archie.

On to the story! Abigail Collins is found in the locked study of her home during a big Halloween party at her mansion. She’s been beaten to death with a crystal ball, used in the séance held there, while seated in the chair where her husband killed himself a year before. Rumor holds that the ghost of her husband appeared during the séance, so many believe he is the murderer.

There are plenty of other, more corporeal, suspects. The psychic Ariel Belestrade has been on Ms. Pentecost’s radar for some time. Skeptical anthropology professor Olivia Waterhouse has also been investigating Belestrade for fraudulent practices and written her up in her most recent book. The psychic’s seductive power is brilliantly portrayed in some of the book’s most chilling scenes.

Even more complications ensue when Rebecca Collins, daughter of the murdered woman and a continuing frustration to her straight-laced brother, starts putting moves on Will, and Will finds herself responding to them.

Spotswood does a great job of bringing the period to life with details small and large, whether about circus life, nightclubs, or the mean streets of NYC. As a side note, the cover art boldly announces both its classic noir roots and Will’s unusual character. An intriguing cover will always make me look twice at a book.

For a fun read, you can’t go wrong with this cosy mystery with a bite to it. Will’s voice and personality alone are worth the price of admission. I’m looking forward to reading the other books in the Pentecost and Parker series.

Have you read a novel recently where you’ve been utterly charmed by the characters?

A Woman Is No Man, by Etaf Rum

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A Woman Is No Man

Rum’s powerful debut novel begins with an arranged marriage. In 1990, Isra’s family is eking out an austere living on the outskirts of a town in the West Bank, having been driven out of their home by the Israeli invasion, which they call the Nakba—the Catastrophe. They are delighted to marry off their 17-year-old daughter to the oldest son of an American Palestinian family who are looking for a quiet, submissive Muslim girl.

The marriage to a stranger doesn’t come close to Isra’s dreams of romance and adventure, but it has to be better than the constant beatings and verbal abuse from her parents. Instead, it is worse. Isra often has cause to remember her mother’s warning: “There is nothing out there for a woman but her bayt wa dar, her house and home. Marriage, motherhood — that is a woman’s only worth.”

Adam and Isra live in the basement of his family’s crowded Brooklyn home. Upstairs are his parents, Fareeda and Khaled, and his three younger siblings. Isra becomes, essentially, a prisoner in the house, where Fareeda watches soap operas while Isra does most of the housework and cooking.

As their Bay Ridge neighborhood has a large Palestinian population, the cultural norms are enforced. For example, only a prostitute would leave the house by herself, and Fareeda takes her only to homes of other women where Isra has to endure snubs from the other women for not having produced a male child. Thus, she is unable to develop social connections. Her plight illustrates the way self-blaming and cultural shaming add to the abuse of women.

Even as Adam takes to drinking and beating her, Isra understands that his lot is not easy either. As the eldest son he is expected to run his own convenience store, help at his father’s store, and then even help his spoiled younger brother set up a third store. She also taps a larger perspective.

The wounds of her childhood—poverty, hunger, abuse—had taught her. That the traumas of the world were inseparably connected. She was not surprised when her father came home and beat them mercilessly, the tragedy of the Nakba bulging in his veins… She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been battered themselves?

In a dual timeline, we meet Isra’s oldest daughter Deya, now 18. Isra and Adam have died, and their four daughters are being raised by Fareeda with the same strict rules. Even as her grandmother searches for a husband for Deya, the young woman wants to break free and go to college. Eventually an estranged family member reveals some jarring truths about the family’s history to Deya and encourages her to stand up for herself.

Despite the repressive, patriarchal culture portrayed in the story, several characters step up to say that such treatment of women, little more than servants who don’t even sit at the table to eat with the men, goes against the Koran and Islamic teachings that celebrate the role of women and enjoin men to honor them. We are told that the Prophet Muhammad himself said, “‘Observe your duty to Allah in respect to the women, and treat them well.’”

One thing that stands out to me is the role of books and reading in the story. For Isra, her sister-in-law Sara, and her daughter Deya, these are the tiny windows into the world and sole comfort in their severely restricted lives.

I’ve read several books recently that frame a main character’s engaging personal story in an explicit political framework: Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez; Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng; Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell; even The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble. In trying to understand how the authors manage to keep the politics from overwhelming the story, what I see is their intense focus on the main character’s experience.

Rum’s task must have been especially difficult given today’s Islamophobic prejudices and anti-Arab stereotypes. And it’s no wonder she found it difficult to make the men into rounded characters, because of the cultural norm that once the men leave the house, what they do in invisible to the women stuck there. And we only have the women’s experience.

It’s important to note that Rum describes their perception of their lives sometimes as simply brutal and other times in a more nuanced way, such as Isra’s recognition of the effects of their historical trauma on the men. I’m sure not all Palestinian families are like the ones portrayed here, but some are and I’m grateful to Rum for breaking the code of silence and letting us in.

Can you recommend a novel about Palestinian families?

A Borrowing of Bones, by Paula Munier

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Former military police Mercy Carr and Elvis are veterans of the Afghanistan war, home now but unable to shake their habits, memories and wounds. Elvis is a bomb-sniffing dog, a Malinois or Belgian Shepherd which is similar to a German Shepherd, forced to retire due to depression after the death of his partner Martinez, Mercy’s fiancé.

They take refuge in Mercy’s cabin in rural Vermont where they have plenty of forest in which to run and hike, and Mercy’s beloved grandmother, a veterinarian, nearby. On the fourth of July weekend, they escape the fireworks and mayhem by hiking in a particularly remote area.

Then Elvis alerts that there are explosives off the side of the path. And nearby Mercy finds an abandoned baby and partially buried human bones. Her 911 call brings U.S. Game Warden Troy Warner and his partner, a Newfoundland named Susy Bear. The four of them try to unravel the mystery—Mercy leaping back into law enforcement mode and Troy reminding her that she is a civilian now.

They run into territorial disputes, including the attempts pf the state police chief to keep them out of the investigation, and hostile families on remote dirt roads who don’t try to hide their disregard for the law. The more they learn, the more they fear something terrible is going to disrupt the holiday festivities in town.

I chose this story because of the Vermont setting, and was rewarded with plenty of woodsy scenes to go with the intriguing plot. The characters also appealed to me, even the minor ones. Mercy and Elvis are sensitively drawn by the author, who avoids wounded warrior stereotypes to present realistic people. Munier also manages to handle big ideas like grief, patriotism and honor with refreshing sincerity. It’s a good reminder to me, as a writer, not to back away from concepts like these for fear they’ve been overdone.

Apparently there is a whole genre of mysteries with dogs, actually a subgenre of mysteries. The two dogs are certainly full-fledged actors in this story, and fully formed characters as well, not cutesy cartoons. Among the dogs in my life have been several German Shepherds and a Newfoundland, so I enjoyed this aspect of the story.

If you’re looking for a new series of mysteries, you might check this out. I know I’ll be looking to travel more trails with Mercy and Elvis.

t’s fun when a book has a dog who works as a character. One that comes to mind is Lessons in Chemistry. Can you recommend another?