A Long Way Home by Myra McIlvain Imagine your husband will spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair because you chose to drive drunk. Your now disabled husband makes you pay for that mistake every day through verbal and emotional abuse. You’ve been trying for years to think of a guilt-free escape from the marriage. Now imagine you are in the World Trade Center on 9/11, and as the Trade Center collapses, you spontaneously decide to fake your death, knowing your husband will receive the benefits of your life-insurance. That’s how the central character in McIlvain’s book, A Long Way Home, begins her journey – not to the new life she imagined, but rather to a life even further complicated by deception.
McIlvain, a master story-teller, plausibly twines this tasty tale about, Meredith Haggerty, a corporate executive in NYC who uses 9/11 to escape to Mexico. But as so often happens in real life, fate intercedes when Meredith meets a priest and ends up teaching English in a small American border community that is fraught with the complexities and dangers of poverty and illegal immigration.
A Long Way Home intrigues us with forbidden romance, danger, a glimpse into the unique challenges experienced by many Latin families, and a whopper of an ending. Does Meredith really escape her obsessed husband. Has she simply traded one brand of sorrow for another? Can Meredith, or any of us for that matter really define our fates? Or are we all just pawns in the game of life?
The End of October: A novel by Lawrence WrightSo, did God come to Austin author Lawrence Wright in a dream one night and say “Lawrence, here’s a tip”. If not, either Wright is psychic or incredibly lucky, as The End of October, which is a book about a pandemic, was published within weeks of America’s acknowledgement of the reality of COVID.
I’ve read several of Wright’s other books, The Looming Tower, which is about 9/11 and won a Pulitzer, Going Clear, about Scientology, and God Bless Texas, so I knew Wright was an amazing journalist. But reading about a fictional pandemic in the middle of a real pandemic was super spooky, and incongruously enjoyable.
The story is about an American microbiologist, Henry Parsons who at the request of the World Health Organization visits the beginnings of a pandemic in a prison in Indonesia. Soon and quickly, due to the spread of the pandemic, and as Parsons spends months trying to get back home to his family, the world begins to crumble in chillingly familiar ways. Schools are closed, the stock market disintegrates, jobs disappear, violence and disorder prevail, and governments implode. Nothing is normal.
If Wright had published this book, and I’d read it in 2019, I’d have been mildly horrified or amused. But by the time I read it in May, when the actual horror of COVID was very real, it felt prophetic and sickeningly believable. So, Lawrence can you please let God know he’s made his point?
Camino Winds by John Grisham
I gave up on John Grisham years ago when I felt he was becoming predictable and formulaic, but decided to take a chance on Camino Winds in a recent desperate search for a road trip book.
Hopefully Grisham wrote this book to capitalize on his fans' loyalty, and to make some money. To think he wrote it because it was a story he enjoyed telling would add insult to injury. It was as close to bad as mediocre can get.
The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir by Samantha PowerThe Education of an Idealist is for all the idealist out there, like Barrack Obama, many of my friends, and me. And thank goodness for idealists. Otherwise this would be a boring, right brain, very out of balance - or should I say, even more out of balance - world.
Infamously known as the Obama campaign foreign policy advisory who referred in the press to Hillary Clinton as a “monster” and was subsequently ousted, Power eventually returned to the Obama Presidential staff, serving in several positions, including the American Ambassador to the United Nations.
The Education of an Idealist is a lot about Power’s inspiring commitment to human rights, but it is also about how Power arrived at her idealism, her upbringing Ireland, and eventual immigration to America to embrace American ideals, and about how she managed to grow up, get educated, and gain credibility as an immigrant, diplomat, woman, mother, and yes, idealist.
I suspect Power’s story may be “idealized” (sorry), but as an armchair policy wonk, I relished her engrossing stories of world strife, intrigue, victories, defeats, much of it turning in her hands. What a life! Oh yes, and as one would expect of the almost perfect Samantha, she’s a wonderful writer.
All Things Left Wild by James Wade
New York City financial analyst and book club member, Suzanne Franks sent me a text saying I should read All Things Left Wild by Austin author James Wade. Without even looking first to see what the book was about I bought and cued it up for an upcoming road trip. Much to my surprise it was a western mystery – two words I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen together!
It didn’t take long for me to discover the reason for Suzanne’s recommendation. About 50 pages in, I was hooked into a unique, well-told story, and deeply-mined characters. The setting may have been late 1800’s in the southwest, and the story launched with a failed horse rustling attempt, but because the story focus is the complexities of family and human relationships, it could have been set anywhere, anytime and been just as successful.
Caleb Bentley is on the run with his brother, chased by the rancher whose horses they tried to steal. As the chase plays out, the characters learn about themselves and each other, and we see ourselves and humanity in them and develop empathy and emotional commitment – the key to any good story.
My only negative comment is that the characters occasionally seemed a little too one-sided– too good, too bad – but I forgave that when they were visceral and the writing was tasty (as it mostly was).
Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalia Sylvester
I have a hard time embracing book topics I don’t believe in, like extraterrestrial beings, or as in Natalia Sylvester’s book, ghost. Actually, although there is a ghost prominent in this book, it isn’t about ghost, it’s about a family’s illegal immigration from Mexico, and how that is played out in several generations’ history and lives – as told by a ghost.
The ghost is Omar, the deceased father of Isabel’s soon to be husband, Martin. Omar appears to Isabel on her and Martin’s wedding day, asking for her help to repair his relationship with Martin and his mother Elda, who’d he’d abandoned when Martin was young. It wasn’t the ghost that bothered me so much. It was the lack of story “payoff”. I kept waiting for something to be revealed on page 25, page 50, page 100 – something to compel me to keep reading – a nibble, some clues as to where we were headed – but it just never came, and I sort of gave up. Others who finished the book said the payoff came at the very end, but unfortunately, the narrative wasn’t quite interesting enough to keep my attention. Maybe you’ll like it.
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