Book Review

Darius the Great is Not Okay, by Adir Khorram

    This novel was hard to find but easy to read.

    Its title and description intrigued me, but I was unable to find it for three years in my bookstore visits, I finally asked and realized it was a Young Adult novel, and thus in that section. 

    Who knew?

    Anyway, Khorram's little gem of a book -- which gets better with every page, and wraps up with a strong, emotional finish -- has a lot to teach us. He delves into Iranian culture. He explores mental health issues, specifically depression. He discusses being bullied and not fitting in. He touches on living with a loved one who has depression, and the emotional toll it takes on everyone.

    Whew. That's a lot for a Young Adult novel to take on. But Khorram does it, and he does it well.

    Darius Kellner -- the protagonist and narrator -- is the son of a immigrant woman, Shirin, from Iran, and a white guy from the United States, living in Portland, Ore., attending his local high school. He tries to accept parts of his heritage but pales in comparison to his younger sister, Leleh's, knowledge and love of it. He calls himself a Fractional Persian.

    Both Darius and his father suffer from depression. Darius is overweight, not active, and has few friends. He thinks his father criticizes him and blames him for being bullied. He derides him as a Paragon of Teutonic Masculinity. (Yes, in capital letter.)

    While he does not get along with his father, he cherises the one thing they share -- their nightly watching of Star Trek reruns.

    The background is a setup to the family's first visit to Shirin's hometown of Yazd, Iran. There, Shirin's father is dying of a brain tumor.

    Once there, Darius enter a world unlike his own. He realizes he loves his grandparents. He learns about Iran's history, especially that of his namesake, and enjoys being called by the Iranian pronunciation, Darioush. But he also realizes that as an American who doesn't speak the language, he still doesn't fit it.

    Then he meets a neighborhood boy, Sohrab. They quickly become friends. Darious is overjoyed that he has found a friend, someone who wants to be his friend. It's an unknown feeling for him, and Darius must also learn the differing ways men and boys relate to each other in Iran than they do in the United States. It makes him uncomfortable at times, but also content with their closeness. 

    Their relationship, along with some surprising revelations from his father, helps change Darius. 

    There is a second book in the series, Darius the Great Deserves Better.  It's in the TBR Stack. 

Book Review: Days Without End

 Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry

    At one point in reading this painful novel, I was thinking of putting it aside forever. But I ploughed through, and eventually, it was worth it. But beware this is a depressing, violent, and traumatic book. 

    The plot, such as it is, is secondary to the descriptions of the scenes and the settings. And while the writing is evocative, it can be incessant at times. And some of those vivid descriptions deal with long passages about slogging through rain, snow and mud, or with hatred, fear, and slaughter. 

    The voice telling us all this comes from the main character and protaganist, one Thomas McNulty. He is a remarkable person to tell this story of the wild west, the Civil War, and the attempted genocide of the Native population. He is an Irish immigrant whose family died in the Great Hunger, a soldier, and a gay man who is gender fluid. He enjoys dressing as a woman, for a job, in the theater, and in his personal life. His loving relationship with John Cole, another male character, is a constant throughout the book.

    Barry gives McNulty a voice in the style of an uneducated person of the mid-19th Century. He uses language, terms, and expresses ideas that likely were common for the time, although considered offensive, if not derogatory and unacceptable, today. Yet, the gay love and transgender issues are treated in a matter-of-fact manner. While the two men often hide their love from others, they are sometimes accepted as a couple. In a passage late in the book, McNulty describes how he is comfortable with being gender fluid.

I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of a woman and wake with the same. I don't foresee no time where this ain't true no more. Maybe I was born a man and growing into a woman.

    The story follows Thomas, or Thomasina, from about the time he is 12 when he and his partner, often called Handsome John Cole, run away from their orphanage and set out to explore the country. They get jobs as female dancers in a mining town, which is otherwise without women. It's not a sexual thing, but about companionship, and it is an enjoyable experience for Thomasina.

    The pair then join the cavalry. This is where the book bogs down. Pages and entire chapters are dedicated to their travels and travails though the mountainous west, the intricacies and politics of army life, and the murder and dehumanization that occurs during the Indian Wars.

    Then we read similar tedious descriptions about the battles of the Civil War.

    Eventually, John Cole, Thomas, sometimes as Thomasina, and a Native child they have adopted settle in Tennessee with an old Army buddy and a few others. But even that life does not go smoothly, and there are more long-winded tales of unpleasantness.

    But for the most part, it is a satisfying ending worth getting to.

Book Review: Migrations

Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy

    Franny Stone is forever seeking, searching, and surviving.

    The budding ornithologist is of Irish-Australian heritage, but she doesn't feel at home in either place. In fact, she rarely feels at home; she only is comfortable in or by the sea -- preferably alone, in the cold, deep ocean water.

    Set again the backdrop of an earth in the throes of a full-blown extinction crisis -- most land animals are gone, birds are disappearing, and the seas are being emptied of fish -- Migration follows Franny as she chases a flock of Arctic terns on perhaps its last migration. She tells us the terns are known for their record-shattering flights.

   That is true. The Arctic tern, a small bird about a foot long with a 2 1/2-foot wingspan, regularly travels the length of the Earth to its breeding grounds. They start up as far north as Greenland, and criss-cross down the Atlantic Ocean in a S-curve, thought to take advantage of the prevailing winds. They can travel some 44,000 miles on their journey. 

    Franny wants to follow them, and oddly, she persuades a fishing boat to take her. A vegetarian and conservationist, Franny dislikes fishermen, blaming them for the destruction of aquatic life. Her pairing up with them and their craggy captain, Ennis, is one of many contradictions in her life. 

    Others include her love for her husband as she always runs from him. She searches for her family, but shies away from releationships. She survives her own reckless life as she follows extinction.

    The story's main arc is the pursuit of the terns and the tale of  her voyage with the raggedy crew she meets and mostly befriends. But pierced throughout are flashbacks to other episodes in her life, which somewhat explain why she is always so antsy to leave those she loves. Some of those revelations can be startling -- those of the "Wait ... wait ... What?" variation. You find yourself re-reading certain passages just to ensure you understood it correctly.

    That is the allure of this sometimes depressing but mostly uplifting novel. It is stunningly beautiful in its story, in its descriptions, and in its warnings about how our actions are killing the planet. Franny is a wonderfully drawn character, with the flaws and fervor of the great heroes and wanderers in literature.

    It's more than a good read. It's a great read.

Book Review: Rockaway Blue

 Rockaway Blue, by Larry Kirwan

    It's almost three years after the 9/11 attacks, and the Murphy family remains in turmoil.

    Police Lt. Brian Murphy lies in his grave. His widow Rose and young son Liam remain lost in their big house by the ocean, unable to live up to the memory of the man who is revered as a martyred hero. His younger brother Kevin, a firefighter, still lives and works in his Rockaway neighborhood, fending off adulthood and his brother's shadow.

 

   His parents, NYPD Detective Sgt. Jimmy Murphy, retired, and childhood sweetheart Maggie, find themselves floundering, their Irish Catholism hanging heavy on their souls; growing old, growing apart, and unclear of both their futures and their pasts.

    Into this steps Kirwan, himself an Irish emigrant who moved to New York in the 1970s, and lived the authentic immigrant experience. 

    Kirwan is a polymath. He's a singer and songwriter, the founder and force of the Irish American rock band Black 47. He's a playwright and novelist. He wrote Paradise Square, a musical about the convergence of Irish and African music in the mid-19th Century, which is opening in Chicago. He is the host of Celtic Crush, a widely popular radio program on SiriusXM.

    In Rockaway, Kirwan wants to write of the Irish community's falling apart, losing its ethnic sense, and no longer dominating the city's police and fire brigades. But the overwhelming novel tries to do too much. Its themes run the gamut -- questions of faith and family, of community and identity, of the changing definitions of manhood and womanhood, of love and marriage, of the shifting cultures, even of the rivalry between the Mets and the Yankees.

    Still, it centers around a single, burning question: Why was Brian -- who died a hero because he ran back inside after leading people to safety -- at the World Trade Center before the first plane hit? Detective Sgt. Murphy's unofficial investigation raises the hackles of his former tribe as he delves into the issues described above. and his efforts at easing his family's guilt and heartbreak sometimes makes them worse.

    It's an uneasy tension that careens through the book, showing that life, tragedy, and death isn't always as clear-cut as it seems.

Book Review: Every Heart a Doorway

Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire

 

   If you are seeking a world to fit into, look for a door. It likely won't be an ordinary door, or you may not recognize it as one. But go to it, and twist what passes for a knob. If it turns, step inside.   

 

   This is your place. It's real, and it should make you happy. 

    Such is a message from Doorway, a strange tale from strange writer. 

    But its message is also acceptance, a plea and a command to welcome  others as they are. Don't judge. What you may think of as others' demons, their quirks, or their differences, may merely be their means of getting by in this world. 

    Doorway is a small, short book -- the first in a series of many, which was first published in 2016. I just discovered it last month.

    It's set in an unusual school in the wilderness somewhere. There, children who have found but returned from the doorways to their worlds -- whether it's a tiny fairy door set into their bedroom wall, or a retangular hole slashed into the air -- are sent to cope and struggle through their desires and the reactions to them. Most want to return, but they cannot find their doors again.

    So they try to make the world they are in their world, and seek to adjust to their differing realities. 

    These children, Nancy, the narrator; Jack and Jill, twin sisters who need each other; Christopher, who came from a world of skeletons; and Kade, a transgendered boy whose parents think should return only as the little girl they wanted; and several others, all go to Eleanor West's school. Miss West, of an undeterminate age, also wants to return to her doorway, and her world. But she cannot find her door -- or perhaps doors are only for children -- so she has created a world of her own, as well as for others.

... her family had owned the countryside for miles around, and now that she was the last, every inch of it belonged to her. She had simply refused to sell or allow developments on any of the lots surrounding her school. ... Some of her greatest detractors said she acted like a woman with something to hide, and they were right, in their way; she was a woman with something to protect.

    So, on this land, with these children, there is an adventure, and a murder mystery, along with sadness and despair. But at times it's light-hearted, warm and fuzzy, and it will leave you with a good feeling. You may not like or enjoy each character's emotions and reactions, but you will come to understand and accept them.

    That's a credit to McGuire's imagination, her kindess, and above all, her outstanding writing.