Book Review: The Light Pirate

•  Author: Lily Brooks-Dalton

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: My first daughter strongly recommended it. 

*******

   

    The story here is excellent -- futuristic fiction that is a cautionary tale of where society is headed, and in some cases, may already be.

    The characters, particularly the protagonist, Wanda, who we see grow from an infant to old age, are well drawn and realistic. Even the supporting roles, the minor characters who round out and give depth to the story, are whole people, even if we wish we could know more about them.

    But ... but ... but -- it does have some flaws. It gets to be, in certain places, just a wee bit more melodramatic than I care for. And the ominous narrator who appears at the end of some chapters to deliver a foreboding message is unnecessary, and quite frankly, a bit annoying.

    Still. 

    The book is set in a Florida where the effects of climate change are seen daily in the climbing temperatures, rising ocean levels, and raging storms. Indeed, the state is going under, both literally and figuratively. Infrastructure is disintegrating, and government, with no money and few people left, are being shut down. People are getting out. Miami has been abandoned. The small town of Rudder is breaking down as the gulf waters encroach on the land.

    Meanwhile, the Lowe family is also falling apart. Kirby, a lineman who is vainly trying to keep the lights on in and help save his hometown, is not dealing well with his pregnant wife, his two boys, and the oncoming Hurricane Wanda.

    Afterwards, we follow Wanda from her birth during the storm, as she grows up while Florida and the country fall apart around her. She is portrayed as a survivor who adapts to a different lifestyle than the one we know, but one that brings constant challenges and devastating losses. 

    She also has a special glow about her whenever she touches water -- again, both literally and figuratively. Whether it's science or magic -- and after all, isn't science just magic with an explanation -- is yet to be told.

    One of the messages that I -- an aging geezer who is set in his ways and dislikes change --got from the book is that I'm glad I have lived most of my life when I did. And I am sorry my generations really, truly, screwed things up.

Book Review: Good Eggs

•  Author: Rebecca Hardiman

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I was looking for a quick and fun read; this was her debut novel, and it looked right

******

    Like her character Millie Gogarty, Hardiman tells a good yarn.

 

    But unlike the elderly Millie, who tends to embellish and stretch out her story telling, Hardiman is concise and keen. She writes a pithy and funny tale about the kerfuffle that three generations of a Irish family find themselves in during the rainy season of their discontent.

    Yet, despite their meanderings, mistakes, and muddled lives, we know, deep down, they are good eggs. Why, it says so right on the cover.

    The middle guy in this saga is Kevin, a son and a father who is trying to hold their lives together, but like many a hapless dad, finds that no one really listens to him. Still, he tries.

     He loves his wife (mostly); he adores his four kids (even when they act out), and he does his best for his mother as she enters the purple phase of her life.

    His mother is Millie, elderly and kinda, sorta losing it, but determined to continue as she always has. She wants to keep her seaside house in Dúg Laoghaire, outside of Dublin, but when she gets arrested for mindlessly shoplifting at her local store, gives in to Kevin's insistences she bring in a caretaker.

    Then there's Aideen, Kevin's 16-year-old daughter. She is, well, she's a moody teenager who hates her family, hates her school, and hates her life -- and she isn't shy about letting everyone know. She does not take kindly to her parents' plan to send her to a nearby boarding school.

    There are a few other characters -- Aideen's perfect but bitchy twin, Nuala (who Aideen calls Nemesis); Kevin's mate's mother, Maeve, who gives Kevin the what for: Miss Bleekland, the school's disciplinarian (and old maid); Sylvia, the American helpmate, and assorted friends, neighbors and relatives -- mostly well drawn, but just around for decoration. Except for one of them. Well, maybe two.

    So that's the setting, and the story takes off from there. It's a short book of 323 pages -- and 64 chapters! -- so it moves quickly. It may take a while to introduce everyone before the real action starts, but then things hurry along. 

    It's funny, gentle, and moving.

Book Review: The Apollo Murders

 

•  Author: Chris Hadfield

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: Hadfield played guitar and sang Bowie in space, so I gave the book a chance.

******

    Gunfights in space! Mysterious holes on the moon! Communists literally hanging on to an American spacecraft orbiting Earth! A Russian lunar rover investigating the potential for nuclear power on the moon!

    And this is no far-fetched, Spaceman Spiff adventure in the far future. This is history.

    Well, an alternative history, with an extra Apollo mission landing on the moon with the idea to keep the Soviets in line -- with Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Leonid Brezhnev appearing in the background, and the CIA and KGB pulling and unwinding each other's strings.

    So it's not really history, but it could be. And Chris Hadfield -- retired Canadian astronaut, fighter pilot, former commander of the International Space Shuttle, a guy who has walked in space, and who sang a version of Space Oddity while in orbit around the Earth -- is just the guy who could pull it off.

    He does.

    This is a fun book. When you're able to look back on U.S.-Soviet relations and treat them as satire, you know you're having a good time. When you make plain ole trips to the moon, even spacewalks on the moon, seem tame by comparison, you've done a good job.

    But Hadfield also takes his science seriously, and does nothing that could be considered impossible. Yes, he sometimes gets carried away in the descriptions of flying and space flight, but I cut the guy a break -- he's actually been there, done that.

    In brief, Lieutenant Commander Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis is a fighter pilot and wanna-be astronaut with one eye blown out when a bird got in the way of his plane. (Oops. So he can no longer fly in space.) But he knows everything about Apollo, so he gets to be in mission control, along with Al Shepard and a bunch of other real guys. (Lots of people and stuff is real in this book. It's all laid out in the end.)

    But Apollo 18 is part of the fiction. Hadfield sees it as an added mission to the moon, to do science and other things. But the Russians, who have a landed a rover on the moon and running it via a special satellite, are acting like they are up to something. So the Apollo crew are tasked with finding out what's really going on.

    A lot of other things are happening on Earth with the U.S flight crew, and when they go to space and discover the Soviet satellite actually has real live cosmonauts on it, things get dicey.

    But Hadfield holds it all together. The various real and imagined characters play well. When events threaten to overtake the American mission, Hadfield reels them back in. 

    It's a good balancing act. An exciting thriller, without the thriller problems that induce eye-rolling and a please-get-this-over-with feeling. Hadfield writes tightly and plots nicely.

    It's not Bowie in space, but it's just as cool.  

Book Review: The Nickel Boys

 The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

    This book is grim, depressing, and infuriating. It's also extraordinary piece of writing depicting a horrific experience that seems all too common in the BIPOC community. 

    Although it's a fictional tale, the story is based in fact. Indeed it is based on facts showing that throughout the United States, Canada, and large parts of Europe, the dominant class structure always has mistreated, abused, and tortured others -- mostly women and people of color -- simply because it can, and it wants to. 

  

    Elwood Curtis is the narrator of his tale. As the book begins, he is an older Black man living in New York City who owns and runs a cleaning company. Then he see reports exposing the defunct Nickel Academy's history of  abuse and neglect, along with the discovery of dozens of bodies buried on its property.

    The story then shifts to Curtis's years as a young Black boy living in the wrong side of the tracks in Tallahassee, Florida, in the 1960s. Of course, because of discrimination and segregation, all Black people lived on the wrong side of the tracks in Tallahassee, Florida, in the 1960s.

    Curtis is a smart kid, and his mother encourages him to educate himself and enrich his mind. He becomes enamored of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his words and actions, and strives to rise above the racism and bigotry surrounding him. But while hitch-hiking to his first day of college classes, he is picked up by a man driving a stolen car. Police stop them, and Curtis is charged with being a juvenile delinquent. He is sent to the Nickel Academy, a so-called reform school in small town Florida.

    Of course, the "academy," based on the Dozier School of Boys, is anything but a reform school. The boys are segregated by race -- with the exception of one Mexican boy, who is sent to either the Black side or white side, based on the whims of the "teachers." Both sides are horribly abused, subjected to random corporal punishment, having their meals withheld, and being sent out to work for local politicians or businessmen, with a small fee for the "headmaster." Some of them are sent for extra punishment, from which they seldom return.

    Whitehead explores the relationships Curtis forms with other boys in the home, along with his experiences with the headmasters. Curtis tries to accept his lot, while maintaining his dignity and fighting back against the cruel abuse the boys are subjected to. He also steps in when some of the other  boys turn on each other.

    The more he learns about the Academy and its "students," called the Nickel Boys, the angrier he becomes.

    The book reaches a high point when Curtis and Jack Turner, his cynical friend and roommate, decide to take action against the crimes of the adults. It's a scary yet compelling narrative that keeps you reading long into the night.

    The novel earned Whitehead his second Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The first was in 2017 for Underground Railroad. "It burns with outrageous truth,"Josephine Livingston said in The New Republic. about The Nickel Boys. The Guardian newspaper said Whitehead showed "how racism in American has long operated as a codified and sactioned activity."

Book Review: The Lola Quartet

The Lola Quartet, by Emily St. John Mandel

The thing about this novel is that none of the characters is likable.

There is no one to root for. The main character, Gavin Sasaki, is deluded, melancholy, and irresponsible. The others are not good people, or are not fleshed out enough to determine.

The plot involves a teenage pregnancy, a runaway, stolen money, a fired reporter's desire to track down his possible connections to the mother and the child, and the backstories on the high school times and musical interests of most of those involved.

Some of the details are overstated. Coincidences abound. For instance, Sasaki is fired from his newspaper job for what is made out to be a major scandal, but in reality is a mundane transgression. 

Frankly, I was disappointed. I have read several of Mandel's other works, and found them to be unique, thoughtful, and consequential. This one did not measure up.

Still, the book is well written, with lines such as, "She moved like a ghost through the caffeinated hours." Mandel's literary style of alternating tales of various characters is intriguing, if sometimes jumbled. The stories come together at the end, though, and most everything makes sense. 

Book Review: Skink

Skink: No Surrender, by Carl Hiaasen

Look, it's Carl Hiaasen, writing a Young Adult novel about Skink, a former governor of Florida who has truly gone rogue. What do you expect?

Something short, witty, and easy to read. Something funny, with hi-jinks and bizarre characters. Something in which the good guys prevail, and the bad guys get punished, often in inevitable, outlandish ways.

Check. Check. And check.

Hiaasen is the chronicler of the Florida man. If he didn't create the trope, he certainly spread it into popular culture.

And Skink is the definitive Florida man. A fearless loner, perhaps insane in the popular meaning, and one who doles out his own brand of justice. He's part man, part myth. He's always there, loves children, animals, and nature, and despises those who defile any of them.

In No Surrender, Skink teams with Richard to find the 14-year-old's missing cousin, who has either run away or been kidnapped. Their harrowing but amusing adventures -- well, amusing for us, maybe, if not for them -- get wilder as the story winds its way along the north Florida coast and into the Choctawhatchee River. 

Enjoy it while you can.