This year I got back into reading fiction. I took a
break for a while because I was trying to seem sophisticated and knowledgeable
by only reading biographies and critically acclaimed nonfiction. Needless to
say that got really boring really quickly.
Packer's splintered narrative style and rich
characters made The Children's Crusade one
of my favorite titles to hit shelves this year. Families, by definition, are
dysfunctional. Mine is, and my best friend’s is, and you’d be lying if you said
yours isn't. And that's the ugly truth. In Packer’s latest family saga, Bill Blair’s
four children (one unwanted) navigate their way through a precarious childhood in an attempt to keep their misguided mother, Penny, from falling off the deep end. Set in what is now Silicon Valley, The Children's Crusade jumps around in
time and point-of-view — not in a needlessly confounding way, but as a way to
intensify another one of its themes: that the four Blair children (like all
children) each came fully loaded at birth with their own idiosyncratic
temperaments.
While
we’re on the topic of dysfunction, let’s talk about my group of friends: and
yours, too, for that matter. Separately, we’re messy people each leading very
different lives. Together, we’re still messy people leading very different
lives who just happen to appreciate each other’s quirks. Lisa Lutz explores the
dynamics of friendship in her 2015 novel How
to Start a Fire which follows three college friends through the treacherous
territory that is adulthood. Kate Smirnoff (like the vodka), Anna Fury, and
George Leoni met in 1993, when all three were students at UC Santa Cruz. Freshman
roommates Kate and Anna found George passed out on the lawn outside a party
they had all attended. The girls quickly become friends and are bound together
for life after a traumatic experience in their mid-20s.
We Never Asked for Wings by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
It’s
rare to find a novel that’s both heartwarming and heartbreaking at the same
time. Letty Espinosa is suddenly handed responsibility for her two children, 6
year-old Luna and 15 year-old Alex, after her parents (the children's former caregivers) return to their childhood
home in Mexico. At first, Letty struggles with the inevitable challenges that
motherhood presents, fumbling her way through a series of bad decisions before
she gains her footing. Diffenbaugh
paints an eye-opening picture of modern day San Francisco for readers; she
introduces us to the immigrant families who are hoping to build a life for themselves
by working three jobs and living in devastating poverty, simultaneously holding
their families together.
Act of God by Jill Ciment
A
mysterious, luminescent mold infestation spreads through Brooklyn in the summer
of 2015, sparing no New Yorker in its path. The ‘supermold’ is first discovered
in the apartments of a rowhouse, entwining the lives of its residents: the
elderly twin sisters, Edie and Kat, one a retired librarian, the other a failed
bohemian; Vida, a middle-aged actress; and Ashley, an 18-year-old Russian au
pair discovered hiding in Vida’s closet. The narrative shifts between the four women as
they’re evacuated from their homes, until Edie eventually dies from spore
inhalation and Kat is left to face the entire bizarre situation alone with only the
company of a crazy cat lady and the unbearable grief that came with the loss of her twin sister. The novel is in some ways a character study and,
in others, a play on science fiction in its entirety. Ultimately, it’s weird
and that’s what I liked about it. Plus--the cover is really pretty.
Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes
Living
can be a distressingly solitary activity and Holmes explores this hard truth
with unexpected poignancy, subtlety and humor. Her characters are students and
urbanites and rule-breakers and quarter-life-crisis-havers, some of whom own
dogs or want to. Holmes is so skillful at characterization — weaving in
specific details that illustrate everyday desires, failures and striving — that
I was suddenly skeptical when I came to "My Humans," the
third-to-last story in the book, which is told from the point of view of a dog.
“My Humans", however, is every bit as moving as the other stories in the
collection and while not perfect it tells us just as much, if not more, about human
nature than the stories actually narrated by people.
