Review: Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

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Translated for the first time into English,  Flights by Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk, has finally landed.  A beautifully fragmented book, Flights executes a perfect blending of fiction, history, and an undiluted observation of the world at large and of the exceedingly small. The novel’s narration is at times omnipresent and at others, co-piloted by an unnamed but immediately familiar  protagonist. The book  acts as a fulcrum from which readers are transported from one of over a hundred vignettes on to the next—occasionally to return and find that things have inevitably changed, having moved on—as if by flight. A man combs over an entire Croatian isle in search of his missing wife and son.  Another visits the widow of an esteemed colleague in hopes that she will divulge long-kept vocational secrets. Chopin’s heart is smuggled by his sister back to his native Poland. Dutch anatomist Philip Verheyen discovers the achilles tendon. The captain of a commuter ferry shuffling unsuspecting passengers turns his helm toward the open sea.

 In one such vignette it is said, “Only what is different will survive.” If those words are to be believed, Tokarczuk will be sustained on such unrivaled and unique writing. As a long-time lover of European novelists such as Milan Kundera and an chronic journeyer my heart leapt with the recognition brought forth by Tokarczuk’s contemplation of modern-day travel. To hear it all rendered by a female voice made me wonder where this translation has been all this time. It was a wonderful read. Flights is a museum of a book; artfully arranged, edifying, fascinating, and insightful.

Review: Saving Tarboo Creek by Scott Freeman

Tarboo Creek has a rich history when it comes to salmon spawning. Located in the western segment of Puget Sound, its waters were once boisterous with spawning salmon. By the time Scott Freeman and his wife, Susan Leopold, both multi-generational preservationists, purchased a tract of land surrounding it, it had long since been channelized into a drainage ditch with a series of culverts that blocked salmon activity mid-stream. They joined with the Northwest Watershed Institute to revive the waters of Tarboo Creek to once again provide a home and nesting ground for salmon. Part science project and part ecological narrative, Saving Tarboo Creek: One Family’s Quest to Heal the Land tells their story and vies for humankind’s ethical responsibility to nature. Though dotted with endearing hand-drawn nature sketches, this is more than a feel-good environmental story. It’s clear that Freeman has done his homework as he namedrops from the vast community of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula; Lichens, Caddis Fly, Bushtits, Bracket Fungi, Sitka Spruce and of course, the Coho salmon to which the book and Freeman’s efforts are dedicated. Perhaps these species are mentioned not to show Freeman’s extensive knowledge, but because they are constantly mingling; living with and around and off of each other. They affect one another, rely on one another and as Freeman points out, none is more reliant or holds more power to affect, whether positively or negatively, this environment than we humans.

For the layperson, it can be difficult at times to navigate the hydrocarbons, photo synthesizers and carotenoids of his world. More than once I was reintroduced to words I hadn’t seen since a college ecology course, but it’s worth the effort; there is much to be learned here. However, if you are expecting a start to finish description of the stream restoration project, look elsewhere. Freeman’s story is a non-linear one and oftentimes, not even his own. He jumps from the life and times of his father-in-law (himself a preservationist), to the endangered mammals of 19th century American Northwest and back to the contemporary tropics of Borneo without batting an eye. The book is more informative than it is narrative and can be likened to reading the transcription of a Ted Talk. With the wrong expectations, it can seem roundabout and even as if Freeman is airing old grievances as he diverges from the salmon and their surroundings and begins to target an array of growing issues. In the end, Saving Tarboo Creek is a call to stewardship and every page is employed to ring that bell. It isn’t about one salmon creek or one family’s efforts. It’s a call to the collective. It’s about all of nature and all of humankind and the domestically violent relationship we have fostered for too long. It’s about change, and if you ask me —it’s about time.

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Review: Lifesaving for Beginners by Anne Edelstein

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What happens when someone you have mixed feelings about dies? What happens when that someone is your mother? In her first memoir, Anne Edelstein examines just that as she details —often by means of looking to the past for answers—the initial years following her mother’s sudden death.

“As the anniversary of my mother’s death approaches, I feel like I’m somehow running out of time, trying to figure out how much I loved my mother.” - Anne Edelstein

With the news of her mother’s drowning, she finds herself overwhelmed by a number of past discontentment that has resurfaced after never being properly put to rest; starting with the violent suicide of her young brother years before, we see the inscrutable role death has played in her life like a parasitic ivy enveloping her family tree. It can take a long time to ease into the cold waters of death, no matter how familiar, and the tenuous relationship she once shared with her mother makes it all the harder by muddying the waters. Over the course of three years, she struggles to untangle a delicate past and know what it all means for the future of her family.

Edelstein gives an especially raw look into an unconventional mourning with sincere bravery and vulnerability. She offers us a glimpse into the complicated and not always guiltless feelings she met in the aftermath of her mother’s death, while still in the shadow of her brother’s. At times it could seem that Edelstein was claiming a certain victimhood and, while that often lent itself to a narrative rife with allegation, it is a by-product of her candor. She dares to say the difficult things that can so often feel unmentionable. This memoir will rouse the hearts of anyone who has experienced the inherent complications of family; anyone who has known the cruel inevitability of death; anyone who has loved. By coming to terms with a severe past, Edelstein offers a unique but reliable hope. There is real connection to be made in Lifesaving for Beginners.

Review: Eleanor Courtown by Lucy E.M. Black

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When her dear cousin Lily sets sail from the Irish shore where the two grew up as sisters, Eleanor is determined to follow suit in order for them to be together. As an unmarried woman of high birth, she manages her travels only by deceiving her family and withdrawing in secret to Canada. Upon arriving, she is distraught to find her cousin both widowed and, in desperate haste, remarried to a crude and cryptic stranger. Certain that something is amiss, she attempts to pry her cousin and newborn niece homeward, but Lily is unhappily resolved to her new lot in life and the girls’ former relationship seems all but severed. Nonetheless, Eleanor is determined to carry out her familial duty and protect her cousin, even from a distance, at all costs. Alone and in a new country, she attempts to establish a life for herself as she learns to stand on such unfamiliar ground.

Lucy E.M. Black has proved herself a novelist to be noted with the spellbinding narrative which unfolds throughout “Eleanor Courtown”. The epistolary style and impressive dialogue are captivating from the onset. Such skill allows you to slip seamlessly into the prose of the past, whether the backdrop be a richly furnished Irish manor, a humble Canadian homestead, or the convivial parlor of a pair of simple but winsome Innkeepers. The cast of characters are the most charming I’ve crossed in a long while, each with personality as well as a rich past. In addition to being an absorbing drama, the story acted as an interesting, and at times distressing, historical portrait. At its core, “Eleanor Courtown” is a story of love; it tells of its endless facets, both sacrificial and enduring, found in the deeds of strangers and of one’s own flesh and blood alike. There is a comfort to be had in reading this novel, particularly in the person of each character. I wrapped myself up in this book like a warm shawl and enjoyed every minute. It is in all aspects engaging and endearing from the first page to the very last.

Review: Girl in the Shape of a Cloud by Jean Thompson

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Jean Thompson’s latest novel, “Girl in the Shape of a Cloud”, is a multi-generational account of three women: Evelyn, Laura and Grace. In a small university town, the past seems inescapable. It greets you at birth and lingers long after you’ve gone. This is the reality Grace lives in, much like her mother Laura before her and her grandmother Evelyn before that; a world of prescribed expectations. Thompson links the women by more than blood in telling their stories and, for once, allowing them to stand alone. Slipping effortlessly between perspectives and timelines, the stories we see may just be the stories of us all. The ones that never get told. “A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl” details the slow creep of life from bygone trysts of youth to the scarcity of sureness, the imposed duties, the dull contempt, and the frustrating mundanity that seems to wear everything down like water as it drips over stone.

Opening at the close of Evelyn’s life, her daughter Laura grapples with the person her mother was and who she herself has become. Meanwhile, her daughter Grace struggles to intercept her own identity from that of her oppressive family: a martyr for a mother, an overworked alcoholic father, and a drug-addled and needy brother. Despite herself, when her mother is hit with a weighty diagnosis following Evelyn’s death, Grace finds herself inheriting all of the things that as a modern woman, she’d hoped to avoid. It is Grace who is left at the helm to try and keep their dysfunctional family afloat. In the process, she is plunged into the cold undercurrent that seems to run beneath all generations of women. Hers is the story of strength as a last resort; a story of strength by default.

I read this book while my parents were in town visiting. I couldn’t help peering over the pages and seeing the time capsules that they had become, the ones that we all are. What unknown stories did they hold? Which ones would others never know about me? It was a welcome perspective and one that seemed to permeate every page of the book.  The characters in “Girl in the Shape of a Cloud” resonated with such basic truths, it was almost a relief to read their accounts and think, “it’s not just me” or, “that sounds just like so and so…”. I laughed at their quips and marital scruples and recognized their silences and the banal ways in which they felt on the sidelines of their own lives. They were real and recognizable in ways that all characters should be, particularly the women around whom the story is built. In fact, I liked them so much that I wish I could have spent more time with them. When the primary perspective falls to Grace, it felt as if the story moved from this complicated lineage of women to the men in Grace’s life: her father, her brother, a faux-lover. I was disappointed to be cut off from the storyline of the original characters who I had come to like and feel deeply curious about. That shift left the novel feeling unfinished for me, but I suspect there was no way around that. I wanted to turn over every rock that Evelyn and Laura had touched. Perhaps it’s simply an unfortunate consequence of all well-liked characters. Still, it is a worthwhile read with strong and emotive themes. “Girl in the Shape of a Cloud” will have you looking at your life and the lives of those around you with new eyes.

Review: The Third Wife by Lisa Jewell

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When his wife is killed in an unlikely accident, Adrian Wolfe is left, to his anguish, alone. This isn’t the first time his life has been overturned (she was his third wife, after all), but it’s the first time that he wasn’t the one in control. When he’d left his first wife and two children, he’d done so with the conviction that it was for love, to be with his second wife and have three more beautiful children. That same conviction had led him to Maya. They had been happy. They were trying for a baby. Everyone from his first wife to his latest child was so encouraging, or so it seemed. He and Maya had a long road ahead which Adrian had already mapped perfectly and now this. This wasn’t supposed to happen; someone had to be responsible.

Despite his grief, when a mysterious and captivating woman seeks him out under the pretense of adopting his late wife’s cat, Adrian takes notice. He’s not the only one. Members of his patchwork family have noticed the woman popping up since Maya’s death, but just as they’re piecing things together, she disappears. With the lines separating accident and intent growing blurrier by the day, Adrian is determined to get to the bottom of things. Doing so forces him to unpack his own baggage and see what really lies beyond his rose-colored glasses; a resentful son who he hasn’t seen in months, a daughter binging on comfort foods, violent emails, a long line of strained family outings and his wife’s own muted protestations. Adrian’s investigation leads him to wonder just how inscrutable Maya’s death had been after all. 

Through the Wolfe family, Lisa Jewell has crafted an intricate puzzle containing all of the classic elements of a whodunit (complete with clues, motives and characters exonerated one by one) while retaining the complex facets of real people. With such a far reaching and tangled familial web, the suspects were practically endless, but never were they obvious. While the story’s premise was entertaining and moved forward at a clip, I wasn’t always impressed with the individual characters. Their dialogue was peppered with bits of grating teenage slang even among the thirty-somethings (“What. Ever”) and even in the case of an unexplained death, they indulged too readily in melodrama. Then again, while these traits might not be likeable, they make each person all the more genuine. This is especially true in the case of Adrian. Just like his two ex-wives and five children, you want so badly to like him that you just do, despite all his mistakes and that is what lies at the heart of the novel; a flawed man trying to make sense of the life he’s upended so badly without ever allowing himself to realize it. It’s all unveiled so subtly that it gets to be a page turner. By part two you’re forced to bore right through it, making this one a great weekend read to swallow up in one gulp.