Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

Jacob is an angry, lonely man who has lost his ability to write poetry. Oh, and he’s hearing and seeing things again. Rabih Alameddine’s spellbinding The Angel of History tells Jacob’s life story as he spends a day at a mental health clinic trying to convince the staff to lock him up for 72 hours. Jacob just can’t take it anymore. His friends and lovers died years ago and now the news is full of drone strikes against his former homeland, Yemen. Without poetry as an outlet, Jacob is adrift in his own mind. But The Angel of History is not just a biographical novel, it’s also a supernatural race against time as Satan and the fourteen saints that Jacob has seen and heard all his life try to get the poet to acknowledge them again...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

Yitzhak Goldah has survived the camps and, as Jonathan Rabb’s Among the Living opens, is being welcomed by his only surviving relatives in Savannah, Georgia. Yitzhak has recovered physically, but he feels numb. He doesn’t care when his cousins suggest changing his name to Ike (to be less obviously Jewish) or working in their shoe shop. He doesn’t care much about the heat and humidity. He doesn’t even seem to care much when people ask him what “it” was like and how he survived. Among the Living has a meandering plot, but it is at its heart a story about a man rejoining the living, breathing world...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

The upstairs/downstairs life we’ve seen on Downton Abbey and similar shows is always high drama. They’re soap operas with great clothes and better manners. The upstairs/downstairs life in Henry Green’s Loving is much more satirical. The servants are not polished and the family are always complaining about their first-world problems. This book is the perfect antidote for people who roll their eyes at the terrible seriousness of Downton Abbey...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.

It was pure whimsy that led Mabel out into the snow to start a snowfight with her husband, Jack, and build a snow-girl with him. Until that point, they had been having a rough time on their Alaskan homestead. The couple were running low on money and supplies. The winter of 1920 might be their last in the wilderness before they had to pack it in and go back east. The morning after Mabel and Jack made the snow-girl, they found it destroyed and started to see a small girl running in the woods nearby. From this point on, it’s hard to tell if The Snow Child, by Eowyn Ivey, is historical fiction or fantasy because we can never really know if Faina is the Snow Maiden from the Russian folktale or the orphaned daughter of a Russian trapper...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

After reading The Little Red Chairs, I needed something lighter. Cheryl Honigford’s The Darkness Knows, thankfully, delivered. This series debut is set just before World War II in the Chicago studios of WCHI. Vivian Witchell is on the lower rungs of the radio star ladder, but she’s just landed her first regular role in the series The Darkness Knows playing a detective’s sidekick. Viv has been on the show for about a week before she lands smack in the middle of a real murder mystery. Viv has all the pluck and gumption of a vintage screwball heroine, making this book a cracking read...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

There are people who deserve second changes and others who very much do not. Edna O’Brien shows us both in The Little Red Chairs. As the novel opens, a man has come to the village of Cloonoila, Ireland, to open a New Age clinic. No one knows much about his past, but his charm opens doors everywhere—at least until the truth about his past gets out. When the metaphorical doors close, Fidelma gets caught out in the cold because she had the misfortune to fall in with with the charming man...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Charlie Dawson is a legend at the office but, after two hundred fifty years of escorting souls to the afterlife, he’s starting to get burned out. He’s tired of seeing death after death and not being able to do anything to actually save their lives. In Colin Gigl’s amazing novel, The Ferryman Institute, we see what happens when Charlie is finally given a choice: to save a life or remain a Ferryman...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

Reading The Second Winter, by Craig Larsen, can be bewildering. The narrative shifts from character to character and through time. The connections between the characters are only slowly revealed and, even then, remain somewhat tenuous. I appreciated the perspective the book presented of lives sliding around each other, occasionally colliding. What made the book difficult was the constant threat of violence to Polina and the other female characters. Rape and sexual exploitation loom too large in this book...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.

Set between the late 1940s and early 1970s, Yu Hua’s Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (translated by Andrew Jones) tells the story of an ordinary man living in hard times. Xu Sanguan works at a silk factory which usually provides enough income to support his wife and three sons. When times get desperate and money runs short, Xu Sanguan sells blood at the local hospital to bail out the family. Unlike most of the Chinese literature I’ve read, this book does not employ any literary pyrotechnics. It is a straightforward story of a man growing up from a curious teen to a selfish young patriarch to a man devoted to his family...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Lavie Tidhar’s The Bookman introduces us to a bold alternate world flavored by Western literature. I lost count of all the literary references in this tale about an orphan (called Orphan, for clarity) who suddenly becomes very interesting to the government and several revolutionary groups. On top of the literary references, there are giant, sentient lizards; automatons; pirated; and aliens. This book has everything...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

The Withrow house—over 100 years old, abandoned for decades—is supposed to save Music City Salvage. It’s got marble fireplaces, extensive chestnut walls and flooring, and stained glass windows. It’s a goldmine for vintage and reclaimed construction. The owner of Music City Salvage buys full rights to the property for $40,000, the last money in the company kitty, and sends his daughter and a small crew to start pulling the place apart. The problem is that the deal is too good to be true: the house is very, very haunted. The Family Plot, by Cherie Priest, plays out over less than a week as the crew starts to fall victim to the house...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

There’s nothing wrong with Pavla. Rather, there’s a problem with everyone who meets her in Marisa Silver’s Little Nothing. Pavla was born somewhere Bohemia before the First World War. The people in her small village are highly superstitious and no one knows what to make of a dwarf. For the rest of her life, people will try and transform her into what they think she ought to be. Silver tells her tale as a grittier version of a fairy tale in which elderly parents pray for a child, after which nothing goes right...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

In Alan Bradley’s Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d, Flavia de Luce, chemistry genius and amateur detective, has returned to her ancestral home in England from the wilds of Canada. And yet, it doesn’t feel like she’s come home. Things are not right. Her father is in the hospital. Her sister has broken up with her fiancé. Everyone is preoccupied. Looking for something to do, Flavia volunteers to run an errand for a friend and stumbles upon a dead body. The discovery of a man hung upside down in an upstairs room perks Flavia up no end and she dives right into her own investigation...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

It isn’t enough to translate Chinese literature into English. The translators do as much as they can to find the right words in English to express the ideas the original author put down, but readers have to be prepared for characters, plots, and references that come from a completely different tradition. I know that I’m missing things when I read Chinese literature. I keep trying, however, because I want to learn more about how people live and think in other parts of the world. I thought about the gaps in my knowledge a lot when I read Red Sorghum, by Mo Yan, and again when I read Raise the Red Lantern, a collection of three novellas by Su Tong (translated by Michael S. Duke). Each time I dive into a work of literature from China, I have to remind myself that the author is playing by different rules...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

Rachel Ingall’s Mrs. Caliban is an odd novella of a bored housewife who suddenly finds someone who needs her: an amphibian man who has recently escaped from captivity. Dorothy’s husband has been drifting away from her for years. Frank stays late at the office and doesn’t say much when he is home. They’re planning separate vacations again this year. And yet, Dorothy hangs on to her life as it is, until Larry shows up at her backdoor...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.

Two years after the end of the Civil War, the people of Franklin, Tennessee are learning to live with the new status quo. Black people are legally free and establishing themselves economically and politically in the town. Mariah Reddick, as a highly skilled midwife, is doing well for herself. But there are some (quite a few, actually) white men and women who very much do not like the new status quo and are willing to use violence to keep the newly freed enslaved people “in their place.” In The Orphan Mother, by Robert Hicks, Mariah and her son get caught in the chaos of an election season. When her son is killed, Mariah seeks justice. She’s not alone, because a former sniper is willing to go outside the law to punish the men who killed Mariah’s son...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration.