The Safekeep is Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and recently won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and I can understand why. It is an exquisite study in character, women’s desire and love.
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The premise of Fruit of the Dead – a modern reimagining of the Persephone and Demeter myth – intrigued me, but I was worried that Fruit of the Dead was going to be too abstract for me to parse, or perhaps too pretentious to enjoy. This novel is neither of those things, but honestly, I do not know what to think of Fruit of the Dead. It is not bad, but I do not think it is very good either. It is interesting, but I was not really invested in the characters.
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George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is a well-received, Man Booker Prize winning novel about the death of Abraham Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, and how Willie ends up in the bardo between life and death. It sounds like an interesting read, but I wish I had taken a moment to flip through the pages before buying this book because I do not like how it was written.
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The Overstory is the second novel of Richard Powers’ that I have read, the first being Bewilderment. The Overstory is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel that was Powers’ last novel before he published Bewilderment, and both novels have a common theme of human destruction of the natural environment. The Overstory is a dense novel that even I found to be a bit much, I think because it presents a lot of hard truths about how unappreciative humanity is of this amazing, beautiful world that we live in, and how our main character energy has resulted in the mass destruction of other lives that share this planet with us.
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I probably never would have read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible if I had not read Demon Copperhead first, and I am so glad I did not miss out on this incredible story of family, religion and race. I completely understand now why The Poisonwood Bible is such a well-regarded novel, and I highly recommend it, just do not let its thickness deter you.
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I wanted to read The Extinction of Irena Rey because of the pretty cover, but also because the plot does sound like it might be interesting: The novel is about eight translators who gather in Poland at the house of the writer Irena Ray to translate her next novel, but then Irena goes missing. The thing is, as soon as I started reading the first chapter, I knew I had made a mistake and that I was not going to like this novel.
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I was instantly drawn to the cover of Heather O’Neill’s When We Lost Our Heads. But then I read the synopsis and decided to give it a pass because the main characters sounded insufferable. I ended up buying it because of the glowing reviews, and because I needed one more book to get free shipping for my Book Outlet order. I reluctantly started reading it when nothing else in my TBR pile called out to me. I was right about the main characters being insufferable, but it turns out there is much more to When We Lost Our Heads then the loathsome relationship between the main characters, and I ended up being wholly engrossed in this novel as I read it.
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There There is the debut novel of Tommy Orange. Orange is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, and he was born and raised in Oakland, California. There There is a story about the Urban Indian and is set primarily in Oakland. It is told from the different perspectives of twelve interconnected Native American characters who are all planning on attending the Big Oakland Powwow. I think Orange did a fantastic job of creating twelve distinct and compelling characters, and I appreciate being able to read about Indigenous life in an urban setting rather than a rural setting or on a reservation.
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You have probably heard of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a story about a runaway boy, Huck Finn, and a runaway slave, Jim, who decide to sail down the Mississippi River to the free state of Illinois. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered to be an anti-racist book, despite its heavy use of a certain racial slur (I should point out that this slur also appears quite frequently in James as well), and the character of Jim is depicted as honorable and intelligent, albeit gullible and loyal to Huck even after Huck plays tricks on him. James is a reimagining of Huck and Jim’s adventures told from Jim’s perspective, and it tells a more authentic story about slavery and the deep-seated racism of the South, something that I think only a Black writer can do. I found James to be an uncomfortable read, but it is also a very interesting story that I recommend whether or not you have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
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I enjoy Kate Atkinson’s novels. She is one of those authors whose books I will always read when she publishes something new, but I was a little hesitant to read Normal Rules Don’t Apply because it is a collection of short stories, and I just don’t get short stories.
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