Favorite books about the Psyche and the Soul

Over a decade has passed since the release of M. L. Stedman’s engrossing debut novel, The Light Between Oceans. Her new novel, A Far-Flung Life, was well worth the wait. Stedman writes with empathy and compassion for the moral conundrums her characters face. The novel explores how people live in the aftermath of tragedy, the secrets they hold close, and the ways love and sacrifice can mend wounded souls.

This multigenerational story begins in 1958 in isolated Merideth Downs, a one-million-acre sheep station in Western Australia. Though the land is vast and beautiful, its ever-changing weather patterns and intrusive wildlife are unforgiving. Generations of the McBride family have farmed sheep in this rural area since 1829. Details of every birth, marriage, death, weather event and sheep activitiees are recorded in logbooks, creating a constant sense of the family’s place in both the past and future of the station. The McBride’s closest neighbors live at another sheep station 100 miles away.

Phil and Lorna McBride have three children. One day, while Phil is driving with his two sons, he swerves to avoid a kangaroo and crashes. Phil and his eldest son, Warren, are killed, while the youngest, Matt, is badly injured. Despite their profound grief, Lorna and her daughter, Rosie, try to carry on as they tend to Matt and hope for his survival. Matt does survive, though he doesn’t completely heal.

That fiery crash sparks a series of events that alter the lives of the three remaining McBrides. As the narrator observes, “It’s a reminder that solid ground, unchanged for millions of years, can rearrange itself without warning or permission. You just have to live with the new terrain. Repair what roads and fences you can. Start from scratch for the rest of it.”

At this point in the story, a disturbing plot thread emerges, and those involved must decide how to proceed. Stedman navigates this thread with sympathy, not judgment. In the hands of a less skilled writer, the book might be too difficult to read. But with Stedman’s skill and insight, the story becomes a message of acceptance, understanding, and love. These are good people wrestling with major moral dilemmas and balancing self-sacrifice with happiness.

In addition to the McBride family, other characters harbor secrets that the community considers taboo. Yet these characters are steady, conscientious members of that community, while the few folks who behave badly appear small and petty by comparison.

What Stedman’s novel conveys is that if we knew what another person has endured, we might never judge anyone harshly. The story is filled with instances of good people trying to protect those they love. 

As I finished the last page, I felt appreciation for this beautiful book, which shows deep respect and understanding for the complexities of being human. M. L. Stedman’s A Far-Flung Life is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Highly recommend. 5/5

Ann Patchett’s moving new novel Whistler is a tender meditation on connection, memory, and healing. Though divorce, grief, and trauma run through the story, the novel is uplifting, not bleak. Patchett writes with characteristic insight about childhood experiences, both remembered and buried, that quietly shape the adults we become. As in Commonwealth (2016) and The Dutch House (2019), the aftermath of divorce occupies the emotional center of the novel, and is also depicted with insight, humor, and grace.

A chance encounter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City reunites 53-year-old Daphne Fuller with her former stepfather, Eddie Triplett. Eddie was married only briefly to Daphne’s mother, and 40 years have passed since he and Daphne last saw one another. Still, his brief presence in her childhood left an indelible mark. Their interests aligned, their banter came easily, and Eddie’s warmth offered comfort to nine-year-old Daphne. She loved him. Together, they had survived a traumatic car accident that deepened their bond: it was Eddie’s kindness and courage in that dire moment that helped keep them alive as they waited to be rescued. Soon after the accident, Daphne’s mother divorced Eddie and contact between them ceased.

When Daphne and Eddie meet again in the novel’s opening chapter, the past returns with startling force. Daphne is overcome with emotion. Daphne says, “And with that I bowed my head and covered my face. I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did. I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backwards.”

Later, she realizes, “…somewhere deep inside myself, in a place inaccessible to me since I was nine, I had missed him every day of my life.”

As adults, Daphne and Eddie are given the rare chance to recover what time seemed to have taken from them. They spend long hours together retracing the paths their lives took in the decades apart and eventually speaking openly about the night of the accident.  Through Daphne and Eddie, Patchett beautifully shows how certain people remain lodged in the heart and how love can endure beneath the surface of ordinary life. Whistler is a wistful novel illuminating that healing, even if delayed, is possible. 5/5

Elizabeth Strout has written another gem. She has a remarkable ability to deeply probe the psyches of her characters while delivering a perceptive and absorbing read. In this novel, her 11^th, she dives even deeper into that well.

Artie Dam, a beloved high school history teacher, is depressed. He feels alone and isolated—not because he lacks people to talk to or spend time with; he doesn’t. He is surrounded by people who love him: his wife of 30 years, his grown son, his fellow teachers, his students, and his friends. Rather, it is an internal angst that plagues him, leaving him with the sense that most thoughts are meant to remain solitary, not shared. The divisive divisions in this country don’t help.

When Artie learns a profound secret about his life, he must decide how to proceed with this knowledge. The revelation forces him to recognize that we don’t truly know ourselves—and sometimes not even the people closest to us. Toward the book’s ending, he thinks he might know why people never say the thoughts closest to their hearts. “Because to say anything real was to say things nobody wanted to know, or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand. It’s a private thing to be alive.”

Strout continues to explore the human condition with persistence and curiosity. Though the book is psychologically astute, its ethos is heavy and existential. Author Elizabeth Day’s blurb on the back sums up this novel beautifully: “Strout is a brilliant chronicler of the ambiguity and delicacy of the human condition.” Highly recommend. 5/5

The Bright Years, Sarah Damoff’s debut novel, is my favorite book (thus far) in 2025. The narrative focuses on a multi-generational family navigating the complexities of alcoholism, concealed truths, and personal tragedy. While challenging subjects, the book avoids becoming overly somber, instead presenting a narrative infused with dignity and hope. Damoff’s beautiful prose and insightful observations contribute to the novel’s poignancy and tenderness.

The story follows Lillian and Ryan Bright, who meet in a Fort Worth public library in 1979, fall in love, and eventually marry. Significant aspects of their histories remain undisclosed: Ryan conceals his father’s alcoholism, while Lillian does not reveal that she gave up a child for adoption. Their lives are initially marked by happiness and the birth of their daughter, Georgette. Yet, the convergence of hidden pasts gradually complicates their relationship. As Ryan succumbs to alcohol dependence, the family’s once-bright years begin to darken. Damoff offers nuanced insight into the origins of Ryan’s addiction and skillfully examines its psychological impact on his family.

Despite these adversities, the motif of healing and connection permeates the novel. Lillian Bright’s reflection that “time can wash dirt off a memory until it is revealed as something else entirely” encapsulates the book’s exploration of forgiveness and hope. Through her vivid depiction of complex characters, Damoff emphasizes optimism and compassion amid hardship. The Bright Years shows that healing is possible.  5/5

With great insight, Elizabeth Strout’s newest novel probes the complexity of human relationships. How well can we know another person? How well can we know ourselves? She concludes not well: “We are all such mysteries.” But her novel offers an antidote to this isolation. Listening to other people’s stories connects us to them and causes us to empathize with their plight. Exchanging stories is a gift we can give to ourselves and others. 

This character-driven novel takes place in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. We have met the protagonists in Strout’s prior books: Bob Burgess, Lucy Barton, and Olive Kittridge. The plot revolves around their deepening friendships, the stories they share, and the murder of an elderly woman on the outskirts of town.

Strout’s characters are defined by the traumas (often unknown to others) that shaped their journey. Her characters’ ordeals occurred in their childhoods and have been the engine (consciously or unconsciously) driving their lives. Olive Kittredge says, ‘If you don’t think everyone is broken in some way, you’re wrong.” The novel’s characters have endured sexual abuse, suicide, alcoholism, disease, divorce, poverty, and the guilt of accidentally killing a parent.

The novel has a wistful tone as the characters wrestle with themselves and those they encounter. They share their fears and worries, their joys and pleasures, and the stories they hear about other people in town. Just when you are about to judge a character’s cruel action or poor choice, the character’s background is revealed, and you feel compassion instead. 

The book can sometimes feel like a quirky collection of short stories. Still, Strout weaves them into an existential narrative about how people overcome their hardships and connect with others. Lucy Barton states, “People just live their lives with no real knowledge of anybody.”

In this world filled with so much suffering, Strout suggests that listening to others without judgment is a gift of love and the only antidote to the existential loneliness of our minds. This novel is poignant, provocative and packed with insights. I highly recommend Tell Me Everything. 5/5

I recently reread Roxana Robinson’s 2008 novel Cost. If you haven’t read this book, you are in for a treat. Not because the story is happy—it is not—but because Robinson is a gifted connoisseur of deconstructing family dynamics. Her elegant prose penetrates the emotional interiority of her characters with precision and empathy.

On one level, the story is about a 22-year-old man named Jack Lambert, who is a heroin addict. On another level, the story is about how a destructive family dynamic is passed from generation to generation, resulting in one family member unconsciously being assigned to carry the burden of the damage.

Jack’s parents, Julia and Wendell, are divorced. When Jack’s older brother Steven tells his parents that Jack’s drug use has become dangerous, they each choose denial, but soon an intervention is arranged. Jack’s parents, brother, grandparents, and aunt gather at Julia’s summer home in Maine. When the addiction counselor asks them to write about what they love about Jack, they all bristle. “Love is not a word their family used.” Though the family members have pleasant public personas, their past anger, hurt and distrust lurks when they are together.

Robinson writes about Jack’s heroin addiction with intimacy and captures the obsessive thoughts of an addict looking for his next fix. She also depicts the emotional cost to Jack’s family as his stealing and lying intrude on their lives. Their feelings alternate between grief and guilt to fury and rage. This theme propels much of the plot.

(Spoiler Alert) However, the more compelling theme is the family dynamic that has pathologized Jack since childhood. “He was always a wild center of the storm.” Jack carried the burden of his parents’ and even his grandparents’ choices. The ambiguity of Jack’s paternity was never discussed. It was unconsciously known. Jack’s father Wendell says at the intervention, “I think I was too hard on Jack.” And then later, “It’s like hearing that he is Chinese or that he’s not my son.” Wendell knows and doesn’t know, and Julia is not sure.

This powerful novel about the scourge of heroin addiction and the scourge of toxic family dynamics long ignored is heartbreaking. Robinson’s ability to illuminate each family member’s past and present interiority is extraordinary. Jack pays a painful price for his addiction as does his family. Eventually, there can be a cost of not dealing with the past. 5/5

In 1992, Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize for her astonishing novel ‘A Thousand Acres.’ Rereading this novel heightened my admiration for this literary gem. Smiley’s ability to inhabit her characters is deep and nuanced. The book is tragic, but Smiley’s psychological acumen is remarkable. The story’s themes touch on aging, power, repression, competition, and control, but mostly the emotional cost of silence within a family and community.

Shakespeare’s King Lear provides the plot’s scaffolding. Larry Cook is an aging widowed patriarch of a respected farming family in Cabot, Iowa. Rather impulsively, he divides his land between his three grown daughters, Rose, Ginny, and Caroline. But when the youngest daughter Caroline questions his decision, he deletes her from the deal. Larry’s decision is rash and may indicate his emerging dementia. His choice catalyzes the dramatic eruption in the Cook family dynamic. Tragedy ensues.

Narrated by the middle daughter Ginny, the story shows the strain of farming the land and raising livestock. Decisions have life-and-death implications that empower and entangle families. Ginny, Rose, and their husbands struggle to maintain the Cook Family’s 1000-acre farm. Rose and Ginny glorify the family’s long history and traditions while feeling trapped in their roles and duties required to keep the farm going. They revere and resent their way of life and the small town where everyone knows each other’s business.

Ginny and Rose also continue to take care of their cantankerous and cruel father, who expects everyone he encounters to defer to him. Unlike the other characters, the origins of Larry Cook’s behavior are unclear. Smiley might say that thousands of years of patriarchy would best describe his callous conduct. He manipulates and denigrates his friends and family because he can; it is as if he is the king of Cabot, Iowa. Meanwhile, the youngest Cook sister, Caroline, has left the farm and is an attorney in Des Moines. Caroline harbors resentment toward her older sisters and blames them for her exclusion from the transaction. She knows nothing of what Rose and Ginny endured to protect her from their father.

Ginny says, “The wisdom of the plains. Pretend nothing happened.” But old wounds appear as Rose, Ginny, and their husbands make decisions about the farm. Repressed emotions begin to leak, and eventually, the characters will give voice to their feelings. The results of years of silence are like a tornado ripping the Cook family members from their foundations. By the novel’s end, the full tragedy of these repressed lives becomes clear.

And though ‘A Thousand Acres’ might sound depressing, it is not. Smiley’s ability to create complex characters and write precisely about their family dynamics is inspiring. Readers can gain insight into the human condition. Isn’t that the purpose of a well-written novel? 5/5

I do love a book set in San Francisco. Hometown pride, I suppose.

Written by Stacia Pelletier and published in 2017, ‘The Half Wives’ is gripping and even hypnotic. Pelletier’s evocative descriptions of turn-of-the-century San Francisco are so immersive that the City feels like another character. It does take a couple of chapters to acclimate to the second-person narrator. But as the complex emotion of the characters emerge, the story crescendo toward a sad but satisfying conclusion.

The entire novel takes place on May 22, 1897. It was on May 22, sixteen years ago on that day that Henry and Marilyn Plageman’s 2-year-old son Jack died. Marilyn and Henry commemorate their son’s death yearly with a ritual at the San Francisco cemetery on Lone Pine Hill. But this year threatens to be different. The City of San Francisco intends to move the graves to Colma, a new cemetery south of the City. Because of the sweeping ocean views, the City believes the current cemetery could be used for homes and businesses. Jack knows that Marilyn can’t bear the thought of moving Jack to a new plot of land. So, Henry does what he can to stop the move. (Read the author’s note at the end of the book first. She explains how most San Francisco cemeteries were moved to Colma.)

After Jack’s death, each privately mourned Jack. Marilyn focused on charity work for an orphanage. And Henry started a relationship with a woman named Lucy, with whom he has a ten-year-old named Blue. He stays with them once a week.

Jack and Marilyn love one another. But like the San Francisco fog, Jack’s death hovers over them. His death is like an invisible string that connects them and restrains them from processing the reason Jack died. ‘The Half Wives’ is a unique and engaging read.

‘The Quickening’ was hard to put down. Michelle Hoover’s lyrical writing, compelling characters, and dramatic setting create a palpable tension. It is a story about two families struggling to survive on the isolated Midwest plains. As the families begin to rely on one another, mutual resentments accumulate. Using language as sparse as the plains, Hoover’s emotionally charged novel transports us to a time, place, and dialect that no longer exists.

In 1913 Mary Morrow walked the mile to meet her new neighbor. She longed for a friend. She had been raised in a city. It was where she met her abusive husband, Jack. On this vast prairie, only one friendship option exists. Her name is Edinan Current. Edina and Mary’s temperaments couldn’t be different. Edinan is content farming alone or with her gentle husband, Frank. Except for a church that plays a part in the story, these folks could be living on the moon. The book explores Edwina and Mary’s internal worlds and reveals their different fortitudes, attitudes, and character. Life proceeds over the years, and they help one another through miscarriages, hurt children, sick animals, failed crops, the Great Depression, a fire, encroaching poverty, and more isolation. Edinia and Mary have secrets; some are known to the other but never acknowledged. These families are intertwined not out of mutual admiration but by circumstance. Eventually, betrayal rears its ugly head. These two women make decisions that affect their families and the next generation.

The book is an homage to the families that farmed in isolation their 180 acres thanks to the Homestead Act. Feelings are not shared. People are tight-lipped and private. Hoover’s use of metaphors, simile, and allegories are breathtaking. Words are not wasted, and meaning exists in the words not written. This powerful story is about the emotional toll of hard work and heartache on two farmwives and their families as they toil on the Midwest plains. 4.5/5

I read Kate Southwood’s ‘Falling To Earth’ over a year ago, and this novel's power has stayed with me. I am in awe of Southwood’s beautiful writing and the cadence of this mesmerizing story. This dramatic story is like reading a tragedy from Shakespeare. Heartbreak awaits you, but you keep reading because Shakespeare’s writing and observations will penetrate your being.

The tragedy Southwood writes about in ‘Falling to Earth’ is twofold. On March 18, 1925, an actual tornado whipped through Illinois, Indiana and Missouri. It was one of the worst tornados in our country’s history and is now called the Tri-State Tornado. This day is the starting point from where Southwood begins her fiction, in a small town called Marah, Illinois. The tornado destroys buildings and people, including a schoolhouse full of children. With so much destruction and loss, the townspeople are overwrought and bereft.

Paul Graves and his wife Mae live in March with their three children and Paul’s mother Lavinia. By some miracle, the Graves family escapes the tornado’s devastation. Their house is untouched, and their children are unharmed. They have done nothing wrong but survive. The story's second tragedy is the community’s reaction to Paul and Mae’s good fortune. Though Paul and Mae work hard to help their neighbors clean up and rebuild, the townspeople with whom they have been friendly, slowly turn against them. A collective but uncoordinated desire for Paul Graves's family to suffer takes hold. This small, tormented town of 1925 becomes snarled in superstitions and small-mindedness. With silent shunning and petty cruelties, they blame the Graves family for escaping the catastrophe. At some level, these former neighbors and friends come to believe that if the Graves family suffers, their grief will be soothed.

This book is a wise meditation on grief. Southwood’s depiction of this dreadful dynamic is well depicted. The novel’s pacing is slow, which makes the action more suspenseful. The story encompasses the rawness of human emotions.

Southwood’s writing is precise with poetic flourishes that pack an emotional punch. More importantly, Southwood’s psychological insight into human emotions and behavior is subtly and superbly delivered. ‘Falling to Earth’ teaches how grief can ricochet, even striking undeserving victims. 5/5

Dani Shapiro’s newest book ‘Signal Fires’ has burrowed deep inside of me. The novel is thoughtful, spiritual, ethereal, psychological and even transcendent. Its power is not in the specific story line, but the existential questions Shapiro explores. She tackles the circular nature of time, the many selves inside each of us, the psychological impact of not processing trauma, the magic of serendipity and the enduring presence of all people (dead or alive) in our universe. Like time itself, this novel moves from the present to the past with hints of the future, providing richness and depth to the story.  

The book begins in 1985. Teenage siblings Sarah and Theo Wilf are driving their friend Misty Zimmerman home. They have been drinking. When the car crashes near the Wilf house, their father, Ben Wilf, who is a doctor, runs outside. His children are uninjured, but Misty is dead. That night, an unspoken agreement is made between Ben, his wife Mimi and their two teens. They will never speak about what happened or how they feel, a pact that persists for decades. “Sarah sometimes wonders whether talking would have been better. Silence didn’t make it go away but instead drove the events of that night more deeply into each of them.” 

Shapiro allows us to enter the emotional lives of these characters in the aftermath of their trauma. And though the characters reflect privately on the horror of that night, they mostly move forward weighted down by their guilt. Consciously and unconsciously they make decisions that alter the trajectories of their lives. “There is no straight line. Memory, history - things that happened fifteen years ago or fifty are as alive now as if they had just happened or are about to happen.”  

After Sarah and Theo are grown and moved away, a young couple moves across the street. One evening, Ben hears the husband calling out. His wife is in labor and the ambulance has not arrived. Ben races to the house and delivers the infant who the couple names Waldo. Over time, Ben and Waldo become close. The novel shows how random connections can affect our lives in profound ways. Waldo becomes an astrophysicist and shares commentary about the stars and space, adding another dimension to the story. But the novel’s primary focus is on the repercussions of trauma. Every person responds differently to tragedy . But holding onto painful secrets can have dire consequences. “Unexpressed, they will wind their way through and around each of them like vines choking a strand of untended trees.” 

The story is a meditation of love and loss, grief and trauma and eventually about healing and hope. I applaud Shapiro’s ambitious exploration of these themes. Though the story is heavy, its intensity is offset by moments of illumination and insight. ‘Signal Fires’ is a novel is infused with humanity and spirituality. I highly recommend. 5/5

‘Migrations’ was one of my favorite novels of 2022. Charlotte McConaghy published this exquisite story in 2019. Suspenseful, gripping and atmospheric, the novel stunned me with its ability to immerse the reader in a different world. Characterized as a CLI-FI (climate fiction) McConaughy certainly comprehends the implications of climate change, but she is also an insightful interpreter of the human soul.

The protagonist of the novel, Franny Stone is a thirty-year-old Irish woman with a troubled past. The details of that past slowly reveal themselves in each chapter, like puzzle pieces that create a full picture by the end of the story.

The novel take place in the not-too-distant future where most wild animals are extinct. No food for one species means no food for the animals up the food chain. So now animals are bred in farms for food, but the natural world as we know it has ceased to exist.

Though not formally educated, Franny’s knowledge about birds is voluminous. Scientists in the story believed that the Arctic Wren a species of bird was still alive and making their long migration from the Artic to Antarctica. Franny wants to follow the Wren to their destination. She talks her way onto a fishing vessel where the crew hopes to take in one last big catch. At some level, she thinks that if she saves the birds, maybe she can save herself.

As we learn about Franny’s life, we can see she is running toward the natural world and away from her traumatic past. Like her mother, she is restless soul who wanders during the day and sleepwalks at night. She says, “It isn't fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.” It feels like she is punishing herself for some unnamed transgressions which we lean in a slow cadence of revelation. Franny’s painful experience of her younger days has nestled into her soul and she feels that she cannot change and must be punished,

‘Migrations’ is heavy and heartbreaking, raw and wrenching. It is a character driven story about a woman wrestling with her past while living in an eerie world without the sound or sight of animals. No fish, no birds, no mammals. This story aches with the fallibility and majesty of human choices both individually and globally. McConaghay is not didactic, just factual. if we don’t make changes The world we know will no longer exist. 4/5

Despite its tranquil tone, Claire Keegan’s ‘Small Things Like These’ packs a provocative punch. In 114 pages, she delves into the heart and mind of a man questioning the purpose of his life. After witnessing a disturbing event, his past comes rushing into the present. Short-listed for this year’s Booker Prize, this small novel inspires,

Christmas is fast approaching in the small Irish town where Bill Furlong was born, raised and still lives. The year is 1985 and an economic downturn has enveloped the town. But Bill, a coal merchant, feels fortunate he can still support his wife and five daughters.

One day delivering coal to the Catholic convent for unwed mothers, Bill finds a young woman locked in the coal shed. It shakes him deeply and unearths thoughts about his own unwed mother. When Bill’s mother had become pregnant at 16, her family disowned her. Because the Protestant woman for whom Bill’s mother worked invited Bill’s mother to move in and raise her child, Bill’s mother was spared the convent for unwed mothers. A blessing for Bill and his mother.

What Bill saw at the convent begins to plague him. His wife says, “If you want to get on in life, there are things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.” But the image of that young, scared girl upsets the compassionate Bill Furlong. His relationship with the nuns is cordial, but still, his conscience won’t rest. “Why were the things that were closet so often the hardest to see?” Feelings about his deceased mother and his unknown father stir inside him. Bill begins to reevaluate his obligations to himself, his family and his community. He wonders, “Was there any point in being alive without helping one another?”

Claire Keegan’s sparse prose grabs her readers and places them in Bill Furlong’s heart and mind. In these turbulent times, she provokes her readers to contemplate their responsibilities to others. If each of us does one small compassionate act, our world would undoubtedly be a better place. 4/5

This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on July 29, 2021

https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/swimming-back-to-trout-river-evocatively-examines-impact-of-chinas-cultural-revolution/

Linda Rui Feng’s debut novel “Swimming Back to Trout River” is an exquisite meditation on love and loss in the wake of China’s ruinous Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. The book brings to life how repressive regimes create lasting emotional scars on individuals touched by their cruelties. The protagonists are vulnerable but resilient as they leave China to start anew in America. Their hopeful moments are few and fleeting as the wounds of the old world shape their choices in the new.

Feng, a former San Francisco resident and professor in East Asian studies at the University of Toronto, has written a book that’s not primarily about China’s politics. Instead, it is an evocative exploration of the inner life of specific immigrants and the burdens they carry with them.

The story begins in China in 1981 as Cassia, a young mother, abandons her 5-year-old daughter Junie at the home of her in-laws. The story of why Cassia leaves Junie unfolds slowly. Junie’s grandparents live in a small village, near a river, where they dote on Junie. Born without legs below her knees, Junie is not deterred by her disability. She is bright, inquisitive and loves her grandparents.

As Junie’s 12th birthday approaches, Junie’s father Momo, who is in the United States pursuing a graduate degree, writes that he will bring her to America to join him and Cassia. What Junie and her grandparents do not know is that when Cassia arrived in San Francisco, she did not proceed with her plan to meet Momo. She works as a nanny for a little boy, while Momo, many miles away, still hopes to reunite with Cassia and Junie.

Cassia and Momo met while working in a factory town in remote China. Both were traumatized by horrifying events during the Cultural Revolution; each witnessed terrifying acts of physical violence and emotional cruelty. Memories of the period remained too raw for them to share, and their emotional distance compounded over time. The birth of their disabled daughter exacerbated their separateness. Each reacted differently to her arrival. A subsequent and tragic life-changing event fueled their growing isolation.

As the story develops, it becomes apparent that although they left China, Momo and Cassia did not leave their personal demons behind. Their interior lives remain bound up in the anguish of their younger selves. By the end of the novel, we learn the secrets that haunt their lives. The narration artfully moves between past and present while the characters’ emotional complexity deepens.

A separate stream in the narrative revolves around Dawn, whom Momo met at university before knowing Cassia. A gifted musician, Dawn makes a mark in Momo’s life, inspiring his lifelong passion for music. Dawn, too, endured tragedy during the Cultural Revolution. While in San Francisco as part of a musical delegation from China, Dawn made the difficult decision to defect. Music’s ability to motivate, nurture and touch human souls is a prominent theme in the story.

Another powerful theme focuses on the Chinese word yuanfen, for which there is no English translation. The concept refers to the idea that invisible threads, which can be identified but not completely understood, connect people and events. Numerous examples of yuanfen create drama and tension as the novel crescendos toward its surprising conclusion.

I might have preferred a different ending, but this quibble doesn’t detract from the book’s extraordinary virtues. Feng, a gifted writer and storyteller, astutely and unusually conveys the role of emotions in determining life choices. “Swimming Back to Trout River” celebrates the power of hope, the interconnectedness of people, the constancy of grief and the complexity of love: together, a microcosm of the human condition.

This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on October 13, 2019

https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/dutch-house-a-powerful-drama-about-family-and-memory/

Ann Patchett’s remarkable new novel ‘The Dutch House’ dives deep into family dynamics, the amorphous nature of memory and the power of the past to shape the present. Patchett continues the theme of her superb book, ‘Commonwealth’: adult children sorting through the detritus of parents’ troubled lives. Patchett’s graceful prose is rich with references to fairy tales and parables. The result is a novel dense with human drama and layers of meaning.

After WWII, Cyril Conroy is a poor man. Due to one successful investment, he becomes wealthy and purchases an iconic house in a suburb of Philadelphia. “Be careful what you wish for” could be the novel’s subtitle; this acquisition is the beginning of the end of Cyril’s happy family and sizable fortune. The mansion, once owned by a Dutch family, is ornate, opulent and architecturally significant. Cyril is confident his new bride, Elna, will fall in love with its lavish beauty. He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Elna, who had considered becoming a nun, hates the ostentatious house. One day, she permanently leaves the Dutch House and her family, choosing instead to help the poor.

This abandonment creates trauma for her three-year-old son, Danny and most especially for her ten-year-old daughter, Maeve. Eventually, their father remarries. His new wife, Andrea, and her two daughters move into the Dutch house, dislodging Danny from his childhood and displacing Maeve from her bedroom. When Cyril Conroy dies unexpectedly four years later, the stepmother, Andrea, cruelly throws Maeve and Danny out of the Dutch house that she now owns. Maeve becomes Danny’s guardian and protector.

Narrated from Danny’s point of view, the novel follows Maeve and Danny as they attempt to make sense of the events that led to their eviction. Though they obtain college degrees, secure jobs, and in Danny’s case, marry and have kids, Maeve and Danny are bonded to one another and trapped in the past. For decades they keep returning to the Dutch House as if a magnetic force is pulling them toward it. While parked across the street, they sit in Maeve’s car and gaze at their old home. With anger, sadness and humor, they examine their past. Maeve shares memories of their mother with Danny. Together, they analyze their enigmatic father and resent their mean stepmother. Danny’s wife says, “It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?”

Their mother’s painful abandonment, their father’s careless choices and their stepmother’s petty vindictiveness alter the trajectories of their lives. As the single remnant of their childhoods, the Dutch House becomes a kind of museum of their memories. Then one morning, when Maeve is forty-nine and Danny forty-two, an unexpected event occurs and they decide to stop parking across the street. Twenty-seven years have passed since their expulsion. They realize, “We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”

Yet the story is far from over. The Dutch House’s grip on their lives lessens but does not vanish. They must once again broaden their perspective of their past and open themselves to an unforeseen present.

Ann Patchett is like an archeologist excavating an emotional ruin. Her two main characters ask questions, analyze facts and arrive at hypotheses that morph with time and greater understanding. Danny and Maeve acknowledge that their memories might be unreliable and shaped to align with the narrative they created. But isn’t that the nature of recollection?

The surprise ending is moving without being maudlin. Acceptance, forgiveness and healing occur in unexpected ways. Ann Patchett’s talents as a writer are evident on every page. As one character says, “Sometimes you’ve got to put the past in the past.” With empathy, Ann Patchett shows us why that is easier said than done.

Alert: This review has spoilers.

In this transcendent novel, Mary Beth Keane’s talent for describing people’s inner lives appears on every page. Nuanced and insightful, the characters in Ask Again, Yes feel authentic and alive. The novel explores the emotional fallout of a tragedy that involves two families. Is forgiveness possible? What do we owe our families amid a calamity?

The year is 1973. Both Frankie Gleeson and Brian Stanhope are New York City rookie cops. When they each begin to start the families, they each move to the suburbs and coincidently land next door to each other. Francis and Lena soon have three daughters: the youngest named Kate. Anne and Brian Stanhope have one son whose name is Peter. The adults don’t interact with each other. Francis tells his daughter Kate to stay away from Peter’s mother, “Something’s not right.” When Peter and Kate enter school, they become close friends. Then a mental illness induced tragedy strikes when Kate and Peter are fourteen. Peter’s mother shoots Kate’s father. The repercussions from this shocking event will entangle the Gleasons and the Sandhopes in perpetuity.

Keane’s keen knowledge of the human condition allows the characters’ inner thoughts to propel the plot rather than external events. Yes, life moves on after the shooting. Everyone lives, though in a state of emotional and physical pain. There are graduations and job promotions, weddings and funerals, but Keane’s focus is on these characters’ internal reflections. Like a kaleidoscope, she shifts the narration, so readers learn the thoughts of Kate and Peter, Francis and Lena and Brian and Anne.

Kate and Peter’s love story dominates. The book’s cover made this plot seem sensational: the enigmatic title certainly added to that impression. Yet in Keane’s skilled hands, the notion that Kate and Peter would want to be with each other seems entirely believable. People who experience trauma together often gravitate toward one another. The fall out from the shooting dominates Kate and Peter’s inner lives. How could it not? They each experience grief, guilt and anguish for their parents and themselves. In the uproar and upheaval that follows, Peter moves to another town to live with an uncle. Kate’s father lingers in the hospital. As they move through their teens and into their twenties, Peter and Kate can think of nothing but each other. All four parents are living with pain and exhort Kate and Peter not to find each other. But they do - and all the family members must now navigate the complex maze of emotional dynamics and begin to understand the heartbreak of mental illness. As a psychiatrist tells Peter’s mother, “You repeat what you do not repair.”

Ask Again, Yes is a thoughtful rumination on how people navigate complicated feelings. She explores the passing of time, the randomness of life’s big choices, the need for understanding, the persistent ignorance around mental health issues, and the importance of forgiveness. The ending moved me in its simplicity and beauty. There is healing and mercy, compassion and empathy. Ask Again, Yes, is one of the most satisfying novels I have read this year. Thanks to the DJKKS Book Club.

Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink is possibly my favorite book of 2018. In every page, I could feel Kadish’s passionate commitment to her characters and to the historical period she describes. Her appreciation of the written word is evident as she captures both the smallest details and largest historical themes. At one level the novel is a mystery to be solved. Yet due to Kadish’s skills as a writer and thinker, we are exposed to other levels of inquiry and thought: philosophy, the nature of love, religious viewpoints, moral obligations, the existence of God, gender roles and the power of the past to affect the present. No lightweight list of ideas to contemplate.

The novel opens in 2000. Helen Watt is a Professor of History at a University in London. When a former student asks her to examine a cache of old letters discovered in a 350 year-old-home he recently inherited, Helen is astounded by what she finds. She knows immediately these letters, written in Hebrew and Portuguese from the 1660s, are historically significant.

The novel then shifts to London in 1657. We meet Ester Valasquez, a young woman in her late teens who was adopted by Rabbi HaCoen Mendes after her parents died. Rabbi Mendes and Ester have left Amsterdam and traveled to London where the Rabbi will lead a small Jewish community. Because he was tortured for not renouncing his faith during the Inquisition, Rabbi Mendes is now blind. Though the rabbi does not support women reading or writing, Ester is a skilled scribe and secretly assists with his correspondence.

Though 400 years separate Helen and Ester, both women seek to utilize their intellectual gifts. Their identities are intrinsically connected to their ability to think and express themselves by writing down their thoughts. Ester says, “.... the unpooling of ink has brought me much comfort always, and often have I written what I would not speak.” However, the religious, social and political customs of that time period do not allow women that option. Esters complains, “A woman’s body was a prison in which her mind must wither.” Nonetheless, Ester develops a way to communicate her own thoughts even as she continues to scribe for the Rabbi. This bold decision contributes to the mystery of these letters three centuries later. In 2000, women participate fully in academia. However, Helen Watt still faces sexism and isolation by the male colleagues in her department. Yet because of brave women like Ester Valequez, Helen Watt publishes her thoughts under her own name.

Kadish’s novel also illuminates the unfair and precarious plight of the Jews. Though fortunate to be in London and not Spain, the Jewish community of London in the late 17th century is at the mercy of the clerical and political leaders of London. An acquaintance of Ester says, “… to be a Jew in this world, I understand is a danger. If a Jew speaks the truth of his faith in the wrong moment, though that faith harms none, he brings down untold wrath.” Kadish depicts the texture of oppression the Jewish community faced during this time.

Rotating between two time structures can be difficult. Often readers connect to the characters in one time period but not characters in the other. In The Weight of Ink I felt immersed in the characters’ struggles from both time periods. At 560 pages, The Weight of Ink is not a short read, but it is an emotionally, intellectually and worthwhile one.

Goldie Cohen is missing from her family’s home in Buffalo, New York. We learn this fact in the first few pages of Nancy Reisman’s absorbing and compelling novel, The First Desire. The year is 1929 and Goldie’s disappearance has thrown the Cohen family into turmoil. In her late twenties and the oldest of five adult children, Goldie directs the household after the recent death of their mother Rebecca. Has Goldie been kidnapped, has she fallen victim to a tragic accident or has she simply left?

Sister Sadie posts signs and notifies the police. After just a couple of weeks and deaf to the pleas of his grown children, Goldie’s father, Abe Cohen, decides that the family will sit Shiva. With this public pronouncement that “Goldie is dead to him", we learn that Goldie’s father believes Goldie has left the family. Abe Cohen’s patriarchal decision-making process gives us our first glance at his stubbornness, inflexibility and the emotional impact on his family.

Abe and Rebecca Cohen were born and raised in Poland where family traditions were rigid and choices few. The reliable routines of the Cohen’s family life in Buffalo provide both an oasis and a prison for the family. Except for Sadie, who lives with her husband Bill and their two daughters across town, the other four siblings live and work with their widowed father in the family jewelry store. Though the Cohen family members’ lives are intertwined, they each live on their own emotional island. They need each other and they resent each other. Their freedom is constrained by money, societal norms, and the customs of their Jewish faith.

However living in Buffalo, not Poland, has allowed these five adult siblings to consider their own needs. So though they remain diligent and dutiful to the family, they feel stifled and suffocated. By our modern sensibilities, they should enjoy the family camaraderie. Instead, the siblings feel oppressed by their roles and responsibilities. They experience the sweetness of being known by their family while seeking anonymity. The freedom to reinvent oneself or seek a new direction seems impossible. These adult siblings feel frozen in time; their maturation stunted. In addition, as the years pass, the shadow of anti-Semitism in the United States and the horrors in Europe hover in the Buffalo air.

Reisman’s novel explores the family interactions to offer an explanation of WHY Goldie did what she did. By probing into each of the character’s perspective (including Goldie), Reisman strengthens our understanding of their needs and longings. Their desires seem to center around autonomy and sexual fulfillment. Reisman describes her character’s daily thoughts and deeper aspirations with empathy and compassion.

I loved the aching humanity of this novel. I wish Reisman had delved into the details of these siblings’ early years, as it would have given readers a greater understanding of the dynamics between the family members in their adulthood. Yet, Nancy Reisman’s The First Desire beautifully illustrates how family love can both comfort and smother.

Full Disclosure: Karen Day is a dear friend and I read several versions of this novel before publication.

Karen Day‘s compelling and psychologically nuanced novel explores the complex dynamic of two college friends Lee Sumner and Clare Michaels. Clare and Lee, along with their sorority sisters Sara and Ducky, travel from Indiana University to Florida for their spring break. Due to adolescent groupthink and poor decision-making, they change their plans to include a stay in Daytona Beach. They arrive in the middle of the night at the dingy, dilapidated rented home of one of Sara’s childhood friends where a party is in progress. With no room to sleep, Lee and Clare stay a few blocks away with a friend of the friend and a horrific event happens. Lee sacrifices herself to let Clare escape.

Set in the 1980’s, this novel takes place decades before the #MeToo Movement and the crime goes unreported. The girls head back to their sorority and each deal differently with the aftermath of the experience. Lee’s state of shock diminishes her drive to become a documentary filmmaker and she sputters through a series of menial jobs and ramshackle rentals. Clare’s guilt about her split-second decision to jump out the window and escape at Lee’s direction undermines her self-identity as a reliable caretaker. Exacerbating Clare’s guilt is her decision not to tell anyone that Lee had said, “Let her go, I’ll Stay.” Clare feels ashamed. “But how could they forgive me when they didn’t even know what I had done.”

Clare and Lee had met during the first exciting year of college. While Lee is intellectually gifted, her family offers Lee few emotional or financial resources. Lee is thrilled to meet Clare whose empathy and care comforts her. Clare is entranced by Lee’s enthusiasm and curiosity and feels rewarded for being a good listener. However, over the course of college, Clare feels weighted down by the drama of Lee’s dysfunctional family and Lee’s related need for Clare’s reassurance and support. Clare says, “….I felt her intensity sucking in the life out of everything.” But in fact, Clare’s resentment derives more from a lifetime of taking care of her mother - the famous author of the bestseller, Listen, Before You Go. Clare feels confused about whether or not Phoebe, the protagonist in her mother’s novel, is based on her or not. Had Clare’s mother prescribed who she should be and how should act? No wonder Clare sometimes feels hollow.

Simultaneously, Lee has transferred her fear of emotional abandonment onto Clare. After the Florida trip, college graduation and marriage to her college boyfriend, Clare, too, feels stuck in her own life. Her guilt about leaving Lee at that dreary house in Florida compels her to routinely visit Lee in New York City and call her every day.

One of the indicators of a successful novel is if the reader witnesses change, growth and connection to the characters. Karen Day’s I’ll Stay achieves this goal. Though the opening chapters are gripping and set the novel’s tone, the later chapters equally captivated me. That is where Day unravels the family dynamics and psychological interiors of both Clare and Lee and their transference and countertransference with one another. Day shows her readers the powerful unconscious forces inside Lee and Clare that shaped the choices they made before and after the Florida trip. She captures the ways in which people seek to replace and replicate unhealthy and healthy family dynamics in friendships and relationships especially in early adulthood. With a light touch, Day shows the benefits of working with a therapist to unpack and understand feelings and experiences especially if trauma is involved.

At the novel’s end, Clare and Lee are ten years out of college and have begun to examine not only what happened on that fateful night in Florida but also the factors that had been propelling them in their pre-college lives. It seems that Clare and Lee will be able to move on with their lives with greater understanding, insight, and hope for their futures. Though they will each carry this trauma with them, it will not define who they are.

Yaa Gyasi’s powerful and painful novel begins in Ghana in the late 1700’s where we meet two half-sisters, Effia and Esi. James Collins, the British governor of the western African “Gold Coast,” marries Effia. Effia moves into the large white castle with Collins and he treats her well. However, Collins reigns over the castle’s dungeon where unbeknownst to Effia, her half-sister Esi waits to be sold into American slavery. The novel’s harrowing narrative rotates between the travails of Effia’s descendants in Africa and Esi’s descendants in America. Both Effia and Esi’s children must contend with new versions of subjugation.

Each generation finds themselves captive to some trauma at the hand of white men. Over time, Esi’s progeny experience captivity in the dungeon, the horror of the ship ride to America, the barbarity of rape and slavery, freed slaves sent back to plantations, indentured servitude, Jim Crow laws of the South, and the drug trade and prejudice in the North. Effia’s progeny in Africa experience fierce battles between the Ashanti and Fanti tribes as they fight for the right to align with European countries to profit from the slave trade. There are tribal wars, sexual violence, machete battles, Colonialism, fires, madness, banishment, and isolation. On both continents, old oppressions end and new ones take their place.

Like a richly textured painting, Homegoing is layered with generations of pain and suffering. It is as if the layers of tragedy are seemingly transferred consciously and unconsciously from one generation to the next. It becomes clear that the dominant survival task of each generation is to navigate the oppression they experience while hoping for a better life for their children. Overcoming racism and/or oppressive tribal customs is a daily task of the characters we meet.

The novel’s structure is as effective as it is impressive. Gyasi does not follow each person from birth to death but instead allows each son or daughter to pick up the narrative from his or her perspective as they connect their own decisions to the hard choices made by their parents. Each individual must navigate oppressive institutional racism along the way.

In beautiful language, Gyasi conveys how, even centuries later, Effia’s seventh great-granddaughter living in the present carries the burden of all the suffering that came before. Marjorie says, “She feared that the nightmares would come for her too, that she too would be chosen by the ancestors to hear their family stories.” In spite of all the horror, the characters exhibit a deep spirituality and psychological awareness about their plight. Even with incremental improvements in the lives of each generation, Gyasi says, “No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.”

In the final pages of "Homegoing", Esi’s seventh great-grandson Marcus Clifton, a Ph. D. candidate at Stanford University, wonders, “How could he explain it to (his girlfriend) Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it - not apart from it, but inside of it.” I believe that this desire is what Gyasi sought to achieve in her novel. She has achieved her goal and so much more.

Elizabeth Graver’s 1977 novel, Unravelling, is intense, raw, sensual, and psychologically astute. Set in the 1820’s in rural New Hampshire, this book is one of the best coming-of-age stories I have read. Graver penetrates the complex inner lives of her characters and imbues them with words and deeds that impart insight and inspire empathy.

Aimee Slater, an older woman, narrates the novel. She tells a mesmerizing tale of how she came to live in a hunting shack on the edge of her parents’ property with limited family contact and minimal social interaction.

As a young girl Aimee lives and works on her family’s farm. Though her family experiences many hardships, Aimee’s relationship with her parents and siblings is positive. Aimee is perceptive, precocious, intuitive, and intelligent. But when she moves into adolescence and begins to have her own opinions, Aimee’s mother withholds her love and her father harshens his tone. Aimee begins to observe the various ways people navigate their feelings. She wonder about her mother’s relationship with her father, “What did she know of the man she lived with? Was he a gentle man with sudden, rare spinnings into rage, or an angry man who mostly held himself in check?”

Aimee and her brother Jeremiah are close in age and spend a lot of time together. As they begin adolescence, the siblings have a sexual encounter in the hayloft of their family’s barn. It is consensual, childlike, brief, and singular. Shame and embarrassment infiltrate their lives and they are never quite the same. In a different era, they might have gone to therapy or talked with a religious figure, but confusion corrodes their relationship. For relief, Aimee decides to leave the farm to work in the mills of Massachusetts. Without understanding Aimee’s motivations, her parents feel rejected and emotionally turn away.

Many tragedies befall Aimee and at age 17 she copes as best she can. She works hard in the mills and lives in a boarding house in Lowell. When she becomes pregnant, Aimee has no one but her family. Instead of sending love and support, her mother sends her a letter filled with judgment and wrath. The letter ends, “Do Not Come Home.” Rather than provide unconditional love, Aimee’s mother’s provincialism and religious superstitions determine her actions. After giving birth, Aimee returns to New Hampshire and does not lie or apologize. And like Hester Pryne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Aimee is shunned. Yet, as the decades pass, she creates her own little family with a disabled man from the town and a traumatized girl named Plumey. Reading about the unraveling of Aimee’s life haunts me. Yet Aimee’s accumulated insight and compassion over the years allow her to understand herself and attempt to reconcile with her elderly mother. As Aimee says of Plumey, “It is the deepest mystery what goes on inside anybody’s head.” Elizabeth Graver succeeds in delving into her characters’ heads and writing a novel filled with emotional and psychological nuance and poignancy.

Published in 2002, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier by Ann Packer is a rich exploration of the emotional dynamics of a young couple, their families, and their group of childhood friends after a traumatic accident. Packer creates characters for which I feel great empathy as they attempt to deal with a tragic situation. Her book reminds us that impulsive actions can change a person’s life.

Mike Mayer and Carrie Bell have lived in Madison their entire lives. They met at 15 and have been dating through high school and then four years at the university. Both are kind and conscientious. Their relationship has been one of thoughtfulness and tenderness. Now engaged, Carrie deflects and delays each time Mike asks about selecting a date. Not without inner conflict, she says, “I was hating myself because none of it felt right anymore. For so long I had thought of him as necessary ballast that would keep me safe. Now that ballast was holding me down, holding me back. I wanted lightness, freedom.” She also explains the stifling feeling she carries about their life in Madison, “We might work at banks and libraries and car dealerships but somehow the trappings of adulthood were merely that for us, merely trappings: the truth about us seemed to lie in the fact that we were still closest to the people we’d known since childhood." Feeling constrained by the confines of her hometown, Carrie imagines a wider world filled with stimulation and unpredictability. She has been emotionally distancing herself from the people she loves.

Mike feels Carrie’s love ebbing. On a picnic with their friends, Mike attempts to get Carrie’s attention by making an uncharacteristically spontaneous dive into a familiar lake. The water level is low and tragedy strikes. Mike becomes paralyzed.

The novel explores how people respond to their responsibilities in a time of crisis and chaos. As Mike deals with his physical paralysis, Carries becomes emotionally paralyzed. Everyone in her life tells her to be strong for Mike. A few months after the accident and burdened by constant hospital visits, Carrie feels the weight of Mike’s accident crushing her and she impulsively leaves Madison for New York. Though young, impetuous, and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of her heart, she needs to get away from the shrinking world of Madison to sort her feelings. Carrie loves Mike and she wants to support him. Yet, should she be disloyal to her own desires and simply marry him? Except for her mom, few people in her tight circle knew of her diminished feelings toward Mike. They think she simply left Mike in his time of need.

Carrie doesn’t offer the insights of an older, wiser woman. Yet, I admire that she seeks to understand herself and reflect on the choices she made and why she thinks she made them. She struggles to imagine if it would be harder to stay with her quadriplegic fiancé or harder to abandon him when he needs her most. And she berates herself for even thinking about leaving him. She wonders how, prior to the accident, Mike could have felt so content with the predictability of their planned lives. She reviews her own father’s abandonment of her mother when Carrie was three.

Carrie has experienced a different kind of trauma. She is only 23 years old. But rather than shrink from pain and conflict, she attempts to search her soul and determine what she should do next. Packer doesn’t offer us a simple happy ending. But like the rest of the book, it is satisfying to watch Carrie wrestle with the complexity of her commitments, her conflicts, and her emerging consciousness.

Alice Munro, the winner of the Nobel Prize in 2013 for her book Dear Life, is among the greatest of short story writers. In her scores of stories, she offers microscopic observations that reveal larger truths about her characters. While her writing is precise and observant, the motivations of her characters are imprecise and opaque. I recently reread one of my favorite Munro stories, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, which was made into a movie in 2007 titled Away From Her.

This heartbreaking story captures the slow painful effects of dementia on a long and complicated marriage. Fiona and Grant have been married for almost 50 years and Fiona, now at 70, is losing her memory. Munro’s narrator lays out the facts of Fiona’s decline without sentiment, “Over a year ago Grant had started noticing so many little yellow notes stuck up all over the house.” After Fiona wonders off at the supermarket, she says to Grant, “You know what you’re going to have to do with me, don’t you? You’re going to have to put me in that place. Shallowlake?” And Grant says, “Meadowlake. We’re not at that stage yet.”

But a paragraph later, on a cold January afternoon, Grant moves Fiona into Meadowlake. The transition is painful, as the rules prohibit Grant from visiting for a month to ease Fiona’s adjustment. Grant suffers. When he starts visiting Fiona, who acts as if she doesn’t know who he is or why he keeps coming to see her, Grant is perplexed. He asks the nurse if Fiona is “putting on an act.” During that month of acclimation, Fiona has become the constant companion to a man named Aubrey who is living at Meadowlake temporarily. The reader wonders if Fiona is retaliating for Grant’s past infidelities, or if Fiona is protecting Grant from her eventual demise.

When Aubrey returns to his home, Fiona is devastated. So Grant visits Aubrey’s wife, Marion, to ask her to let Aubrey visit Meadowlake for the sake of Fiona who has descended into depression. Grant’s primary motivation seems noble. He wants to ease his wife’s pain. That Grant loves Fiona is never in doubt. Grant has exhibited a version of loyalty in their long marriage, but he has not been loyal. So is he also atoning for his guilt? Is he proposing a relationship with Marion in exchange for Aubrey’s return to Meadowlake? When Marion calls Grant to ask him to attend a dance, is he acting on his pattern of infidelity or is he sacrificing himself for his wife? Munro describes their encounter but divulges nothing. Grant probably doesn’t entirely understand his motivations. And - spoiler alert - the reader simply learns that Grant has arranged for Aubrey to visit Fiona.

Munro’s captures the complexity of human emotion with her linguistic agility. Her writing is precise as a pinprick. She never becomes maudlin, nor does she pass judgment on her characters, even though this reader did!

Munro’s genius is that she writes engrossing stories and understands multiple motivations. With plenty of puzzle pieces provided, her readers can put the puzzle together in whatever way they choose. Each conclusion is plausible because there are so many complicated emotions percolating inside her characters. As Fiona says to Grant on the last page, “You could have driven away. Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me, Forsooken me. Forsaken.” Is she speaking of Grant's past betrayals or her present living situation at Meadowlake? Probably both.

This is a tragic story about the effects of dementia on a marriage characterized by steadfast love and constant betrayal. Maybe Munro is saying love, in all its possible permutations, is still love. And due to her exquisite restraint, she leaves her readers reaching for their own conclusions.

Some divorces feel like a tsunami. The resulting tidal wave hits the whole coastline, but some communities get hit harder than others. Ann Patchett’s impressive new novel, Commonwealth, explores the effects of divorce on two families. Spanning decades, this novel is like a longitudinal study of the psychological effects of divorce on the six children whose lives were altered by the dismantling of their families.

Set in Los Angeles, the novel opens when thirty-year-old Bert Cousins kisses Beverly Keating at a christening party. A drunken mistake? End of story? No, because within a couple of years Beverly divorces her husband Fix, marries Bert, and moves across the country with her two little girls to live near Bert’s family in Virginia. Fix Keating is left alone in Los Angles. Bert Cousins leaves his wife Theresa and their four small children in Los Angeles. Though I wished that Patchett had explored Bert and Beverly's decisions to abandon their two young families, it seems that Patchett is more focused on the fallout for the kids.

Every summer, the Keating kids visit their dad in L.A. and the Cousins kids visit their dad in Virginia. And there are several weeks when all six kids become a version of the “Brady Bunch” sharing two bedrooms and a bathroom at Bert and Beverly’s house in Virginia. Beverly’s daughters welcome the visit of the four Cousin children. Patchett writes “Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: They did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty. The six children held in common one overarching principle that cast their potential dislike for one another down to the bottom of the minor leagues: they disliked the parents. They hated them.”

And for good reason: these adults create havoc in their children’s’ lives. Bert and Beverly are self-involved and not present even during these summer visits. Taking care of six young kids is exhausting and so Bert and Beverly abdicate their responsibilities and the older kids fill the void. On a family road trip, Bert and Beverly leave a note under the kids’ motel room door; “Have breakfast in the coffee shop. You can charge it. We’re sleeping late.” The narrator offers, “One more document in the ever-growing mountain of evidence that they were on their own.” When the kids sneak down to the lake with a bottle of gin and a gun they find in Bert Cousins’ car, it becomes clear just how ignored they are.

During one of the summers, Cal, the oldest son of Bert and Theresa, dies. No clear picture emerges of the minute-by-minute specifics of what occurred that day. Caroline, now the oldest, instructs the other kids on what to say to the parents. The adults think that Cal died alone. But the other five kids were there and bear some responsibility for his death. In their guilt and youth, the stepkids adhere to the agreed-upon story. Even thirty years later, it is unclear it the parents know what transpired that summer afternoon.

Patchett keeps the emotion on an even keel in describing Cal’s death – almost too even. There must have been crying and chaos, grief and guilt. Moving deftly in time between the stepkids and parents, Patchett allows the characters to share their perceptions of what happened that summer day. Their adult recollections have been shaped and altered by the passing of time. The surviving five kids are haunted by guilt about Cal’s death. They struggle with relationships, employment, and addiction. The most capable of the clan ends up in a meditation center in Switzerland, breathing in and out the troubling memories of her childhood. In adulthood, each of the Keating/Cousins children flees to their own psychic corner. None of the grown kids live in the same town as each other or any of the four parents. Yet they are still a collection of citizens belonging to the commonwealth of their blended family.

One of the stepkids, Franny Keating, shares the story of her childhood with her boyfriend who is an author. The resulting book is a catalyst for the blended family to move their PTSD to the forefront. Patchett’s engaging writing lets the reader witness the complicated dynamics of the blended and extended family members. Only a writer with Patchett’s skill could capture the feelings and development of so many characters over such a long period of time.

For the Keating/Cousins kids, the complicated trajectory of their future lives was set in motion the day Bert Cousins kissed Beverly Keating. I won’t spoil the ending, but Patchett finds some redemption in the connection of the children to each other amidst the detritus of the parents’ poor decisions.

In this powerful story about a young girl growing up on a rundown horse ranch in Colorado, Aryn Kyle takes us on a ride that is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Alice Winston is 12-years old and lives with her father, Joe, her mother, Marion, and, until recently, her 17-year old sister Nona who eloped with her boyfriend. Alice’s father is struggling to keep the ranch afloat and her mother never leaves the house. Alice feels isolated and confused as she attempts to put the puzzle pieces of her life together. Alice is living her life, but she does not understand it.

The book exquisitely depicts life on a horse ranch and Alice’s internal musings about the people in her life. Alice also learns about human traits such as tenderness, cruelty and indifference by observing the interactions between her horses. She tries to comprehend why her father does what he does, why her mother does not come downstairs, why her sister abandons them, and why her lab partner Polly Cain drowns. The adults that provide the scaffolding of her life are doing the best they can, but they are limited. There is no one on the ranch capable of taking care of Alice’s most basic needs. She wears her sister’s hand-me-downs that are either too big or too small.

Kyle captures the rich complexity of Alice’s interior life as she encounters her immediate family, her grandparents, her classmates, and eventually the rich women who board their horses at the ranch. Alice names this collection of women "the Catfish" and one of the daughters becomes her first friend. Issues of class, adultery, and alienation seep into the interactions at the barn. Though the Catfish provide money to the Winston family, the residue of these womens' dysfunctional lives affect Alice and she feels more confused than ever. Enter Alice’s English teacher, Mr. Delmar. Alice confides in Mr. Delmar and through their conversations, Alice starts to make sense of the world and gain self-confidence.

One night, Alice’s mother Marion asks Alice about her father’s affection for Patty Jo, one of the Catfish. Alice is surprised that her mother knew her father's feelings, She says, “All these years, I had thought we were protecting her, shielding her from the ugly world outside. But now I wondered how I could have ever believed that I was protecting anyone from anything. The world was what it was. There were no secrets. There were only things that went unsaid.”

Kyle’s lyrical writing is both quiet and startling. She offers psychological insights and deep development of Alice's character. There are wonderful quotes that made me reach for my highlighter. When Alice learns from her sister the reason for their mother's retreat to her room, Alice says, “This information, I didn’t have to accept it. Stories get twisted over time. Memories changed shape. It didn’t have to be truth if I didn’t want it to be. The event flashed through my mind and I saw it happen. Real or not, it would stay in my mind, a scar on something that had moments before been flawless. It would be there forever.”

Kyle writes, “Childhood is never over, not really. But the places we come from don’t leave us as easily as we leave them.” No doubt Alice’s growing up will leave her with scars. It is hard to imagine recommending such a bleak book. Yet by the end of the novel, Alice has something she does not have at the beginning: a sense of empowerment. She better understands the choices and behaviors of the people in her life. The puzzle pieces are beginning to come together.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers is a beautiful book about the redemptive power of love, wisdom, grace and healing. By illuminating the Victorian era practice of communicating feelings through flower selection, Diffenbaugh softens the otherwise painful story of a young women trapped in the foster care system. We first meet 18 year-old Victoria Jones on her “emancipation day.” Victoria's social worker is driving her to a transition home in the Sunset District of San Francisco. Victoria feels unwanted, unloved, and unworthy. Abandoned at three weeks, Victoria has lived in dozens of foster homes. Though she is bright, her anti-social behavior and attachment disorder cause her to hide within herself. Victoria has pushed away anyone that begins to care about her. The pain of familiar isolation is better than the pain of rejection and abandonment. Miraculously, she endures the foster care system for 18 years. After running away from her “transition” home, she is homeless and living in a public park. She eventually works for a florist named Renata and rents a tiny room from Renata’s sister. After she meets Grant at the flower market, he hands her a clipping of mistletoe, which Victoria knows to symbolize - I surmount all obstacles. Victoria then gives Grant snapdragon which symbolizes-presumption. Victoria’s feels fear and something new: a glimmer of hope as she realizes they both know the language of flowers.

The story alternates between Victoria’s post-emancipation life and her recollection of the most formative year of her life when, at age 10, Victoria is placed in a foster home north of San Francisco. Her new foster mother, Elizabeth, is single and lives in a house on a vineyard. After experiencing abuse and neglect, Victoria seems incapable of receiving love. Yet, the lush landscape of grapes, flowers, and endless sky offer possibility. Her new foster mother sets clear boundaries for Victoria. She cooks her delicious meals, pays attention to her, and treats her with compassion and respect. Victoria’s hardened heart begins to yield. She is finally being treated with respect, not like an unworthy foster kid.

Initially, it is difficult for Elizabeth and Victoria. Yet, Elizabeth knows the shame of rejection and abandonment. She too was neglected and received little love from her distant father and mentally ill mother. She perseveres due to the love of her older sister, Catherine, who now lives next door. This experience provides Elizabeth with empathy and understanding. She tells Victoria, “Nothing you could do would make me send you away. Nothing. So you can go on testing me, hurling my mother's silver around the kitchen, if that is what you have to do - but know that my response will always be the same: I will love you and I will keep you.”

Elizabeth teaches Victoria the turn-of-the-century practice of conveying emotion through flowers. This cryptic communication resonates with Victoria and she begins to share her emotions through flowers. Victoria asks Elizabeth the name of the flower for hate. Elizabeth retorts, “The flower you are looking for is clearly the common thistle, which symbolizes "misanthropy." Misanthropy means hatred or mistrust of humankind. Victoria responds, “No one had ever described my feelings in a single word.” Victoria quickly absorbs this new language and uses it to communicate her feelings to Elizabeth. Victoria settles into Elizabeth’s world and experiences the feeling of being loved. “I didn't want to go back. I liked Elizabeth I liked her flowers, her grapes, and her concentrated attention. Finally, I realized, I had found a place I wanted to stay.”

Yet trouble is brewing. The sisters have not spoken in 15 years. The silence emanating from Catherine’s house next door has wrapped itself like a vine around Elizabeth’s heart. She begs her sister to talk with her, but is met with silence. Her grief and despair take their toll on Elizabeth's relationship with Victoria. When the day comes for Elizabeth to adopt Victoria, Elizabeth panics. She does not get out of bed. She fears she cannot provide Victoria with the love and nurturing she never received. Emotional chaos ensues and Victoria does something shocking. The foster care system cannot make sense of what transpired. There is miscommunication and misunderstanding and the fragile possibility of a loving home evaporates. Victoria is sent back into the foster care system for eight more years. Her grief is overwhelming as Victoria knows Elizabeth loves her and yet, in her guilt and confusion, Victoria believes she deserves her fate.

I don’t want to spoil the many subplots. But during the year that Victoria lives with Elizabeth, the seeds of love and acceptance were planted in Victoria. They are not revealed for 10 more years and Victoria’s painful path is hard to observe. Yet, Victoria does change and learns to integrate a bit of the love and trust she learned from Elizabeth into her present life. When Victoria sees Elizabeth again after 10 years, she bring Elizabeth a huge bouquet of flowers. The flowers in the bouquet are: Flax – I feel your kindness; forget me not – forget me not; hazel - reconciliation; white rose - grace; pink rose - a heart acquainted with love; helenium - tears; periwinkle - tender recollections; primrose - childhood; and bellflower - gratitude. Victoria has grown and changed. She not only understands the language of flowers; she can now experience the feelings they symbolize.