This book was fine.

The premise was fun, the food sounds so yummy, and there's some very funny bits throughout (the scene with the bread starters was so cute!). Reena generally felt fleshed out and I appreciated her love for and desire to protect her food and culture from trendy acculturation. But she felt like the only character who received that treatment, and Nadim (the love interest) felt more like a Frankenstein('s monster) of stories and quirks meant to make him interesting than like a cohesive character. The same feels true of Reena's family dynamics, especially when it comes to her sister, and for the whole plot around the conflict between Reena and Nadim's families.

Not a bad choice if you're looking for a quick pick-me-up, but it's likely to leave you hungry -- both for Indian food and a bit more substance.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

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adventurous emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75

As a historian, an immigrant, and a lover of multi-generational sagas, how could I not love this book? While I'm preparing a review, I keep track of all the things I like and dislike about the book, and with this one not only could I not come up with things for the "dislike" column, I ended up needing the space for all the things I did like! These include:

the motif/theme of fate through the game of pachinko, with the characters' fortunes rising and falling through history as a matter of luck/fate

the cycles of Sunja's life, as her own fortune rises and falls
(I loved how, between the highs and lows of her trajectory, she often finds herself contemplating the dirt under her nails -- Lee doesn't draw the connection out explicitly, but it's such a symbol of Sunja's roots and continually brings up the question of to what degree her life was changed by leaving Korea.)

the attention to women's experiences -- and not just women, but "little" women, women who would seem unimportant in the broad scope of history, but who actually make up the bulk of that history. I love any book that shows how day-to-day life continued in the midst of major historical events.

all the different forms of diaspora represented throughout the novel

how the story grows through time, getting more complex and adding more and more characters as we go through time, just as families do themselves

In this way, Pachinko is kind of like the cabbages Sunja searches for in Osaka (and turns into that life-saving kimchi!): so multi-layered, and every idea can be pulled aside to reveal another. Lee has constructed her novel like a tight clump of stories, ideas, and characters, each separate but so deeply connected at their heart.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

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challenging dark emotional hopeful sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This is one of the best books I have read in a long while.

At this point, I have probably read about 50 books that were written during or after the pandemic; some address it directly, some do their best to avoid any references or connections, and many show the pandemic's influence, even if it doesn't appear on the page. This is the first novel I read that turned the pandemic experience into real art; something that highlighted the commonality of human experience though a pandemic characterized by isolation, and which made me feel seen in the grief, resilience, and transformed understanding of human connection I've experienced over the last three years. How High We Go in the Dark is so clearly the product of deep reflection on the need and longing for community at a time of extreme isolation.

Through the book, Nagamatsu explores both how individuals adapted to this fictional pandemic and how the human race as a whole did; the structure of interconnected short stories allows him to portray a wide array of people and experiences along with a longue durée vision of how humanity adapted to a new reality over centuries. It is a deeply sad book, steeped in trauma and grief, but it is also such a hopeful one, which highlights human adaptability, persistence, and the endurance of the things that connect us all to each other. Yes, it's a sci-fi book, but even as Nagamatsu dives into the far-off future, through stories of intergalactic travel in search for new habitable worlds, the actions and motivations of the characters are so recognizably human. As we continue to discuss what exactly "the new normal" means for us, How High We Go in the Dark helps us reflect on what aspects of our lives are products of our society/context and what is true of all humankind.

I read the book in two or three sittings, but almost immediately wanted to go back and read individual chapters, to sit with them and reflect on each on its own. It is a hard, emotional book, so that might be a good approach if you know you're not in a place to spend too much time with the topic. If you want to do that, I might recommend my favorite of the chapters as a place to start: "Through the Garden of Memory," which is perhaps the most hopeful chapter of all as it highlights the endurance of humanity in the absence of society

(a group of people find themselves in a sort of limbo, unsure whether they're alive or dead, and try and fail to save themselves; then, they encounter a child, and decide to try and save him. At the end, they can only sit with the hope that what they did actually helped)

.

That said, I enjoyed the connections between the chapters, which are subtle but help drive home the message about the interconnectedness of the human experience. Those connections might be hard to pick up if you read the chapters in isolation, over a long time. Whichever way you choose to do it, this is a book to pick up and sit with.

Content Warnings

Moonrise Over New Jessup by Jamila Minnicks

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emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

If you've read any of my other reviews, you know I'm a sucker for a well-constructed, tight-knit, loving community (my family is large and from a small town, so I guess there's something I can connect to there...). This book really delivers! Minnicks' storytelling reflects the very real, historical and contemporary tensions felt by Black Americans over how to build community and a future when faced with a society intent on treading upon them.

The protagonist, Alice, is a young Black woman escaping violence and a sense of abandonment in her home town in Alabama, who accidentally stumbles upon New Jessup, a Black township in the middle of the Jim Crow South. Over the course of the novel, Alice gets to know, then grow into life in a place with no white people and, by extension, no segregation. Her being new to town serves as an excellent tool for Minnicks to introduce the community as well as to highlight the many ways in which this experience is radically different from the rest of the so-called New South without it feeling too much like a lecture/history lesson. Alice's being from outside New Jessup also gives her excellent insights and perspective as, as she settles into life in the town, she increasingly finds herself surrounded by discussions about the future of New Jessup.

I love Minnicks' writing, especially the attention she pays to character growth and to the relationships between characters. There is, of course, the relationship between Alice and Raymond, but I think I was especially moved by the care with which Minnicks wrote the relationship between Alice and other women, including Alice's sister (Rosie) and her employer in New Jessup, Ms. Vivian. There's one scene during which Ms. Vivian is sorting pearls for Alice's wedding dress, which reminds Alice of sorting field peas with her mother and Rosie as children (something I have done with my own mother and grandmother more times than I can count!) that was perhaps the purest expression of familial love I have read in a very long time. Similarly, Alice's expressing of how she has changed and thrived since arriving in New Jessup through the motif of gardens and flowers took my breath away.

Lastly, as a history teacher, I have to mention the depth of research into Black thought, activism, and community building this novel displays. For one, the debates taking place throughout the novel (those wishing to keep New Jessup segregated to protect their community and those advocating integration, those wishing to stay and never leave New Jessup and those who want to go elsewhere, etc) and the characters themselves echo the major debates and figures of the Black community throughout the twentieth century. By focusing on Alice's experiences, however, Minnicks brings to the fore the often-overlooked experiences and roles of the Black women at the margins of the civil rights movement.

I was so sad to finish this book, I almost want to read it all again already. Run, don't walk, to get yourself a copy.

When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole

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mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Cole displays great skill with character and world building in When No One is Watching, seen especially in her depiction of the neighborhood at the novel’s core. It’s a little hard to pin down the genre of this novel, but in any case it is clearly a love letter to tight-knit communities – which are, as Cole illustrates, threatened by “revitalization” projects such as the one Sydney finds herself living through.

As a historian, I enjoyed the red thread through the book of history, from the tour that starts it all to Sydney’s research for her own. I found Cole’s use of the tour at the very beginning, which Sydney found so empty and lacking in any content that truly mattered or reflected the lived history of the neighborhood, a lovely device to introduce the issues at the heart of this story, and I absolutely loved Sydney’s “full circle” moment in chapter 17, when she sees the connection between the research she has done and what is happening to her neighborhood.

That said, some of the story-telling elements did not work effectively or even took me out of the story. I rarely read thrillers, but I was struck by the pacing of this one and how long it took to get to the action/stakes. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the first half, which is where all that rich world-building happens (and which makes the reader truly feel the horror of something that might otherwise seem insignificant, such as the bodega closing), simply that it did not line up with my expectations for the book/genre. I also found the POV shifts between Sydney and Theo ineffective, because they revealed each character’s actions and thoughts to us at the same time as they were wondering about each other; as they each doubted the other, we already knew their motivations and roles/where they stood, even if some secrets were not revealed from the outset.

Lastly, I have to say, I was not a fan of the ending, which felt dissonant; the pacing was entirely off from the rest of the novel, the genre seemed to dive into sci-fi and horror, and the “bad guys” were unidimensional caricatures. For a “thriller” that took so long to get to the action, the ending was extremely unsatisfying.

I picked this novel up because I wanted to spread my genre horizons and read a thriller, and in the end what I liked best was the attention to characters and communities… Keep that in mind if you decide to give this one a try.

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thatotherjlo's reviews 212 reviews

thatotherjlo's reviews
212 reviews