Nevermore: Paper Girl, Eleventh Hour, A Death in the Family

Reported by Rita

 

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy

 

From one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding America's social fabric, her most personal and powerful work: a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown Urbana, Ohio, was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the '70s and '80s--certainly not for her family. Her dad was known as the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy economy and thriving schools, and Macy had middle-class schoolmates whose families became her role models. Though she left for college on a Pell Grant and then a faraway career in journalism, she still clung gratefully to the place that had helped raise her. But as Macy's mother's health declined in 2020, she couldn't shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened. Macy had grown up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was the community's civic glue. Now she found scant local news and precious little civic glue. Yes, much of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, but that didn't begin to cover the forces turning Urbana into a poorer and angrier place. Absenteeism soared in the schools and in the workplace as a mental health crisis gripped the small city. Some of her old friends now embraced conspiracies. In nearby Springfield, Macy watched as her ex-boyfriend--once the most liberal person she knew--became a lead voice of opposition against the Haitian immigrants, parroting false talking points throughout the 2024 presidential campaign. This was not an assignment Beth Macy had ever imagined taking on, but after her mother's death, she decided to figure out what happened to Urbana in the forty years since she'd left. The result is an astonishing book that, by taking us into the heart of one place, brings into focus our most urgent set of national issues. Paper Girl is a gift of courage, empathy, and insight. Beth Macy has turned to face the darkness in her family and community, people she loves wholeheartedly, even the ones she sometimes struggles to like. And in facing the truth--in person, with respect--she has found sparks of human dignity that she has used to light a signal fire of warning but also of hope. 

A really interesting read filled with really good information and research sources.     -KM       5 stars

 

The Eleventh Hour: A Quintet of Stories by Salman Rushdie

Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight's Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor. These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home: India, England and America, and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life. They are the reckoning with mortality that we all must one day make, and speak deeply to what the author has come from and through. 

The writing is really good, interesting, and entertaining.     -WJ      5 stars

 

 

A Death in the Family by James Agee

Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written. As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident--a tragedy that destroys not only a life but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family. A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.

The beauty of this book is the love in it. It is beautifully written.      -AH      5 stars

Other Books Mentioned: 

Crosscut: An Evan Delaney Novel by Meg Gardiner

The Rainmaker by John Grisham

When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain

Runaway: Stories by Alice Munro

Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith

Country Vet: Thirty Years of Treating Animals and Trying to Understand Their Owners by Randy L. Skaggs

A Child in the Forest by Winifred Foley

 

New Books: 

Homeschooled: A Memoir by Stefan Merrill Block

Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer's Guide Through the Sleeping Mind by Michelle Carr

Simply More by Cynthia Erivo

Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases by Lydia Kang