Nevermore 6-30-26
Reported by
Rita
The White
Album by Joan Didion
From a jailhouse visit to Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton to witnessing First Lady of California Nancy Reagan pretend to pick flowers for the benefit of news cameras, Didion captures the paranoia and absurdity of the era with her signature blend of irony and insight. She takes readers to the “giddily splendid” Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the cool mountains of Bogotá, and the Jordanian Desert, where Bishop James Pike went to walk in Jesus’s footsteps—and died not far from his rented Ford Cortina. She anatomizes the culture of shopping malls—“toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes”—and exposes the contradictions and compromises of the women’s movement. In the iconic title essay, she documents her uneasy state of mind during the years leading up to and following the Manson murders—a terrifying crime that, in her memory, surprised no one.
This book was quite relatable and nostalgic. I enjoyed it and recommend it. -PP 5 stars
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
Set in a near-future Kolkata, India, ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, in which two families seeking to protect their children must battle each other. Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma's husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma's purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen. Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma's frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. How far will they go to secure their children's future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe?
I thought this was well-done and very
engrossing. -AH 5 stars
Yellowface by R.F.
Kuang
Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena is a literary darling while June is a nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls?, June thinks. So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse, stealing Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I. So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees. But June cannot escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens her stolen success. As she races to protect her secret she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
This was interesting but I found the plot
unbelievable and the narcissistic main character hard to like. -DC
3 stars
Other Books Mentioned
Sooley by John
Grisham
Every
Victory Counts by Sierra M. Farris
The Maid's
Tale: The Remarkable True Story of One English Maid's Life Below the Stairs by Tom
Quinn
The
Foursome by Christine Baker Cline
The Company
of Owls by Polly Atkins
Hazel's
Amazing Mother by Rosemary Wells
Travels
with Agatha Christie by David Suchet
New Books
American
Rambler by Isaac Fitzgerald
Sublimation by Isabel
J. Kim
The Wish by Heather
Morris
Death on
the Lanai by Rachel Ekstrom Courage
