Book Description:

Enter description here

Verdict:

4/5 Stars. Tension and forward pushing drama created by foreshadowing of a fire.
"Steam-of-thought"

Book Information:

Title: Bright Burning Things

Author: Lisa Harding, Irish Novelist

Publication: 2021, HarperVia

Setting: Current times, Ireland

Historical Influence:

Author's personal experience as an actress, family dealing with alcoholism

Themes Include:

Addiction, Recovery, Motherhood

Book Description:

Elsanor, a 1920's spinster believing she is too ugly to be loved, embraces her chance at intimacy one evening which leads her to marry into the Italian Martinelli family and become disowned by her own family. In her new Texas farm land in 1934, now a wife and mother, Elsa must face the difficulties of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. The various droughts the Martinelli's experience lead Elsa to fight against abandonment, illness, her children's loss of faith, and the struggles of moving West to become a migrant outsider in California.

Verdict:

I finished this novel a couple of weeks ago and found it difficult to grasp my overall thoughts on it. There are many talking points ; many controversial sore spots for some, and I believe it could open the door to excellent discussion.

I was taken in by Elsanor, partly because she reminds me of my younger self. Some of her thoughts invited me to walk in her shoes. There is a comfort and tension in reading about someone who reminds you of a previous version of yourself; a version you may not be proud of owning.

I also enjoyed the descriptions of the land, labor of that land, and the deep connection the family felt toward making a place for themselves through their work of said land.

The novel takes a bleak turn when The Dust comes. In some ways, I feel author Kristin Hannah gave The Dust its own characterization. Her descriptions are so apt that I sometimes felt like I could feel the dust parching my throat.

The novel is then told from the perspectives of Elsa and her daughter Loreda, who sees their circumstances through different lenses: one of the conservator, who wishes to keep what she has, and one of the dreamer, who seeks something beyond what she knows.

When The Dust fails to settle, Elsa moves her family away from the land she has learned to love for the health of her son who had taken ill from dust inhalation. Their journey to California, where posters and word-of-mouth says there are many opportunities for work, is not without its challenges, but Elsa finds reality to be starkly different than the recommendations she received.

The end of the novel takes a turn, painting a picture of worse desperation in California, of the fight for fair labor, and the push for early unionization.

The end left me in tears. Not every book touches me to the point of crying, so for this fact, I am thankful to the novel for giving me emotional release. I did, however, feel the ending was forced. It was clearly devised to make me feel devastated to the point of it being less realistic, and therefore less honest of a telling.

I teetered back and forth between rating this 4.5 or 5 stars, and two weeks later have come to the conclusion that I would rate this as one of my favorite books of the year. As such, I have decided to lean toward saying this was a 5 star book for me at the time that I read it, as compared to other reading experiences I enjoyed this year.

Book Information:

Title: The Four Winds

Author: Kristin Hannah, American novelist

Publication: 2021, St. Martin's Press

Setting: 1920's - 1930's US, from Texas to California.

Historical Influence:

The Great Depression; The Dust Bowl; Labor strikes and push for unionization

Themes Include:

Expectation vs. reality; Dependence vs. independence; authority vs. self-actualization; Self-perception and pride; the downward spiral of systemic poverty

Book Description:

It is the Summer of 1983 and Nina Riva is throwing her annual party at her Malibu residence. Discussions of family history lead to the portent of Malibu burning.

Verdict:

The story takes place from 7 am the morning of Nina's party to 7 am the next morning, with glimpses into the lives of Mick and June Riva, Nina's parents, interwoven into the storyline. The flashbacks were the most heartfelt chapters, leading up to around the half point of the book where family history lessens, the lives of the Riva siblings take center stage, and the party becomes the spectacle now cast in the foreground. Similar to my experience reading The Good Earth series, the lives of the parents were of greater interest to me than that of the children they bore, partly because I seem to be drawn to rags to riches stories and characters who "pull themselves up by their bootstraps."

In this line of thinking, Nina Riva was my favorite of the siblings, and the character with whom I relate most closely. I found personal victory in the ways she lightens her own load near the end of the novel, including being brutally honest in front of her family about what she sacrificed and revealing aloud to them and to herself what she really wanted out of her own life.

The fire that is alluded to in the beginning eventually does occur, but is less important to the overall story or consequences of the life of the family described in the novel, similar to the feeling I got about Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. Both novels begin with the teasing that the fire could potentially be another layer, another character even in the storytelling, but in both novels, the fire is just a consequence of the actions of the characters within, with very little importance in the overall telling.

At the depths of the novel are its recurring themes, the most stark of which to me were that of inheritance. The novel questions what is inheritable? Are our traits determined by nurture and upbringing? Or are there pieces of our parents that we carry with us, behaviors that we continue, even without their presence? What makes a family? What makes a mother and father? Who do we include in our families and what lines do we draw about who we choose to love? What helps us prevent repeating the past and what drives us to keep the promises we speak?

Surfing is another recurring theme, although as important as it becomes to the Riva siblings, surf culture is also something mentioned as an aside, and not fully embraced by the plot structure the day of the party, except for descriptions of some of the Rivas surfing. Surf culture goes beyond the act of surfing on occasion, and it would have been interesting to see the siblings change based on the adoption of their cultural interests.

The problems of celebrity are somewhat highlighted in the novel, although they do follow the stereotypical beliefs of how celebrity behaves, how wealth distorts our views of what limits may be. However, Nina is something of a breath of fresh air, as she doesn't seem to let celebrity change her personality, but rather it is something she responds to instead of allowing it to shape her.

Overall, I would recommend a read-through of Malibu Rising. While not a life-changing novel, it provides worthwhile entertainment in the form of story, emotion, and contemplation. I look forward to reading more from Reid.

Book Information:

Title: Malibu Rising

Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid, American novelist

Publication: 2021, Random House

Setting: 1956 - Sunday, August 28, 7:00 AM, 28150 Cliffside Drive, Malibu, California.

Historical Influence:

1980's surf culture, 1980's Malibu and celebrity culture, 1950's - 1980's USA

Themes Include:

Generational inheritance

Body objectivism

Obstacles of celebrity

Book Description:

Title: And Then There Were None

Author: Agatha Christie

Publication: 1939, UK

Genre: Crime Novel

Awards: The world's best-selling mystery with over 100 million sales and one of the best-selling books of all time.

Description: The story of Wang Lung, a poor farmer in rural China, who is helped by O-lan to turn their section of earth into a profitable legacy for generations of their family.

Verdict: I read this book before in my teen years, and thought it was a good time to revisit it in my mid-30s. It was as charming as I remember. I have a great interest in Chinese traditions and storytelling, although Buck provides an outsider-perspective that illuminates the culture through my similarly American lens, but may also lose some of the authenticity of a first-person, primary source account. I was surprised to find that The Good Earth was the first book in a trilogy, and thus purposed to read the trilogy.

Book Information:

Title: The Good Earth

Author: Pearl S. Buck, American writer and novelist

Publication: 1931, USA

Genre: Historical Fiction

Awards: 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Literature

Setting: 1900's China

Historical Influences: Chinese foot-binding, women sold to slave houses and sold to husbands, filial piety

Themes include connection to the earth, value of labor beyond monetary numeration, wealth vs. traditional values, second-class treatment of women in traditional Chinese culture.

Description: A memoir of Flander's experience limiting her shopping and minimizing her clutter amid a year of change in her career and personal life.

Verdict: Listed as a Self-Help Book, I was hoping for more information and less memoir. The book itself read like a refined blog post, which is usually author-centered and not an empirical, audience-centered guide that I expect from a Self Improvement title. If you're looking for a minimalism or decluttering guide, skip to the last chapter with a list of how you can carve "Your Year of Less" for yourself, although it may seem cold and uninspiring without the context of the author's experience.

There are some coming-of-age insights Flander's shares while struggling with alcoholism, weight loss, the divorce of her parents, losses in love and of her pets, while carving out an identity for herself, but all of these were parallel experiences during her "year of less," and mostly unrelated to the titled topic. However, there is very little joy communicated about how minimizing her purchases affected her life positively, and therefore, the inspiration to follow her path is lacking.

In reality, this was an account of her struggle to stick to her goal amid life changes all around her. The book was not useful for me, nor was what I was hoping for. As the book stands, Flander's could have titled it, "The Year of Less: A Memoir of Losses That Allowed Personal Gains" and it would have been more apt at describing the book in entirety.

Book Information:

Title: The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store

Author: Cait Flanders, Canadian Author, Podcaster, and Blogger

Publication: 2018, Canada (British Columbia)

Genre: Memoir (listed as Self-Help)

Awards: Wall Street Journal Bestseller in April 2018, Amazon Chart's Most Sold Nonfiction in July 2018

Key Takeaways:

1. Develop a budget that aligns with your goals and values.

2. Take inventory of what you have, what you want, and what you actually need and use. Edit your stuff.

3. Watch savings grow - put what you save from spending, any money made from selling clutter

4. Appreciate what you have and use what you buy

Description: A court room case of racial tensions in Post-WWII Pacific Northwest uncovered by character perspectives and memories.

Verdict: Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, and set among the farming and fishing culture of the Pacific Northwest, Snow Falling on Cedars tells a story of a Japanese-American man who is accused of murder. The novel has long-winded trial sections that could lead to burn out, but the strong depiction of the crossroads of multicultural American experiences, apt explanations of Japanese-American cultural perspectives, and the love stories of key couples kept me reading until the end.

Book Information:

Title: Snow Falling on Cedars
Author: David Guterson, American Novelist
Publication: 1994, USA
Genre: Historical Fiction Courtroom Novel
Awards: 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, 1996 Swedish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award for Best Translated Crime Novel
Setting: 1954, San Piedro Island, North Puget Sound of Washington State

Historical Influences: WWII social consequences in the Pacific Northwest, Japanese American Internments following the Attack on Pearl Harbor, character Arthur Chambers inspired by Walt Woodward of Bainbridge Island, Nels Gudmundsson based on Guterson's father, possibly influenced by Harper Lee's 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird.

Themes Include:
Cycles of prejudice, choice vs. chance, guilt and innocence.