Big Sky, A Jackson Brodie Mystery

Emotionally drained by Ocean Vuong, I went in search of a light British mystery, my go to genre for the pleasure of a quick down and dirty, fully engaging read. But lately I just can't seem to escape the horrors of human trafficking. Maybe it's because Don and I are drawn to the dark British police procedurals on offer from Acorn TV or the BBC. Here I was, lulled into the beauty of the Yorkshire

coast, the setting of Kate Atkinson's "Big Sky," thinking that former policeman and current PI Jackson Brodie was pursuing a simple infidelity inquiry, when I was suddenly smack dab in the middle of a twenty-year-old crime that had never really ended.

Brodie, walking his ancient dog Dido on the cliffs while mulling over how to communicate with his confounding teenage son Nathan, comes upon a man who appears poised to jump. Brodie prevents a suicide but is soon embroiled in a sex trafficking ring that makes Jeffrey Epstein look like a boy scout. 

Atkinson is the master of red herrings and her convoluted plotline is full of quirky characters, a washed up drag queen, a formerly trafficked teen who married up, who may at first glance seem superfluous. All will become clear.

The subversive in me is drawn to Atkinson's Brodie because he is less interested in the rules and more interested in justice. He is known for making morally questionable decisions when retribution is called for and, though it might make a reader cringe, there's a certain satisfaction in seeing evil people staring down the barrel of a gun or at the mercy of a righteously vengeful wife.

All the reviews claimed that this novel, fifth in the Jackson Brodie series, could be read as a stand alone but I'll admit that I often felt like an outsider at a party. There were so many references to people and cases from Brodie's past that I would have enjoyed being privy to, in particular his relationship with a young policewoman named Reggie, not to mention Julia, the mother of the delightful Nathan. I will now go back to the library and snatch up "When Will There Be Good News," so that I can fill in the gaps. 

The sardonic, witty Atkinson who brings Brodie to life would seem like a very different writer from the one who brought us the profoundly brilliant historical  novels "Life After Life" and "A God in Ruins." Of course, it's to her credit that she's so versatile. You may not know what you'll discover when you open a Kate Atkinson novel but I guarantee you'll be properly entertained.

Ocean Vuong's Gorgeous Debut Novel

Contrary to current opinions coming from the White House, we have always been a nation of immigrants. One of the multitude of enhancements that our immigrants have given us is a treasure trove of glorious literature. The pain of assimilation is rife with possibilities and wordsmiths from such disparate countries as Ireland, Iran, Nigeria, or China have made their literary mark. Now, a new voice, only one generation away from his mother's homeland, Vietnam, speaks in a raw, painfully honest way about the lingering effects of relocation as the result of war. https://www.oceanvuong.com/about

Not as angry as Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen's "The Sympathizer," https://readaroundtheworld-sallyb.blogspot.com/search?q=the+sympathizer "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous," is deeply personal, barely skirting the border between fiction and memoir. Little Dog, our narrator, is writing a letter to his illiterate mother, a letter she will never read but one

that allows him to excavate the beauty and horror of his twenty-some years as a bi-racial child living in Hartford, Connecticut, with his mother, Rose, and grandmother, Lan.

Each of these women obviously suffers from PTSD. Rose works all day at a nail salon, having escaped a husband whose brutal beatings she now visits upon her little boy. Lan, when not plagued by flashbacks to the burning of her village by the Americans, is an epic storyteller who protects her grandson with words. And words, language in all its diversity and nuance is very much a subject of this work.

There is much violence in this novel yet it is tempered with an equal amount of love. Little Dog's memory and descriptive powers are acute, whether he's expressing his admiration for the strength of these women who raised him or his admission to his mother that he is gay. Like the poet that Vuong is (Night Sky with Exit Wounds), he soars when he writes of his first love, Trevor, whom he meets while working the fecund tobacco fields of the Housatonic river valley. He can also bring readers to their knees with his memory of the pink bicycle with training wheels that his mom picked up at a thrift shop. The older boys in the neighborhood have a field day with Little Dog, snatching the bike and scraping off the pink paint, only to have mom diligently dry his tears and repair it with small strokes of neon polish lifted from the salon. 

This is one of the most powerful books I've read this year and it will make my top ten, no doubt. Still, few reviewers have warned that some readers may be put off by the graphic nature of the sexual relationship between Little Dog and Trevor or, more disturbing to me, the desperately realistic portrayal of opioid and fentanyl addiction. Putting that aside, Vuong's novel is one more wrenching addition to the masterful writings from immigrants to America, made all the more remarkable when you understand that these masterful craftsmen and women are not even writing in their native language. An achievement indeed.

The Guest Book by Sarah Blake

Families are fascinating! There are no two ways about it. Think of the things you've been told about your forbears. Mythic? Fantastical stories handed down through generations that no one had the nerve to question? Am I really related to Annie Oakley because my mom told me so? Did that big old mysterious house on Main Street in Lee mean that our Irish ancestors had money once? What happened to it? Why did my great aunts take in guests in order to stay afloat?

Sarah Blake does a bang up job of helping readers interrogate their own pasts by introducing us to the Milton family,  Ogden and Kitty, old line WASPS who've made their money in banking. We meet them in the mid-1930's when the drums of war were just beginning to sound in Germany. Ogden Milton, a titan of

business, makes a fateful decision that will reverberate through the Milton family for generations even as it remains buried in the memory of only a few.

And this is a novel about memory. It is also about privilege - particularly white privilege - and about identity. It's about what people choose to hide about themselves and about the pain that comes with opening up. Blake has created a wonderfully believable, sometimes despicable, often heartbreaking cast of characters, and set them on a private island in Maine - a place where Ogden, the patriarch, predicts "that everything good will happen." He probably should not have tempted fate.

In an interview, Ms. Blake said that she wanted to show how people react to "hinge moments" in history. As in several novels I've read this year, one of those moments was when people in the United States were hearing rumors about the plight of the Jewish people in Germany and Poland and chose not to pay attention. The late fifties, when we meet Joan, Evelyn, and Moss, the second generation of Miltons, began another pivotal time. 

Women clamored to be more than wives and mothers. Joan Milton takes her own apartment and lands a job in a publishing house. She falls in love with a young Jewish man, Len Levy, whose roommate is black. An aspiring writer and devotee of James Baldwin, Reg Pauling graduated Harvard with Joan's beautiful, sensitive brother Moss, who, though groomed to be a banker, yearns for a life of free expression, writing music and performing in jazz clubs.

During the summer of 1959 these young people, in their naivete, converge on the sacrosanct Maine island where Evelyn's engagement party is in full swing. Each of them seeks a kind of truth, but the truth of the events that transpire on the island that night will be hidden for another generation.

This is one of those wonderful, five hundred page generational sagas that make for impeccable summer reading. It's easy to lose yourself in the family dynamics, not to mention losing yourself on the island that gives the family its identity for good or ill. Blake sets out moral dilemmas for her characters but she does not judge them too harshly. She posits that historically people will learn from their past and grow. But first they must know their history and understand it.

 

Patsy

Nicole Dennis-Benn won the Lambda Literary Award https://www.lambdaliterary.org/  for her debut novel, "Here Comes the Sun," setting herself up as a courageous spokesperson for queer women of color. In her new book, "Patsy," Dennis-Benn elevates the conversation to an even more inclusive level, exploring bisexuality, mother-daughter relationships, the nature of desire, and the boundaries that societies place on so many of us. She's also created a searing indictment of the immigrant experience.

This is a brave story about a Jamaican woman, Patsy, who is in love with her childhood girlfriend Cecily, but who is forced by cultural pressure to bear a child from an unwanted pregnancy. How Patsy responds to her daughter, Tru, and to the physical and psychic bonds of motherhood will inflame some readers. Others, perhaps more honest or compassionate, will feel a gnawing despair for Patsy's seemingly untenable situation.

Cecily has long since left Jamaica behind to settle in New York City from whence she writes glorious letters of life in her new home, always reminding Patsy that she is Cecily's one true love and encouraging her to escape the confines of her religious and homophobic Jamaican community.

And Patsy does finally manage to get the exit visa, engaging Tru's father and his wife to take on the raising of the five-year-old girl just for a short time, until Patsy can land a job in that promised land and save enough to send for Tru. Of course, the best laid plans, as we all know, seldom come to fruition and what Patsy discovers when she arrives at Cecily's elegant Brooklyn brownstone will take even the most intuitive reader by surprise. 

Dennis-Benn's writing is a joy to read. Gorgeously detailed, she brings to life the sounds and smells of the New York boroughs, the Jamaican patois of the other immigrant men and women with whom Patsy bonds in her strange new city, as she bounces from one demeaning job to another. Without papers she is never able to call upon her education, her penchant for numbers. Illusions destroyed, Patsy sinks into a deep shame and depression, unable to pick up the phone. Unable to admit failure to her judgmental, evangelical mother or to her distant daughter.

Yes, I know this sounds too depressing to be enjoyable but actually, not so. The heart of the story lies in young Tru whose arduous road to young adulthood we are privy to in chapters that alternate between Patsy's life in New York, and Tru's burgeoning understanding with her father, stepmother, and brothers. 

Dennis-Benn knows the hardship that she writes about. I have heard her speak at conferences about her love/hate relationship with her home, Jamaica, and the difficulty of being a gender fluid person of color in that place. Now living in the states with her wife, she has found the freedom and joy to write openly and honestly about the life that Patsy and Tru could only dream of. Her work is eye-opening.