Category: Book Reviews

Yellowface – Review

On November 28, 2023

In Blog, Book Reviews, Nonfiction, Reading

BY R.F. Kuang

I’ve read great satire before. I also read plenty of books on writing and publishing. The blend of this style and these subjects in RF Kuang’s novel Yellowface makes it un-put-downable, especially for writers/authors. Allow me to make some observations: – Satire comes off best when the author appears to poke fun at themselves. Mark Twain’s prose in The Innocents Abroad wouldn’t have had the same bite if written by Oscar Wilde (notwithstanding the fact that Wilde would have been 15 years of age at the time of publication.) Yellowface’s humor bowls the reader over both because of HOW she wrote it and because SHE wrote it. Way more powerful than if written by Emily Henry who I admire as a humorous writer who has written about the publishing industry. – Some readers read satire for satire’s sake, but Kuang goes further. A well-known author once taught in a workshop that a book has to contain absolute truths (facts,) but will be remembered for its profound truth (the reader being able to picture themselves dealing with a similar conflict.) Fact: Diverse voices have been overlooked before in publishing. Fact: The industry is attempting to resolve this. Fact: If you’re not bringing diversity to the table, there are fewer opportunities for publishing work.

But here’s the profound truth that Kuang displays to readers–how would you react to these absolute truths if the changed publishing environment affected you, personally, as a writer? – I scanned a couple of other reviews that complained the translation of social media posts to the print version of Yellowface was awkward. Pro tip: listen to this book on audio! The pacing, tension, and transitions are all seamless. Here’s my take–satire makes the reader laugh but also has the serious purpose of highlighting societal dilemmas. The author isn’t obligated to solve the issue. Instead, their job is to put it into a form we can talk about. Kuang does this brilliantly in a page-flipping, fun, read. Thank you!

A Fever in the Heartland – Review

By Cam Torrens

On October 23, 2023

In Blog, Book Reviews, Nonfiction, Reading

BY TIMOTHY EGAN

Timothy Egan, author of “The Worst Hard Time” has put together another deep dive into a dark and turbulent chapter of American history. His latest bestseller, “A Fever in the Heartland,” focuses on the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the Roaring Twenties. At the epicenter of this disturbing tale looms the enigmatic personality of D.C. Stephenson, a man whose charisma and cunning tactics eventually put him in the position of Grand Dragon of the KKK in Indiana, where he served as the chief architect of the Klan’s explosive expansion across the Midwest.

Egan presents Stephenson’s character as a study in paradoxes—the Klansman bore a magnetic presence, and deftly tailored his life story to suit his ambitions. His influence was monumental, and the KKK’s xenophobic, hateful ideology gained traction, mainly through his use of the age-old tools of power–violence, graft, demagoguery, and back-scratching.

In the backdrop of the Klan’s ascension, a seemingly powerless figure, Madge Oberholtzer, emerges as an unexpected agent of change. Egan explains how her tragic fate becomes intertwined with Stephenson’s, leading to a dramatic revelation of his true character–that of a sadistic sexual predator. It is her harrowing testimony and the trial that follows that eventually brings the Klan to its knees.

Egan’s a brilliant storyteller. He paints a vivid and haunting picture of an era marked by hatred, intolerance, and the dangerous charisma of a man who harnessed these forces to advance his own ambitions. “A Fever in the Heartland” is a must-read for the youth of today.

Why? Because although the issues might change, there will always be leaders lacking in character but swollen with ambition who will stoke the fires of intolerance for their own end. Egan calls those people symptoms of the problem, not the problem itself. That might be true, but I argue we can use those symptoms to recognize an impending perilous path for our country.

Watch for this: a charismatic personality who tries to use controversial rhetoric to win over the working-class/rural population while simultaneously banning party dissent. Throw in allegations of misconduct ignored by that same personality because they feel they are above the law.

These are symptoms of a problem. Character trumps all when it comes to leadership. If you can’t point to a leader and tell your kids “This is who you should aspire to emulate,” then you can’t listen to that same leader, even if they seem to make sense.

Pachinko

By Cam Torrens

On June 6, 2022

In Blog, Book Reviews, Fiction, Reading

BY MIN JIN LEE

“Living every day in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”

Book recommendations come my way from a variety of sources. Friends, my writing group, the library newsletter, and even the entity that seems to know me best—Amazon—all contribute to a growing list of books that are “must” reads. But the best book I read this spring wasn’t pushed my direction.

I click-baited my way to it.

My daily Colorado Sun newsfeed gently suggested I check out the opening title sequence to a new show on Apple+, Pachinko. Bypassing the major news events of the day, I went straight to YouTube and watched the cast dancing to Let’s Live for Today by The Grass Roots. Immediately hooked, I parasited my way into my daughter’s Apple+ account to watch the first episode. Normally, English language dubbed over a Japanese/Korean script wouldn’t be my schtick–but there was something about this story…

Back in the day, whenever I mentioned a good movie to my high school drama teacher (who also served as the English teacher, ASB advisor, and about half the other positions in the school,) Ms Lewis would remind me “the book beats the movie every time.” Ms. Lewis was rarely wrong.

Min Jin Lee’s second book, Pachinko, earned her a National Book Award finalist spot in 2017. The story follows Sunja, a young woman born in Japanese-occupied Korea, as she escapes the stigma of an illegitimate child by emigrating to Japan and raising her family in Ikaino, the Korean section of Osaka. Spanning nearly 70 years, Lee deftly weaves a compelling family saga through the Asia’s 20th century rise to modernity.

Although I was lured in by colorful TV stars dancing in a Pachinko parlor, it turns out that was just glitz for the big screen. The book’s plot—things that happen to a family over decades—kept me hooked. It was a familiar concept, like Larry and Sally Morgan in Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety; or Danny and Maeve Conroy in Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. I find the journey of a family familiar and Dickensian.

But I’m also wary of comfort reads. It’s important to push outside comfort zones and I’ve been guilty of diving into a series at the expense of broadening my horizons (no thanks to you Wyoming cowboy authors, CJ Box and Craig Johnson.) I’m familiar with Asian culture after living two years in Seoul, Korea and three years in Beijing, China. But saying I understand the Asian mindset is like a foreigner splitting five years between New York and Los Angeles and returning home claiming to completely understand Americans. Nope.

Min Jin Lee opened my eyes to the plight of the zainichi (Koreans living in Japan,) and the workings of the yakuza (Japanese and Korean gangsters,)—topics I knew nothing about. Her book settled me in an unfamiliar but intriguing world—like discovering Orville Peck’s music or Avogado6’s art—and I liked it.

The stoicism Lee describes throughout her novel was not a surprise. I’ve read and watched enough Chinese authors and directors (Ha Jin’s Waiting; Zhang Yimou’s To Live) to recognize that a hero in an Asian drama is one living a life of quiet desperation, bound by tradition, authoritarianism, or—in Pachinko’s setting—discrimination. These are not stories that conclude with “Mai Tais and Yahtzee”—instead the journey is the story.

Given the choice of thumbing the remote over to Apple+ of checking out the book, I recommend the latter. But not before you watch that opening title sequence—one more time!

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

By Cam Torrens

On March 1, 2022

In Blog, Book Reviews, Nonfiction, Reading

BY anne applebaum

Non sequitur: a statement (such as a response) that does not follow logically from or is not clearly related to anything previously said.

I used a non sequitur several weeks ago. Not that I would have self-identified my error through the use of the Latin term—wouldn’t want to pile pretentiousness on top of ignorance, right?

The topic was Ukraine and the potential Russian invasion and the appropriate international response. I believe my input to the dilemma was something along the lines of, ‘not that I condone Putin’s actions, but it’s worth considering Ukraine, as a country, has only existed for 30 years. Sure, there is a long history of Ukrainian culture, but the reality is that Russians have lived in eastern Ukraine for much longer than the country has survived as an independent nation-state.’

I guess I threw out my remark to show an inkling of knowledge about Ukraine and Russia. Who knows, maybe it worked because I didn’t get much of a reply from the person to whom I was talking. But something felt off about my comment. It might have been factually true, but it was neither insightful nor relevant.

So, I did what I always do when I realize I’m behind the power curve on an issue. I hit the books.

I started with Tim Judah’s In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine, a 2016 book of interviews and descriptions from pro-Ukrainians following the 2014 Maidan Revolution and pro-Russian rebels manning fortifications in eastern Ukraine. Judah traveled the corners of the country pulling tales and opinions from everyday people on the streets while giving his unfamiliar readers a geography and history lesson (I’d never heard of Bessarabia in Ukraine’s southwest—600K people speaking primarily Russian but ethnically Bulgarian, Moldovan, Albanian, Gagauz and Roma. You travel through the country of Moldova just to get to this part of Ukraine.) I finished the book knowing much more about modern Ukraine than I did before.

In February, I took a seminar on Putin’s Russia and listened to a lecture by the Foreign Policy Association on Russia as a nuclear state in decline. The presentation was online and recorded and presented on the day Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, many of the discussion questions were obsolete.

But the mother lode of Ukraine background proved to be Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. As the title suggests, the book focuses on the 1932-33 Ukraine famine—or in Ukrainian, the Holodomor. Pulling from primary sources, including diaries and recordings, the description of the tragedy is heart-wrenching and serves as both a reminder of man’s capacity for cruelty and a harbinger of future atrocities in the impending World War.

I recommend the book, not solely for Applebaum’s characterization of Stalin’s reasoning (collectivize the farms to increase grain exports and finance his economic plans, mobilize poor peasants against richer peasants—kulaks—to provide scapegoats in crisis) or his execution (refuse to lower grain quotas during the famine, take food from farmers’ homes, bar starving peasants from entering cities in search of food, relocate Russians to the eastern Ukraine to make up for the 13% of the population who were deported or starved to death,) but also for the excellent history she provides of Ukraine before and after Russia’s February Revolution of 1917. She wraps up the book with an epilogue summarizing the period from the famine to modern day Ukraine.

This book opened my eyes. How can you discuss a country’s history of sovereignty if they’ve never been given a chance? Ukraine sits at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, the second largest country on the European continent with some of the least defensible borders. Ukrainian culture reached its peak over a thousand years ago, before being invaded by the Mongols, dominated by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and taken over by the Soviets.

The international community won’t tolerate Italy reclaiming Great Britain just because they used to be part of the Roman Empire. They won’t put up with Great Britain trying to force India back into the British Empire. The list goes on—and I recognize there’s probably another fancy Latin phrase that describes a logic fallacy in my argument.

So, two points:

Ukraine deserves to have its sovereignty supported (for all of you asking about the military option…that’s a different essay for a different day)

Check out Applebaum’s book from your local library or buy it. Especially if you need a refresher (or a primer, in my case) on Ukraine history.

Note: Amazon links are for reference only. Recommend using your local library!

Klara Meets Cloud Cuckoo Land

By Cam Torrens

On December 23, 2021

In Blog, Book Reviews, Fiction, Reading

BY Kazuo Ishiguro and Anthony Doerr

No, the title above is not an actual book. I just finished reading Klara Meets the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr.

Not my usual genre—both these authors are writers of literature, as opposed to my go-to authors of mystery, crime, and suspense. But these two had already lured me in years ago—Ishiguro with his Remains of the Day (Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go; Doerr with All the Light We Cannot See (Pulitzer Prize) and his collection of short stories, The Shell Collector. Ishiguro writes concise prose, able to say so much with just the right words. Doerr turns poetry into paragraphs even I can enjoy!

Imagine my surprise as I turned to literature this month and found both these books included a glimpse into the future, far enough forward that you could accuse the authors of dabbling in science fiction.

Klara and the Sun reveals a world where Alexa and Siri are no longer voice helpers, but Artificial Friends that walk, talk, and think—sentient, in fact. Ishiguro neglects setting and science (we readers aren’t sure where the story takes place or how the science works) in favor of character and existentialism. It works…and proves a page-turner comes in many forms.

Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land deftly hops between characters from the 1453 siege of Constantinople, present day Lakeport, Idaho (based on one of my top-5 “I want to retire there” locations—McCall, ID), and a spaceship bound for a new “Earth” in 2146, all tied together by an inextricable attraction to an ancient Greek story of a utopia in the skies.

Wait. That sentence above was long and awkward and doesn’t inspire a lot of enthusiasm to read the book, right? Trust me. Anthony Doerr can make the long read fast and he leaves out the awkward. He’s a masterful storyteller and Cloud Cuckoo Land is just plain fun, in that special way a “story with a meaning” can be.

So, which to read first? If you’re feeling like a realist this week and are interested less about optimism than about pondering our future, start with Klara Meets the Sun. It’s a short (but engaging) read and you’ll spend more time thinking about Ishiguro’s characterizations of mankind’s future priorities than you did reading the book. My favorite quote, however, shows what doesn’t change:

“I suppose I’m saying [she] and I will always be together at some level, some deeper one, even if we go out there and don’t see each other any more. I can’t speak for her. But once I’m out there, I know I’ll always keep searching for someone just like her.”

But if it’s hope and idealism you seek, even in the face of a virus that won’t go away and an uncertain climate, then turn to Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. Like Ishiguro, he pokes at what’s existentially important in a declining world:

“But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be part of the problem is to be human.”

Both books are beautifully written by talented authors. You’ll find as much joy in thinking about what you just read as you did hoping the books wouldn’t end.

The Lincoln Highway

By Cam Torrens

On November 27, 2021

In Blog, Book Reviews, Fiction, Reading

BY AMOR TOWLES ‧ RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 5, 2021

Amor Towles, former investment banker and now a best-selling writer, is not a prolific author. He has published three novels since 2010: Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and his latest release, The Lincoln Highway.

“I’ve read everything he’s written!” probably doesn’t sound very impressive…

But Towles is one of the few authors writing books I would read again. Normally, I plow through novels like a freight train through snow drifts—no turning back. Towles’s books, however, are extraordinary; representative of the time and thought he pours into them. For a reader who respects the classics but is more comfortable with genre fiction than The Great Books, Towles offers an alternative: literary fiction that feels like a classic but has you flipping pages like a USA Today bestseller.

When I read his Rules of Civility, I felt as if I was reading a cross between Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Funny thing, I remember little from those classics, but couldn’t put the Towles book down.

When I read A Gentleman in Moscow, Tolstoy came to mind. I have no idea why, because I’ve never read a Tolstoy novel (just a couple of short stories.) And you would think a story about a man who stays in the same hotel for thirty years would run about the same pace as Tolstoy, but that’s Towles’s genius. Another book I shouldn’t like but ended up loving.

I knew The Lincoln Highway involved a road trip, and I tried to picture how that “link to the classics” was going to work. Would I feel like I was reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Travels with Charley? I was hoping for something a little more upbeat and my level. Mark Twain and his iconic Huckleberry Finn, maybe?

My youngest boys wrote and illustrated a book for my daughter’s college graduation a couple years ago about her impending road trip from Durham, NC to Tacoma, WA. Structured like The Odyssey, it included a strange hitchhiker, stale jojos from The Flying J truck stop, and zombies chasing my daughter, moaning “Bras” (my sons were later horrified to discover they had misspelled “brains.”) This was the type of road trip I hoped Towles had authored!

I was not disappointed. The Lincoln Highway takes place over ten days in 1954 and ranges from the Midwest to New York City. The novel’s tone is much closer to Mark Twain and my boys’ masterpiece than Steinbeck. He seems to have done it again because when I finished, I felt like I had read a page-turner from Homer (my oxymoron.) He has put together unique and rich characters, each on a personal quest, with the road trip as the “coming of age” vehicle.

My only critique is a backwards compliment. Towles’s character development is so good, I invested myself in the minor players as much as the main characters. At the conclusion, he left me with questions as to the fate of those other players.

If you’re a reader of literature, then approach this book recognizing it’s more Twain than Steinbeck. If you’re a genre reader and rarely read anything that gets a book review, I encourage you to give The Lincoln Highway a go. Some good ol’ boys on a road trip! What could go wrong?

But if you read nothing older than 2005, prefer short sentences and lots of suspense (like me) then I’ll throw you another recommendation that’s nothing like Towles’s work. Try Five Total Strangers by Natalie D. Richards.

Local Woman Missing

By Cam Torrens

On October 13, 2021

In Blog, Book Reviews, Reading

BY Mary Kubica ‧ RELEASE DATE: may 18, 2021

I’m hooked on psychological thrillers. Give me Sheri Lapena, Riley Sager, Tana French in the morning and I’ll finish the book that night. But my favorite is Mary Kubica. The master of the plot twist has done it again with her new release, Local Woman Missing.

Kubica’s style caught my attention through audiobooks. Her first person-present tense point of view is perfect for the audio medium. Put your headphones on and your three-mile jog will turn into a marathon. I’ve read half her books on audio. But the other half had me flipping traditional (well, ebook) pages faster than an audiobook on 1.5x speed.

Long-time Kubica fans will find the structure of her seventh novel familiar. There’s an inciting incident and then she intricately weaves the story between ‘before’ chapters and ‘after’ chapters. This book centers on (surprise) a missing woman. But not just one. Days after the first disappearance, a mother and her daughter also go missing.

Then—eleven years later—the daughter, Delilah, returns. What happened the day she disappeared? Where is her mother? And the first missing woman? As her brother, Leo observes,

“To be straight, I never thought they were going to find you. I gave that up a long time ago. In all honesty I kind of wish they hadn’t ‘cause Dad and I were getting along just fine without you.”

It’s a wild ride, and in traditional Kubica fashion, she not only twists the plot in unpredictable directions, she turns it as well, forcing the reader to reconsider their original assumptions.

If you find yourself just as enamored with these psychological thrillers as I am, then try Riley Sager’s Lock Every Door or AJ Finn’s Woman in the Window. Both these authors can turn a straight-forward plot on end and keep you guessing until the last page.

Overall, a 5 out of 5 stars review. A few naysayers out there claim Mary Kubica is formulaic and predictable. I don’t know—maybe she is, but it’s interesting to note that in order to label her in that fashion you have to read all her work. I bet those critics flipped through every last page… just as quickly as I did.

The SILENT WIFE

By Cam Torrens

On April 27, 2021

In Blog, Book Reviews, Reading

Long-time Karin Slaughter fans will gobble up her latest release, The Silent Wife. The thriller continues Slaughter’s melding of two separate series: the Grant County books with medical examiner Sara Linton, and the Will Trent series with—you guessed it—GBI sleuth Will Trent.

My first exposure to Slaughter was through an author interview. Her comments about trying to break into the crime thriller genre in the 1990s struck a chord. As progressive as I thought those decades were, evidently publishers still considered a woman author candidly writing about mutilation, rape, and murder “in poor taste,” despite the successes of her best-selling male cohorts.

Slaughter ignored those stale paradigms with her breakout 2001 novel, Blindsighted. Blown away by both her groundbreaking detail of a heinous murder, and by the quality of her first published novel, I immediately followed the read with her newest effort, The Silent Wife.

Slaughter did not disappoint. Years after the events in Blindsighted, medical examiner Sara Linton teams with Slaughter’s newest protagonist, Will Trent, to investigate a prison riot and subsequent murder. An inmate who has always claimed innocence offers information on both events if Linton and Trent reopen his own murder case. He claims Sara’s dead ex-husband, police chief Will Tolliver, screwed him over years before, sending him to prison while the actual murderer continued murdering young girls.

Slaughter pivots the story between the original murder cases and the present-day investigation, the protagonists searching for a pattern that will identify the killer who remains on the loose.

I’ve only read two Karin Slaughter novels and argue that’s an advantage over long-term Slaughter fans.

First, this book can stand alone outside of the series. Karin Slaughter has written 20 bestsellers that include one or both of our protagonists. I sped through this book and did not once feel that the story was confusing because I’d never read a Will Trent book before. Don’t feel you need to start from the beginning.

Second, I suspect avid Slaughter fans take her storytelling skills for granted. I don’t. She’s got a special talent for character, plot, and gore. Her protagonists leap off the page, pursuing justice while struggling through deep flaws in themselves and their relationship with each other.

“With Will, Sara was keenly aware that she was the only woman on earth who could love him the way that he deserved to be loved.”

The plot is fast-paced, and no suspect gets a pass until the reader rolls into the nail-biting conclusion. The gore is not gratuitous. Slaughter’s depictions of extreme violence show detailed research and she presents the scenes to the reader in a dispassionate, almost medical, manner. I’m not a gore fan, but Slaughter does it right.

Readers looking for similar authors/titles providing the medical/crime thriller vibe that Slaughter has mastered should check out Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli and Isles series. You decide—start with her 2001 bestseller, The Surgeon, or the latest release, 2017’s The Bone Garden.

I’ll rate The Silent Wife a 4.5 out of 5 stars. The acid test? I generally read two to three books at once, but when I stumble on a page-turner, the other books go to the back burner. I read The Silent Wife straight through.