In this riveting narrative nonfiction, Catherine Prendergast pieces together the lives of Nora May French and Carrie Sterling, two women at the center of Bohemian poet George Sterling’s gallingly imprudent life. Right from the get-go, you know that all three meet their respective ends by their own hand via cyanide. What you don’t know is the salacious story of their messy entanglement. 

The Sterlings were some of the OG influencers, hired to lure other artsy types out to the fledgling colony of Carmel-by-the-Sea. George was infamous and deeply entrenched in the literary circles of the Gilded Age, nicknamed “King of Bohemia.” He was a notorious philanderer & his long-suffering wife Carrie was made to play host in this new (and fairly rudimentary) place while George drank heavily and flirted with every beautiful woman in sight. 

Prendergast’s book is a master class in research. Throughout, she sporadically reflects on the misogynist injustice imbedded even in seemingly innocuous things like archival structure. Each woman — and Nora May particularly — was exceptional on their own, but their histories were intentionally (and in some cases maliciously) folded into into the records of the era’s famous men. The methodic persistence required to compile such a complete and compelling account is truly noteworthy.  

The first half is a bit dense, mapping out a dense array of relationships that requires discipline to keep track of. But the second half is a serious page-turner, especially after a midpoint big reveal.

Note: this book is fascinating but it’s also pretty bleak, even verging on macabre, not by any fault of Prendergast but due to the nature of the story. Please pay attention to the content warnings.

O Beautiful follows Elinor, an early-40s Asian American woman who has her first major assignment after a career shift from modeling to journalism. She is back in North Dakota, where she grew up, to cover the oil boom in the Bakken. She was recommended for the role by Richard, a former professor & Elinor’s most recent ex. While in North Dakota, Elinor is grappling with the changes to the area since she left, trying to suss out the storyline for her article, and reflecting on her life up until now. 

I was really drawn to the idea of this book, but I ultimately found it a little clumsy and underdeveloped. The plot flits about, never quite landing on a through-line, leaving each narrative trail only cursorily explored. The writing itself, while having snippets of inspired process, lacked finesse. There was a significant amount of telling rather than showing.

Additionally, Elinor is fairly irritating character; she is prickly and snobby and even at times combative. This is not an issue in its own right, but it was hard to tell if she was intended to be quite as abrasive and inconsistent as she ultimately came across. One moment Elinor would be (understandably) railing against a sexist or racist experience, the next she would not understand a very clear insinuation about her safety in a very male-heavy town. It was confusing as a reader, and left me feeling like the author couldn’t quite decide if Elinor was 20 years old or 40 years old. 

 I picked this up in October when I was in the mood for something spooky but not too scary, ideally with a campus novel feel, and while this wasn’t anything particularly excellent, it did hit those notes.

Madam follows a young Classics teacher named Rose in the late 90s who takes a post at a remote, prestigious all-girls boarding school in the Scottish highlands. When she arrives, she immediately senses something highly secretive and eerie happening that she is not yet privy to as the first outside hire in decades. The story follows Rose’s attempts to honor her mounting discomfort and piece together the truth of what happens at Caldonbrae Hall.

To me, Madam felt like what would happen if Paris Geller entered a thriller-writing contest at Chilton. It is creepy and disconcerting, but fairly underdeveloped. There is a feminist bent but it’s pretty clumsily delivered. The school’s discipline was pretty inconsistent and the ending felt too tidy. That said, the atmosphere of unease was well-delivered and the scenes were richly described. 

When Women Invented Television focuses on the pioneering women who are responsible for the early TV programming that led directly to many of our modern staples. The book focused on four key women as they blazed trails on the nascent platform.

As is a theme with stories of these sorts, women and minorities proved the concept of the new technology before powerful white men were willing to take a chance on it. Once they did, the women were pushed out and in some cases intentionally erased. Something that was particularly noteworthy about this history of television was the extreme impact of McCarthyism on the industry and actors. Both Hazel Scott and Gertrude Berg suffered personal, devastating losses due to baseless fear-mongering during the Cold War.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and loved learning about this absolutely exceptional women. 

 Fredrik Backman has a magical ability to spin a story around a chorus of characters who are endearingly ordinary and make their shared narrative engaging and heartfelt.

Anxious People is lighter than Beartown & A Man Called Ove (his most popular books) but carries the same excellent writing and deeply human characters. An inept bank robber accidentally ends up with a room full of hostages & the book plays out over the course of the day as the captives, captor, and police navigate the situation. Each character brings their own baggage, fears, hopes, and dysfunctions. True to form, Backman paints them all with an honest, compassionate brush, evoking a sense kinship both among the eclectic cast and with the reader. He also makes me laugh in every book he writes, while still maintaining wholehearted sincerity.

While this is a quintessential ensemble cast story, one of the character arcs stuck out to me thanks to the tenderness shown to anxiety.

Although Zara’s coping mechanisms were incredibly acerbic, the takeaway is a grace-filled encouragement for pressing on.

It was also one of the first books I’ve read that explored the connection between anxiety & suicidal thoughts (instead of using depression as a the main catalyst).

If you have even the slightest inkling to read this book, go buy it now and put it at the top of your TBR.

White Tears / Brown Scars is a remarkable, essential work. Hamad writes with extraordinary clarity and thoughtfulness, exposing the persistent systemic oppression of women of color and the intentionally cultivated cultural disdain for anything that even remotely threatens white supremacy. She outlines white women’s unique role in this oppression and calls out the cultural narcissism required to keep alive such a complex communal delusion. This will easily make my top three antiracism recommendations & would pair well with Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre. 

I saw someone describe this book as Hood Feminism 201, and I think that’s a helpful characterization. This is not the starting point for an antiracism (re)education. If you have not yet addressed white fragility & accepted white supremacy as a significant threat to our collective flourishing, this book could be overwhelming. Hit those topics first and then circle back here to continue your journey. 

Once you pick it up, prepare to be brought along on an exceptional, scholarly exploration of the roots and tools of white supremacy, how women of color are caricatured and silenced, and the extremely dangerous weaponization of White Womanhood. What makes this book especially extraordinary is the writing style. Hamad somehow delivers deep truths in a way that is both sober and passionate. She communicates the depth of pain caused and simultaneously presents logical arguments for the dismantling of the responsible systems. To be frank, I wanted to highlight the entire book. 

Moore chronicles the lives, illnesses, legal fights, and tragic deaths of the ‘radium girls,’ young women who painted dials using luminescent paint in the early 20th century. 

When radium was discovered by the Curies at the turn of the century, it became something of a global phenomenon, used for countless purposes and much-sought after. Due to its luminescent quality, it was used to make watch faces and aircraft dials glow in the dark. Enter: the radium girls. They used a technique called lip-pointing to make their brush tips as narrow as possible. This meant putting the paint in their mouths, repeatedly, for the duration of their employment. At first, the dangers of radium were unknown (by the general public), then minimized, then outright denied. Unfortunately, these women would come to carry the truth in their bodies, over time dying gruesomely in alarming numbers from a previously-unstudied type of poisoning. 

The book moves at a steady clip, imbuing with humanity the girls whose lives were treated as disposable. We learn of their families and dreams before radium wrecked their bodies. Bravely, a number of them stood up to the industry and fought for new worker protections and updated workers comp approved conditions, even with terminal diagnoses. 

What made this story particularly gripping was how relatively recently this took place as well as the eerie arguments used to discredit science, echoing a lot of present-day rhetoric. And, as is always true with these types of book, these women embodied resilience even though, had everyone acted compassionately and humanely from the get-go, they wouldn’t have been called to such bravery. Frustratingly, it took loud male allies and a few male deaths to get their plight taken seriously. 

If you enjoy nonfiction and underdog stories, I recommend you pick this one up!

Usually I find the descriptors “genre-bending” & “ambitious” entirely annoying, but both are truly apt for this epic saga across time and space, spanning from 1400s Constantinople to decades from now aboard a spaceship headed to a new planet after we’ve thoroughly wrecked this one. A collection of protagonists propel the narrative with a translated Ancient Greek story serving as the connective tissue between each. 

Author Anthony Doerr is immensely creative, and I was surprised at how well he gathered the threads of each story in a way that felt thoughtful without being overt. Each storyline has complicated human characters and well-developed sense of place. Admittedly, the beginning felt a little disorienting, jumping between an impressive number of characters in such a way that was initially hard to track. But if you stick with it, the convergence is worth it. More than once, I exclaimed out loud as a new revelation unfurled. 

Cloud Cuckoo Land dances between themes of fragility & resilience, hope & despair, bravery & fear. One endorsement mentioned the term “stewardship,” and that really struck a chord once I finished the book. Each character has something they are cupping tenderly like a fallen bird, trying to usher it through a complex and crumbling world.  
 
My main critique of this book is the handling of the neuro-diverse character.

While Seymour is never explicitly called autistic, he is coded as such. All of his concerns about the environment are entirely valid and the manipulation he experiences which leads him to the villain role is handled insensitively & even somewhat harmfully.

I wish that Doerr had been more thoughtful here.