This atmospheric and suspenseful novel centers on Franny Stone as she follows the last migration of Arctic terns south from Greenland in a near-future world where we are deeper into the climate crisis and only a handful of wild animal species remain. To do so, she talks her way onto one of the few remaining commercial fishing vessels and convinces them to track the terns as a last-ditch effort to find whatever fish are left in the sea.

 McConaghy has crafted an eerie and emotionally charged novel wrapped around an uneasy narrator. Franny’s past unspools slowly in flashbacks throughout the book, delivered like a slowly dispersing fog. Her unfettered, willful nature ties the years together as we learn about her unconventional marriage to Niall Lynch, a disarming professor passionate about conservation.

I found the start of the book a little slow, in part because the characters were so nebulous that it was hard to grasp onto anything. However, as the story and its players came into clearer focus, I only became more intrigued. I was specifically struck by the nature of Franny and Niall’s relationship: at once capricious and remarkably committed, their tenderness and mutual understanding was such a beautiful ember in the midst of an otherwise cold and gray world. 

Part of the power of this novel is the way McConaghy’s writing evokes the visceral nature of Franny’s pull to wander and the depth of her self-condemnation. Her split desires and war with her own body are memorably crafted. There were quite a few excerpts I wrote down because the writing was both beautiful & sharp. Also, the setting is remarkably unsettling, conjuring an ambience of entirely-realistic destruction. 

It’s always hard to review a memoir, but this one particularly so. In The Last Girl, Nadia Murad recounts her experience of living through ISIS’s takeover of her Yazidi community, the mass execution of most of the men, and the enslavement of the women to be sabaya (sex slaves) for the militants. 

Murad’s writing is clear & deliberate, detailing her trauma in hopes of raising awareness & bringing justice to bear on ISIS for their war crimes. She reminisces on her youth, growing up poor but with a loving mother, large family, and a very tight-knit religious minority community. Against this backdrop, the ISIS takeover & genocide is utterly devastating to read. 

Murad mentions that she struggles to extend forgiveness to those who were not a part of ISIS but did not actively combat the new order. She candidly engages with the strain of balancing compassion against feeling abandoned. Even the family that ultimately aided her escape is not fawned over in the text. Murad acknowledges that while she is grateful, she wishes that dissenters had chosen to be more actively engaged with rescues and resistance. I admired her honesty and bravery. 

Ultimately, this book is remarkable, haunting, courageous, and important. I strongly recommend you pick it up. 

Site Fidelity is a short story collection, reflecting on environmentalism, our responsibilities to those around us, economic hardship, and resilience in the face of difficulty. A few of the stories have intertwining characters, and all have some tie to Colorado.

I loved this collection. Boyles has a way of deftly developing atmosphere and characters, quickly drawing the reader in to the varied lives we get to peek into. No two stories were alike, yet each struck a human chord that offered something relatable and poignant.

While the collection on the whole is excellent, a few stories stood out in particular: In “Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars,” Ruth yearns for her home in Colorado after moving to Nevada with her love and then feeling their lives disintegrate with the introduction of children and the hardness of the recession. In “Early Warning System,” Mano challenges the authority that is poisoning the town’s water through negligence. In “Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012,” Sister Agnes reflects on a life dedicated to service and what she is called to do when her pre-school is threatened by environmentally-irresponsible development. In “Natural Resource Management,” Leah must deal with the fallout of a flood while also handling the fallout of her husband’s arrest.

I was struck by Boyles’s masterful way of making observations in subtle, tender ways. The characters have a unifying touchpoint (geography), but each has unique stories to tell and demons to face. I fully expect to revisit this collection, seeking out the sentences that were beautifully crafted and made my breath catch a bit when I read to them.

This book rides the line between reporting and memoir as author Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks and the cells that were taken from her without her knowledge during treatment for cervical cancer. Those cells went on to be known as HeLa and it is no exaggeration to say that they galvanized scientific discovery around genetics and disease. Skloot compiles a gripping, multi-decade narrative that talks about Henrietta’s family — both before and after HeLa, the scientific community’s advances thanks to the infinitely growable cultures, and the medical ethics discussions that surround the cells’ harvest. In and of itself, the story of these cells is fascinating, and complex. 

However, what the book’s title doesn’t tell you is how much of the book will be about Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter, who was just an toddler at the time of her mother’s death. Her circumstances are tragic and abusive, both at the hands of immediate family and in the dismissive treatment she receives from scientists and doctors when she tries to learn about her mother. Skloot has to work very hard to earn Deborah’s trust (over literal years) in order to get a more complete picture of Henrietta’s family and legacy. 

I have read a lot of books in the previously-untold-stories genre, and yet this one stands out in particular thanks in part to the medical ethics quandary, but also due to the extraordinarily bonkers family history and dynamics that constitute the Lackses. I’m glad it was all one book, but there was truly enough story in both aspects for individual books in their own rights!

Skloot’s writing is gripping, lucid, and cinematic. I learned a lot from this read and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it. 

Sparse and affecting, this novel follows one Colombian family from the earliest days of the parents’ relationship on through two decades of life. Through fateful yet ordinary decisions, the family is fractured between their native Bogotá and the U.S. Talia, the youngest daughter, lives in Colombia with her father while her mother and two siblings carry on life in New Jersey. The story is rich with ambient language and poignant observations. In just under two hundred pages, Engel encapsulates the human toll of a bordered world and the tensions inherent in loving across distance. 

There is a moment about two-thirds of the way through that brought together for me the entire story up until that point. I was struck by the way Engel crafted the story to be both coherent and disparate, descriptive yet lean. It was as though the book’s style reflected the family’s situation. Masterfully, the novel balances heartbreaking circumstance with remarkable resilience in a way that does not reduce any character to an inspirational story. They are fiercely loyal to one another and so they press on, simply because they must. 

I am not a Central American immigrant, so I cannot speak to that specific experience. However, I can tell you that based on my volunteer work that the experiences with the US immigration system outlined in this story are in no way far-fetched. If you find yourself reading and thinking it’s dramatized or unlikely, I challenge you to interrogate those assumptions. 

A sparse intergenerational epic, Of Women and Salt depicts a line of Cuban women from the 1850s on through present day. With rotating perspectives and non-chronological structure, the story focuses mainly on Carmen and her daughter Jeanette who live in Miami with relatives who remain in Camagüey.

Of Women and Salt is written with evocative, poignant language and some truly incisive commentary subtly incorporated by way of characters’ inner monologues. In my opinion, one of the most meaningful parts of this book is the way it humanizes every protagonist. Each woman is complicated, relatable, and doing her best with the life she has. Their interconnectedness amplifies the way trauma’s effects ripple in furtive, intractable ways. 

While this book is beautifully written and wonderfully atmospheric, it fell short for me in a couple ways. Specifically, the story felt somewhat disjointed and underdeveloped. I suspect it would have made an excellent short story collection rather than a novel. Secondly, the incorporation of Ana and Gloria struck me as peripheral in a way that rang hollow, like their particular story was short-changed. 

In this riveting memoir, Cheryl (a.k.a. Crystal a.k.a. Harbhajan) recounts her childhood growing up on the run, crisscrossing the globe with her family in order to evade Interpol. Her earliest memories are in the Himalayas at the age of four, when her family were practicing Sikhs. From there, they live in Australia, South Africa, Romania, Israel, Canada, and the U.S.

Apart from globe-trotting & elite athletics (she trains at a high level for both swimming and gymnastics), Diamond’s childhood set the stage for an extremely dysfunctional adolescence thanks to her charming yet intensely controlling father. Not only was the family on the run, they were living by his set of rules and principles that set them even further apart from regular society.

I'm almost 100% sure that Chiara and George killed Frank, and that was such a wrenching moment that really tipped the scales for me on the dysfunction of the family.

When Cheryl finally tries to shed her family’s history and obtain legal citizenship, the depth of her situation comes to light. Having an authentic New Zealand birth certificate proves useless as claiming her citizenship would amount to fraud since her parents signed it with their aliases. She is truly a girl with no base.

Some reviews of this book have said it feels too unbelievable, but I disagree. It’s far-fetched and intense, sure, but it didn’t feel made up. In fact, it hit exactly the way I think the best memoirs do: a place that is stranger-than-fiction and incredibly heartfelt. On top of that, Diamond is an excellent writer, evoking a strong sense of place in each setting as well as offering insightful commentary on her emotional state along the journey.

The concluding chapters verged on sententious, but that’s my only serious qualm with the book. On the whole, I’d recommend it, especially if you liked The Glass Castle or Captain Fantastic. P.S. The audio was superb. Add Eileen Stevens to the list of narrators I’ll enthusiastically follow. 

Reading Popisho felt like a tripping headfirst into an adult version of The Phantom Tollbooth set to a soundtrack of "For The Benefit of Mr. Kite."

Set in a fictional Caribbean archipelago called Popisho, this delightful and kaleidoscopic book takes place over the course of a day and follows a chorus of magical characters as the impending wedding of the Governor’s daughter approaches. At the center of it all is Xavier Redchoose, the macaenus (a role appointed-by-the-gods to prepare a meal for every Popisho resident over his tenure). 

This was easily one of the most creative books I’ve ever read. Everyone in Popisho is born with “cors,” another word for some sort of magical endowment. But not in a predictable witchcraft/sorcery way. Cors are as varied as people; some people have extremely long limbs, others can detect when you lie, others can change the colors of random objects. Author Leone Ross also committed impressively to world-building. There were so many invented words that I gave up on looking up definitions and just leaned in to the disorientation. And every plot turn felt completely original and entrancingly chaotic. 

This book traces the lives of the eponymous women, aka NPR’s “founding mothers.” A hybrid four-subject biography plus a recounting of the early days of the National Public Radio, Napoli’s work presents a engaging, well-researched chronology that highlights some truly pioneering women. 

I did not know a whole heap about NPR going into this book, and it did give me a solid sense of its scrappy, humble beginnings. Each woman profiled had an interesting backstory and sincerely admirable drive to be a part of the journalism world. Hailing from largely privileged backgrounds, none had stories of significant adversity apart from their gender. Even still, hearing their family’s histories and particular roles in their development was one of my favorite parts of the book. For example, Did you know Cokie Roberts was the daughter of a Congressman (and later a Congresswoman) and stared down social conventions to marry her Jewish beau, Steve? And Linda hails from New Mexico where her father owned a grocery store? There is a strong sense of matrilineal gratitude. Every woman could point to another woman who blazed the way before them in some way inspiring their ambitions.  

Now, to a few of my gripes. While the subtitle suggests a focus on the founding mothers, the middle third of the book was heavily skewed towards a portrayal of early NPR: the politicking, the leadership, the financial crises. And, while interesting in its own right, these chronicles only vaguely talked about the headlining women. They were present and held power, but were far from the main players. Some of the most interesting coverage of their individual achievements at NPR staff actually came in the epilogue, a structural choice and flummoxed and frustrated me. For instance, Nina Totenberg played a pivotal role in the Anita Hill coverage and revolutionized the way we relate to Congressional proceedings as the general public. But stories of this sort were largely smushed into the last 40 pages. 

Also, there was, in my opinion, not enough air given to the fact that while these four women were fiercely devoted to one another and their network, they did seem to have a clique-like mentality (at least as portrayed by Napoli) and did not fully acknowledge their privileged positions as white women with supportive partners and familial support. 

Finally, three of the four featured women are alive today. I was disappointed that they did not seem to have a significant role in the book’s research. It would have been even more powerful with direct reflections/commentary from Susan, Linda, and Nina.