After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

 Aug. 25, 2023--San Antonio

After the Funeral and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley is a book of short stories set in English in recent times.  The stories are well written and are interesting, but I found them to be a bit bland--lacking in ways such that I would put the book down after reading only a part of a story and then not pick it up for a couple of days or so.  Usually, I finish and return a book within 3-5 days.  I have had this one over 2 1/2 weeks!  (At one point I put it away and read another more interesting book because I needed to read something I was enjoying more.)  There are no exciting events in the stories; these are slice-of-life stories that are centered around women and what is happening within a given period of their lives.  I gave the book 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

Southernmost by Silas House

Friday, Aug. 18, 2023--San Antonio

Southermost by Silas House was a troubling novel for me.  Uncomfortable decisions are being made throughout it.  The characters seem real, although not all are likable.  The character flaws that exist in many adults are evident throughout the book which also deals with intolerance (social and religious), vindictiveness, and meanness.  Although there are some wonderful situations, something bad is always around the corner throughout the novel.  The story centers around a man and his son.  The man has been raised within fundamentalist Christianity and is the pastor or such a church.  He is married to a woman who is actually more fundamentalist than he is.  As their son grows up, the father delights in his tenderness and love for all things.  The mother secretly takes him for counseling because she thinks he needs to learn to be more manly to get by in this world.  The boy's goodness and gentility actually provide insight to his father regarding the intolerance he has exhibited toward others and leads him to begin to question whether what he has preached as acceptable behavior is truly just and whether it truly matches what Christ taught and exhibited in his life.  The consequences of his expressing this change in belief result in great changes in his life that lead to a poor decision that makes things even worse for his and his son's future.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5 mainly because of how much of it made me uncomfortable.

Pedro & Daniel by Frederico Erebia

 Monday, Aug. 14, 2023--San Antonio

I actually read Pedro & Daniel by Frederico Erebia about two weeks ago and forgot to post my reivew of it.  It is a young adult novel about two Mexican American boys growing up.  It's an awkward life in many ways.  One of the brothers is darker than the other which often makes a difference in the cultures of people of color.  In fact, Pedro, the darker brother looks just like his absent father which is a frustration to his mother, since she went against the family's wishes to marry a man from a darker-skinned, less financially successful family than hers.  Both boys are gay, but are so different in almost all other ways.  Pedro plays football and is more like the macho concept expected of boys in the culture.  Daniel plays with dolls and refuses bend to the wishes of his family to be more like a man.  But the boys depend on each other to mentally deal with the various types of abuse they face within the family (both immediate and extended) and elsewhere.  Both want to get away from home as quickly as possible.  It is a wonderfully written story that continues through the 80s and the AIDS epidemic with both brothers as adults still supporting each other and struggling in terms of their relationships within the family.  Although fiction, much of it is based on the real life the author had with his brother Daniel.  Readers should be ready to be greatly affected emotionally.  I gave the book 5 stars out of 5 and kept thinking about the boys' story for days after finishing reading it.

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead

Sunday, Aug. 13, 2023--San Antonio

Crook Manifesto is the fourth novel I have read by Colson Whitehead, and it may be the last.  I seldom read multiple novels by the same author. Of the 3 previous novels, I gave 5 stars out of 5 to two of them (The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad) and 4 stars out of 5 to the other (Harlem Shuffle).  Although this book got great reviews, it was not nearly as enjoyable to read as those 3.  Most of the book is a detailed description of the history of crime in Harlem given at a rat-a-tat pace with lots of details.  I had to keep pushing myself to pick the book up again.  It didn't read to me like a novel until the final 10%.  The research that must have gone into that first 90% had to be extensive and impressive, but it didn't payoff as enjoyable reading to me.  I only gave this book a rating of 3 stars out of 5. 

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2023--San Antonio

This Other Eden by Paul Harding is a sad story based on some true events.  It takes place in the early 1900s on an island off the coast of Maine.  I group of freed blacks and mixed-race people had come to the island in 1866 and settled there. Seven generations had continued living there in one-room shanties with no conveniences at all and cut off to a great extent from life on the mainland.  At the time of the story, the group consisted of about a dozen people with some of them shows signs of inbreeding.  Their daily lives were still lived much like those of all their ancestors in the previous decades.  Their clothing was warn and patched.  The only change of significance was that a school had been built on the island and a man who spent his summers on the mainland came to preach on Sundays and to teach on 3 other days of the week.  He managed to get assistance from the people on the mainland for building the school, providing supplies, and also supplying aid to the residents of the island.  But that resulted in the mainland people becoming more aware of the conditions on the island and to consider the situation to be a "problem" that needed fixing.  Eugenics was a topic throughout the world at the time, so men from the mainland came with calipers, and other measuring devices plus a camera to get photos of the inhabitants of the island.  They observed and wrote a record of the lifestyle there--people living in filth, children born of incest, trash everywhere.  They felt they had to "rescue" the people which would include putting the children in homes or asylums.  They also observed the potential of the island being developed with a hotel that would draw tourists to the area.  The book is a sad description of what happened to the lives of those living there and how the actions taken were a disgrace with significant consequences.  I found it hard to read the book at times because of the actions occurring.  But it is well written and is fascinating to read, too.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.