reading lately: can't put them down

Given a choice between "characters" and "plot" I'm pretty much always going to go "plot" - I love a story that makes me not be able to put a book down. And I've got some excellent selections in that regard from my recent reads - all of them made me want to stay up way past my bedtime to finish. (And bonus, they all have quite well done characters too!)

Little Fires Everywhere
This book starts with the inciting incident – a teenager setting her family’s house on fire – and then spends the rest of the story exploring how things came to a burning point in an idyllic town, literally and figuratively. Set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a “planned” community, where even the paint colors of houses have to be approved (super fascinating in itself), the story brings together the wealthy Richardson family and their 4 high school aged children, well-established in the town, with Mia, an artist who is new to the area, and her daughter, Pearl, who become tenants at the Richardson’s rental house. The relationships among the children and parents come to a flash point, especially with the black sheep daughter Izzy, at the same time that the town itself is coming to a flash point, over a court case deciding whether a Chinese-American baby adopted by a family in town should be returned to her biological mother. The intrigue of Mia’s mysterious past, the town’s obsession with the adopted baby girl, and the teenagers’ secrets all wrapped me up so thoroughly that I did not want to put this one down. And also really made me wish I had read it with a book club – there’s SO much to discuss, from identity to motherhood to culture to the cost of always following the rules. Highly recommend. 4.5/5 stars


The End We Start From

As the city of London is becoming submerged by floodwaters and society is devolving into chaos and anarchy, a woman gives birth to her long-awaited first child. They escape with family to higher ground, but they eventually must move from place to place to stay safe. Sounds depressing and dark? Perhaps, but really this book left me with a feeling of light in the end. In the midst of the fear and uncertainty in the world, the baby still manages to grow and thrive, and some of the ordinary moments of raising a child really stand out - like forming a playgroup at a refugee camp. This is one of those books that you can’t put down because you get so wrapped up into the reality of its world, and it sticks with you for a long time after you’ve reached the end (which comes fast - it’s only 160 pages!) - and not just because of this potential post-apocalyptic sort of reality. The focus on the relationship of a mother and her baby, and how that baby’s milestones like rolling over, and firsts like saying “mama”, still go on in all of their ordinarily glorious ways in this world, was really quite moving. I saw this book compared to another favorite of mine - Station Eleven - and I guess I can see some similarities in that they’re really well-written post-apocalyptic sort of stories, but the writing in this one is so different. It’s so short that every word really counts: the writing is really spare and exacting, and so sometimes it’s more about reading between the lines. In that way it reminded me much more of The Dog Stars, which I also highly recommend if you enjoy books like this. 5/5 stars

Artemis

If you’ve read Andy Weir’s previous book, The Martian, then you know how he’s good at making a sciency story quite thrilling, even for a non-sciency person. In this new release he moves over to the moon, where he imagines the first (and only) city on it, Artemis. You get some more technical stuff on how it came to be built, and how people function living on the moon, but that’s for the most part wrapped really well into the entertaining story of Jazz Bashara, a schemer who is always looking for ways to make a little money. Her petty smuggling turns into all-out criminal masterminding when a billionaire recruits her in a scheme to take over a major moon industry, aluminum production. There’s a lot to keep the pages turning in this one – this sabotage scheme that Jazz gets involved in turns into chaos involving the mob and more…and then there’s also the fact that life on the moon is a bit precarious. You know, lack of oxygen and all. I thought the world he set up in this book was quite fascinating, and I liked the wise-cracking Jazz; she kept making me think of the character Rey in Star Wars, how she’s kind of going it on her own in a scrappy way, barely scraping by, but then getting involved in something much bigger, and her major smarts and talents come out to shine – and you can’t help but root for her, even if she is involved in the seedier side of things at times. This felt more like science fiction to me than The Martian, which makes it not exactly in my wheelhouse, but it was a pretty entertaining read. 3.5/5 stars

Into the Water
In a small town in England, a single mother is found drowned in the river, the same place that a teenage girl was found earlier in the summer. The town is in crisis in the aftermath of these losses – not least because these aren’t the first drownings of women in this town’s history…and these latest ones are dredging up long-buried secrets from the river. Being told from multiple viewpoints of people in town (sister of the drowned woman, her daughter, a police officer, a teacher, etc.) made it take just a little bit to get into the book because of the switching back and forth in short chapters, but once I was in, I really liked how the multiple narrators wove the story together in bits and pieces, and how that propelled the story along. To me this read more like a literary mystery than an intense psychological thriller – bonus being that there are actually likeable characters, sometimes my main complaint of the latter. I really enjoyed this one (it’s better than Girl on the Train!), especially for how it reminded me of some British crime dramas I love, like Broadchurch or Case Histories. 4/5 stars

I Found You

On a stormy day, single mom Alice comes across a man, confused and alone, on the beach, and she invites him into her home (despite her better judgement, and that of her friends). As she tries to help him remember who he is, the story alternates over to Lily, a recently immigrated newlywed whose husband has been missing for a couple of days. Then when we intersperse a third storyline, about a family vacationing in this seaside town twenty years earlier, who meet a mysterious young man who seems a bit off… Leaving the reader wondering, who is the man from the beach? Is he Lily’s husband? The mysterious young man from the past? Eventually, as Alice leads the lost man around town, trying to trigger his memory, and Lily leaves London for the seaside in search of her husband, the storylines all come crashing together. I love a good British mystery, and though this one wasn’t quite as solidly in the detective category that I usually gear toward with them, it had good pacing and some pretty satisfying mystery elements that kept me guessing (though not in an overly intense psychological thriller way – there were actually some characters to like!). A good pick if you’re into Liane Moriarty, or perhaps Paula Hawkins or Ruth Ware 3.5/5 stars


Any books you haven't been able to put down lately? I have When We Were Worthy and Bonfire lined up to read next, and I'm hoping they'll fall into this category too!


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