along for the journey

Long Island Girls by Gabrielle Korn

Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)

Genre: fiction

Review: It took me a while to figure out why Korn name-drops so many brands and bands and trends in this book, but I finally realized that it's because this book is very intentionally grounded in the times and places it portrays, spanning the 20 years from 2005 to 2025, and the country, from Long Island to California.  Frankly, as someone who's not into indie music and doesn't pay much attention to brands, it put a barrier between me and the story.  Once I figured out that the names were just signals to orient us in time, space, and socioeconomic status (and that there were other signals that a brand-oblivious person like me could use), and not meant to convey any superficiality on the part of the characters, I was able to get on board.  And once I was on board, I enjoyed joining Susan in her journey to discover who she's meant to be.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

not subtle, but not preachy

The Leavers by Lisa Ko
Rating: 3.5 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: When he is 11 years old, Deming's mother goes to work one day, and never returns.  Deming is soon put into foster care and then adopted.  We meet Deming again 10 years later, and struggling with an identity crisis.  Does he want to try to be the academic his academic adoptive parents want him to be, or does he want to follow his own love of music and try to make it as a musician?  Ko is more than a little heavy-handed in making the reader understand that this is something of a stand-in for his mixed feelings about being an American-born Chinese who spent half of his life in a lily-white upstate New York college town.

This character-driven story will appeal both to readers who enjoy books about immigrants, as well as those about characters searching for their own personal identity.  Told through the point of view of Deming (in the third person) and his mother (in the first person), the full story of what happened to Deming's mother, both how she came to America and what happened the day she disappeared, is gradually revealed.  This is a grim, but ultimately hopeful and redemptive novel that lays out the difficulties of immigration and assimilation without being overly preachy.

Sympathetic Reilly

Handling Sin by Michael Malone
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Challenges: TBR, A-Z (title)
Review: This is a big book, with a lot packed into it, so it's sort of hard to know what to say about it. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of The Pickwick Papers, with misunderstandings and coincidences, and the main characters sort of bumbling around and managing to get themselves into and out of trouble with seeming to really understand what was actually going on around them.

Similarly, the book reminded me a lot of A Confederacy of Dunces, at least in the beginning. There's the sort of curmudgeonly and generally disapproving Southern man, who looks with disdain at almost everything around him, and is convinced that he could do everything better if only he were allowed to run things.

What makes this book different from either of those two is that Malone actually allows his main character to grow and learn during the story. This made "our hero" an actually sympathetic character (as opposed to Toole's Reilly) and I actually cared about the end result of his enforced quest, if not everything that happened to him and his companions on the way.