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This memoir tells an old story: teacher and student embark on an affair. She was in her teens. He was much older, with a wife and kids. The twist: they got married, and she wrote a book about it—Half a Life. They were together for 45 years. In this sequel written after his death, she both celebrates their love, and has the opportunity to explore the tricky perspective of current day attitudes toward such relationships. Honest and touching.
This lively novel delves into carnival life in the early 1900s. Luna Park at Coney Island now features Rio, a miserable merman captured in the East River. Benny, an ironworker who was tasked with building the tank, has fallen in love with Rio and develops a scheme to free him. It takes intricate, suspenseful plotting by a cast of eccentric freak show characters to pull this off. Timing of the tides and a rival carnival’s machinations increase difficulties. Delightful illustrations enhance this charming fantasy.
Everybody Says It's Everything
Twins Drita and Pete were close in childhood but now she’s the responsible one and he’s screwing up royally. He had a baby with junkie girlfriend Shanda but split when things got awful. (A moment’s inattention, and their son almost died.) According to Pete and Drita's mother, Jackie, who’s been wheelchair- bound since a car crash caused a miscarriage and subsequent infertility, she adopted the kids from Albania. Now Pete has fallen in with other Albanians planning to return to Kosovo at the height of the troubles. So many secrets, including the actual origins of Drita and Pete, further fray the already shredded fabric of familial relationships. Intense, gritty, and moving—the characters really want to make it work against considerable odds.
In this novel, we first we meet Heron, an old introvert, and his daughter Maggie in 2022. He brought her up alone, no mother not in the picture. Then we toggle back to1982 when said mother, Dawn, is struggling with a powerful attraction to her new friend, Hazel, despite having a husband and a very young child. Dawn and Hazel try to keep their meetings surreptitious, but word gets out and the law steps in. The judge awards Heron full custody to protect Maggie from “perverse influences.” Maggie never knew what had happened (she was too young), but has always felt an emotional void. When Heron dies, Maggie finally learns the chilling truth. This story is told quietly, but it shocked me to the core that not so long ago there could be such ignorant, punitive prejudice. Set in England.
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