Neshama’s Choices for September 16

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Worry by Alexandra Tanner

After her relationship crashes, Jules spends hours on the Internet, fixated on blogs from right-wing preppers. She’s anxious by nature and her virtual, vacuous job gives her lots of time to worry. Into her Brooklyn apartment crashes her sister Poppy, supposedly temporarily. She’s a needy mess. Now immediate worries along with ongoing conflicts intensify for Jules. But the close proximity gives them a chance to delve into their family history and discover how much they love each other. (Note: those blogs are both chilling and hilarious.  I wonder how fictional they are.)

The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp by Leonie Swan

Agnes turns her large English country house into Sunset Hall, taking in her fellow elders on a paying basis. It’s a great cast of characters, some of whom, like Agnes, had demanding positions before they retired. There’s a resident tortoise, Hattie (I didn’t know they hissed), Edwina whose yoga practice keeps her strong and flexible, and glamorous Charlie who arrives with an Irish wolfhound named Brexit. When three corpses turn up in brief succession, the denizens use their detecting skills to find out who did what to whom while covering up secrets of their own. Charmingly formulaic, with lots of wit.

O Beautiful by Jung Yun

The spacious skies of North Dakota have been radically sullied by the oil industry, and freelancer Elinor gets a chance to write a piece about it for a big magazine.  Her mentor Richard handed her the assignment, had done extensive research, and expected her to follow his outline. But when she arrives, her interviews lead her in different directions. She grew up in the region, the daughter of a military man and his Korean wife who left the marriage after she wasn’t subservient enough to fulfill her husband’s expectations. Elinor gets an earful from locals she encounters, faces all sorts of nastiness including racism, and discovers how much the place has changed with the huge influx of workers desperate for big money. It’s a rough, exhausting ride that takes Elinor into highly stressful, sometimes dangerous situations. In the end, there’s a sliver of hope as Elinor finds her way into the story via a woman from the local Indian reservation.

D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michael Faber

Young Dhiliko is alarmed when the letter D vanishes from both spoken and written words. She turns to old Professor Dodderfield who sends her on a quest with his faithful dog (or sometimes sphinx) to a very cold and snowy land. There she has all sorts of bizarre encounters until she finally has to face the Gamp, a dictator who has caused so much havoc in his world and hers. With considerable help from supernatural beings, she manages to dismantle his Tower of Light which drains his power and restores D to language. The book came out in 2020. I don’t know how I missed it then but think it should be considered an important addition to the list of classic (not so) fantasy tales. Especially these days, this quirky fable doesn’t seem so farfetched as we face our looming version of the Gamp.