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At a British boarding school, our unnamed narrator is addressed as “Miss.” She’s young, from Australia, gay, and her role is somewhat nebulous, primarily there for damage control. Like when one of the girls breaks a visiting boy’s nose because he assaulted her, that student is sent away for a while. (No blame falls on him—what else is new?) Everyone loves the headmaster’s wife, Mrs. S, who is glamorous and seductive. That includes our Miss, who falls hard. Another staff member, the Housemistress, is also gay, and the two of them periodically go out to a bar, but no one can divert Miss from her intense crush on Mrs. S that is ultimately fulfilled. Suffused with obsession and passion, rich with descriptions of the countryside, and packed with the odd rituals of boarding school life, this book immersed me into a superheated emotional milieu.
In this unusual memoir, Toews lets us into her thought processes with short entries—whatever’s on her mind at the time. Primarily she’s trying to answer this question from her application to a conference: why write? Some are from her journal, some are letters to her sister Marj, and many describe her wild hippie days. We eventually learn more about Marj, and how Toews’s breakthrough finally occurred. There are a number of charming descriptions of her relationship with her grandchildren. I love the opportunity to be privy to internal processes, and the author generously, candidly invites us in.
Sara, a freelance journalist stuck in Jerusalem, really wants some action. In 2012 she gets the chance to join other members of the press at The Beach, a once swanky hotel on the Gaza Strip, as nightmare action ramps up. She has a “fixer,” a local who can translate and drive her around but also finds a guy who might get her in contact with a Hamas commander; most correspondents are allied with Israel. The denouement is, not surprisingly, a total mess (as is the conflict), but the amazing thing about this novel is how comic it is. That old expression “funny as a crutch” really fits. Eye-opening!
In this sprawling, complex novel, we meet five women and two of their daughters who have roots in Puerto Rico but now live in the Bronx. They have intersecting relationships that center around one of the mothers, Luz. When she was a young Puerto Rican ballet student, she was orphaned in a car accident in 1975. Her body was smashed. and the trauma affected her brain, leaving her with gaps in memory and episodes in which she goes vacant for a spell. The question of the paternity of her daughter Marysol has always been murky. Marysol and her friend Graciela plan a trip to bring Las Madres to their homeland. This ends up coinciding with a devastating hurricane in 2017. Interpersonal tensions rise among them, but they manage to come through by helping devastated locals. One fascinating aspect: Luz’s scientist parents spoke four languages, and scrambled Luz comes out with phrases in each, willy-nilly. (It helped that I know some French and German; regrettably not much Spanish.)
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