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Amy, younger of the two, is the Good Girl of the family as contrasted with older sister, Ollie, who acts out like crazy and has spells in the bin when her behavior gets too outrageous. Amy, who started out as a dogged, joyless academic, ends up in publishing (like Lerner) and becomes quite successful. But she’s drawn to messy guys like shadows of her sister, and when she makes a conventional marriage, it fails. Ollie eventually comes around and the sisters finally bond. You could say the Shreds weave into a rough but sturdy tapestry.
Perpetually upbeat Jordan works for an enterprise that has created the Family Friend, an app that listens to everyone in the house and offers recommendations on the spot, from analgesics to therapists, most instantly available online. His new wife, Rosie, is a canvasser for a socially responsible organization and hates her job. She yearns for a simple country life, and they end up buying a charming but problematic cottage. Jordan loses his job—issues of “trust and safety,” which the app offered, have been compromised, but his well-heeled parents bail them out. Things get gnarly as they meet their neighbors, a creative, skilled bunch of people whose genders and relationships are confusing to say the least. Rosie is drawn to them, Jordan gets jealous, and it’s held breath until she makes her choice between them. It didn’t take me long to realize this is a fable, in which magic realism jousts with cutting edge satire. It’s a draw.
Subtitled: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America. Tworkov grew up in Greenwich Village in NYC in the ‘40s. Daughter of an artist, she was exposed to a wild cultural milieu. At 20 she took off for Japan, India and Nepal. She came back in the States during the explosive events of ‘68, then on to Montreal with a draft-dodging husband. Along the way she encountered many strains of Buddhism and embraced various practices when she became mired in depression. All this gives her a deep, broad perspective to cover a panoply of leaders and approaches which found expression in Tricycle, The Buddhist Review, which she founded in 1991. With its mystical, ineffable nature Buddhism is very challenging to write about but Tworkov does an amazing job, as well as sharing fascinating details of her far-flung life. Wow!
I have an appetite for disaster stories and this novel fills the bill. When a jetliner’s pilot has a heart attack, it crashes into a nuclear power plant in a small town in Minnesota. This could be a Chernobyl in the making, but plant workers, firefighters, and many other citizens band together to do what they can; the plant must be shut down before it explodes. There’s a heart-stopping countdown and moving examples of bravery and sacrifices. Good characterizations flesh out the story, like Connor, a terrified eight-year-old suspended over a river in a van who’s saved against all odds by Dani, a fiercely determined firefighter. The author, who’s been a flight attendant and a bookseller, puts her experience to good use.
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