What I Read in September
Even though we’re into the second week of October, I wanted to tell you about the four excellent books I read last month. They helped get my reading mojo back on track, thank God. It feels weird when I can’t sink into a book.
Of these four, there were three novels and one memoir. All were written by women. One was from my own shelves — a used book purchase most likely within the past 9 years. (There is a phone number with a Pittsburgh area code written inside the cover, so I’m assuming I acquired it while living here.)
Let’s start with Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, 2000). I read this for my friend Sue’s Big Book Summer Challenge, an event I sign up for every year with all good intentions but usually don’t finish. (Last time I completed this particular challenge was 2016!) As we all know, this wasn’t a typical summer but this was a perfect summer novel.
Set in fictitious Zebulon County, a southern Appalachian forest and farming community, Prodigal Summer focuses on the interconnected stories of three residents: Deanna, a reclusive wildlife biologist who becomes involved with a mysterious young hunter despite their opposing viewpoints; Lusa Maluf Landowski, a farmer’s widow who must decide whether to stay on her husband’s land (and continue to deal with his overbearing, judgmental family) or return to Lexington, Kentucky; and Garnett Walker, an elderly cantankerous man who feuds with his spitfire of a neighbor about God, crops, pesticides and the world in general.
Prodigal Summer explores the connections and similarities that very different people have with the earth, themselves and each other. The descriptions of life in this rural mountain community are beautifully rendered, something that I always enjoy about Barbara Kingsolver’s writing. She knows exactly how how to draw her reader into a sense of place. Although this novel was published 20 years ago, its themes of love, betrayal, acceptance and change are timeless.
Isn’t that an amazing cover? You know you’re in for something a little out of the ordinary with The Harpy by Megan Hunter (Grove Press, 2020). For starters, let’s review our Greek and Roman mythology. According to such, a harpy is a ravenous monster with a woman’s head and body and a bird’s wings and claws. It’s the perfect emotional description of Lucy, a married young mother who is understandably devastated in the aftermath of her husband Jake’s affair.
Think you know this story? Think again. With writing that slices right through the page, Megan Hunter gives her reader a sinister twist: to even the score between them, Lucy and Jake agree that she gets to hurt him three times, with no warning. A mesmerizing suspenseful page-turner that will be one of my favorites of 2020. The Harpy will be published on November 3.
Every so often a book comes along that unexpectedly collides with a timely national moment. With the death of United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18, women’s reproductive rights and access to healthcare (especially abortion) in America are severely threatened. In Loved and Wanted, Christa Parravani delivers a powerhouse of a memoir about living in West Virginia, being married and unexpectedly pregnant at 40 with two very young children, and working full-time as a college writing professor while being her family’s main breadwinner.
When she consults with her ob-gyn about the possibility of an abortion Parravani encounters (and illuminates with visceral prose) the stark, harmful realities of conservative political agendas masquerading as medical regulations, the shameful disparities of healthcare from state to state, and the pervasive environmental and economic factors that threaten her family and many others. Loved and Wanted, to be published by Henry Holt on November 10, is a heartbreakingly raw, courageous and vitally important book.
Strong women and the nuanced complexities of mother-daughter relationships that reverberate through each generation are at the heart of Gabriela Garcia’s debut novel. Of Women and Salt spans 19th- and 20th-century Cuba into present-day Miami, Texas and Mexico, and captures five women’s often fraught emotional connections to each other, their deepest secrets and their unresolved traumas as it shifts in time and perspective. Garcia, the daughter of Cuban and Mexican immigrants, portrays each of her characters’ interconnected stories with a deeply personal understanding of how the immigration experience is an individual one that shapes one’s self-identity and sense of survival — if not for oneself, for one’s children.
Of Women and Salt, scheduled to be published by Flatiron Books in April 2021, is one of my last reviews (at least for the foreseeable future) for Shelf Awareness. (Read my full review as well as my interview with Gabriela Garcia in the September 30 Max Shelf issue of Shelf Awareness.)
The post What I Read in September first appeared on melissa firman.
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