Some Peril

 Recently, I came across my kids’ Christmas lists from 2011. My son was three at the time and my daughter was six. He was into books featuring Spiderman or Super Friends and loved Duplo Blocks. She couldn’t get enough of Disney fairy books and doll accessories for her knockoff American Girl doll. 

As they’ve grown up, holidays have become simpler and yet, more complicated. This year, my son wants to build his own computer. My daughter pines for some roller skates she saw on Instagram. They are sold out. Some peril is involved in deciding what to get her instead. 

One constant is that Santa will always bring them a book or two for their stocking. Even if they get cast aside on Christmas morning for shinier objects, they will eventually end up on their nightstands.

For the middle schooler:

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence by Michael Marshall Smith

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet Book 1 by Ta-Nehisi Coates 

 

For the high schooler:

Watch Us Rise by Ellen Hagan and Renee Watson

American Street by Ibi Zoboi

“How often do you get to learn that lesson? That sometimes you just lose?”

 Looking for escapist fiction, while steering away from anything truly apocalyptic, can be a challenge these days. I haven’t connected with a lot of science fiction I’ve tried. And the same goes for romance (with the recent exception of books by her and her).  And finding fiction that checks both thought provoker and page turner is even harder. Enter Memorial by Bryan Washington.

Benson and Mike are a young couple living in Houston. The week Mike’s mother is expected for an extended visit from Japan, Mike tells Benson he’ll be flying to Japan to spend time with his dying father.

Told from both men’s perspective, Washington examines the work, sweat, and yes, tears, involved in keeping a relationship from floundering. Mike’s mother sums it up best when she says:

“I’m fluent in fine, Mitsuko says. Fine means f*cked.”

Read an excerpt published in the New Yorker here.

Gaslighting

Allie Lang, a single mother, lives contract to contract in her work as a celebrity ghostwriter. After her last project was scrapped due to the #metoo proclivities of its subject, she’s excited for her next assignment: a book on motherhood by emerging feminist icon Lana Breban. So begins Impersonation by Heidi Pitlor.

As the weeks pass, Lana refuses to share any personal memories of raising her son Norton.  So Allie begins drawing from her own experiences with breastfeeding, toddler tantrums, and thwarting gender stereotypes to pad the narrative. Lana is thrilled with these stories even as she continues to brush off Allie’s inquiries into her own mothering style.

While Lana has the luxury of stretching out the project, Allie struggles to make her rent, pay for a broken filling without insurance, and find a reliable babysitter she can afford.  Even though she signed a confidentiality agreement, Allie tells her mother about her latest project. Her mother, in turn, brags to a friend who ends up tweeting out her identity after the book is published.

Although she feels betrayed by Lana’s response to the brouhaha that ensues, Allie learns she must fight for the right to tell her own story. Not anyone else’s.

Fans of Pitlor’s The Daylight Marriage will relish the way similar themes of parenthood and codependency play out in a much happier ending.  

Faux-ingenuous

Whichever way the votes tally this week, we are still four years away from electing the first female president. 

In the alternate history Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld, we would, in 2020, be four years into the term of the first.

In this version of events,* Hillary and Bill still meet at Yale Law School. She’s charmed by his charisma, and they soon become a couple. Early on, she catches him kissing another woman, but they stay together. After graduation, they move to Arkansas together. She teaches at the law school, and he runs, and loses, his first campaign for office. When she realizes his dalliances have been ongoing, Hillary decides to move to Chicago without him.

“The margin between staying and leaving was so thin; really, it could have done either way.”

Fast forward two decades, Hillary is a law professor. After she hears Bill is going to run for president, she considers a run for Congress. Even though Carol Moseley Braun has a chance of becoming the first Black female Senator, Hillary decides to run against her in the primary. And wins.

“Some people who run for office want to create change, and some want everyone to fall in love with them.”

In this portrayal of Hillary, Sittenfeld gives us someone who wants both. 

* If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the plausibility of this universe, read this.