Curious Minds is a mystery-adventure caper featuring a pair of quirky and seemingly incompatible leads that I think may work better on the screen rather than as a book. Without charismatic actors to bring Knight and Moon to life, they just came off as trying a bit too hard to be funny but instead are being a jerk (Knight) or simply annoying (Moon). I’m sure I must’ve read Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels before. I seem to remember enjoying them, and I know humour is one of the trademarks of her mysteries, but the humour in Curious Minds just fell flat for me. While the mystery aspect was interesting, it also seemed more set up for a caper type adventure for the leads than an actual puzzle to solve, which makes the characters and the humour much more important to get right.

Curious Minds stars the unlikely duo of Emerson Knight, an introverted, eccentric and handsome billionaire, and Riley Moon, a feisty financial analyst assigned essentially to babysit Emerson when he makes the unusual request to withdraw all his gold from the bank. Riley is highly educated and supposed to be brilliant and super talented, but is surprisingly naive about a lot of things, which I gather is meant to make her cute and endearing. Emerson is rude and condescending, but really does care for Riley in his way, so then sexual tension develops. Bad guys want to keep Emerson from his gold, so Emerson needs Riley’s help. And so on and so forth. There are even Batman-type gadgets thrown into the mix.

A book that follows a standard formula isn’t necessarily a bad thing for me, but this just didn’t quite work. That being said, it was an entertaining story to read, and I think I may have enjoyed it more as a buddy comedy on TV. I’m afraid I haven’t read a Stephanie Plum novel in a while, so apart from a vague memory that I did enjoy that series, I’m not sure how this compares and how Evanovich fans will respond to this. I may pick up a future Stephanie Plum novel, but I think I’ll give this series a pass.

+

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Here I Am is such a complex, textured, immense story that it took me a while to formulate this review. My Goodreads review admits needing to sit with my feelings for a while, as I wasn’t quite sure how to do justice to the reading experience. That’s an idea of the impact this book had on me while I read, and until now, I’m still not sure I completely understand why. Here I Am is a doorstop of a book, 576 pages that feels longer because the author has packed so much in. It’s sprawling in scope in that it contextualizes protagonist Jacob Bloch’s wrestling with his Jewish identity within the framework of a war in the Middle East, yet it’s also intimate in focus in that the significance of world events are pulled back into the deterioration of the Bloch family.

Here I Am is a book that begs to be teased apart, one that compels the reader to confront the very real questions of identity, family and legacy that Jacob is facing. It’s a hefty volume that explores its issues explicitly, with extensive conversations between characters, yet that offers no easy answers. It’s a story to dive right into, yet not quite to lose oneself in.

What does it mean to be Jewish in North America? Jacob Bloch isn’t particularly devout, but being Jewish plays a big part in his concept of family, as something that spans generations from his father Isaac through him and his wife Julia and to their children. So it’s a big deal when their eldest son Sam decides he doesn’t want a bar mitzvah. Worse, Jacob feels his marriage to Julia deteriorating. In one scene, the narrator recounts almost two full pages of dialogue between the couple, each line revealing restrained affection and love, yet prefaces it with the phrase “if they’d said what they were thinking.” The scene ends thus:

But he didn’t say anything and neither did she. Not because the words were deliberately withheld but because the pipeline between them was too occluded for such bravery. Too many small accumulations, wrong words, absences of words… [p. 59]

I love this because I expected a big dramatic moment, yet a marriage declining because of a series of kind words left unspoken feels more real.

There’s enough drama within the family that I first wondered if including a subplot about conflict in the Middle East was even necessary. But then I realized that this subplot was key in highlighting how conflicted Jacob felt about how he expresses his Jewish identity. His life of comfort in America is contrasted with his cousin Tamir’s military service in Israel:

[Tamir had] grown up while Jacob had just grown in. He’d fought for his homeland, while Jacob spent entire nights debating whether that stupid New Yorker poster where New York is bigger than everything else would look better on this wall or that one. He tried not to get killed, while Jacob tried not to die of boredom. [p. 224]

Jacob is forced to confront this comparison when Tamir and his family come for a visit. At one point, Jacob says that Tamir and his family’s personality traits are “not their Israeliness… it’s just them,” but he clearly ascribes something to their “Israeliness,” a rather amorphous sense that they are more Jewish than he. I’m not Jewish, so I can’t say how this will resonate with Jewish readers, but it does resonate with me as an immigrant. How Filipino am I still now that I’ve become Canadian, and am I any less Filipino for having moved away? If I ever have children, how Filipino will they be, and in this era of globalization, how much does that even matter? These are questions I wonder about, and while I don’t know how other readers will respond, I do think there’s something in Jacob’s struggle that feels universal. The Middle Eastern conflict in Here I Am prompts Jacob to confront his comfortable lifestyle and ask himself how Jewish he can actually consider himself to be.

The title Here I Am comes from the story of Abraham, which is told in some variation across the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, when God comes looking for Abraham and his sacrifice, Abraham responds “Here I am.” As a Catholic, I learned that this story is about Abraham’s willingness to obey God, no matter the cost. According to Wikipedia (and, I believe, mentioned in the novel as well), many Jewish scholars teach that the story is about God testing Abraham’s loyalty, and that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son is him passing the test. In Here I Am, Israel calls for aid and Jacob faces his own test.

Here I Am is a thought-provoking, beautifully written novel that I recommend savouring. This is Foer’s first novel in eleven years, and well worth the wait.

+

Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

When the publicists for Meg Elison’s The Book of the Unnamed Midwife reached out and called the book “a modern-day look at women’s equality and access to reproductive health,” I was immediately intrigued. I think it’s a particularly timely and relevant topic, and I love seeing it explored in fiction.

SYNOPSIS

Philip K. Dick Award Winner for Distinguished Science Fiction

When she fell asleep, the world was doomed. When she awoke, it was dead.

In the wake of a fever that decimated the earth’s population—killing women and children and making childbirth deadly for the mother and infant—the midwife must pick her way through the bones of the world she once knew to find her place in this dangerous new one. Gone are the pillars of civilization. All that remains is power—and the strong who possess it.

A few women like her survived, though they are scarce. Even fewer are safe from the clans of men, who, driven by fear, seek to control those remaining. To preserve her freedom, she dons men’s clothing, goes by false names, and avoids as many people as possible. But as the world continues to grapple with its terrible circumstances, she’ll discover a role greater than chasing a pale imitation of independence.

After all, if humanity is to be reborn, someone must be its guide.

Its sequel, The Book of Etta, comes out February 2017.

Q&A with Meg Elison

In your own words, can you tell us about The Book of the Unnamed Midwife?

I began with a burning injustice in birth culture and misogyny, and I read the entire canon of post-apocalyptic fiction because I wanted to end the world, over and over. The books delivered that, sometimes sadly, sometimes angrily. But even the best ones scarcely dealt with women at all. I was at Berkeley when I began it, and I remember asking one of my professors if the main female character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was meant to be read as barren, as an analogue to the protagonist’s castration. The professor, who had spent twice my lifespan behind the podium, blinked and told me he had no idea; the question had just never come up. Science fiction and post-apocalypse fiction was the same. Very few writers seemed to consider that all these furtive sex scenes might end in pregnancy, or that these refugees from the end of the world might need tampons. With a few exceptions, like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and P.D. James’ Children of Men, the genre seemed barbarously ignorant of women’s lives. So the book began to take shape because it needed to exist.

In The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, birth control and a woman’s right to bodily autonomy are central to the plot, what inspired you to write about this subject?

I’ve watched the War on Women rage on and on, with the rollback of abortion rights from state to state and an insidious slide back into casual misogyny in common rhetoric and culture. I went through puberty with a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves in my lap, and the struggle for women’s equality was presented to me as something that had been won, at least in the United States. It didn’t occur to me until it was far too late how easily we could lose all the ground that we’ve gained. Piece by piece, the rights of women are being dismantled. I can’t be at every Planned Parenthood to escort people safely, and I can’t be loud enough to shout down legislation that tries to take our power away. Writing this book was the loudest I could scream my worst fears and hopefully help keep them from coming true.

Slate has called The Book of The Unnamed Midwife, the “science fiction analog to the Zika crisis.” What do you feel are the connections?

Zika is a crisis of reproduction freedom. It disproportionately affects women and makes pregnancy hazardous and morally fraught. I remember being terrified when El Salvador issued its advice concerning Zika: just don’t get pregnant. The government gave that advice to women who have almost no access to birth control, in a nation where abortion is illegal. Now, Zika is making inroads in Florida, where the state has actively worked to block funding for reproductive health care and comprehensive sex education. Zika will do the most damage in places where women are already disadvantaged and have no recourse. The plague in Midwife isn’t Zika, but it elicits the same kind of terror. It flourishes in those places where women already have little to no reproductive freedom and it brings terror into the delivery room. I never wanted to correctly predict a future as scary as this one.

What was the most interesting thing you learned while researching this book?

I spoke with a couple of midwives and all of them were happy to share with me the most horrific sleep-robbing stories they had of how bad births can go. More than one of them told me that they don’t share stories of birth-trauma with pregnant people, because we have a culture of terrifying them before labor. But they were happy to share with me, once I told them about the book. I learned that birth control expires a lot faster than I hoped it would. Weirdly, my research taught me a lot about civic engineering. I wanted to know what services would shut down first, and how. I wanted to know how fast cholera would run in the streets when municipal water cut out. I learned some things that might save my life in a disaster smaller than the one I wrote.

What do you want readers to take away from reading your book?

I want people who read Midwife to really grapple with what being a woman is like. I used the most extreme circumstances to tell this story, but many women deal with intimidation and assault under normal circumstances. I want the reader to see women as people, and to be disgusted by their relegation to chattel. I hope that readers see that although this book is grim and gutting, there’s hope in it. I’m a realist, but reality usually offers a sliver of hope.

What’s coming next?

The sequel to Midwife, The Book of Etta will be out soon! It’s about Etta, the young woman mentioned in the frame tale of Midwife, and it deals more with gender essentialism and the way things aren’t what we thought they would be when we first began them. I’ve also got a couple of other books in the works and I’m always writing short stories. What’s coming next is more barn-burning stories with kick-ass queer people in them, because that’s what I do.

+

Thanks to the author and her publicists for the Author Q&A above.