"Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng

It's no surprise that Ng's novel is currently a popular miniseries. It's filled with family drama, mystery and intrigue, and teenage and adult angst.

The novel is about the tension between two families with opposing views on the world. First there's the Richardsons: Mom, Dad, and high school children Lexie, Trip, Moody, and Izzy. They live in wealthy suburban Shaker Heights and are committed to living the traditional American Dream. Then there's Mia and Pearl, who move into a rental house the Richardsons own. Mia is an artist, traveling as inspiration strikes her with her high school daughter Pearl. As the children form friendships with each other, the mothers' opposing viewpoints are brought into conflict.

Mia is the hero of the book: wise, comforting to all, unflappable, unrelenting in pursuit of her craft. Her big secret--that she agreed to act as a surrogate for another couple but instead ran off with her unborn child--is a sign of her love and devotion. At the end she leaves intensely personal, perfectly tailored, on-the-nose art pieces for each member of the Richardson family. Which, c'mon, is just creepy. If she hadn't been run off by Mrs. Richardson, what would she have done with them? While Mia has many admirable traits, I wish she had been more nuanced. Is it that admirable to pursue your audience-less and payment-less art at all costs, even the life of your daughter?

If Mia's the hero, then the suburban characters--no, the suburban moms, of course--are the villains. I'm fully ready to acknowledge there is plenty wrong with suburbanites, but a broadly characterizing them as self-entitled, narrow-minded, and insular feels dully stereotypical at this point, especially when such criticism is always targeted at the moms. Even the names suggest such disdain. Mia, though an adult mother, is just Mia. But Mrs. Richardson and Mrs. McCullough are always their surnames, just another reflection of their lack of identity and coolness. Mrs. Richardson is portrayed as completely unsympathetic, and even though Mrs. McCullough ought to be more sympathetic given her enormous number of miscarriages and the loss of a child she has cared for as her own for a year, she too comes off undeserving because of her money.

Ultimately the book is deeply--and troublingly--romantic. It favors the passionate free spirits and vilifies the orderly suburbanites, all while ignoring reality. It suggests any pursuit of money or suggestion that money correlates to happiness is wrong but says nothing about the horror of poverty. At the end (massive spoilers), Bebe kidnaps her child from the McCulloughs and returns with the child to China. We're led to see it as an act of heroism, a rightful return, but Bebe is also destitute. A mother-daughter bond is powerful but does not provide food. I don't mean that to say that the baby should have stayed with the McCulloughs, but rather to suggest that Bebe and May Ling's ending is not a "happily ever after" as the novel implies. Similarly, 15-year-old Izzy runs away at the end after setting fire to her family home, with the implication that she will miraculously someday join Mia and Pearl and they'll all be happy, free spirits together. Again, this is a horrific misrepresentation of the life of a homeless runaway teen.

In the end the book paints with a very large brush in depicting its teenage and adult characters. Its targets feel easy. It's an engaging mystery with little depth or meaning.

Note: Looking up the cover for the book, I saw that the new Hulu miniseries specifically casts Mia and her daughter Pearl as black, a change from the book where their ethnicity is never referenced. I think this contrasts could add a layer that's missing from the book and also perhaps complicate Mia and Mrs. Richardson's relationship more than the novel does.

"The City We Became" by N.K. Jemisin

At this point, I've read--and adored--quite a few of Jemisin's novels. The City We Became stands out from her other entries by being the first to take place in our world, rather than a fantasy environment. Sure, there's still magic and bizarre creatures and people with powers, but it takes place in New York City! Our New York City!

It's easy to understand such a shift. After all, if there's an American city that's been endlessly mythologized, it's NYC. Heck, there's a whole genre of "love letter to New York" movies, TV shows, and books. Whether you're a born-and-raised city dweller or a farmer in Montana, NYC means something to you. Jemisin plays with that mythology and meaning by taking it literally: in The City We Became, NYC and its boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island) are embodied by human avatars who are endowed with powers drawn from their boroughs' characteristics.

However, by setting her novel in the real New York, Jemisin creates a relationship with the reader that is different from her other works. In the Broken Earth trilogy, for example, readers are on equal footing in their confusion over orogenes' powers, but The City We Became relies on readers' knowledge of--and adoration for--New York to work.

This is where I hit my first stumbling block. There are people for whom New York is everything: the apex of America, the place where it happens. And plenty of those people aren't New Yorkers (and perhaps have never even been to New York). Then there are those for whom cities have little appeal. Though I've been to New York a handful of times and I get that it's a big city and has a lot of cool stuff... meh? Don't get me wrong, the suburb in which I live is dull and lifeless, but I still don't feel the pull of the city. Or know much about it (I'll admit those could be related).

I think that buy-in is key to really loving The City We Became, which relies on the insane and joyful jumble and mismatch of people and ideas that is New York to craft its characters and conflicts. For those of us who don't love it, the New York adulation can become a bit eye-rolling.

In depicting the real New York, Jemisin also gets to play with another real issue: racism (also sexism, homophobia, and ageism, though racism is the more dominant theme). Her books always feature characters of color and address issues of discrimination, but here she gets to address American racism explicitly. There's some good and bad there. On the one hand, some of the discussions have a feel of "Racism 101," lacking much nuance or depth. Because the Big Bad uses white racists to attack, the racism can feel heavy-handed and obvious (Aislyn's father feels especially caricatured), which can obscure the less obvious--but more pervasive--racism today. Still, it's rare to see racism discussed in fantasy settings, so Jemisin's focus feels relevant and warranted.

I also thought the characterization if Aislyn (Staten Island) was especially good. She's a racist xenophobe, but you can understand why she's that way and how her experiences have confirmed her prejudice--and just how challenging it is to undo. The Woman in White (the Big Bad) is especially good at manipulating that prejudice. The focus on "niceness"--Aislyn assumes that because the Woman in White is "nice" and looks like her, she can't be bad--was an especially effective point.

Ultimately, though, The City We Became is a fantasy action novel. And here's the thing. I was annoyed by the book. Rolled my eyes at all the mentions of just how awesome New York is. Thought the characters were cheesy, over played. Yet I kept returning to it whenever I had a minute. Flew through its 500 pages. And even though I knew it would end with a hand-holding mantra of "We are New York!", I still welled up.

Miscellaneous:

• I realized just how rarely we see older heroes in fantasy settings. Though we're frequently reminded that Bronca (the Bronx) is in her 60's (maybe even 70's), I wanted to miscast her as a younger woman. Even Brooklyn is older (50's?) than your typical heroes.
• The boroughs rely on "constructs"--essential New York things--to get their powers (e.g. the first time Manhattan gets his power it's through a credit card). In the final fight, Manhattan turns into King Kong. I was so tickled.
• There's a lot going on with multiple universes/layers of existence, all of which speaks to the Woman in White's motivation. It works to add layers (the Woman in White isn't inherently evil), but it's also confusing and perhaps works against some of the metaphors and symbolism Jemisin's crafted to challenge racism.
• Addendum: There's some interesting stuff suggesting that gentrification (worldwide) is a result of the Woman in White's attempts to weaken and infiltrate the cities to be born. Need to think more on it
• Manhattan's roommate-to-be, Bel, plays an important role in the early chapters and is then completely forgotten. I wonder if he'll return in a more significant way.

"White Fragility" by Robin DiAngelo

White Fragility acts as a sort of primer on racism, specifically the omnipresent racism in the United States that elevates--and simultaneously makes invisible--whiteness in order to perpetuate the subjugation of people of color more broadly and Black Americans in particular. Unlike a lot of popular nonfiction that is narrative-focused and anecdote-heavy, White Fragility operates much more like a textbook: straightforward, term-focused, with easy-to-follow lists and summaries (though she does include illustrative examples). While in other subjects I might have been turned off by the didactic approach, here I appreciated it. The starkness of her claims removes any potential ambiguity; the repetition ensures the point is received, not subconsciously countered by a reader's internal judgment.

What makes DiAngelo's book important, especially for me, is its focus on "good" racists--liberal, progressive whites who sympathize with the historical plight of people of color but disown their own complicity in racism. DiAngelo argues this type of racism is perhaps even more pernicious because it's more challenging to fight and counter, even as it perpetuates oppression.

In reading the book, I was able to understand so much of what I've experienced: my own racist ideologies despite my liberal attitude; my discomfort around people of color; my inability to articulate why racism perseveres today when overt, act-specific racism is condemned; the challenges--and failures--I've experienced trying to talk about racism as a teacher in a primarily white school.

It explains why, though I've spoken with white friends about racism, it's always been in a "tsk, tsk" kind of way, something that's made easier with Trump in the White House. I mean, I'm nothing like him! I've almost never spoken about my own racism. It's what's allowed me to dismiss the intense segregation in which I grew up and in which I currently live as a neutral choice of good schools.

Towards the end of the book, DiAngelo addresses the question of "what should I do when I encounter a white person engaging in racist behavior or holding racist attitudes?" Her immediate response is, "What are you going to do about your racist behavior and attitudes?" Again, I was challenged. I had still been reading the book with a removed attitude. Yes, white people do that!, I'd agreed. Not, I do that. It was so easy to fall into the trap of seeing myself as one of the "good" ones, someone who was aware and owned-up to her racism, someone who would accept exposure as a racist. The most important thing you can do, DiAngelo argues, is to be aware of your own racism and work to break white solidarity. You probably won't change the mind of a fellow white peer by exposing his or her "well-intentioned" racism; but you can break the unspoken agreement (that works to perpetuate racism) that whites stay together by speaking out.

The book has a lot of consequences for my work as an educator. I've struggled to discuss racism in any meaningful way in the classroom, and when it's brought up, it's primarily historical, such as in Huck Finn and A Raisin in the Sun. It's too easy for the students--no, me--to frame the book's overt depictions of racism as bad while dismissing any relevance to today. I've realized discussion about racism needs to be overt, it needs to be about whiteness, and it needs to be about today. DiAngelo has also made it clear that such a discussion will not go over well. Students'--and my own--white fragility will be triggered, and in a predominantly-white classroom, it will feel safer to retreat to white solidarity. But I still need to say it, even if only to challenge the tacit norm. In some ways, her assertions are comforting. She is a career diversity educator, and yet she regularly encounters hostile or reactionary participants. Why should I expected any discussion I lead would end racism? Such an acknowledgement frames the inevitable "failure" of such discussions as a product of white fragility. The success comes in working to challenge it despite the failure.

There are also implications for how I raise my daughters. Like many white people, I've focused on the generic "treat everyone the same!" model, which again perpetuates racism and white superiority by failing to acknowledge the racist system in which they are raised. Though I've spoken with them about historical racism against Black Americans, I've never spoken to them about their own whiteness. Such omissions are compounded by the fact that we live in a highly segregated neighborhood and the girls will attend a highly segregated school. They encounter few people of color in their lives on a regular basis, and my husband and I have no local friends of color. A vague "be kind!" message and some picture books with protagonists of color aren't going to cut it. It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that we'll move to an integrated neighborhood or that our social groups will substantively change. At a minimum, then, I need to explicitly acknowledge those realities to my daughters while finding ways to expand their experiences.

Overall I found White Fragility accessible and clear; I would highly recommend it to any white progressives.

"Red at the Bone" by Jacqueline Woodson

In many ways, Red at the Bone parallels The Mothers, which I read last year for book club. In both books, young Black teenagers become pregnant. Afterwards the mothers seek life far away from home--and their children's fathers--at college, while the young fathers stay home, mourning their lost loves. The central difference is that the pregnancy in The Mothers ends in abortion, while Iris, the mother in Red at the Bone, chooses to keep her child.

That key difference allows Iris' daughter Melody to become a character central to the novel, and it also allows Melody's father--Aubrey--a different path than the father in The Mothers.

Red at the Bone provides the perspective of many characters: Iris, Aubrey, Melody, and Iris' parents. This allows Woodson to give internal and external contextualization to each character's feelings of love and grief, frustration and dreams. I particularly appreciated the voice of Iris' mother, Sabe, as she carries on the legacy of her family while working to support her future. Given the recent controversy over Trump's decision to hold at election rally (the day after Juneteenth) in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of a horrific massacre of Black residents by white mobs in 1921, the novel situating Sabe's life as a reaction to her family's experience in Tulsa was especially meaningful.

The multitude of voices in a slim book does mean some elements get short-shrift. Aubrey and Iris are brought alive as a young people but given little attention as adults, and Aubrey's death on 9/11 felt too quickly gleamed over. I would have also liked more on Iris and Melody's relationship as adults, given its strained beginning.

Overall I preferred The Mothers in its rich depiction of characters, but Red at the Bone offers more nuance into the family dynamics at play.

"Little Eyes" by Samanta Schweblin

Most people of my generation remember Furbies, though I never had one and honestly can't remember having friends who did. Little Eyes plays off the basic premise of Furbies with an essential twist: what if a real human was controlling the Furby--or, in the novel's case, a kentucki? What if one could pay to own a kentucki or could pay to be the one controlling the kentucki? The reader is immediately made to ask the question--which would you choose?

At first, it seems like it would be far better to be a controller operating the kentucki, as they can act anonymously and without real-world consequences. After all, a keeper (one who owns the kentucki) opens him/herself open to all sorts of invasions of privacy as well as safety risks. Who would want some unknown person watching them anonymously any hour of the day?

Though there are obvious risks associated with being a keeper, they're also fairly ordinary risks (theft, burglary, pornographic material), and Schweblin mostly avoids focusing on them. Instead, her primary target seems to be what happens when we reduce one human being to another human being's pet.

Keepers continue to act as ordinary humans, reacting with their new "pet" as much or as little as they want. Controllers are at their keepers' mercy for physical and human access while operating the kentucki. Keepers can speak and interact with the world, whereas kentuckis are given only indiscriminate animal squeaks and motorized wheels. Kentuckis can be physically and emotionally abused with little recourse beyond squeaking angrily and ramming against objects.

By their very nature, kentuckis encourage the dehumanization of another, and Schweblin depicts the insidious results, even among relationships that at first appear benign. There's elderly Emilia, enamored and protective of her younger keeper, Eva. There's Alina, bored while on residence with her artist boyfriend, who at first appears friendly to her mole kentucki. Or the father who initially rejects the kentucki bought by his ex-wife for their son but eventually warms to the "friendship."

The book is organized not as a single narrative, but rather a collection of short stories, with some individual stories broken up into "chapters" throughout the book. Schweblin, an Argentine writer, situates her keepers and controllers throughout the world, for a variety of perspectives.

Ultimately the novel was far more harrowing than I expected (particularly the conclusion to Alina's story) but also fascinating.

"Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster" by Adam Higginbotham

Before reading Midnight in Chernobyl, I knew that Chernobyl was the site of a massive nuclear power plant explosion. I knew that the land surrounding it was abandoned and reclaimed by nature. I knew a lot of people died. I didn't know much.

The book goes into incredible detail about all the missteps--both structurally in the creation of the reactor and operationally on the day of the disaster--that let to the explosion. While many of the operators made mistakes, Higginbotham primarily faults the design and construction of the reactor itself, the shoddy materials and craftsmanship allowed under a USSR more focused on image, speed, and individual prestige than safety and quality.

Even though the errors leading up to the explosion are terrible, so too is the reaction after the explosion occurs. Officials are slow to order evacuations, unwilling to believe that the reactor was truly destroyed. Even more lives were endangered in the confused attempts to quell the reactor fire and to contain the radioactive ash and debris that resulted.

Perhaps what surprised me the most was how little we still know about the effect of radiation. There were a couple dozen nuclear operators and firefighters who died early and relatively quickly of acute radiation sickness. However, estimating the true effect of the nuclear fallout has been difficult, and even understanding its impact--positive or negative--on wildlife and fauna is murky.

For a book awash in technical scientific description of nuclear physics, Midnight in Chernobyl is accessible and engaging. My knowledge of the science is still shaky, but I do have a basic understanding of how and why the explosion occurred.

Similarly, though it can be easy to get lost in similar-sounding Russian names, but the book is surprisingly easy to follow even without keeping them straight. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to be able to describe, even vaguely accurately, more than a couple of the individuals described and their responsibilities, yet I don't feel like my overall comprehension suffered.

This spring my motto has been "everything's a metaphor," and there's plenty of metaphors to be found in the Chernobyl disaster that are applicable to use today as we fight Covid-19. Though battling the disease is quite different than dealing with the fallout of a human-caused nuclear disaster, there's lessons to be learned. There's the fact that we're willing to marshal enormous resources to fix catastrophic problems--but very bad at taking the simpler measures that would have prevented them in the first place. I was also struck by how often people were making life-or-death decisions on incredibly little or incomplete information. There were some bad actors, but more often than not, there were individuals making decisions without any real knowledge of what they were doing. Huge amounts of effort, time, money, and--most importantly--human life, were spent for naught. The book also highlights the huge disparities in our knowledge. Yes, we can harness the power of nuclear energy, but there's so much we don't know about how it works and its effect on humans. That point also resonates during the pandemic. We can build incredible computers and have stunning technology yet everyday it feels like we're getting contradictory information about how Covid-19 spreads and how to treat it.

"Normal People" by Sally Rooney

I'm happy to engage in "did the book or the movie do it better" talk (of course, as a literature aficionado, my alliances typically lay with the book), but that question gets muddled--for me--in the case of Normal People. I began watching the new Hulu miniseries first, then started reading the book, and then read/watched more or less simultaneously, curtailing my reading as necessary to ensure I didn't get ahead of my spot in the miniseries. For that reason, I view the book and miniseries as intertwined, two complementary parts of a whole, rather than separate entities. This point of view is made easier to accomplish because the novel's author, Sally Rooney, wrote a textually-faithful adaptation, at times taking entire conversations word-for-word from the book.

This long introduction is all to say that this is a review of the book and miniseries.

On paper, the story isn't my typical fare. Marianne and Connell attend high school together. She's wealthy but "weird" and unpopular; he's poor (his mother is a housekeeper for Marianne's family) but easy-going and popular. Nonetheless, they're drawn to each other and begin a secret affair. The book then follows them as they come together--and move apart--over the next several years. It could be a cliche Nicholas Sparks' novel, or a melodramatic young adult book.

Somehow it's neither, and even though nearly the entire story is about Marianne and Connell's relationship (other characters come and go, but all remain bit players), I'm not even sure it's a romance. Instead, it's perhaps about the kind of friendship that allows you to grow as a person by allowing you to be yourself. A friendship that validates the part of you you hide from others.

One of the elements I most enjoyed about the novel was its portrayal of the contradiction in one's outer persona and inner life. Marianne presents as cold and uncaring, but inside she's deeply shattered by her family's neglect and outright abuse; she seeks pain from others as a way of recreating her inner feelings of self-loathing. Connell presents as "chill" and "one of the guys," but he struggles with feeling like an impostor, of seeing no place for him in the world. Though Marianne and Connell hurt each other as they struggle to maintain that outer persona, they also allow each other to go beyond a neat box.

The most disquieting element of the book and miniseries is Marianne's descent into unhealthy BDSM, arousing out of a desire for submission. She ends up in a series of relationships that abuse that desire and leave her feeling even more empty. Her desire for submission is complicated, as clearly it arises from her abusive family, yet it feels simplistic--and unfair--to suggest she "shouldn't" want it. Though not easy to understand, with a healthy partner (ultimately Connell) she can achieve that feeling in a loving and supportive relationship.

Rooney frames the book's dialogue without quotation marks, a modern style that effectively emphasizes the intimacy of Connell and Marianne's relationship. The miniseries can't play with punctuation, so in its one significant departure from the novel, it includes several explicit sex scenes. In other stories it could be prurient, but the emphasis is on the intimacy, on the way sex allows two reserved and uneasy people to feel free and understood. The blunt nudity doesn't feel gratuitous, but rather reflects the joy of reciprocated vulnerability.

There were a few missteps for me. Connell's brilliance in school and writing is somewhat overplayed. Marianne's family is so needlessly and unceasingly cruel that they feel like cartoon villains rather than real people. There are some conversations that are meant to make Connell and Marianne sound sophisticated (like one complaining about the emptiness of Facebook posts after a friend's death) that instead feel worn.

Nonetheless, it's a captivating book and an engrossing miniseries. The book stands alone, but by itself you don't get the lilting Irish accents and the gorgeous Irish countryside (or, yes, okay, the sex. Or Connell in a school uniform). It's worth it to consume both.