Wandering Stars and My Friends (Impressions)

 

"A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors or how strong their weapons." 

Pros:

• Memorable Characters - especially, as indicated by the above quote, the women.
• Part One is solid historical fiction from the Native American perspective
• Tommy Orange writes very readable historical fiction.

Cons:

• Part Two (set in 2018), the aftermath of the tragedy that ended Orange's There There, makes for tedious reading well before it is over. 
• The novel offers little that hasn't already been said just as well in numerous other similar novels written by Native Americans.

"The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and, although nothing does, we continue to live in that dream."

Pros:

• Well developed, complex characters
• Seamlessly ties together Libyan history from the 1980s through the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011
• Excellent prose style
• Vividly captures the paranoia that Libyan exiles lived with for decades
• Satisfying and somewhat hopeful ending

Cons: None that are worth even mentioning

These are the seventh and eighth 2024 Booker Prize nominees that I've read. My Friends is one of my favorites so far, Wandering Stars one of my least favorites - with five still to go.

Wild Houses - Colin Barrett (2024 Booker Prize Nomi ee)

 Colin Barrett's Wild Houses is a solid example of psychological crime fiction, and I recommend it to anyone who, like me, enjoys this subgenre of crime fiction. But for this exercise, my rating scale is a little different from what I use when personally rating non-Booker Prize nominees. In this instance, I am doing as much of a forced ranking exercise as I am an awarding of "stars" to the book. And of the thirteen books nominated for this year's prize, I see Wild Houses fitting solidly in the upper half of the thirteen-book pack, producing a relative rating of something like 3.75 stars. Just something to keep in mind.

Dev lives alone on the outskirts of a small Irish town, seldom leaving his property other than to attend to his basic needs. He quit his job after his mother died, and now lives alone in the family home with his dead mother's old dog. And he likes it that way, so when his two cousins bang on the door late one night with a battered teenager they want to stash somewhere for a few days, Dev is not at all happy about it. But Dev, huge a man as he is, is not the type to put up much of a protest about anything, so he suddenly finds himself with three uninvited guests - two of whom he knows could explode into violence at any moment.

As Dev will learn, it's all part of a revenge plot his cousins have hatched against the teenager's older brother, a man who owes their boss a considerable amount of money. Dev is a simple enough man, but he is far from stupid, and he knows that the likelihood of his rather dim cousins pulling off something as complicated as a kidnapping for ransom and revenge is pretty low - and that he will go down the drain with them when it all blows up. 

So there they are. Three cousins, two of whom are brothers, and a teenager who desperately wants to escape the situation he mysteriously finds himself in. Dev's old house becomes a pressure cooker, and as the hours creep by, it becomes more and more likely that someone is going to explode. Dev and his cousins' prisoner can only hope they are not destroyed by the blast.

Barrett has written a character-driven crime novel here, but one in which he doesn't limit himself to exploring the past of only his four main characters and how each is reacting to what looks more and more like a life or death situation. Instead, Barrett alternates chapters set in the old farmhouse where the boy is being held with chapters showing what the teen hostage's mother and young girlfriend are going through as they reluctantly team up to find the missing boy before it is too late to save him. The best things about Wild Houses are the six or seven characters at its heart, each of them memorable and very real in their own way.

Wild Houses is likely to be one of the best crime fiction novels I read this year - but the Booker Prize competition is stiff this year. And everything is relative.

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Updated Personal Ratings of 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden - 5.0 stars

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars

Wild Houses - Colin Barrett - 3.75 stars

Headshot - Rita Bulwinkel - 3.5 stars

This Strange Eventual History - Claire Messoud - 2.5 stars

Orbital - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars

2024 Booker Prize Shortlist Announcement

 

Well, the 2024 Booker Prize shortlist dropped just over an hour ago, and it's left me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I've already read three of the six finalists; on the other, Orbital, the book I think the least of so far, made the cut along with the Australian entry Stone Yard Devotional, a book that may or may not ever be published in the U.S. as far as I can tell. This already reminds me of last year when the Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song, was not published in this country until after it won the prize. As Yogi Berra supposedly once said, "it's deja vu all over again."

Here are the other five finalists to go along with that wonderful cover of Stone Yard Devotional:

So there are now two American authors (James and Creation Lake), one British author (Orbital), one Canadian author (Held), one Dutch author (The Safekeep), and one Australian author (Stone Yard Devotional) still in the running. Of the ones I haven't read yet, I'm seeing the most positive comments about Held, so I hope to get my hands on that one soon.

Question: now that Book Depository has closed it's doors forever, does anyone know how I might obtain a copy of the Australian entry without breaking the bank on postage...and shipping time. I don't think I can buy an e-book version in the U.S. unless the book is published here. Am I wrong (I hope) about that?

Headshot - Rita Bullwinkel (2024 Booker Prize Nominee)

 

I don't remember ever having watched a women's boxing competition before I began reading Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot. I simply had no interest in the sport, and would almost certainly not have read this one had it not been part of the 2024 Booker Prize longlist. And I would have missed out on a really good book for that reason.

Rather than get bogged down in the mechanics of the sport and this particular tournament, Bullwinkel chooses to go inside the heads of the eight young women competing in Reno to be "the best in the world at something." How the girls, all of them between fifteen and eighteen years old, got it into their heads that winning a competition in Reno that only they, a handful of family members, their coaches, the paid judges, and the gym owner even know about is another story...but they all believe it. And winning it is the most important thing in their lives - until all of a sudden it isn't.

The tournament begins with eight competitors, four matches on the first day leaving four winners to move on to the semi-final bouts the next morning. The second day's first two matches determine which two girls will fight for the tournament championship later in the day. Headshot presents chapter-like segments covering each of the seven, total, fights. 

Bullwinkel sets the novel's overall tone early in the first match:

"This imagined winning in front of people who will never see her win, even if she does win, is symptomatic of the fact that Artemis Victor, like Andi Taylor, is more than anything, delusional. The desired audiences will never see them win. Even if they were to go and box professionally, hit some women in bikinis in the basement of a casino in Las Vegas, they wouldn't impress the people who they encounter in their lives outside of boxing. They would only impress each other, other women who are trying to touch someone with their fists."

In each of the first four matches, the reader learns who these girls are, where they come from, and the whys and hows that explain their presence in Reno, Nevada to pay so dearly for the chance to go home with a cheap little plastic trophy - along with the right to think of themselves as "the best in the world at something." Readers are made privy to the innermost thoughts of the eight competitors, their doubts, jealousies, resentments, goals, and hopes. Headshot is very much a character-driven novel, one that happens to take place almost entirely inside a shabby gym's shabby boxing ring.

The girls, as different as they may look to outsiders and even to each other, are really more alike than they are different. They are all emotionally fragile and for them boxing is their best chance of being "seen" by their peers and family. They just want others to acknowledge that they are real and valuable people. Only one of them can leave Reno feeling that she's accomplished what they all come there hoping to achieve, but every single one of them is going to learn something important about herself while she's there.

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Personal Ratings of 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden - 5.0 stars

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars

Headshot - Rita Bullwinkel - 3.5 stars

Wild Houses - Colin Barrett - 3.0 stars

This Strange Eventful History - Claire Messoud - 2.5 stars

Orbital - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars

The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden (2024 Booker Prize Nominee)

 

Just as I was starting to have serious doubts about the judgement of this year's Booker Prize selection committee (and this is the fifth longlisted nominee of theirs I've read), I started to read Yael Van Der Wouden's The Safekeep. I almost immediately sensed that there was something different about this one, but I didn't want to get my hopes up too high that this lone Dutch nominee would at least give Percival Everett's James a solid run for the prize money. Well, in my estimation at least, The Safekeep does more than that; it's even better than James. 

The novel opens in 1961 in a more rural part of the Netherlands where people have finally put World War II far enough behind them to begin thinking about the future. Isabel is living alone in the big house she grew up in with her two brothers, Louis and Hendrik. The siblings have only recently lost their mother but, Isabel's brothers left home long before the woman died. Still, this is the only home that Isabel has ever known, and she is quite content to be living there alone. She seldom sees her brothers, each of whom are busily living separate lives of their own, and would rather keep it that way, really.

That all changes when Louis introduces his latest in a long string of girlfriends to Isabel and Hendrik over dinner one night. Isabel makes it very clear that she despises the little bleached blonde, and she makes her escape from the restaurant as quickly as possible - hoping never to see Eva again. But when Louis learns that he will be out of town on business for several weeks, he insists that Eva stay in the family home with Isabel because the young woman has no place else to stay while he is gone.  

Isabel is paranoid about protecting the things in her home and is already convinced that the girl who cleans house for her every few days is walking away with the family heirlooms one piece at a time. After Eva moves in, little things seem to disappear even quicker than before despite Isabel's attempts never to lose track of Eva when she is inside the house. As the disdain the two women feel for each other grows day by day, the house begins to feel to both as if it is about to explode.

And that's when the fun begins. There are at least two major plot twists in The Safekeep that caught me by surprise just about the moment I was starting to get comfortable with where I thought the story must be heading (thank goodness I was wrong both times). Van Der Wouden's clues about her dramatic storyline shifts are strong enough that readers won't be particularly shocked by the direction she goes if they are paying attention to the details. It is exactly these plot twists that make The Safekeep stand out in the crowd for me. 

This is a character-driven novel filled with multiple characters that began to feel more and more real to me with every new detail I learned about their personal histories. It is also one of the most sexually explicit novels I've read in a while, something that I mention here only as a warning of sorts for readers who try to avoid novels of this nature. The Safekeep is not a perfect novel, but it is definitely my favorite of the five Booker Prize nominees I've read to this point.

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Personal Ratings for 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden - 5.0 stars

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars 

This Strange Eventful History - Claire Messoud - 2.5 stars

Orbital  - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars

Orbital - Samantha Harvey (2024 Booker Prize Nominee)

 

(This begins what will likely be a months-long project to read and review the thirteen 2024 Booker Prize nominees. I read James by Percival Everett, another of the nominees, in June 2024. That review can be found here.)

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The premise of Samantha Harvey's Orbital is a promising one that offers numerous possibilities for exploration. Six people are in orbit around the earth in the international space station: two Russian men, an American man, a British woman, an Italian man, and a Japanese woman. Three of them have already been there for three months by the time that the other three arrive to begin their own six-month stints in obit around the planet. At this point, the reader would expect to learn more about the daily routines and assignments of the individual astronauts, their motivations for being there, a little about how they ended up becoming space explorers, and maybe best of all, what kind of personal relationships, emotional bonds, or irritations from each other's constant presence will develop over time. 

And to be fair, there's some of all of those things in Orbital. Just not enough.

Harvey tries hard to make each of her six characters into the unique individuals they deserve to be, even going so far as to labeling them this way early on:

Anton (Russian) - "the spaceship's heart,"

Pietro (Italian) - "its mind,"

Roman (Russian) - "its hands" and current captain,

Shaun (American) - "its soul,"

Chie (Japanese) - "its conscious," and

Nell (British) - "its breath."

Harvey, especially at first, offers some compelling, well-written observations such as when she mentions that the six are a kind of "floating family." She says:

"They are both much more and much less than that. Even the slightest mood swing can drastically change how they see and feel about each other. They sometimes get a feeling of merging."

...or when she explains how safe they all have come to feel inside their self-contained little world:

"...they are encapsulated, a submarine moving alone through the vacuum depths, and when they leave it they will feel less safe. They will reappear on the earth's surface as strangers of a kind. Aliens learning a mad new world."

There are just not enough moments like these despite the personal losses and fears some of the six try to keep hidden from the rest of the crew.  This is not a long book (probably the shortest of the thirteen nominees), and the reader is only along for the ride for 16 days worth of orbits. The sights outside the space station windows can change only so much, and the observations and reactions of six people to those sights even less. With repetition, those observations, and the prose used to describe them, begin to get less and less striking or effective relatively quickly. 

I hate to say it, but I was ready to reach the end of Orbital long before I got there. I hoped it would be saved by one of those big, dramatic endings that sometimes work so well, but Orbital just sort of fizzled away until it was done and gone.

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Personal Ratings for 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars

Orbital  - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars

James - Purcival Everett

 

 Purcival Everett's James begins as a reimagining of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told this time through the eyes of the man Huck loves to torment with his practical jokes, Miss Watson's slave Jim. For about half the book, that's exactly what James delivers as readers find themselves immersed in the familiar world created by Twain in his classic novel. That's all interesting and kind of fun, but then Everett abandon's Twain's plotting and completely changes the tone and nature of James. And abandoning what has always seemed to me to be the much weaker half of Twain's novel, along with Twain's farcical tone, and suddenly shifting to a serious and more realistic tone to tell the rest of Jim's story works brilliantly. 

Right from the first page, James promises to be fun, especially for those readers familiar with the Twain novel. 

"Those little bastards were hiding out there, in the tall grass...Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy...It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night."

 Jim, who calls himself James and holds night classes to teach the slave children how to speak the Black dialect that white people expect to hear them speak, is almost exactly the opposite of what Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn think he is. Jim, a self-taught reader and philosopher, is every bit as brilliant as the boys believe he is stupid and childlike. That's the plan - and it works really well for Jim and his family right up until the moment that Jim learns he is about to be separated from his wife and daughter by being sold separately to a new owner.

Then all bets are off - and the novel really takes off.

James becomes much darker in tone - and in content - as Jim desperately tries to survive on the run long enough to rescue his wife and daughter from bondage at least long enough for them to make a northward run for freedom together. Jim, with some help from Huck when he needs it most, will still have to risk everything if he is to succeed in his quest to free himself and his family for good. This half of the book also features a "Big Reveal" that although not entirely unexpected at the point it finally arrives, will still delight most readers with its audacity.

James is likely to go down as one of the better known books coming out of 2024, and it will probably be considered for more than one literary prize along the way. I do think it will read differently for readers familiar with Twain's plotting in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn than for those who have perhaps not read Twain since they were children. James reminds me a little of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, but I will be surprised if it attains quite the same level of success.