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Dance of the Happy Shades, by Alice Munro

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Hearing of Munro’s death sent me back to this, her first book, winner of the Governor General’s Award in 1968. One of my favorite authors, Munro wrote short stories exclusively, forcing her to master the art of compression. Even these early stories demonstrate—to my delight—the kind of concise writing we expect in poetry. Munro is lauded for capturing the life of small towns in rural Ontario, drawing on her experience of growing up in one such town where she was born in 1931. As Hermione Lee writes in the New York Review:

Munro’s “real life” ingredients become enormously familiar to us: the childhood in the fox farm on the edge of town, the mother with incurable Parkinson’s, the studious girl reading her way out of the country into university, the expectations for young women in 1940s and 1950s provincial, conservative, colonial Canada; the early marriage and motherhood in Vancouver, the condescending young husband, the adultery, the divorce, the deaths of her parents, the returns home.

Yet even when I come across some of these familiar details, each story feels new to me and each character a new and different person. She establishes the new character immediately, sometimes by starting in media res, sometimes by giving her an unmistakably original voice.

Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on . . . “The Time of Death”

Now that Mary McQuade had come, I pretended not to remember her. It seemed the wisest thing to do. She herself said, “if you don’t remember me you don’t remember much.” “Images”

Setting and mood, as well, are deftly established with just a few sentences. Here, the narrator has returned to her hometown for a visit and is sitting on the steps with her sister Maddy in the quiet night.

At 10:30 a bus goes through the town, not slowing much; we see it go by at the end of our street. It is the same bus I used to take when I came home from college, and I remember coming into Jubilee on some warm night, seeing the earth bare around the massive roots of the trees, the drinking fountain surrounded by little puddles of water on the main street, the soft scrolls of blue and red and orange light that said Billiards and Café . . . “The Peace of Utrecht”

This story also illustrates why I value Munro’s work so highly. The tangled relationship between the two sisters, one who stayed to care for their aging mother and one who left, is the fire smoldering between lines laying out the events and memories, the encounters and discords. No story I’d read before this one truly captured the roiling emotions and testy skirmishes between sisters that I’d experienced. Munro is someone who gets me. Was.

Stories, such as “Boys and Girls” where the narrator rejects her mother’s homemaker-in-training chores to join the boys doing far more fun farmwork, speak to me childhood. Others could have been written about my life as a young mother. “The Office” begins:

The solution to my life occurred to me one evening while I was ironing a shirt. It was simple but audacious. I went into the living room where my husband was watching television and I said, “I think I ought to have an office.”

Girls and young women populate the stories in this first collection. I’ve read many of her later stories, which only get better, and now am looking forward to reading her last two books.

Have you read Alice Munro’s work? What is your favorite story?

Poetry of Richard Wilbur

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I host a monthly poetry discussion group where we read and talk about the work of a single poet. These sessions give me, and others, a chance to explore the work of a variety of poets whom I might not otherwise have read, with the additional insight gained from everyone’s comments. As a poet myself, I have learned a lot about what different people look for in a poem, what they notice or find appealing, how they interpret certain lines. Lingering on a single poem for a time also encourages me to stay with a poem when I am reading alone and make the effort to draw back the layers, instead of reading quickly and moving on.

This month we read poems by Richard Wilbur. I’d heard of him: a famous twentieth century poet, he was the second poet laureate of the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize twice, the National Book Award, and many other awards and honors. However, I’d never read his work.

Known for using traditional patterns of rhyme and meter and for optimistic themes, his work fell out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s when confessional poetry and free verse became more popular. Eventually, though, the pendulum swung back again, combined with his own tendency toward more personal poems as he grew older. That was when he won his second Pulitzer and was nominated as poet laureate.

A good example of traditional form is Black Birch in Winter, with four quatrains and an AABB rhyme scheme in each. Some people were distracted by the rhymes, but we all liked the careful description of the rough bark and the way he compared it to “mosaic columns in a church” and “the trenched features of an aged man.” Trenched! We found many examples of fresh and surprising uses of familiar words as we went through the poems.

The final stanza lifted the poem into the realm of the extraordinary, where he reminds us that despite their “shriveled skin,” these trees are still “doomed to annual rebirth.”

And this is all their wisdom and their art-

To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.

As I age myself, I know I will return to these lines.

Another poem that surprised me was The Death of a Toad. Caught by a power mower, the toad manages to get to the garden and hid under the cinera leaves. While on one level the scene is about the conflict of humans with nature, on another it makes me consider our own vulnerability; a catastrophe can come out of nowhere and disrupt our destiny and all our plans. Even more, the author’s close observation of the toad and its decline reminds me to pay attention, always, no matter how trivial the subject.

We were all stunned into silence by Cottage Street, 1953, which describes a meeting over tea between Sylvia Plath and the author, hosted by Edna Ward. Ward was Wilbur’s mother-in-law who was friends with Plath’s mother, who is also present at the tea party. Did it really happen or only imagined? Doesn’t matter. What comes across so powerfully is his own humility and shame that having been invited to help her, save her, he finds himself impotent. And the two women, Edna and Sylvia, and the choices they made.

Wilbur’s most anthologised poem, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, begins during hypnagogia, that is, the moment between sleeping and waking, before consciousness and rational thought fully take over. With images of angels and laundry and nuns, the author explores the interface between body and soul and ends with “keeping their difficult balance.”

I’m grateful for the opportunity to dig into this author’s work, and for the assistance of my fellow poetry lovers. There are so many poets and so much poetry, yet we can explore them one poet at a time, one poem at a time.  

What poet have you heard of but not yet read?

The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

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I’m always thrilled to stumble across an inspiring story based on real events, a story that’s been lost to history. In 1865, the Civil War is over, but freedom has only worsened the lives of former slaves. On the Montgomery Plantation, twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo carries the trauma of her years as a slave: her mother being sold away, her father lynched, and beatings that have scarred her back and soul.

She hates, with all her being, and cannot find room in her heart for love, even for William, the older preacher who loves her. Still, she knows he is a good man and agrees to marry him. She knows what she wants: to make real her vision of a Happy Land where people can live freely and be treated with respect. She envisions a cooperative community, where everything is shared so that all can prosper.

When events make it impossible to stay on the plantation, Louella and William lead a group of former slaves to find a place to settle and build their community. They travel for months, encountering dangers and surprising succor in the post-Civil War South, eventually settling in the Carolinas. Louella and William are appointed Queen and King of Happy Land. It thrives, growing to 500 families, but internal friction develops and threatens all they’ve built.  

Miller’s fictionalised version of this true story captures the drama of Louella’s terrible journey from hate to love. The injustice and outright abuse can be hard to read about, but will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with slavery and Reconstruction. Another aspect that can be off-putting but not unexpected for someone of the time is Louella’s devout Christianity. While no doubt historically accurate, Louella constantly excusing injustice by saying that God has His ways or hoping God would hear her need seemed to take all the air out of the story.

Luckily she often speaks her mind and finds creative ways to accomplish her goals. Such parts kept the story moving. By having Louella take the lead and speak her mind, Miller shows us a complex character. Each of the characters—and there are a lot—is fully depicted as an individual.

Given the egalitarian nature of Happy Land, I was uncomfortable with the titles of king and queen, especially since they were used as day-to-day nomenclature, i.e., referring to King William or the King and Louella likewise. Of course, this is one of the dangers of using real events for a novel. The author shouldn’t go against the actual historical record.

Having just read Erasure, a novel of how the public and the publishing industry only want and will only accept one view of The Black Experience, I appreciated this portrait of a harmonious and loving marriage as well as that of a thriving community.

The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

The book’s language is fairly simple; in fact, I wondered if it wasn’t a Middle Grade or Young Adult novel, though the traumatic violence rules out Middle Grade. However, it’s an easy read and an immensely valuable addition to our understanding of the time and also of what one woman can accomplish. She had a dream, and she made it come true.

What novel have you read that was based on real events?

Erasure, by Percival Everett

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Several friends have recommended the film American Fiction, and of course I wanted to read the novel first. Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed Monk in reference to the great jazz musician and composer, teaches at a California college and writes dense, experimental novels that attract almost no readers and the criticism that they do not reflect the African American experience. My immediate thought was: okay, we’re in fantasyland. In real life, such a writer would not be able to have a second novel printed, much less—I think it’s four—and retain a devoted literary agent.

As his latest novel racks up rejections from publishers, Monk is incensed that debut novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a middle-class black woman who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days,” is a huge bestseller and will be a movie. It embodies all the worst racial stereotypes, but is being hailed as a genuine and brilliant representation of the African American experience, a criticism frequently aimed at Monk’s work. Apparently it’s a takeoff on the real 1996 novel Push by a person using the pseudonym Sapphire.

Monk is infuriated not only by the praise and commercial success of this exploitative novel but also by the publishing industry and book-buying public’s obliteration of the experience of the many African Americans like himself. So he writes his own parody of these stereotypes and sends it to his agent using the obvious pseudonym of Stag R. Lee. He assumes everyone will recognise it for the satire that it is, and is shocked when it sells for a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal.

Meanwhile, he is wrestling with family issues. His mother and sister in Washington, D.C. need his help, while his brother is suffering the personal and professional fallout of having come out as gay. Presenting a paper at a conference in D.C. gives him the opportunity to see his mother and sister, but also entails encounters with bitter literary rivals of his own.

A big chunk of the book is a complete version of his surprisingly successful novel, which I found painful to read. Well, I didn’t read more than the beginning and the end. I began to think that Everett’s real purpose with this novel was to laugh at all the snobby readers who agreed with Monk’s anger at the praise of anything reinforcing these heinous racial stereotypes, and then devoured and praised an example of the same.

Oh, and look! Commercial success for Everett’s book and now a movie deal. Very meta.

Everett also inserts the complete paper Monk presents at the conference, a send-up of semiotics. A little of each was enough. Satire that goes on too long becomes boring. On the other hand, I thought the frame story of the family was well done, especially the mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. I began to think that this would have been better as a good novella or even a short story.

A little more thought led me to the realisation that—trying not to give away too much here—Monk in the frame story is actually doing the same things his protagonist in the parody does and experiencing the same frustrations; only the details are different. More meta; interesting, but not enough to sell me on including all the dreck.

Another thing I liked about the frame story was the representation of a writer’s mind. Every now and then Monk would get a story idea and create a short scene for it, or a thought would prompt him to create a short dialogue between two historical figures, philosophers, artists, etc. Plopped right into the story, these were brilliant. Been there, for sure.

There were a few more fantasyland moments, undercutting the supposed realism of the frame story. Overall, though, I found a lot of the book hilarious, boring at times, infuriating at others. A good workout!

Have you seen American Fiction or read the novel on which it’s based? What did you think of them?

The Stranger in the Woods, by Michael Finkel

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Subtitled The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, this nonfiction book introduces us to Chris Knight, a man who spent 27 years living alone in a tent in the Maine woods. Not alone the way Thoreau was at Walden Pond, where he entertained guests and took his laundry home to his mother, but truly alone. In all that time, the only word Knight uttered to another person was a gruff Hi to a hiker he ran into.

Obsessed with avoiding discovery, or even another chance encounter, he never built a fire or walked in the woods when there was snow on the ground. When the ground was dry, he knew the woods so well that he could move through them without making a sound or leaving a sign.

In researching this book, Finkel sets out to answer the questions we can’t help but ask: Why would he choose such a life? How did he survive the winters in just a tent? What about food, medicine, etc.? No matter how much you cut back on that etcetera, you surely need a sharp knife, a candle or lantern, clothes to replace those that wear out.

We learn, often in his own words, how Chris broke into nearby cabins to steal food, clothing, reading material, and other things—only dire necessities and only cabins that didn’t have year-round occupants. People in the area told stories about the North Pond hermit, and it was during a theft that he was finally arrested.

Wondering why anyone would choose such a hard path, Finkel delves into the lives of solitaries, from the Desert Fathers and anchorites to solitary confinement in prisons. He reviews current thinking about the autism spectrum and goes further to consult scientists about a physical component.

One’s desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin, sometimes called the master chemical of sociability, and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.

Nurture always goes hand in hand with nature, and we learn that Chris’s family was compulsively private, living off the grid and having only minimal contact with neighbors. When 20-year-old Chris disappeared, driving away from his first and only job (one that he’d only barely begun), they didn’t report him missing or try to find him.

Finkel interviews Chris in jail and exchanges letters with him, thus giving us first-person accounts of Chris’s life in the woods. I can only imagine, having worked in one, how awful jail must have been for this man who had lived in silence (aside from natural sounds) for 27 years.

It’s a fascinating story, and one ripe for discussion. Was Chris lucky to be arrested before he aged to the point where he could no longer manage his survival? He was already slowing down. While he never took much, Chris’s thefts scared people and invaded their privacy; only once he was arrested did they return to not locking their doors. And what about Finkel himself? His pursuit of Chris in the face of the man’s reluctance to talk or meet with him borders on stalking. Or does it cross over? Is it okay because he’s brought us this incredible story?

While privacy ranks high on my list of moral imperatives, I have to admit that I’m grateful to know this much of Chris’s story. I make time to be alone, preferably among the trees, when I can. I’ve lived in a tent in the New England woods, though in a shelter with a wood stove in the winter. I would never do what he did, but a part of me understands it.

It’s possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

Have you read a story—fiction or nonfiction—about someone who has turned their back on society?

The Quiet and the Loud, by Helena Fox

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In this Young Adult novel, Georgia at 18 is barely holding it together. Taking a gap year at home in Sydney, Australia, before college, she keeps getting texts from her alcoholic father who lives in Seattle, Washington. He has been a danger to her for her whole life, but she feels duty-bound to help him. The story opens with a vivid flashback to one such occasion.

Her best friend Tess, also 18, has deliberately gotten pregnant, determined to become a teen mom, and assumes that Georgia will not only bring her smoothies and wait attendance on her, but will also help her raise the child. They’ve been best friends forever, so Georgia feels she must support Tess, even as her attention is being drawn in other directions.

Such as her rewarding part-time work teaching art to children, which offsets her friend Laz’s despair about the climate crisis. Her grandfather, who lives with them, may be losing his marbles, or at least his teeth, but adds comic relief with his relentless pursuit of elderly women.

Georgia’s mother is happily married to successful artist Mel, whose brusque demeanor hides a penetrating insight. She is the one who gifts Georgia with two successful coping mechanisms: kayaking and painting.

Suspense grows as we learn more about how her father’s alcoholism has affected her. As he spirals and Tess becomes mired in post-partum depression, 2019’s wildfires come ever closer, sending Laz into an apocalyptic frenzy and Georgia to the brink of despair.

I loved Fox’s previous novel How It Feels to Float, and am myself overly sensitive to loud sensory input, so I was eager to read this one. I was not disappointed. While the themes can be difficult, Georgia’s voice is a welcome companion.

Much of the writing is gorgeous, especially lyrical passages out in the kayak. And Georgia’s burgeoning feelings for her new friend Calliope are handled with grace and compassion.

Can you recommend a Young Adult novel that you’ve enjoyed?

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

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Like Antonia in Alvarez’s Afterlife, Richard, a widower, has just retired from his career as a college professor in what was formerly East Berlin.

Perhaps many more years still lie before him, or perhaps only a few. In any case, from now on Richard will no longer have to get up early to appear at the Institute. As of today, he has time—plain and simple . . . his head still works just the same as before. What’s he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head?

Such transitional moments in our lives roll grief and possibility, loneliness and freedom into a turbulent mess. The first thing in Richard’s mind, however, is the calm lake on whose shore he lives, and the man who recently drowned there, his body never found. All summer everyone has avoided the lake: swimmers, fishermen, boaters. Nobody talks about it; they just stay away. It stays calm.

On a chance trip to Alexanderplatz, he doesn’t notice the African refugees staging a hunger strike there until he sees them on the news later. He didn’t notice them because he was thinking of the Polish town Rzeszów, which had a system of tunnels, essentially a second city underground, originally built in the Middle Ages where Jews took refuge when the Nazis invaded.

Moved by the refugees’ refusal to speak or give their names, the academic in Richard stirs to life: Here is a project! He decides to learn who these men are by interviewing them. Through Richard we hear their voices, their stories, and learn about what it is to be a refugee.

I loved Erpenbeck’s Visitation and looked forward to this novel. The beginning is brilliant. Her imagery and profound insight moved me deeply and had me marking page after page. However, the story slows as Richard starts tangling with bureaucracy and coaxing the refugees to talk to him. It’s a difficult tightrope for a writer: to reflect the tedium of the situation without boring the reader.

The story picks up again as we get to know the refugees individually, and as Germany’s bureaucracy begins to close in on them, narrowing their chances of being granted residence and thereby a work permit. As a lawyer whom Richard consults says, “The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense.”

Most members of my book club agreed that, while this was a challenging read, partly because of the pacing in the middle and partly because of the subject matter, it was also an important book to read. We all learned a lot, even those who already worked in refugee services. Those who read through to the end found it a worthy cap to the story, and were moved by the generous responses of the friends with whom Richard shared his stories of the refugees.

We talked about the symbolism of the drowned man. Like the Polish city, there are hidden things here as well as things we turn our eyes away from. When do you become visible? What do you have to do?

When you do become visible, as when Richard listens to the men and shares their stories with his friends, things do change—minds change.

I also found much here about communication woven into the story. Some have to do with the refugees’ struggle to learn German and Richard’s to learn some of their languages. Some have to do with how words are like borders: mutable signs, or written in sand, the way the boy from Niger learned his own language, lost when the wind blows.

The Italian laws have different borders in mind than the German laws do. What interests him is that as long as a border of the sort he’s been familiar with for most of his life runs along a particular stretch of land and is permeable in either direction after border control procedures, the intentions of the two  countries can be perceived by the use of barbed wire, the configuration of fortified barriers, and things of that sort. But the moment these borders are defined only by laws, ambiguity takes over, with each country responding , as it were, to questions its neighbor hasn’t asked . . .  Indeed, the law has made a shift from physical reality to the realm of language.

The border between life and death is here too: the chances that determine which side we will land on, the ghosts that cross over. Richard is sometimes nostalgic for the lost world of his childhood in East Berlin, before the wall came down. As one member of my book club noted, perhaps that early grounding in communal living makes Richard more open to caring about the fate of these others. Indeed, the novel calls out the weakness of capitalism: its callous disregard of the common good.

As Mary Oliver asked: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Here is one man’s answer.

What novel have you read that illuminates one of the great political issues of our time?

Fortune Favors the Dead, by Stephen Spotswood

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Fortune Favors the Dead

This witty, fast-paced mystery starts in New York City in 1945, with Willowjean “Will” Parker and her boss, famous detective Lillian Pentecost, investigating the murder of society matron Abigail Collins. Will has been Pentecost’s assistant and protégé for three years, the two having met when Will saved the older woman’s life with her knife-throwing skills.

Knife-throwing? Yes, at the time Will had been working as a roustabout in a traveling circus for five years, gaining some unusual skills. She’s the one telling this story, and her sassy, smart voice makes this a thoroughly enjoyable ride.

Pentecost, too, is unusual, and not just because she is a female detective at a time when women who stepped up during WWII are being forced into domestic roles while jobs are given to the returning men. She has multiple sclerosis, a progressively degenerative disease which at this point affects her stamina and gait but not her brilliant mind.

I loved both these characters before even getting to the story. Casting someone with a chronic disease as a major character is a rare and brilliant stroke. Plus, Will undermines all the stereotypes for women, not to mention circus workers, of the time. The duo quickly put me in mind of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, reimagined as women, but I love that Will is still a young woman, still finding her way in the world, unlike Archie.

On to the story! Abigail Collins is found in the locked study of her home during a big Halloween party at her mansion. She’s been beaten to death with a crystal ball, used in the séance held there, while seated in the chair where her husband killed himself a year before. Rumor holds that the ghost of her husband appeared during the séance, so many believe he is the murderer.

There are plenty of other, more corporeal, suspects. The psychic Ariel Belestrade has been on Ms. Pentecost’s radar for some time. Skeptical anthropology professor Olivia Waterhouse has also been investigating Belestrade for fraudulent practices and written her up in her most recent book. The psychic’s seductive power is brilliantly portrayed in some of the book’s most chilling scenes.

Even more complications ensue when Rebecca Collins, daughter of the murdered woman and a continuing frustration to her straight-laced brother, starts putting moves on Will, and Will finds herself responding to them.

Spotswood does a great job of bringing the period to life with details small and large, whether about circus life, nightclubs, or the mean streets of NYC. As a side note, the cover art boldly announces both its classic noir roots and Will’s unusual character. An intriguing cover will always make me look twice at a book.

For a fun read, you can’t go wrong with this cosy mystery with a bite to it. Will’s voice and personality alone are worth the price of admission. I’m looking forward to reading the other books in the Pentecost and Parker series.

Have you read a novel recently where you’ve been utterly charmed by the characters?

A Woman Is No Man, by Etaf Rum

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A Woman Is No Man

Rum’s powerful debut novel begins with an arranged marriage. In 1990, Isra’s family is eking out an austere living on the outskirts of a town in the West Bank, having been driven out of their home by the Israeli invasion, which they call the Nakba—the Catastrophe. They are delighted to marry off their 17-year-old daughter to the oldest son of an American Palestinian family who are looking for a quiet, submissive Muslim girl.

The marriage to a stranger doesn’t come close to Isra’s dreams of romance and adventure, but it has to be better than the constant beatings and verbal abuse from her parents. Instead, it is worse. Isra often has cause to remember her mother’s warning: “There is nothing out there for a woman but her bayt wa dar, her house and home. Marriage, motherhood — that is a woman’s only worth.”

Adam and Isra live in the basement of his family’s crowded Brooklyn home. Upstairs are his parents, Fareeda and Khaled, and his three younger siblings. Isra becomes, essentially, a prisoner in the house, where Fareeda watches soap operas while Isra does most of the housework and cooking.

As their Bay Ridge neighborhood has a large Palestinian population, the cultural norms are enforced. For example, only a prostitute would leave the house by herself, and Fareeda takes her only to homes of other women where Isra has to endure snubs from the other women for not having produced a male child. Thus, she is unable to develop social connections. Her plight illustrates the way self-blaming and cultural shaming add to the abuse of women.

Even as Adam takes to drinking and beating her, Isra understands that his lot is not easy either. As the eldest son he is expected to run his own convenience store, help at his father’s store, and then even help his spoiled younger brother set up a third store. She also taps a larger perspective.

The wounds of her childhood—poverty, hunger, abuse—had taught her. That the traumas of the world were inseparably connected. She was not surprised when her father came home and beat them mercilessly, the tragedy of the Nakba bulging in his veins… She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been battered themselves?

In a dual timeline, we meet Isra’s oldest daughter Deya, now 18. Isra and Adam have died, and their four daughters are being raised by Fareeda with the same strict rules. Even as her grandmother searches for a husband for Deya, the young woman wants to break free and go to college. Eventually an estranged family member reveals some jarring truths about the family’s history to Deya and encourages her to stand up for herself.

Despite the repressive, patriarchal culture portrayed in the story, several characters step up to say that such treatment of women, little more than servants who don’t even sit at the table to eat with the men, goes against the Koran and Islamic teachings that celebrate the role of women and enjoin men to honor them. We are told that the Prophet Muhammad himself said, “‘Observe your duty to Allah in respect to the women, and treat them well.’”

One thing that stands out to me is the role of books and reading in the story. For Isra, her sister-in-law Sara, and her daughter Deya, these are the tiny windows into the world and sole comfort in their severely restricted lives.

I’ve read several books recently that frame a main character’s engaging personal story in an explicit political framework: Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez; Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng; Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell; even The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble. In trying to understand how the authors manage to keep the politics from overwhelming the story, what I see is their intense focus on the main character’s experience.

Rum’s task must have been especially difficult given today’s Islamophobic prejudices and anti-Arab stereotypes. And it’s no wonder she found it difficult to make the men into rounded characters, because of the cultural norm that once the men leave the house, what they do in invisible to the women stuck there. And we only have the women’s experience.

It’s important to note that Rum describes their perception of their lives sometimes as simply brutal and other times in a more nuanced way, such as Isra’s recognition of the effects of their historical trauma on the men. I’m sure not all Palestinian families are like the ones portrayed here, but some are and I’m grateful to Rum for breaking the code of silence and letting us in.

Can you recommend a novel about Palestinian families?

A Borrowing of Bones, by Paula Munier

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Former military police Mercy Carr and Elvis are veterans of the Afghanistan war, home now but unable to shake their habits, memories and wounds. Elvis is a bomb-sniffing dog, a Malinois or Belgian Shepherd which is similar to a German Shepherd, forced to retire due to depression after the death of his partner Martinez, Mercy’s fiancé.

They take refuge in Mercy’s cabin in rural Vermont where they have plenty of forest in which to run and hike, and Mercy’s beloved grandmother, a veterinarian, nearby. On the fourth of July weekend, they escape the fireworks and mayhem by hiking in a particularly remote area.

Then Elvis alerts that there are explosives off the side of the path. And nearby Mercy finds an abandoned baby and partially buried human bones. Her 911 call brings U.S. Game Warden Troy Warner and his partner, a Newfoundland named Susy Bear. The four of them try to unravel the mystery—Mercy leaping back into law enforcement mode and Troy reminding her that she is a civilian now.

They run into territorial disputes, including the attempts pf the state police chief to keep them out of the investigation, and hostile families on remote dirt roads who don’t try to hide their disregard for the law. The more they learn, the more they fear something terrible is going to disrupt the holiday festivities in town.

I chose this story because of the Vermont setting, and was rewarded with plenty of woodsy scenes to go with the intriguing plot. The characters also appealed to me, even the minor ones. Mercy and Elvis are sensitively drawn by the author, who avoids wounded warrior stereotypes to present realistic people. Munier also manages to handle big ideas like grief, patriotism and honor with refreshing sincerity. It’s a good reminder to me, as a writer, not to back away from concepts like these for fear they’ve been overdone.

Apparently there is a whole genre of mysteries with dogs, actually a subgenre of mysteries. The two dogs are certainly full-fledged actors in this story, and fully formed characters as well, not cutesy cartoons. Among the dogs in my life have been several German Shepherds and a Newfoundland, so I enjoyed this aspect of the story.

If you’re looking for a new series of mysteries, you might check this out. I know I’ll be looking to travel more trails with Mercy and Elvis.

t’s fun when a book has a dog who works as a character. One that comes to mind is Lessons in Chemistry. Can you recommend another?