Review 474: Land of Milk and Honey

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A dystopian near future book, where a smog covers everything, blocking out light crops fail worldwide. A new mung-bean flour, a gray food, that replaces so much as sustenance that can be grown. Our narrator, the main character is a chef. She wants the fresh food no longer attainable, except in this mountain land that is advertising for a chef, where the ultra-rich have retreated. She lies on her application in the hopes of getting the job, which of course she gets in for a trail period, being the chef for the Sunday dinners with the residents.

The book is somewhat elusive, at least at first. It is very food-centered. I’m not considered a foodie or anything like that so much of this is lost on me. The lists and descriptions of food, don’t do much for me.

The story is so wrapped-up within the food, but it also is speaks about climate change, greed of the ultra-rich, racism, manipulation and much more, yet not deeply. There are topics brought up but mostly dismissed in order to list more foods. The narrator’s feelings of complicity, guilt, and yet desire is all wrapped up with food, even when she doesn’t eat.

And yet despite everything, the novel ends with hope.

Review 473: Crank

Crank by Ellen Hopkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Next month (April) a new top 10 of the most banned books will be coming out. I was looking over last year’s list, nearly all are young adult titles. This one stood out for a me a little, as it said the book was in poetry form. I was curious about the format.

So, I wanted to see what this was…read a preview then decided, okay let’s read a bit more, see how this goes, then read the entire book in one day.

This is one of those cautionary tale for teens against getting into drugs, particularly meth, which also goes by many other names. The main character reflects what happened to the author’s daughter, so it is more based on fact than fiction.

The daughter, Kristina, was sent to her father’s for a summer visit of several weeks, court ordered after nearly no contact for eight years. He lives in another state, she gets on a plane alone for the visit. Her father is negligent to an extreme.

Kristina comes home with a new personality, calls herself Bree to her new friends and has new habits, such as smoking cigarettes, kissing boys, and oh yeah a monster habit for meth. It’s a downward spiral from there.

And this brief summary is exactly what happened to the author’s daughter as well.

The poetry format was unique, and occasionally got in the way of the story-telling, but for the most part it was just a unique way to tell this story. A powerful book for sure.

Review 472: The Mysterious Life of the heart

The Mysterious Life of the heart by Sy Safransky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The writing is of a good quality throughout. The introduction says the selections when read front to back follow a journey. There is a sense of that, with more innocent and new love in the early selections, with later in love type love, following a terminal illness or death.

Overall the entries felt more geared towards the sad part of love. The love being focused on here is romantic love just about exclusively. Other types of love do seep into the stories, but it is the pairing up that is the theme.

Perhaps it was my wish for more on the new love, the joy of love and less on the disaster of love, and the pain of love lost. Yet I’m not sad to have read these stories and essays, and the poems interspersed were just right.

Of course, with all collections a few were more enjoyable than others, although with the quality of writing here none are poorly written. It is just my personal preference for maybe two or three that I did not enjoy as much, which is far fewer than found in most collections.

Review 471: The Great Divide

The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez
My rating: 3.25 of 5 stars


While overall I did like this story, I wasn’t blown away. I found there were too many characters and not enough depth. While the backdrop is building the Panama Canal, we actually don’t see very much of it in the story. (Okay, there is the digging, but this really is not the focus.)

Instead the story is about the people in Panama at that time, and their personal story. Many people went there because of the this grand project, while a few people are locals. For those Panamanians their story helps to highlight the changes to their country.

In the novel, a few of the characters have some resolution to their immediate problem, but for others we don’t have that, instead only to infer. One character introduced very late in the book has no resolution and makes me wonder why was that person there anyway? Perhaps that is nitpicking, but that felt like the author was trying to be all encompassing and the book would be stronger less.



Thanks to Ecco, Harper Audio and NetGalley for an advance audio review copy of this book.

Review 470: Between Before and After

Between Before and After by Maureen Doyle McQuerry
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A dual time-line story from the early 1900’s in Brooklyn and the modern time in San Jose, California in 1955. The point of view is of the mother Elaine, with Molly the daughter in the other. This is billed as young adult, which made me a little more forgiving for the book.

Molly is curious about her mother’s past, as she doesn’t speak about it. Some snooping found some things such as old photos, but her dad’s words to his wife when he left sparked her imagination: “Bury your past before it buries you.”

Molly figures one best way to find out about her mom is through her Uncle Stephen, but then he gets distracted by a mystery of a miracle.

It sounds like a mystery, also set up like that, but it was so obvious what was going to happen, or discovered, that I can hardly call it a mystery.

Elaine’s timeline is hard, her mother and baby sister die from the Spanish flu. Her father in mourning turned to drinking heavily and being more absent than at home. So, Elaine had to quit school to keep the house together and get a job, she becomes the missing mother to her brother Stephen. Luck landed her a job reading to a blind elderly man in a fancy house. The job barely covers their rent, at least Pop still provided a little money as well, but most of Elaine’s and Stephen’s meals come from the Gossleys.

I found the book okay, not really a page turner and maybe a little slow. Perhaps a young person wouldn’t see the obvious “mystery”. The author’s note at the end mentions her grandmother died from the 1918-1919 pandemic, leaving three children behind, her father being ten years old. They lived in Brooklyn, and this setting became the spark for the book.

Review 469: Dayswork

Dayswork by Chris Bachelder
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

When I started this book, I was a skeptic, this is an usual style of book. There isn’t a plot really, the sentences on the page are mostly not grouped together into paragraphs, there is a lot of white space.

Many of the sentences are seemingly random bits of information, mainly about Herman Melville’s life, but then can go on tangents.

Also mixed in is the narrator with her family. They are under lock down during the early days, months, of the pandemic. She and her husband, along with their two daughters, are remotely working and going to school. Her husband is a creative writing professor, her job is not mentioned, but seems also to be a writer. She is the one obsessed with researching Melville, sharing much of what she finds with her husband, as he would enjoy it too.

So the book feels like non-fiction, the two writers of Dayswork are married and work in the same fields. They have a child, or children, I don’t know, only that they are parents. The few things I’ve looked up about Melville are true, so it makes me wonder why this is fiction. Perhaps it is easier to invent that pandemic life, the family quirks. But it makes me suspect validity for these interesting facts about these writers: Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Marilynne Robinson, along with all the others, such as The Biographer.

I did enjoy the book, I would call it an unusual biography of Herman Melville. I have read scantily little of his work, and now feel like attempting Moby Dick. His life was not a happy one, and his family suffered as well. Do I now want to read a real biography of Melville? Yes, a little, perhaps someday.