Improvement by Joan SilberMy rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
There’s a lot more going on here with this short book than it initially seems. The book revolves around Reyna, a single mom in New York City, visiting her boyfriend currently in jail at Rikers Island. She seems to get along with her aunt Kiki more than her parents, perhaps because they have more in common than either knows.
After Boyd gets out of Rikers his fellow coworkers plan a scheme to make money smuggling cigarettes from Virginia to NYC. They can make a fortune by avoiding the taxes. Rayna’s decisions on how involved she wants to be in this creates a snowball effect (others are calling it a butterfly effect).
Each chapter takes on another point of view, some following the forward moment of the story. Then we step back in time and follow the aunt who lived in Turkey for a long time, who married a failed rug dealer, and got involved with some smugglers of antiquities.
The final chapter comes back around to Reyna, dealing with the aftermath of her decisions.
It was a good enough book, but there are flaws, one of them being that the book is very short. I think it would have been a richer story with more depth. I liked how the Turkish rugs were woven through the book.
I wanted to read this book, as I had heard the author tends to write about how we are all connected, intertwined. This book does indeed follow that pattern.
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