Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver

 I think I've enjoyed everyone of Barbara Kingsolver's books.  Her characters are realistic and engaging. In this story, she borrows from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens using the same first person narrative of an orphan from birth to adulthood in a modern day setting.  The story was so moving because she poignantly portrays the struggles of single moms, abandoned and fostered children, drug abuse from prescriptions for pain, the power of love and ultimately the strength of the human spirit  This one goes near the top of my 2023 list.

Pulitzer Prize Winner

Published: 2022  Read: October 2023  Genre: Fiction

When I Wear My Alligator Boots - Shaylih Muehlmann

 Sub-title: Narco-Culture in the U.S. - Mexico Borderlands

I was given this book as a gift.  The young woman who wrote it was working on her doctorate and stayed in the communities of Mexico that live with the drug culture that has invaded parts of the country.  It was eye-opening.  She suggests that the "war on drugs" has feed the growth of the cartels as it provides a market for illegal drugs. Everyone becomes involved either directly or indirectly.  A difficult read.

Quotes:

"The phenomenon whereby people simultaneously become defensive during an interview and inflate their own role is what Elizabeth Dunn (2007) has called the 'pufferfish syndrome'."

Published: 2014  Read: October 2023  Genre: Non-fiction Sociology

When the World Didn't End - Guinevere Turner

 Using the journals she kept from her childhood, Turner revisits growing up in a cult that worshipped its leader who declared the world would end in 1975.  Shuttled between communal homes across the U.S. hoping for a seat near the "Queen"- the cult's mother - she's constantly judging herself unworthy and racked with guilt over the slightest criticism.  Shipped to her mother and mother's boyfriend who leave the cult, she's torn from everything she knows and thrust into the World, which she's been taught is evil.  The true evil is her stepfather and mother.  A bizarre and sad story that highlights how children are shaped by their caregivers and yet survive by their own will and belief in themselves. 

Published: 2023  Read: October 2023  Genre: Memoir

A Fever in the Heartland - Timothy Egan

 

In the 1920s, after WWI and when the Jazz Age, flappers, and prohibition lived, the Ku Klux Klan emerged again, after having been eliminated after the Civil War.  This story tells how they came to have over 500,000 members in the mid-1920s, marching in mass in Washington DC.  The horrifying fact was that a major stronghold was Indiana, the "heartland" of the U.S.  The membership spread from there at the instigation of D.C. Stephenson, a despicable manipulator who coerced men to join for $10 a piece. He exploited the prejudices of whites against Jews, immigrants, and African-Americans. The book chronicles the rise of the Klan and its downfall (or maybe only its receding) after Stephenson is tried for a brutal attack on a young woman. It's easy to see the parallels to current U.S. divisive factions.  A must read.

Published: 2023  Read: October 2023 Genre: History 

Halcyon - Elliot Ackerman

I fell for the jacket summary on this one.  The story is told by a professor trying to finish a book on the Civil War. He's hanging out at an estate called Halcyon, owned by a lawyer.  The twist is, Al Gore is president, the lawyer has been raised from the dead with new medical technology.  The "alternate reality" approach was intriguing at first and I kept getting pulled through the story to see what could have happened.  In the end, nothing changes - our culture and national outlook lead to the same results.  The ending was unsatisfying and abrupt.  I liked the writing style and found many admirable turns of a phrase quoted below.  

Quotes:

"A low sky weighed on the earth, gradually absorbing the distance into the fog"

"...he never glanced back [at the presentation slides] for reference...He wouldn't think to, in much the same way a dancer would never think to mouth the count of his steps."

"Never forget history is what the living think of the dead"

"The thing of it is you can have more than one life, but there's only this one world to live it in."

"You really think I want to live life, parsing who did what to me and when, and how come that means I can never achieve x or become y, trapped in an endless feedback loop of my own trauma?  That's not progress."

Published: 2023  Read: October 2023  Genre: Fiction