Lucy by the Sea - Elizabeth Strout

Looking at YouTube videos of the best books of 2022 from various reviewers, I found this one mentioned as one of the post pandemic themed reads.  I'd read the author's Olive Kitteridge  back in 2008 and enjoyed it.  Her books connect her characters across the stories, Olive playing a minor role in this one.

Lucy, her main character was not someone I liked very much.  She's 60ish and recently widowed from her second husband.  She's an insipid worrier that I thought might be experiencing the beginnings of dementia. The story is told from her point of view, where her first husband, a scientist, insists she and their daughters leave New York as the pandemic hits, taking off for Maine, hence the title.  

It's a painfully reminiscent chronicling of our lives during Covid-19 and there are recognizable reactions to our real life experiences during its scourge.  Her reflective, passive acceptance of what has happened in her life and what happens during their time in isolation is in contrast to the reactions of those surrounding her. 

In the end I found the story soothing and comforting, a looking back on what some have survived. I appreciated the story's handling of our fears and doubts and the changes it as wrought on our ourselves, our families and our lives.

Quotes:

"I had often thought before: that there had been a last time--when they were little--that I had picked up the girls.  This had broken my heart, to realize that you never know the last time you pick up a child."

"My mother, because she was my mother, had great gravity in my young life.  In my whole life.  I did not know who she was, and I did not like who she had been.  But she was my mother, and so some part of me had continued to believe things she had said."

"Because I would never have had an affair, I thought William would not either.  I had been thinking like myself."

Published: 2000  Read: Jan 2023 Genre: Fiction 

The End of Men - Christina Sweeney-Baird

Written in 2018 and finalized in 2019 this story imagines a future where a virus only affects males - and is 90% fatal, leaving the world with only 10% of the males due to an X-chromosome mutation.  Told in first-person by a slate of female characters from different walks of life; a doctor, a scientist, politician, teacher, anthropologist. They have different reactions and experiences to the extreme loss of males; their husbands, sons, brothers, co-workers, friends.  The profound grief is explored with each character and then...the adjustments they make as individuals and as a society that changes so drastically.  Feminism and males as a minority is explored.  Re-populating the human race made me wonder what it would be like if only 10% of the males in the world were eventually the ancestors of all the subsequent generations.  The world eventually goes on. 

I thought there were so many other perspectives the author could have detailed and was disappointed there wasn't more depth to the story.  Many of the changes were to me "oh, yes, that would change." Not enough pilots or surgeons or engineers or mechanics.  I suspect the book was pushed to release when the coronavirus became a reality.  Despite those shortcomings, it would a rich source of discussion.  

Quotes

"Gynarchy is the word we use for the takeover by women of the world, depriving men from taking their rightful places in society."

"I stand in the hallway breathing heavily for a a few seconds before breaking into a smile.  I have never felt so powerful.  This must be what men used to feel like.  My mere physical presence is enough to terrify someone into running.  No wonder they used to get drunk on it."

Published: 2021  Read: October 2021  Genre: Fiction