Watching You by Lisa Jewel (no Spoilers)

Lisa Jewel's 2018 Watching You is a fantastic murder mystery in a small British town.  The narrative

alternates between short police interviews that take place a short time in the future and the actual story as it plays out.  It's a bit difficult to describe without giving the whole plot away, but I will say that there was a kind of "twist" that truly surprised me and a zinger in the last sentence that was a real stunner!  It's kind of fun to get to literally the last sentence and...

The school head (I think like the principle?), Tom Fitzwilliam, as charmed almost every woman and girl in town, but occasionally he'll creep out the ladies with a "wolfish" glance that hints at some nefarious interiority.  Tom's son sits in his bedroom window spying on the neighbors and teenage girls, photographing everyone and tracking their movements in a notebook.  Neighbor Joey has a hot, cuddly husband but also a crush on Tom.

It's sort of the perfect mystery novel - keeps you guessing, easy to keep track of the characters - a very clever twist that had me flipping back to the beginning of the book the moment I collected myself at the end!  Highly recommend!

Nota Bene:  I've also read her The Girls in the Garden - and at least based on these two books, Jewel doesn't seem to obsess on the details of the destroyed female body for her novels, which all-too-many people do.  I appreciate not having to wade through what feels like obsessive, masturbatory glee in the violence acted upon women.  She's not ignoring violence against women, just not resorting to the objectification of women that you often find in mystery novels.

Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman

You know what's cool about Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman - she uses  To Kill A Mockingbird as an influence on the story.  Reminder: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee was published in July 2015, and Wilde Lake was published in May 2016.  According to Lippman, she had already started her novel before Lee's second book was "found", as it were.  I just LOVE a story that is revisited or reworked from a different point of view, so I really enjoyed this aspect of Wilde Lake.  Done well, it enhances both the new work and the old one, because it calls you back and maybe helps you look at it a different way.

To wit, Lu (Louisa) is the first female state's attorney of her county in Maryland, following in the footsteps of her well-respected father, Andrew Brant.  Her brother AJ is the sort of person everyone admires, star athlete, strong student, friend to everyone.  They have a devoted black housekeeper, a gay neighbor kid that inserts himself into their lives, and, when they were younger, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks accused their black friend of raping her.

The story straddles two time-lines - one of Lu and her brother as teenagers (Lu a bit younger and sort of tagging along with AJ's friends.  For the most part, her father helps keep the accusation of the rape secret, everyone agreeing that it was most likely perpetrated by her abusive father.  In the present-day, Lu is taking the lead on a case of a woman murdered in her condo, with no apparent motive.  It's a good mystery, and she connects the dots nicely. 

Although Go Set a Watchman wasn't very well received, I quite liked parts of it, particularly the "you can't go home again" (to put it mildly) aspect.  Just as Scout finds that her father and brother aren't the white shining heroes of her youth, Lu is also struggling with interacting with her father as an adult, recognizing that the man she and so many others idolized isn't perfect.  There's also a continuing theme of how "people thought then".  Lu and other characters are grappling with how the casual racism and misogyny of the past continues to impact people today, and what the statute of limitations is on those actions.

He was a man of a certain generation, a man of his time. We always want our heroes to be better than their times, to hold the enlightened views we have achieved one hundred, fifty, ten years later. We want Jefferson to free his slaves and not to father children with any of them. We want Lindbergh to keep his Nazi sympathies to himself. We want Bill Clinton to keep it in his pants. Martin Luther King Jr., too.  And that's just what we expect of the men.  The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. The present, this day, this very moment we inhabit - it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.

The Mothers by Brit Bennett

Brit Bennett's 2016 The Mothers was a wonderful read.  She creates a strong sense of place (southern
Cal, around San Diego and the military bases down there.  I visited that area this summer and it's really unique) and characters - Nadia and Aubrey are the type of girls you want to be best friends with.

In the beginning, Nadia and Luke, the minister's son, are secretly dating, and she gets pregnant.  She has an abortion and this connects them for a long time.  Nadia meets Aubrey, another motherless child in her town and church, and they become like sisters.  Nadia's mother died by suicide shortly after she was born, and Aubrey's mother failed to protect her from her abusive boyfriend, so she left.  These two black girls form a strong bond that surpasses Nadia going to college and law school in other cities.

The "Mothers" of the title are actually the collective elder mothers of the church, who operate as something like a Greek chorus in the book.  Bennett writes them from first person plural, like an omniscient narrator, but with some sass.

We would've told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honest left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask you hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

Spoiler!

The end of the book was exquisite.  The Mothers move from the position as distant narrators to active participants in the story as they casually share their observances about Nadia and Luke and Luke's parents, causing membership in the church to flag and eventually the church fails, the paster and his wife no longer pillars of their community.  And this last paragraph!  I die.

We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She's her mother's age now. Double her age. Our age. You're our mother. We're climbing inside of you.

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

Oh, how I loved Jeannette Winterson's Frankissstein (and the gorge cover art, which helps makes sense of those extra esses!) Winterson, who's such a genius at mixing contemporary language and thought while telling an "old" tale, brilliantly merges the stories of Mary and Percy Shelley, Byron and Co., as they famously shared a house in Italy in 1816 and Mary began writing the novel Frankenstein, with a contemporary (perhaps in the not-to-distant future) cast of characters that resemble (/are?) that group.  Ry Shelley is a doctor researching the effect of robots on humans' health. Ry is transgendered and confuses many of the other characters by not presenting as a binary figure, but they are firmly and happily secure in their non-binary body.  I don't want to reveal the other names because I think they're rather clever and will leave that to the reader to discover.  Anyway, Ry meets with various people involved in robotics, hilariously, a man who creates sex-bots and thinks they're the wave of the future (and makes a pretty good case for it, tbh). 

Winterson conjures all sorts of fascinating themes in her book including where (and if) the nature of the soul resides in the body and the created body (ie Frankenstein's monster, sex-bots, and characters in books); creativity and computation; the mind and the computer as a holder of knowledge; and the ownership of creation - you know, like a lot of the stuff that makes us human.

Joy of joys, I also convinced husband to read this book which was a particular coup for moi, filling me with a pride unparalleled since he started using the term "toxic masculinity" with some regularity.  I personally loved the bits re: the nineteenth century while husband naturally enjoyed the 21st.  Percy and Byron are lauded as these brilliant British master poets and meanwhile there's this trickling little side story that goes, Oh, did you know Mary Shelley wrote one of the most enduring stories in the English language and, oh yeah, she was only 19?  But what Winterson draws out is her enduring humanity, mourning the loss of her children while trying to maintain a semblance of a home while her husband flits around renting homes in broke-down mansions in remote locations.  Mary's frustrations build to a culminating excoriation of the male poet:

 "His lordship upholds the law when it suits him. So do they all. Revolutionaries and radicals until it touches on property - and that includes women and children. Till it comes to whatever hurts them personally. Whatever checks their stride. God! Their infidelities, their indifference, their insensitivity. Great God! The insensitivity of poets. [...] 

How many 'great artists? How many dead/mad/disused/forgotten/blames and fallen women?"  

As startling and electrifying as Mary's rage is, Ry's experience as a trans person - amidst their careful academic exploration is an event of shocking violence that the reader learns has happened multiple times before and they quietly deal with, knowing from past experience that notifying the police will not help.  The sudden violence was a visceral reminder of how unsafe life can be for trans people - it comes without warning or reason.  The disruption I felt as a reader was merely a glimpse of what it must be like to experience that as a person, and I thank Winterson for showing me a bit of what that might feel like. 

So many wonderful things wrapped into this relatively small book, not least of all how reading and writing are such amicable contributors to our human experience.  Frankissstein is really a must-read for book lovers.