MONOGAMY by Sue Miller

It’s not a stretch to guess what this novel is about. A long, happily married couple, the envy of friends and family because of their abundant love for one another, comes under a microscope of anger and disbelief when one of them dies, and a secret comes to light. In Miller’s deft hand, the reader walks with these characters through everyday life as they ruminate over past and present choices. I love how Miller loves her family of characters, warts and all. 

Favorite line(s): She could remember rushing upstairs to tell her mother of her own rapture with The Messiah after she’d gone to hear it in Rockefeller Chapel one year with her father and her oldest sister. Oh, of course, her mother said, dismissal in her voice. She knew it perfectly well. She’d sung it in Chorus in her senior year of high school in Belmont, and Bob Samuelson, who had the tenor solos, had been madly in love with her then and couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She remembered what she’d worn for their performances—it was the first time her mother had allowed her to wear black: how sexy she’d looked! She recalled—for herself primarily. Annie sensed even then—the party they’d had after the last performance. Bob had drunk too much from a flask he’d brought with him, and in the car on the way home, he’d tried to kiss her. She was stretched out on the daybed in Annie’s father’s study while she was telling Annie this, a paperback mystery in her hand, her cigarette waiting in the ashtray next to the bed, its smoke coiling slowly upward. But what about the music? Annie wanted to ask.

LUSTER by Raven Leilani

Spare and episodic, Luster is pumped full of life by Leilani’s beautiful writing. “How do we even know what we want? How do we know we’re ready to take it?” The central questions Edie, a twenty-something outsider, must ask and answer for herself when she begins a bizarre relationship with her married lover and his wife. Luster examines racial politics and the fragile sexual manners of the sexes without sentimentality or guise. 

Favorite line(s): In the city, there is a smell. Hell’s Kitchen, a rotting, fugal fruit. Midtown, smelling of mildew and old pecorino. In the two months I’ve been gone, I forgot that this is what happens in New York when it rains, all the animal and human excretions made into a piping soup. I open the window a little bit and immediately there is a glaze on my face. I have missed it so much, the way the city tilts for all its events. The Puerto Rican Day Parade and the airborne brass of an approaching float. The West Indian Parade and Eastern Parkway’s glitter dunes. SantaCon. But today it is Comic Con, and as we approach the convention center, the founders of social awkwardness are climbing from hot fifteen-dollar double-decker buses, towing cases of hardware down Ninth, coming out of the Skylight Diner in their goggles and crinoline skirts, excited to hear about the processes behind their respective cosplays. 

AMERICAN DIRT by Jeanine Cummins

Say what you will about the claims of appropriation, but I found American Dirt informative and well written except for the ending. The reappearance of a character at the end left me scratching my head. Yet, never did I get the sense Cummins was guilty of cultural entitlement. The acknowledgments page is full of primary and secondary research she conducted in order to write the book. I don’t know the writer’s background. Is that a thing to be front and center before reading fiction now? What’s the book about? Lydia Perez owns a bookstore in Acapulco, Mexico, and befriends a charming patron who changes her life forever. With her eight-year-old son, Luca, Lydia flees Acapulco for safety in the U.S. The journey of the migrant is told in harrowing descriptions of humanity at its worst and finest. 

Favorite line(s): She does this exercise with authority, and her mind obeys. She repeats this over and over: don’t think, don’t think, don’t think. And because of this self-control, she moves mercifully toward sleep. The flashbacks dump adrenaline into her bloodstream a hundred times a day, so her body is helpfully exhausted. Her eyelids drop. But then there’s the moment after letting go, the momentary drift after casting off from the shore and before being caught by the current, and in that lapse, she plummets. Her limbs jerk, her heart clobbers, and her brain provides the memory once again of clacking gunfire, the odor of burning meat, the sixteen beautiful faces, scrubbed blank of their animations and turned vacant toward the sky.