Spring is a true reconstructionist.—Henry Timrod

THE JETSEETTERS by Amanda Eyre Ward

I needed some light reading after tackling a problematic work-in-progress essay. Plus, all the pandemic news takes up lots of space in my head. The Jetsetters fit the bill. Charlotte Perkins wins a contest for a ten-day cruise from Greece to Rome to Barcelona. She invites her three grown children to accompany her, hoping it brings them closer as a family. Instead, confined to the ginormous ship, the Splendido Marveloso, Lee, the struggling actress, Cord, a Manhattan venture capitalist, and Regan, the harried mother with a jerk for a husband, percolate over their own shortcomings while lashing out at each other. Lee is broke and alone. Cord hasn’t told his family he’s gay. Regan’s husband is cheating on her. Over buffet meals and sightseeing excursions, the reader witnesses the reconciling of childhood slights in order to move on with their lives.

Favorite line(s): As usual, there was no discussion, no room for despair, no hope for comfort. In Charlotte’s home, emotions were unsavory and unacknowledged. Strength, she had been taught, was found by relying on yourself, your steely ability to ignore complications. Louisa’s favorite expression was “and Furthermore.” It meant: it is what it is. Move on. Don’t speak of this again.

FATHER OF THE RAIN by Lily King

Heartwrenching, maddening, and magnetic, King’s 2010 novel is a testament to how a miserable childhood rides in the passenger seat through adulthood. Gardiner Amory, the fun-loving, martini-swilling father of our narrator, Daley, moves through his privileged life without regret. When his second wife leaves him, Daley upends her own life to take care of her father when his health deteriorates. She cooks him steaks and wears a tennis skirt to please him when they visit the country club, and he agrees to live a sober life. The trade-offs both characters make are short-lived when Daley realizes that everyone sees her father as “perfect the way he is.” And her father sees his daughter as a deterrent to a life that makes him happy.

Favorite line(s): If I sleep, my dreams are a continuation of my thoughts and my thoughts are like muscles, flexing and twitching inadvertently and repetitively, squeezing but never quite hard enough. I feel certain, as one does in bed in the dark, that if I can line up the right sequence of thoughts I can solve the problem of my father, the problem of me and my father in the same room. My mind circles. But as tome point through the thin lids of my eyes, I begin to feel the slightest lifting of the night from the sky, and then I’m liberated from the cell of these useless thoughts, and I see eucalyptus trees, a narrow road, and a yellow door with a pale green window. My heart beings to pound. I’m free again. The little hollow of the driver’s seat is waiting for me. The radio works. Jonathan had it fixed for me last week. I’ll stop at the Howard Johnsons’ for breakfast. I’ll sit in the booth my mother and I sat in on the way to Lake Chigham. As I pack up my few things and make the bed neat and tight, just as she taught me, I’m aware of how mercurial my emotions are, how last night my mother felt lost to me in a terrifyingly permanent way, and today she feels close by. Death is like that. Death is mercurial, too.

MY SISTER THE SERIAL KILLER by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Korede and Ayoola are two sisters growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, who form a protective bond against their abusive father and clueless mother. Korede does everything for her younger sister, Ayoola, even helping her to clean up and cover up the murders and attempted murders of various boyfriends. Dark comedy. Sisterly jealousies. Unrequited love. All set within the scorching heat and whirring air conditioning of a city fighting “to survive in a city that strives to suffocate women at every turn.” This is a story of the complexity of the sister bond more than the story of a murderer.

Favorite line(s): I am staring at the painting that hangs above the piano nobody plays. He commissioned it after he passed off a shipment of refurbished cars to a dealership as brand-new—a painting of the house his dodgy deals had built. (Why have a painting of the house you live in, hanging inside said house?) As a child I would go stand before it and wish myself inside. I imagined that our alternates were living within its watercolor walls. I dreamt that laughter and love lay beyond the green lawn, inside the white columns and the heavy oak door. The painter even added a dog barking at a tree, as if he knew that we used to have one. She was soft and brown, and she made the mistake of peeing in his office. We never saw her again. The painter could not have known this; and yet, there is a dog in the painting and sometimes I swear I could hear her bark.

CLEANNESS by Garth Greenwell

Read this author if only for his sentence structures. His honed descriptions. Dialogue without quotation marks (and the reader is never confused). Set in Sofia, Bulgaria, the narrator is a young, gay, American, teaching high school English. Divided into three sections, Cleanness follows the unnamed protagonist as he seeks sex with a stranger, love in a long-distance relationship, and the duality of moving back to America, “but I’m not going home.” The prose is at once still and full of life as a Giorgio Morandi painting.

Favorite line(s): It was a nice hotel, it cost more than I would usually have wanted to pay, but its luxury was like a grand gesture abandoned, the large room with its gorgeous view filled with furniture and linens in various stages of disrepair. Even so, we felt a little flare of happiness on entering it; R. dropped his bags and stepped onto the bed, jumping up and down a few times, and I laughed with him, even as I sensed, just past the edges of what we felt, a hovering dread. It was a habit of mine, to rush toward an ending once I thought I could see it, as if the fact of loss were easier to bear than the chance of it. I didn’t want that to happen with R., I struggled against it; he was worth struggling for, I thought, as was the person I found I was with him. Then R. stopped jumping and stood at the foot of the bed, throwing his arms wide, and I stepped toward him for the second half of our ritual of homecoming in these temporary homes; and as I wrapped my arms around his waist and pressed my face to his chest, I felt a flood of relief, the release of something increasingly tightly wound.