Spring Book Reviews: 3 of 3
Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.—William Shakespeare
THE GLASS HOTEL by Emily St. John Mandel
Mandel’s previous novel, Station Eleven, which told the story of a group of survivors banding together after a flu pandemic wipes out most of humanity (scary to read now?), was a finalist for the National Book Award a few years ago. Although a different tale altogether, The Glass Hotel, too, examines that intersection of the ordinary into the surreal. Vincent meets financier Jonathan Alkaitis while bartending at the Glass Hotel. Soon after, she is luxuriating in mansions, private planes, and closets full of designer clothes until the ruse is up, and Alkaitis is exposed for running a Ponzi scheme that ruins the lives of other characters in the novel. As the ghosts of Alkaitis’s victims haunt him, Vincent moves from a life of privilege to kitchen work on a cargo ship. As different a tale as it seems, this novel dropped this reader into a dream world she didn’t want to end.
Favorite line(s): Like the way you see shipping,” she said, and this remained in memory as one of the most delightful conversations Leon had ever had, because he’d never talked with anyone about the way he could tune in and out of shipping, like turning a dial on a radio. When he glanced across the table at Marie, for example: he could see the woman he loved, or he could shift frequencies and see the dress made in the U.K., the shoes made in China, the Italian leather handbag, or shift even further and see the Neptune-Avramidis shipping routes lit up on the map: the dress via Westbound Trans-Atlantic Route 3, the shoes via either the Trans-Pacific Eastbound 7 or the Shanghai-Los Angeles Eastbound Express, etc. Or further still, into the kind of language he'd never speak aloud, not even to Marie: there are tens of thousands of ships at sea at any given moment, and he likes to imagine each one as a point of light, converging into rivers of electric brilliance over the night oceans, flowing through the narrow channels of the Suez and Panama Canals, the Strait of Gibraltar, around the edges of continents and out into the oceans, an unceasing movement that drove countries, a secret world that he loved so much.
STRAY A Memoir by Stephanie Danler
This memoir from the author of Sweetbitter hooked me with the first line: The list of things I thought I knew but did not know grew quickly during my first weeks back in Los Angeles. After years living in New York City, Danler returns to her roots and rents a dilapidated house in Laurel Canyon because the realtor tells her Fleetwood Mac lived in it in the 1970s. From this perch in the Hollywood Hills, Danler waits “for my next life to start” after the post-publication of the successful Sweetbitter (on my favorite’s shelf). From that metaphorical house in shambles, Danler examines how she got there beginning with her parents’ addictions and neglect to the conflict and drama she craved in her affair with a married man. Unsentimental and heartbreakingly honest, Stray left me in awe of this beautiful author’s talents. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Favorite line(s): Loving liars, addicts, or people who abuse your love is a common affliction, and we are all mostly the same. We have a gift for suffering silently. No one taught us how to trust the world, or that we could, so we trust no one. We’ve never developed a sense of self. There is no cure for the Monster, or the black hole. Not falling in love, or becoming a parent, or making money, or working harder. Boundaries help. It’s through boundaries that we construct ourselves, say Here is where you end and I begin. However, while boundaries are powerful, they’re unfortunately not solid. They are made in the imagination, and there are inherent flaws in arming oneself for battle in our fantasies. What is shocking isn’t that we have lived through the traumas of our lives. The miracle is that we are still remotely permeable.
PRETTY THINGS by Janelle Brown
Two grifters stake out a wealthy socialite holed up in a dusty mansion in Lake Tahoe with intentions of stealing the contents of a safe. Ashley (Nina) and Lachlan (Michael) dupe the Instagram influencer, Vanessa, into agreeing to rent them the caretakers cottage on the property while they pose as an Irish writer and a west coast yoga instructor. Their efforts to scam Vanessa take a sinister twist when the couple's true identities are revealed. Bonus: Nicole Kidman is set to produce and star in a series based on Brown’s novel. Which character will she play? Ashley or Vanessa?
Favorite line(s): I didn’t mind leaving Vegas behind. We’d been there two years—an eternity in our lives—and I’d hated every minute of it. There was something about the overwhelming heat of the place: the way the relentlessly beating sun made everyone laconic and mean, the way it drove you into the sterile embrace of air conditioning. The halls of my high school smelled chronically like sweat, sharp and animal, as if the entire student body was living in a constant state of fear. Vegas didn’t feel like a place that anyone should actually live in.