Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero. —Josh Rose

Cheers to all the reluctant heroes in these three books!

AFTERLIFE by Julia Alvarez

The reader learns in the Prologue that Antonia’s husband dies from a heart attack on his way to a retirement dinner for his wife, who taught college English. A year into her grief, her oldest sister, Izzy, goes missing. Antonia and the other sisters plot and plan to get her back and into treatment for her mental illness. At home, Antonia is dealing with her own dilemmas: a pregnant Mexican teenager shows up needing her help when the boyfriend she came to live with doesn’t want her anymore. Afterlife explores the intersection between putting the oxygen mask on first before saving others, and what it means to reinvent a life after the moral compass is lost.  “It’s a great effrontery to discover other people aren’t you,” our narrator realizes. But then she opens her heart to others only to discover herself. A beautiful book. 

Favorite line(s): How can she not despair? Antonia wonders. As if responding to her thoughts, the speaker goes on to say that pessimism would be an ethical catastrophe. We have to live as if, in other words, by metaphor. Antonia of all people should be able to do this. She has spent a lifetime working in those vineyards, taking leaps of metaphor, cultivating her own little plots of prose and poetry. She must live as if Same, as if Izzy, as if her parents, tias, tios, as if, as if . . . the list of losses goes on and on—as if it matters to them that Antonia not fall into one of her moods and join them.

SEPARATION ANXIETY by Laura Zigman

Judy and Gary’s marriage has fizzled out, but they can’t afford to separate, so July sleeps in the bedroom while Gary takes residence in the basement. Judy suffers from writer’s block and can’t seem to revive her former success as a children’s author. Gary smokes pot nonstop to curb his anxiety. Their teenage son, Teddy, knows both his parents are pretending. Judy embarrasses them both by wearing her dog in a sling to self-soothe. A family-in-crisis novel filled with dark humor and self-deprecating one-liners about social media and self-help gurus. It’s easy to love these characters.

Favorite line(s): But there is the loneliness. The aloneness. How I startle awake in the dark, panicked, full of dread, floating on the night sea on a tiny raft surrounded by all that vast blackness. I see myself from above. The light from the moon guides me nowhere. I’m connected to nothing and no one, lost, and certain only that I’m destined to die broke and alone from one of the swift lethal cancers that took my parents in their later years, without getting another chance to turn the thing around. Even before Gary starts sleeping in the snoring room, when the marriage already feels like a suffocation, his florid debilitating anxiety disorder having turned my desire into maternal concern years ago, I wake like that, worried about the short run, the now, the present: How will I get from this moment to that moment? Where is the vine that will swing me to the other side?

A LESSON BEFORE DYING by Ernest J. Gaines

Gaines’s masterpiece takes place in Louisiana right after WWII when a white jury convicts a black man to death for a crime he did not commit. Jefferson’s defense attorney tells the jury his client couldn’t have committed the crime by comparing Jefferson’s intellect to a hog’s. Grant Wiggins, a black teacher at the plantation school and the novel’s narrator, is given the task of lifting Jefferson’s despair so he can walk to his death with dignity. How does he do it? Reluctantly and with questions of his own. Mainly, what does it mean to be a black man—educated or not—in the oppressive Jim Crow south.   

Favorite line(s): “Do you know what a myth is, Jefferson?” I asked him. “A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they’re better than anyone else on earth—and that’s a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. They would no longer have justification for having made us slaves and keeping us in the condition we are in. As long as none of us stand, they’re safe. They’re safe with me. They’re safe with Reverend Ambrose. I don’t want them to feel safe with you anymore. I want you to chip away at that myth by standing. I want you—yes, you—to call them liars. I want you to show them that you are as much a man—more a man than they can ever be…They play by the rules their forefathers created hundreds of years ago. Their forefathers said that we’re only three-fifths human—and they believe it to this day.”