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Read: July 2023

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Girlfriend on Mars: A Novel

by Deborah Willis

I began reading “Girlfriend on Mars: A Novel” by Deborah Willis today. It’s a humorous, touching, and captivating debut novel that satirizes the idea of space travel funded by billionaires and tells a love story that spans across planets. Alic Munro, one of my preferred authors, praised the book’s emotional depth and range, as well as the author’s exceptional clarity and skill in writing.

Amber Kivinen is vying for a chance to join MarsNow and be part of the first human-led mission to Mars. She is one of twenty-three reality TV contestants worldwide, including an attractive Israeli soldier named Adam, a charming Canadian named Pichu, and several science enthusiasts and aspiring influencers. Billionaire Geoff Task is sponsoring the mission; only two seats are available.

Meanwhile, Kevin, Amber’s boyfriend of fourteen years, is left behind as Amber pursues her dream. He spends his days caring for their hydroponic weed business in their expensive basement apartment in Vancouver while wondering why the woman he loves is so determined to leave the planet with someone else.

In a reality TV show similar to Survivor and Star Trek, Amber participates in challenges in various parts of the world. She seems to develop feelings for Adam, but it’s unclear whether it’s genuine or a strategy to avoid getting eliminated. Furthermore, given that the technology to return to Earth from Mars is not yet available, would Amber be willing to abandon everything to become a billionaire’s experimental subject on the red planet? Even though the rainforest is currently ablaze, Geoff Task has purchased New Zealand, and Kevin may be struggling with depression, is there any chance for a brighter future on Earth?

Girlfriend on Mars is an impressive first work from a brilliant and unique writer, as described by Molly Antopol. It presents a satirical critique of our societal desire for fame and fortune amid environmental turmoil. At the same time, it delves into humanity’s fundamental yearning and eternal cliché: love.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: February 2025

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Three Days in June

by Anne Tyler

Today, I dove into the enchanting world of “Three Days in June” by Anne Tyler, a novel that promises to become an instant classic. It beautifully captures the experience of a socially awkward mother-of-the-bride as she navigates the whirlwind of emotions before and after her daughter’s wedding. After shuffling through the frosty morning air on my walk, wrapping myself in the warmth of Tyler‘s words about three sun-soaked days in June felt like the perfect escape. What a delightful contrast!

Gail Baines is having a bad day. First, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow, her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the groom’s mother. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay or even a suit.

However, the crisis occurs when Debbie shares a secret she has just learned about her husband-to-be with her parents. This will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor and full of the joys and heartbreaks of love, marriage, and family life, “Three Days in June” is a triumph and shows the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the height of her powers.

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Read: December 2021

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How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith. This book was a gift from my son Jon. The New York Times selected How the Word is Passed as one of the best books published this year. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation’s collective history, and ourselves.

How the Word is Passed is one of the best books I have read in 2021. I had read an excerpt in The Atlantic on the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. Like most of us, I had placed the book on my to-read list, where it remained lost in the cobwebs. Fortunately, my son Jon purchased the book for me.

Secondly, the book rekindled my long-lost dream of being an American Studies professor. As soon as Jan and I met, I dropped plans to leave Brooklyn and start graduate school in the fall of 1974. I made that decision primarily because of how much I loved Jan. But it was also partly that I did not have a clear vision of what my life would be like as a professor. The book provided clear examples of people like Yvonne Holden at The Whitney Plantation redefining history to be more accurate and inclusive. I probably could not have done as well as she did, but I can now see that it might have resulted in a career for me that could have been impactful.

Goodreads provides this overview for those who still need to be convinced to read this book.

It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving over 400 people on the premises. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola Prison in Louisiana, a former plantation named for the country from which most of its enslaved people arrived and which has since become one of the most gruesome maximum-security prisons in the world. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.

In a deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country’s most essential stories are hidden in plain view-whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods—like downtown Manhattan—on which the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women and children has been deeply imprinted.

Informed by scholarship and brought alive by the story of people living today, Clint Smith’s debut work of nonfiction is a landmark work of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in understanding our country.

How the Word is Passed is one of the best books I have read this year and many prior ones. I encourage you to read it and share your comments.

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Read: May 2022

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The Peacekeeper: A Novel

by B.L. Blanchard

The Peacekeeper: A Novel by B.L. Blanchard is about North America, where The United States and Canada do not exist. After reading about Ethiopia during the ill-fated Italian invasion, I looked for an alternative history of my continent. An independent Ojibwe nation surrounding the Great Lakes is the change in venue that I was seeking.

Although crime mysteries are not my preferred genre, I found The Peacekeeper: A Novel by B.L. Blanchard a pageturner and a highly recommended book. Chibenashi’s works resolve a second murder twenty years after his mothers. The victim is his mother’s best friend. The search for truth will change his life and those close to him.

The Goodreads summary:

Against the backdrop of a never-colonized North America, a broken Ojibwe detective embarks on an emotional and twisting journey toward solving two murders, rediscovering family, and finding himself.

In the village of Baawitigong, a Peacekeeper confronts his devastating past.

Twenty years ago, Chibenashi’s mother was murdered, and his father confessed. Ever since caring for his still-traumatized younger sister has been Chibenashi’s privilege and penance. Now, another woman is slain on the same night of the Manoomin harvest—his mother’s best friend. The murder leads to a seemingly impossible connection that takes Chibenashi far from the only world he’s ever known.

The central city of Shikaakwa is home to the victim’s cruelly estranged family—and to two people Chibenashi never wanted to see again: his imprisoned father and the lover who broke his heart. As the questions mount, the answers will change his and his sister’s lives forever because Chibenashi is about to discover that everything about those lives has been a lie.

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Read: July 2022

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The Surgeon’s Daughter

by Audrey Blake

I did something I had not done in decades. After finishing the Big Library Read of 2022, The Girl in His Shadow, by Audrey Blake, I immediately started reading the sequel, The Surgeon’s Daughter. The protagonist, Nora Beady, was such a strong female lead that I could not wait to find out what happened next. In the sequel, Nora Beady, the only female student at a prestigious medical school in Bologna, is a rarity. Nora’s tenacity and passion reminded me of Jan, the love of my life.

In the 19th century, women were supposed to remain at home and raise children, so her unconventional, indelicate ambitions to become a licensed surgeon offended the men around her.

Ms. Blake has a split personality— because she is the creative alter ego of writing duo Jaima Fixsen and Regina Sirois, two authors who met as finalists of a writing contest and have been writing together happily ever since.

The pen name – Audrey Blake – was in response to the publishers recommending a more straightforward author’s name. Regina’s daughter is named Audrey, and Jaima’s son is Blake.

The Surgeon’s Daughter is the forty-fourth book I have read this year and the ninety-ninth since the beginning of 2019. My Goodreads goal for 2022 was twenty-two books.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

Under constant scrutiny, Nora’s successes are taken for granted; her mistakes used as proof that women aren’t suited to the field.

Everything changes when she allies herself with Magdalena Morenco, the sole female doctor on-staff. Together the two women develop new techniques to improve a groundbreaking surgery: the Cesarean section. It’s a highly dangerous procedure and the research is grueling, but even worse is the vitriolic response from men. Most don’t trust the findings of women, and many can choose to deny their wives medical care.

Already facing resistance on all sides, Nora is shaken when she meets a patient who will die without the surgery. If the procedure is successful, her work could change the world. But a failure could cost everything: precious lives, Nora’s career, and the role women will be allowed to play in medicine.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Read: October 2021

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The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook. The New Wilderness is a timely book and one that resonated with me. When Jan and I met in 1973, it was a revolutionary time with movements encouraging communes and returning to the farm. Neither Jan nor I were interested in living in a commune. Reading this book helped reassure me that we made the correct choice.

The summary of the book is:

Margaret Atwood meets Miranda July in this wildly imaginative debut novel of a mother’s battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change; A prescient and suspenseful book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, Man V. Nature.

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now.

Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it. Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they slowly and painfully learn to survive in an unpredictable, dangerous land, bickering and battling for power and control as they betray and save one another. But as Agnes embraces the wild freedom of this new existence, Bea realizes that saving her daughter’s life means losing her in a different way. The farther they get from civilization, the more their bond is tested in astonishing and heartbreaking ways.

At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood and what it means to be human, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary novel from a one-of-a-kind literary force.

When I finished this book, I read Pompeii Still Has Buried Secrets by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker. It reminded me of all of the threats to civilization that we face, who will be Pliny the Younger to be “the only surviving eyewitness account of the disaster.” Fleeing our cities for the wilderness is no longer an option!

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