I started reading Blue Skies: A Novel by T. C. Boyle today. The book is an eco-thriller with comedic elements. It explores the relationships between humans and their habitats in a world where natural disasters frequently occur, where "the only truism seems to be that things always get worse."
by T. C. Boyle
I started reading Blue Skies: A Novel by T. C. Boyle today. The book is an eco-thriller with comedic elements. It explores the relationships between humans and their habitats in a world where natural disasters frequently occur, where “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.
Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry” to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young “Burmie” she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently sets a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events threatening her survival.
Blue Skies follows the tradition of T. C. Boyle’s finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with biting wit and intelligent social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd—are struggling to adapt to the “new normal,” in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope.
But there’s more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the bland façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet’s future. Blue Skies deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, from pet bees and cricket-dependent diets to massive species die-offs and pummeling hurricanes, in which “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.
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.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
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by Alia Trabucco Zerán
Today, I delved into the unique narrative of ‘Clean: A Novel‘ by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes. This compelling novel, shortlisted for the Femina Etranger and Medicis Etranger Prizes, unfolds the story of a maid who has witnessed a lot and a family on the brink of collapse. The narrative is centered around a young girl’s death, with the family’s maid being the critical witness under interrogation, tasked with recounting the events leading up to the tragedy.
Estela’s journey from the countryside, leaving her mother behind, to work for the señor and señora when their only child was born is poignant. Their ad for a housemaid: ‘Smart appearance, full-time,’ was her ticket to earning enough to support her mother and return home. Estela cleaned their laundry, wiped their floors, and made their meals for seven years, but she also became privy to their secrets, witnessed their conflicts, and raised their daughter. She heard the rats in the ceiling, saw the looks the señor gave the señora, and knew about the poison in the cabinet, the gun, the daughter’s rebellion, the mother’s coldness, and the father’s distance. She experienced it all.
After a series of shocking betrayals and revelations, Estela’s silence becomes her shield, broken only now to reveal how it all unraveled. Is this a tale of vengeance or a confession? A clash of classes or a lesson in caution? With each page turn, ‘Clean: A Novel‘ builds tension, offering a gripping, incisive exploration of power, domesticity, and betrayal from an international star at the peak of her storytelling prowess.
by Megan Angelo
Followers by Megan Angelo is one of NPR’s Books We Love from 2020. Goodreads describes this as an electrifying story of two ambitious friends, the dark choices they make, and the stunning moment that changes the world as we know it forever.
Followers is a novel, but it could easily be read as history with all that has occurred with technology and social media. With the increased discussion of the Metaverse, how close are we to a significant spill of personal information? With the focus on followers defining our culture, how close are we to being manipulated by social media?
As a wannabe blogger, I am impressed by a handful of likes on social media and two comments on my posts. Although I can understand the temptation of Orla and Floss to manipulate the system for their benefit, it is something I know I would not do even if I had the skills.
The spill of personal information is described in a very plausible way. It is not just credit card data but private conversations, photos, and secrets that are spilled and alter the world as we know it. Is this possible? Hopefully not, but without adequate privacy regulations, we may all wake up one day to know that our most private secrets become known by everyone.
Marlow, the daughter of two mothers, along with Orla, provides an option of how we might all leave with less reliance on blue screens. As a secessionist nation in NJ, Atlantis was an interesting alternate reality.
Goodreads provides this overview if you are not convinced to read this book.
Orla Cadden is a budding novelist stuck in a dead-end job, writing clickbait about movie-star hookups and influencer yoga moves. Then Orla meets Floss ― a striving wannabe A-lister ― who comes up with a plan for launching them both into the high-profile lives they dream about. So what if Orla and Floss’s methods are a little shady and sometimes people get hurt? Their legions of followers can’t be wrong.
Thirty-five years later, in a closed California village where government-appointed celebrities live every moment of the day on camera, a woman named Marlow discovers a shattering secret about her past. Despite her massive popularity ― twelve million loyal followers ― Marlow dreams of fleeing the corporate sponsors who would do anything to keep her on-screen. When she learns that her whole family history is based on a lie, Marlow finally summons the courage to run in search of the truth, no matter the risks.
Followers traces the paths of Orla, Floss and Marlow as they wind through time toward each other, and toward a cataclysmic event that sends America into lasting upheaval. At turns wry and tender, bleak and hopeful, this darkly funny story reminds us that even if we obsess over famous people we’ll never meet, what we crave is genuine human connection.
I recommend Followers as not only a good read but an allegory of our technology-dominated culture.
by Dane Bahr
The Houseboat: A Novel by Dane Bahr was one of 6 New Paperbacks to Read This Week in The New York Times. Miguel Salazar of the Times described it as “A girl claims her boyfriend has been murdered outside a small town in Iowa, and although no body is found, collective suspicion lands on a loner who lives in a rotting houseboat along the Mississippi River. Through chapters that shift in perspective and move through time, Bahr builds to a nail-biting denouement.”
Edward Nese, the regional marshall from Minnesota, was a character that I could identify with, as he was widowed but still married. Of course, in the early 1960s, I was still a middle school student and would probably have been freighted by The Houseboat.
I recommend this true crime novel. Until the last page, you will be unsure how it will end.
After reading non-fiction history about the assassination of President Garfield, I needed a change of genre.
The Goodreads summary provides an overview,
James Sallis meets Mindhunter in this stylish and atmospheric noir set in a small town in Iowa in the 1960s, a midcentury heartland gothic with plentiful twists and a feverish conclusion.
Local outcast Rigby Sellers lives in squalor on a dilapidated houseboat on the Mississippi River. With only stolen manikins and the river to keep him company, Rigby spirals from the bizarre to the threatening. As a year of drought gives way to a season of storms, a girl is found trembling on the side of the road, claiming her boyfriend was murdered. The nearby town of Oscar turns its suspicions toward Sellers.
Town sheriff Amos Fielding knows this crime is more than he can handle alone. He calls on the regional marshall in Minnesota, and detective Edward Ness arrives in Oscar to help him investigate the homicide and defuse the growing unrest. Ness, suffering from his demons, is determined to put his past behind him and solve the case. But soon, more bodies are found. As Ness and Fielding uncover disturbing facts about Sellers, and a great storm floods the Mississippi, threatening the town, Oscar is pushed to a breaking point even Ness may not be able to prevent.
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.
I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.
by Cristina Rivera Garza
In 1934, a young José Revueltas traveled to Tamaulipas to support the cotton workers’ strike in Estación Camarón, which would later serve as the foundation for his landmark novel, Human Mourning. In her groundbreaking novel Autobiography of Cotton, Cristina Rivera Garza recounts her grandparents’ journey from mining towns to those same cotton fields. Her narrative intersects with Revueltas’s life and offers a vivid and evocative account of the history of cotton cultivation along the Mexico-U.S. border.
Through archival research and personal narrative, Rivera Garza explores how cotton transformed the borderlands by recounting the story of the cotton workers’ strike. She reveals how cycles of deprivation and environmental destruction continue to affect generations. Rivera Garza skillfully creates a new kind of border novel that illustrates how a fragile landscape drastically changed her grandparents’ lives and the territories they helped to develop. In this intimate fictionalization, Autobiography of Cotton offers a rich social history that encompasses agricultural colonization, labor activism, environmental degradation, and cross-border migration.
I recommend “Autobiography of Cotton,” but readers should be patient as the book shifts back and forth in time. Everything becomes clear as you continue reading.
Cristina Rivera Garza is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Liliana’s Invincible Summer. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and founder of the University of Houston’s PhD in Creative Writing in Spanish.
Christina MacSweeney is the award-winning literary translator of works by Julián Herbert, Valeria Luiselli, and Elvira Navarro. She received the 2024 Sundial Literary Translation Award for her translation of Verónica Gerber Bicecci‘s The Company.
Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books that I’ve personally vetted to ensure quality and enjoyment. Additionally, by supporting these selections, you’ll help me continue to provide you with more personalized recommendations. I earn a small commission from your purchase, which allows me to buy and share even more books with you. Your support truly makes a difference!
by Julia Armfield
From Julia Armfield, the beloved and award-winning author of Our Wives Under the Sea, comes a speculative reimagining of King Lear. Private Rites centers on three sisters navigating queer love and loss in a world that is drowning. It has been raining for so long that the landscape has reshaped itself, and old rituals and religions are beginning to resurface. Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken to each other in some time.
However, when their father—an architect who was both cruel and revered—passes away, their lives are forever changed. His death offers the sisters an opportunity to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father’s most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until a revelation in his will shatters their fragile bond.
The sisters are more estranged than ever, and their lives spin out of control: Irene’s relationship is straining at the seams, Isla’s ex-wife keeps calling, and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother’s long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters’ lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters were chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.
Julia Armfield is the author of the novels Private Rites and Our Wives Under the Sea, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror and Best Debut Novel, and the story collection salt slow. Her work has appeared in Granta, Lighthouse, Analog Magazine, Neon, and Best British Short Stories 2019 and 2021. She is the winner of the White Review Short Story Prize and a Pushcart Prize, and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Awards in 2019. She lives and works in London.
Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books I’ve personally vetted for quality and enjoyment. Additionally, by supporting these selections, you’ll help me continue to provide you with more personalized recommendations. I earn a small commission from your purchase, which allows me to buy and share even more books with you. Your support truly makes a difference!
by Rachel Kushner
Today, I started reading Creation Lake: A Novel by Rachel Kushner, a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award. This novel follows a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France. It is a gripping page-turner filled with dark humor. Creation Lake is Kushner‘s finest achievement—a work of high art, comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.
The story revolves around a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman who employs ruthless tactics and possesses striking beauty. She is sent to carry out covert operations in France. The narrator introduces herself as “Sadie Smith” when she arrives at a rural commune of French subversives, whom she is secretly monitoring, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-to-do Parisian whom she meets by so-called “cold bump”—making him believe their encounter was accidental. Like everyone else she targets, Lucien is helpful to her and ultimately manipulated by her. Sadie operates with strategy and deception, following instructions from her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government. Initially, these contacts want her to provoke reactions. As the story progresses, their demands become more complex.
In this region filled with ancient farms and prehistoric caves, Sadie becomes captivated by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe. Bruno mentors young activists who believe that the path to emancipation lies not in revolt but in a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie thinks she is the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno enchants her with his ingenious counter-histories, poignant laments, and tragic narrative.
In brief, striking sections, Rachel Kushner‘s interpretation of “noir” is taut and dazzling.
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