One Sentence Book Reviews

And a couple titles I didn't get through

Last chance to blast off to Jupiter

Applications for the Journey to Jupiter Writing Retreat close Sunday. If you want to take your book to the next level, apply now!

Feed your soul with storytelling

• Next Story Jam is Thursday, May 8th at the Eno House Artists’ Den in Hillsborough, 6:30-8:30pm. Come and tell a story or be an enthusiastic audience member. The prompt is Mayday! Tell a story about a time you had to sound a distress call. What kind of help did you need? What happened?

• The final performance for this spring’s storytelling class is Thursday, May 22nd, 7:30pm at the Carrboro ArtsCenter. Get your tickets now!

• More frequent announcements of Story Connection events are being sent out separately from this Substack. If you are local to NC and want to get all the Story Connection updates, subscribe here.

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The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Read this book if: you want to get consumed by a 500-page thriller set at a summer camp with some class warfare and a feminist bent, all centered around a couple whose first and second child go missing, decades apart.

Additional thoughts for writers: This is a great book to look at if you want to see deft management of hints and reveal—watching Moore dole out morsels from the beginning about various enticing subplots was a pleasure. The book has multiple POVs and a skipping around timeline, both of which she denotes very simply—each chapter has the name of the narrator and the point in time clearly marked. It’s a page turner, and the ending is satisfying. I can’t say this book changed my life¹, but if you want to check out of life for a second, block off a weekend (it reads fast) and cozy up with this one.

Deluge by Stephen Markley

Read this book if: you are in the mood for a deeply researched 900-page epic about the climate crisis, the activists fighting to do something about it, the politicians and corporate interests fighting to maintain the status quo, and the ordinary people who are losing their jobs, homes, and lives in climate extremes—which Markley emphasizes will soon be all of us.

Additional thoughts for writers: There’s a certain type of book that makes you go how in the hell did he write this? Markley does SO many different POVs here—policy wonks, climate scientists, war veterans, and more—all remarkably detailed and highly convincing (to me at least). Interestingly, I’d never heard of Markley, an Iowa grad, or this book, which is very well-written and also a genre-defier—it’s not literary fiction, but it’s way too complex to be sold as mass market anything. I love a book that dazzles me and defies categorization—even one that convinces me we’re totally fucking doomed.

James by Percival Everett

Read this book if: you love Mark Twain, Huck Finn (though you don’t have to have read it to enjoy the book—I haven’t, and can assure you I never will), and are hankering for a fast-paced, well-written, biting commentary on race in America that is satirical and devastating.

Additional thoughts for writers: The cleverness of this book begins in the conceit: retelling Huck Finn from Jim’s POV. Everett is an expert, constructing a world that both restores the humanity of the protagonist, now James, and shows in every line, scene, and event the absolute horror of living in a Black body in the U.S. Everett makes taking an existing story and turning it on its head look easy, which I’m sure it’s not. It’s a reminder that a great question to ask of your story is what would it look like if somebody else told it? Most writers who undertake that question as a free write learn something useful.

Reading With Patrick by Michelle Kuo (memoir)

Read this book if: you want to know what happens when a Taiwanese Harvard graduate committed to social justice becomes a teacher in an all-Black high school in rural Helena, Arkansas; although the book focuses mainly on the relationship between the author and Patrick, one of her students who is incarcerated, it astutely captures the systemic failures that perpetuate inequality in this country.

Additional thoughts for writers: Writing about race in this country is insanely fraught. I’m not in a position to evaluate Kuo’s approach to that; I will only say she is thoughtful and honest in ways I think a lot of writers do not have the courage to be. She is deeply honest about herself—her beliefs, her shortcomings, her privilege, and her struggle to find her own place in this confusing country. The story is also a love letter to reading and books, demonstrating the power of education and how easy it is for a person to grow if they are given the right tools. This is not a book I will forget.

A few words on DNFs (Did Not Finish)

Like many, I have no problem with DNF-ing a book—life is too short to keep reading something I’m not into. When I DNF, it’s usually for one of two reasons. The common one is: this isn’t bad, but I’m really not in the headspace to read this right now, which is where the two below sit. The rarer one is: this book is poorly written, implausibly plotted, boring, or crazy-making (see Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom²).

Some people have trouble DNF-ing. You do you, but life is short. Too short to read books you don’t like when there are books out there you will.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

This really had the makings of a book I could get into: written by a poet, starring Cyrus, a 20-something queer recovered addict and orphan of Iranian parents who goes on a quest to understand his identity—that’s a lot of complexity that would normally draw me in. But there was a lot of engine revving and I didn’t connect with Cyrus and his preoccupations in a compelling way.

Blob by Maggie Su

A 24 year old biracial college dropout whose life is not really going anywhere discovers a blob, which she takes home and kinda sorta turns into a person. The writing is crisp here, the story moves along. But a lost 20-something isn’t where my head is at right now, and even with the blurb from Kevin Wilson³, I bailed out.

1. I think Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History are doing similar things in cleverer ways.

2. Picture it: Iowa City, 2010, a snowy Sunday afternoon. I am reading Freedom, a scene about the young Indian woman “falling in love” with the 60 year old white man (at least that’s what I recall). I throw the book across the room and swear off Franzen forever, a decision I have no regrets about.

3. I love Kevin Wilson, and you can be sure I won’t DNF his new book Run for the Hills, due in May.