Library Journal listed End of Story as one of the “big books this week” (2/20/24).
A.J. Finn is known for his remarkable The Woman in the Window.
End of Story by A.J. Finn
The Perfect Predator
If you love reading about medical breakthroughs, you’ll love this memoir by Steffanie Strathdee. Her husband was the first person in the U.S. to receive phage therapy for his multi-drug resistant infection. None of it would have happened with her grit and determination. A riveting read.
American Innovations
Readers who like stories about odd characters who find themselves in strange situations, will love this new collection by Rivka Galchen.
As strange as the characters are, though, it’s easy to relate to them.Who hasn’t felt what this character in “The Lost Order” feels so keenly?
“But one day I woke up and heard myself saying, I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can’t help people eat cereal any longer.”
After a strange caller angrily denounces her for a missing Chinese take-out order, the narrator of “The Lost Order,” comes to some startling conclusions about her marriage and herself.
“The Region of Unlikeness,” is about another lost soul who befriends two eccentric intellectuals at a coffee shop. She is secretly attracted to one of them and repelled by the other.
“American Innovations” bravely tackles magical realism, body image, and deformity.
“Wild Berry Blue,” is a wonderful coming-of-age story about a girl who has a crush on an ex-junkie who works at her favorite McDonalds.
In one story, “Once Upon an Empire,” a likable but possibly deranged narrator, loses all of her belongings. No one steals them; instead, in a magical realism way, they become mobile and literally walk away from her apartment.
She finds them in a dumpster but is reluctant to identify them to the police.
Less successful stories included in this collection are “Dean of the Arts” or “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman.”
Galchen’s collection was long-listed for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
The Big Door Prize by M.O. Walsh
In a novel that’s sweetness served up with a side of realism, Walsh explores a small town’s inhabitants desire to live the best version of themselves. When a simple plywood cubicle with the word DNAMIX shows up at Johnson’s grocery story, it causes the good people of Deerfield to behave in outlandish ways.
The machine, which does a quick DNA scan, determines if an individual has lived up to his or her potential. Ordinary townspeople suddenly decide they are meant to be puppeteers, Olympic champions, magicians, or members of royalty.
The townspeople’s gullibility infuriates Douglas Hubbard who feels the machine spits out random occupations. He is flabbergasted and irked to learn that his readout is spot-on. Even though Douglas wants a more exciting life, that of trombone player, the machine tells Douglas his life station is “teacher.”
Douglas has been a teacher for years and it leaves him depleted and exhausted. Every day that he teaches feels like eight days instead of one. Naturally, he is irked to find he is the only person in town given such a prosaic life station.
Most of the characters are humorous and endearing. Pat, Deerfield High’s principal, refuses to swear yet she uses nonsense words that sound suspiciously like swear words. Tipsy is the town’s only cab driver. He drives constantly, taking no money for fares, because it helps him keep a promise he has made to himself.
Father Pete is a good man even if he takes a drink now and then. The mayor nearly abandons his mayoral duties after getting his DNAMIX readout of “cowboy.”
Mixed in with the humor, however, is an unfolding mystery. What happened to the mayor’s son, Toby? Did he die from a DUI accident or was it something even more sinister? Beneath the amusing stories about Deerfield eccentrics, there is a darker story of the mistreatment of a young woman and the unquenched desire for revenge.
In March 2023, The Big Door Prize became an Apple+ television series.
Though I haven’t watched the television series, the novel certainly has comedic moments.
The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay
The Secret of Lost Things is a captivating literary who-done-it. After her mother dies, an eighteen-year-old from Tasmania makes a transformative journey to New York. Rosemary takes a job at the Arcade, a bookstore that sells everything from paperbacks to valuable rare books. At the Arcade she begins her unique education.
The Arcade’s employees are each eccentric in their own way. Mr. Pike is extremely parsimonious, Mr. Weiss is an albino, Mr. Mitchell looks like a large Australian bird, Pearl is a opera-singing transvestite, and Oscar is an emotionally-distant man who keeps Rosemary under a Svengali-like thrall. Rosemary, however, feels they each have something to teach her.
Like Ahab in Moby-Dick, each of the characters is obsessed with something. Instead of a whale, all seem to be obsessed with finding a lost Herman Melville manuscript, The Isle of the Cross.
Each of the characters in the Arcade are objects in a Wunderkammen; in fact, Hays has Rosemary visit Peabody’s Wunderkammen. Mr. Weiss views Rosemary as a “curiousity” because she comes from Tasmania and because of her wild, red hair.
In Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Pike, Rosemary tries to imagine a benevolent and stern father. She is herself, like Ishmael of Moby Dick, an orphan searching for her identity.
In a subplot, Hays introduces Lilian and her son Sergio, one of the “lost” from Argentina’s dirty war.
At his request, Rosemary begins a strange collusion with Oscar Jarno. She also becomes, against her will, an assistant to Mr. Weiss. In a sense, she is their object to do with what they will; that is, until she breaks free from their spell.
Repressed desire, madness, revenge, embezzlement, betrayal, and the lost manuscript by Herman Melville all play a part in this auspicious literary debut.
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
“You have to take a chance don’t you? Its like crossing the road with your eyes shut…you don’t know what’s going to happen next.” –Kitty Finch.
Nina decides that standing near Kitty “was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle.” Nina thinks Kitty is a wild, adventurous spirit.
Jurgen wants to marry Kitty; Madeleine Sheridan is afraid of Kitty and thinks she is “mad.” Joe thinks she’s depressed and a dangerous groupie.
Kitty, a botanist, is unlike any house guest he’s ever met. She has stopped taking her medication and sees people walking through walls.
Kitty is also beautiful with a habit of walking around sans clothes.
Kitty’s poem, which she calls a conversation, is called “Swimming Home.” In it, she calls the pool a “coffin” so its easy to surmise her intentions.
Joe who pretends he hasn’t read her poem does not want to accept consequences. He warns his daughter not to get in a car with her, but then, surprisingly, he takes Kitty out for drinks at the Negresco.
Maybe its her madness that make her vision clearer, like the fool in King Lear. She gives a spooky foreshadowing of events:
“I know what you’re thinking. Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all. That is why I’m here…I have come to France to save you from your thoughts.”
Nothing is as it appears in this novel about two couples vacationing in France. Everything rings true, however. The characters are well-developed and the scenes are well crafted.
This startling novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
Set in New York, My Name is Lucy Barton, is a psychological portrait of a woman who has survived a terrible upbringing of cruelty and poverty. At the start of the novel, Lucy, who is temporarily hospitalized, received visits from her mother. Lucy is grateful for the visits and grateful for the doctor who seems to genuinely care for her.
Underneath the mother’s kindness, however, there is an undercurrent of cruelty. Lucy is the only one who has successful escaped her humble beginnings in Amgash, IL.
Lucy has gone to college and become a writer but she still experiences loneliness and disconnection. Once after Lucy has her first baby, she calls her mother. Her mother, however, refuses to accept the charges for the collect phone call.
This novel is set in the 1980s before cell phones and smart phones. Another crucial part of the novel is the AIDS epidemic; Lucy feels a connection with outcasts and with the neighbor who is dying.
The brothers and sisters she left behind in Amgash feel some resentment for Lucy, who made it out of the rural community. Those themes are explored in Strout’s award-winning short story collection, Anything is Possible.
Lucy discovers she will always be connected to her family even though she has left them and started life anew elsewhere.
Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone
Spineless is a fascinating memoir about a woman obsessed with jellyfish. Berwald became enamored with the marine life after taking a course in Israel. Once she explored the Red Sea coral, Berwald was hooked. After having children, though, Berwald felt sidelined by her options.
Though she faced many obstacles, Berwald’s slippery subject takes her to Italy, Japan, and Israel. In a journey that mirrors the life cycle of the jellyfish, Berwald’s becomes enthralled with the jellyfish’s story–their anatomy, their ability to reproduce in increasingly acidic waters and what that portends about the ocean’s future.
The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James
Like most of St. James’s novels, The Sun Down Motel invokes the supernatural. Strange events have been occurring at the Sun Down Motel since the eighties
Carly, who just lost her mother to cancer, decides to find answers to questions her family have been dodging for years–what really happened to her Aunt Viv.
The Sun Down Motel looks identical to photographs from the time Carly’s Aunt Viv worked the night shift there in the eighties.
The rumors prove true; Carly realizes the motel is haunted by several spirits. In the middle of the night, the lights go off and the locked doors open. While working at Sun Down she hears odd things and receives strange phone calls.
Fortunately, she has Callum and Nick, two locals who help her decipher Fell’s strange history. Less helpful are Alma Trent, a retired police officer, and Marnie, a freelance photographer. Both know what happened to Viv yet each refuses to disclose it.
In the novel’s alternate eighties timeline, Viv’s story unfolds. Like Carly, Viv has an intense drive and curiosity about murder. Viv solves the murder cases yet she naively puts herself in the murderer’s path.
What’s best about the novel is the way the two women (Viv and Carly) mirror each other. Both are courageous and fiercely determined to solve crimes. The surprising twist at the end will enthrall most readers. The closure Carly receives is well-deserved and earned.
Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
The premise of Every Heart a Doorway is that the universe extends an invitation to certain children: a door to a new world. This new world, whether it be called Confection, or Prism, or Halls of the Dead is a magical place where the individual feels completely at home.
Some of these children are never seen again. Others are for whatever reason forced or told to return to real world for a short time. These children who have made this magical journey are heart-broken when they find themselves back in the real world
All of the students that end up at Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Children want desperately to find the door and the world that claimed them.
Eleanor tells the parents of these children that she will offer group therapy and that she will shatter their delusions. Eleanor actually sees her school as a “way station.” She wants nothing more than to help them find their door again, even if the odds are against it.
Just as Nancy, a new student, learns to navigate her way around the school, the unthinkable happens. Her roommate, Sumi, is murdered, the body mutilated.
Everyone suspect Jack (short for Jacqueline) because she has been to harsh world called the Moors. She and her twin sister were both in service to a Lord Vampire.
When two more bodies appear, the magical fantasy becomes a mystery.
Seanan McGuire who also writes horror as Mira Grant blends genres in this slim, yet well-plotted fantasy.
Every Heart a Doorway won a Nebula award in 2016 for best novella as well as a Hugo award(2017)and Alex award (2017).
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