Books Set in North America; North America; New Orleans, Louisiana

The Things We Lost to Water, by Eric Nguyen (2021)

The Things We Lost to Water is a wonderful novel about a Vietnamese family that immigrated to the United States from Vietnam after the war.  The novel begins in 1978 when pregnant Hương and her young son, Tuấn, run towards a boat to escape from Vietnam.  Hương was grasping her husband’s hand, but in the crush of people, they were separated and he stayed behind.  Hương gave birth to her second son, Bình, in a refuge camp.

Ultimately, the family finds itself in Louisiana and settle in New Orleans East.  Hương writes and continues to try to communicate with her husband Công, begging him to leave Vietnam and come to New Orleans.  Most of her letters are returned to her, however, she eventually received a postcard from him telling her not to contact him anymore.  She tells her sons that their father died in Vietnam.  His absence in the family is actually a presence in the family.  His “ghost” hovers over his sons.

The author captures New Orleans East with its shotgun houses, slummy apartment buildings and bayou filled with garbage.  As a young teen, Tuấn rebelled against his mother’s overprotection and joined a Vietnamese gang.  Although he was very young when he left Vietnam, he had some memories, hence ties, to his country of birth.  Bình, however, never lived in Vietnam, and felt American, so insisted that he be called Ben.  Ben is studious and after he landed a job with a literature professor, was able to obtain a scholarship to attend college.

Although she never stopped loving Công, Hương met and began dating Vinh, a fellow refugee with no apparent ability to hold a job.  He moves in with the family and tries to assume a surrogate father to Hương’s son.  Years later, Hương learns that Công died.  She and Tuấn return to Vietnam for his burial service.  They find that the country has vastly changed in the years since they were gone.

The novel takes the reader from the family running through water in Vietnam to facing the flooding following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  Water is a thread throughout this novel.  The Vietnamese word Nước means both country and water, thus the book’s title is a bit of a pun.  This novel captures the flavor of the New Orleans immigrant experience.

Read:  October 28, 2021

5 Stars

Books Set in North America, Washington State, United States

Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson (1995)

 

Snow Falling on Cedars is part trial novel, part mystery.  Set in San Piedro, a remote island in the Puget Sound in the 1950s, it takes place in the years after World War II, where Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese-American stands trial for the murder of fellow fisherman, Carl Heine.  Many of the men of San Piedro had fought in the War, and many are still skeptical of the Japanese.

 

Although Kabuo was born in the United States, and thus was American, he was born of immigrant parents.  Even before the War, there was considerable prejudice against the Japanese who lived on the island.  Furthermore, there were laws which prevented its Japanese citizens from owning land.  Underlying this novel is a feud between the Heine and Kabuo families.  Carl’s father had an arrangement to sell Kabuo’s father 7 acres of property for growing strawberries.  Kabuo’s father was making regular payments, but before he could make the final two payments, he and his family were sent off to an internment camp.  While Miyamoto family was interned, Carl Heine’s father died.  Carl’s mother, Etta, was a bitter and prejudiced woman, who took the opportunity to sell the land to another strawberry family.  When the Miyamoto family tried to claim their land, they were surprised to find it had been sold out from under them.  This feud brewed for many years.

 

When Carl was found drowned under suspicious circumstances, the local law enforcement was quick to settle on Kabuo as their prime suspect.  The novel begins with the trial, but the story is told in flashbacks as the reader meets the characters.  The reader learns their backstories and the interactions between the townspeople and the island’s Japanese community.  As evidence piles up against Kabuo, prejudices of the entire community are exposed.  The novel builds the suspense to the end.

 

Read first: December 29, 2003 / Second time: October 21, 2021 (for Hadassah Attorney Council Book discussion)

 

4 Stars

Books Set in North America; United States

Fast Girls: The 1936 Women’s Olympic Team, by Elise Hooper (2020)

 

This is a novel that focuses on the lives of four young women athletes who competed to make the 1936 United States Olympic track team. The novel is based on the lives of Betty Robinson, Helen Stephens, Louise Stokes, and Tidye Pickett.  Each woman came from very different backgrounds and the author takes the reader back to their origin stories.

 

Running, and athletics in general, were not considered “suitable” for women at the time, and the Olympics Committee threatened to cancel future women’s events.  A strong lobby, however, kept women’s sports in the Olympics.

 

Betty Robinson was from the Chicago area and had competed in the 1928 Olympics at age 16.  While in high school, she caught the eye of the men’s track coach and was allowed to join the men’s track team.  From there, she ultimately qualified for the 1928 Olympic trials.  She had hoped to be able to compete in future Olympics, but a small plane accident in 1931 (although the story has the incident occurring in 1932), left her seriously injured.  She was not expected to live, but sheer will-power got her walking again.  Once she was walking again, her brother-in-law urged her to try running.

 

Helen Stephenson was from a small farming town in Missouri.  She was tall and gangly, and always felt like a misfit.  Her father was a poor farmer who wanted her to work and earn money for the family.  Her mother, however, had gone to college and wanted her daughter to gain an education.  Helen loved to run, and running was a way for her to be herself.

 

Louise Stokes was from a working-class Black family in Malden, Massachusetts.  She loved running but knew that she needed to help with her family’s finances.  Her church and her town, however, supported her ambition to run and provided her with the funds to join the Olympic team.  She faced discrimination but did become one of the earliest Black professional runners.

 

Tidye Pickett is the least developed character in this novel.  She, too, was a Black runner who made it to the 1936 Olympic team while fighting racism.

 

The novel also briefly delves into the politics of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  The United States Olympic committee had debated whether or not to allow athletes to compete in the Games that were being held in Nazi Germany.  The decision to compete was close.  Some of the team members themselves, questioned whether or not they should participate in the games.

 

This is an interesting novel and the author tried to tackle such topics as feminism, racism and sexual identity.  The novel takes place when women’s sports is in its infancy and all of the women initially face obstacles intended to halt their competing for fears that it is unlady-like and will impair their ability to have children in the future.

 

I would classify this book as a Young Adult novel.  It is a book I would have really enjoyed as a junior high student.  It was an interesting look at the beginning of women’s track competitions.

 

Read:  October 16, 2021

 

3.5 Stars

 

Books Set in North America, United States, Seattle, Washington

Firefly Lane, by Kristen Hannah (2008)

 

This is a novel about a life-long friendship between two women who couldn’t be more different.  They became friends as young teens, when Tully Hart and her hippy mother, Cloud, moves into the house across the street from Kate Mularkey.  Although Kate and her mother have the normal teen mother-daughter struggles, she comes from a stable middle-class family.  Tully, on the other hand, lives mostly with her grandmother unless her mother floats into her life for brief periods.

 

Tully is a risk taker.  She decided early on that she was going to become a star reporter.  Nothing will stop in her way.  As teens, both girls were going to pursue that path, but that wasn’t the route that Kate wanted.  Kate knows that Tully always gets what she wants.  When both young women intern at the local television station, both are smitten by Johnny.

 

Sadly, this book is filled with cliches.  I quickly tired of the constant pop culture references beginning in the 1970s and continued throughout the length of the book, which ended around 2008.  The author constantly teases the reader into thinking that a rift will divide the friendship, and hints that the rift will be over Johnny.  The rift, which the reader knows is coming, is actually over another matter.

 

As Kate and Johnny’s daughter, Marah, becomes a teenager, she and Kate enter into their own teen-age mother/daughter struggle.  Marah turns to her “Aunt Tully”, who typically takes Marah’s side.  Hence the rift, which actually came about when Tully basically accused Kate of being an overprotective mother on live television.  After this event, the two women didn’t speak to each other for some unspecified years.

 

The point the author is trying to make is that in life, family is what matters most.  This comes only in the last 30 or so pages (and this is quite a long book).  As the book nears the end, we learn that Kate, who married Johnny after she became pregnant, has inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) and is dying.  She thinks that Tully is after Johnny but has reconciled with that thought.  Although Johnny had a one-night stand with Tully before he and Kate married, he was truly in love with Kate.

 

I read the book in its entirety.  If this had been the first book I read by Kristen Hannah, it would not have been inclined to read her other books.

 

Read:  October 10, 2021

 

3 Stars

Books Set in Africa: Cairo, Egypt

Sipping from the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt, by Jean Naggar (2008)

 

Sipping from the Nile is a memoir of a young women who grew up in a wealthy and privileged Jewish family in Egypt.  The author was born in December 1937, on the cusp of World War II.  She grew up in a pampered and sheltered environment, so the horrors of the War largely escaped her.

 

Although her family had Italian passports, they had roots in Egypt going back centuries.  Over the years, the family had amassed an enormous fortune through banking and lived in a large mansion with many servants.  They were integral members of high Egyptian society and rubbed shoulders with high level diplomats and kings.

 

As a young girl growing up, she and her family traveled extensively throughout Europe and she (as well as other members of the family) was fluent in many languages, including English, Italian, French and Arabic.  When she entered high school, she was sent to a boarding school in England.  It was her first time being separated from her family and, although it gave her some freedom, she was also very along among her British classmates.

 

It wasn’t until the Suez crisis in 1956 that the author began to realized that being Jewish in Egypt had consequences.  Although she describes the losses of their home and property, as she recounts the family’s life in exile, they seemed not to have suffered too badly financially.  She is still able to maintain a high-society lifestyle.

 

I found the first part of the memoir more interesting that the latter part.  I tired of reading of all the “fabulous” connections her family made: winning Olympic medals, meeting all the rich and famous, all the designer clothing her mother had commissioned, etc.

 

Interestingly, it wasn’t until after she moved to the United States that she began to realized that her Jewishness was and identifying factor.  While growing up in Egypt, although her family was Jewish and observed all the rituals and holidays, being Jewish was just a fact of life (until after WWII and the country itself had a massive political turnabout).

 

Scattered throughout the book are numerous family photos and scene of Egypt.  They added to the book, and I enjoyed perusing them.

 

Read: October 4, 2021

 

3.5 Stars

 

 

Books Set in North America; United States, Baltimore, Maryland

A Patchwork Planet, by Anne Tyler (1998)

 

This novel is narrated by Barnaby Gaitlin, the black sheep of his wealthy family.  As a teenager, Barnaby and his friends got their kicks breaking onto other people’s homes.  Instead of going for the money and valuable objects, however, Barnaby liked to read people’s diaries and look at photos.  His antics eventually got him in trouble, and he was sent to a reform school.  His teenage past is told slowly through his memories as he moves forward in his life.

 

Barnaby works at manual labor at a company called Rent-a-Back.  His job mainly involves doing small chores for elderly clients.  Although he could work for his family Foundation, he prefers living a quiet life, albeit one with little money or future prospects.

 

He had a short-lived marriage, and now has a young daughter, who lives with her mother and stepfather.  Barnaby visits her once a month.  Because she lives in a different town, he must take a train to see her.  On one of his train trips, Barnaby meets Sofia Maynard, who is on the train on one of her regular visits to see her disagreeable mother.

 

When Sofia learns of Barnaby’s job, she arranges for him to do some small tasks for her Aunt Grace.  All goes well until Grace accuses Barnaby of stealing her lifesaving, which, because she doesn’t trust banks, she kept hidden in her flour bin.  Barnaby claimed he never touched it, but the accusation causes him to reevaluate his life.

 

I would call this a very quiet novel, but one in which the characters are interesting, and the reader wants to know how they navigate their lives.

 

Read:  October 2, 2021.  I first read this book on May 17, 1999.

 

4 Stars