Author: alamancelibraries

Liberation Day by George Saunders. New York: Random House, 2022. 233 pages.

A mother seeks revenge on the stranger who hurt her son. A grandfather writes a letter to his grandson explaining why he did not take more action to stop a dystopia from forming. Two office workers who are both engaging in bad behavior struggle with their incompetent manager. Two women who were once in love with the same man reflect on their lives during a chance encounter. These are just some of the protagonists featured in George Saunders’ latest short story collection, Liberation Day.

George Saunders is best known as a short story author, and Liberation Day marks his first short story collection since his highly acclaimed collection Tenth of December in 2013. Throughout his career, Saunders’ stories have focused on ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Saunders’ writing often combines elements of science fiction with stories set in a world that feels similar to our own, just a few years in the future. Saunders also explores the psyche of his protagonists, offering insights on his characters to the readers that are not always evident to the characters themselves. This technique is exemplified in the story “Mother’s Day.”

“Mother’s Day” features two women, Alma, and Debi, who lives are forever linked by Alma’s late husband Paul. Paul was a frequent cheater, and Debi was his most frequent partner. In Alma’s internal monologue, she blames her children, Pammy and Paulie, for her husband staying out all night, passing out on the front porch, and smelling of other women’s perfume, instead of recognizing her husband for who he truly was. Debi imagines herself as Alma’s opposite, a free-spirited hippie in contrast with the uptight Alma, but as she recounts her past and her estrangement from her daughter and the lack of true love from her romantic encounters, it is clear both women are choosing to believe a comforting narrative rather than face their reality. Saunders reveals these details not to harm the characters that he has created, but to show the reader how easy it is to have a false narrative we tell ourselves.

Saunders writes with precision, but also a sense of humor. “Elliott Spencer” tells the story of an elderly man who has had his memory wiped to serve as a propaganda tool. Even in this bleak scenario, the relationship between 89, as Elliott is now known, and his handler Jer, has many funny moments as Jer is amused with and takes pride in his protégée relearning basic words. While Elliott’s fate is incredibly dystopian, by the end of the story, Saunders has given Elliott hope for a better life without the story taking a sappy turn.

Liberation Day is another brilliant collection from a modern master of the short story. The stories, while a bit offbeat, are full of humanity, and might reveal some inner truths to their readers.

Elizabeth Weislak is the Youth Services Coordinator at the Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at eweislak@alamancelibraries.org.

Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell. New York : Tor, 2022.

Romantic fantasy novels provided a gateway back into reading for many adults during the pandemic.  Can romantic science fiction novels persuade reluctant readers to dip their toes into a genre that is often seen as obscure and complex?  Give this approach a try with Everina Maxwell’s Ocean’s Echo.  While the novel’s plot includes genetic tampering, psychic abilities, chaotic space, and interplanetary coups, its heart remains rooted in its protagonists and their growing life together.

Tennalhin Halkana is the nephew of the Senator.  He has grown up in the limelight pretending to be perfect while constantly being reminded in private that he is the family failure.  Tennal, as he prefers to be called, is a “reader,” a person born with neuromodified genetics allowing him to read minds.  This is seen as a dangerous, distrust-worthy trait in Tennal’s society where “writers” or “architects,” those able to control minds, are prized instead.  Tired of this prejudice, Tennal strikes out against his family, living a life of decadence and escapism while he can.

Surit Yeni is the perfect soldier.  He has every military regulation memorized.  Literally.  However, he is also the son of a notorious traitor and a secret architect, unwilling to disclose his power just to rise through the ranks.  More annoyingly to the military, Surit has a strong moral compass.  When given orders he knows are wrong, he finds a way to follow those orders to the letter of the law…all while dodging the intended meaning of his superiors.

Thus, when Tennal is captured, forced into the army against his will, and told to “sync” with Surit, a soul-bonding process between reader and architect that would take away Tennal’s free will, Surit refuses to go through with the procedure.  However, he also refuses to leave Tennal alone and vulnerable, knowing that the military could simply find another architect ready to bind Tennal for life.  Instead the two men strike a plan to fake the “sync,” pretending to be able to read and influence each other’s minds until they can smuggle Tennal to another star system where he can be free.

Tennal and Surit, however, are not the only people in their universe.  Soon, they find themselves caught up in even larger and more insidious military machinations that force them to their limits.  Linked together through extreme circumstances, Tennal and Surit start to find themselves through loving each other, but what will this mean when their worlds are torn apart?  Beaten, broken, having only each other, can the pair find a way to save their galaxy as well as themselves?

Rebecca Mincher is the Children’s Library Assistant at Graham Public Library. Contact her at rzimmerman@alamancelibraries.org or 336-570-6730.

“Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love” by Dani Shapiro. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2019, 250 pages, $24.95, Kindle $12.

Dani Shapiro is a middle-aged professional writer with a slight interest in genealogy when she submits a DNA test kit for laboratory testing in 2016. As an Orthodox Jew, she’s not surprised when the results show 52 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi heritage. What rocks her world is the 48 percent English and western European ancestry that she can’t explain.

Both Dani’s parents are dead and her much older half-sister from her father’s first marriage doesn’t show significant chromosomal similarity in their genetics.  This lack of shared genetic material causes Dani to go on an odyssey that yields long buried secrets about her family history.

As a child and into adulthood, Dani is fair-haired and delicate featured in contrast with brunette contemporaries in her Jewish community.  She remembers receiving several questions from others about her appearance being unusual for her purported background.

After the shocking DNA result, Dani’s husband does some amateur sleuthing on a national DNA genealogy database and reveals a biological cousin with no known connection to her family tree. After exploring the cousin’s background with some advanced internet searching, Dani figures out that her recognized father is probably not her biological father and that the biological father may be living and someone she can trace.

Some twenty years earlier, Dani’s dad died in a serious car accident and her mother makes passing reference at that point to being treated by a fertility doctor in Philadelphia in order to get pregnant.  With her mother now dead as well, Dani tries to piece together her actual paternity. There are few older relatives to ask and so Dani seeks to contact a physician related to her cousin match in the DNA database and to research the fertility clinic. She reasons that medical students were often sperm donors for insemination and she’s able to pinpoint a certain retired doctor as her probable biological father.

What transpires is that as her parents became more and more desperate to conceive, they used the services of a non-licensed fertility doctor who used medical students as donors and a sperm-washing technique to boost chances of conception.  Much of Dani’s inquiry focuses on whether this technique was known to her parents and how it would have conflicted with their Orthodox religion. Did they know or suspect that her father was not the biological parent because of this process or did the chances of a healthy infant blind them to any moral or religious qualms?

Dani eventually arranges a face-to-face meeting with her biological father and tries to make peace with her new-found heredity and fit it into her world view. Her journey yields new insights on kinship, belonging, identity, and how biology impacts our sense of self.

Lisa Kobrin is the Reference Librarian at May Memorial Library. She can be reached at lkobrin@alamancelibraries.org.

Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn. New York : Margaret K. McElderry Books, [2022].

The middle book(s) in a series always feel a bit like a letdown. You know you’re not going to get resolution and answers to all of your questions, and it is easy for the story to get swamped down in details and foreshadowing for the next book.

But…

That didn’t happen in Bloodmarked. Deonn has written a wonderful second entry in the Legendborn Cycle that lives up to the promise of the first novel, and gets you ready for book three!

Bree is getting ready for the rite that will awaken Arthur’s Table and complete her transformation into Arthur’s Awakened Scion. She is woefully unprepared, given that she hasn’t spent her life getting ready for this moment, like the other Legendborns. Luckily, she has her friends – Alice, William and Sel – to help her prepare for the Rite and deal with the pressure from the Regents and the Legendborn leaders. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have her boyfriend Nick, who is Lancelot’s Scion and was abducted by his father after Bree was Called. And she is having little success crafting armor and weapons from aether. Most of the time, she just burns herself.

Bree wants nothing more than to complete the rite so she can go rescue Nick, but, of course, nothing goes as she plans. After being betrayed by the Regents and the Legendborn leaders, Bree runs for her life. She goes to Volition, a Root stronghold, where she will be safe and can figure out her next move, but what happens next changes everything.

This is a book you don’t want to put down because every chapter brings a new danger to Bree and her friends, as well as an escalation of the “will they, won’t they” sexual tension between Bree and Sel. Being a Gen Xer, it reminds me of the Angel/Spike love triangle in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s hard to choose between Nick and Sel, because they both love Bree, and they love each other, having been bonded for so many years. They bring out different sides of her, and she needs both of them in her life.

Deonn’s world-building is fantastic, and her description of the two branches of aether/root magic is fascinating. She has taken all of the racial unrest of the South (and all of the U.S.) and expressed it through the magical structure of her world. It feels all too familiar when people express racist sentiments and treat Bree as less-than in both the magical and non-magical world.

Now we have the long wait for the next book!

Mary Beth Adams is the Community Engagement Librarian for Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at madams@alamancelibraries.org.

“We Deserve Monuments” by Jas Hammonds. New York : Roaring Brook Press, 2022, 384 pages.

Content warning: grief, cancer, death, homophobia and racism

“We Deserve Monuments” is an incredible story of how prejudice affects three generations of women – Letty, the grandmother, Zora, the mother, and Avery, the daughter.

Avery is a high school senior, getting ready to apply to colleges and follow in her mother’s footsteps as an astrophysicist. But when her mother gets a letter from her grandmother Letty’s next-door neighbor, saying that Letty is dying of cancer, Avery is dragged to Bardell, Georgia with her parents.

To say that Letty and Zora are at odds with each other would be understating their rancor. Letty doesn’t want Avery, Sam and Zora at her house. She is rude, grumpy, dismissive, and completely unwilling to do anything to improve her health, like stop smoking. Zora has brought Avery to Bardell just once in her life, and Avery barely remembers anything from that visit, other than the fighting between her mother and grandmother. Zora’s motto in life is to “Live Forward,” not revisiting the past or discussing it at all. Avery knows very little about her grandmother or her grandfather Ray, who disappeared before Zora was born.

At first, Avery plans to just survive her time in Bardell and focus on college applications and her plan to go to Georgetown University. But her next door neighbor, Simone, captures her heart the second she sees her, and Avery can’t help but become friends with Simone and her best friend, Jade. The best friends welcome and support her as she tries to connect with Mama Letty, discover what history her mother is hiding, and find out about her grandfather, whom her mother and grandmother don’t want to talk about.

I don’t want to spoil any of the plot, so I’ll stop there, but I will say that this book touches on the Jim Crow South, racism, the Ku Klux Klan, murder, infidelity, trauma, bisexuality, queerness, and love. Each generation of women has their own burden that needs to be shared before healing can occur.

Hammonds has written characters that absolutely come to life in your mind. What I love about them is they’re so flawed, but they’re trying. And you want to cheer them on and try harder yourself, because this book brings up your own issues with race, sexuality, and trauma. The women in this novel are strong and hardheaded, but love deeply and fight for what’s right.

This is a book that people of all ages should read – don’t let the Young Adult label make you think it won’t deeply affect you. I definitely cried for the last 100 pages or so of We Deserve Monuments, and loved every minute of it.

Mary Beth Adams is the Community Engagement Librarian for Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at madams@alamancelibraries.org.

“The Last White Rose:  A Novel of Elizabeth of York” by Alison Weir.  New York:  Ballantine Books, 2022, 526 pages

Fifteenth century England was dominated by the War of the Roses—a military and political power struggle between the British noble houses of York (symbolized by the white rose) and Lancaster (symbolized by the red rose).  “The Last White Rose” is the story of Elizabeth or “Bessy”, the oldest daughter of King Edward the IV, a Yorkist king who sits on a precarious throne and dies relatively young leaving a large family of minor children and nakedly ambitious relatives.

Edward IV wrested his crown from a mentally imbalanced Lancastrian King Henry VI, but he had great difficulty holding it against his scheming brothers Richard, Duke of Gloucester and George, Duke of Clarence in what became family warfare.  After Edward’s death, grasping relatives sequestered the young English princes and princesses (including Bessy) and had them declared illegitimate to make way for their own political ambition.  Eventually, Bessy’s uncle Richard of Gloucester ascends the throne as Richard III after clearing all impediments, including inconvenient child heirs.  A century later, Richard will be portrayed as a murdering, hunch-backed villain in the history plays of William Shakespeare.

Edward IV’s oldest daughter Bessy is best known in English history for being both the sister of “the two little princes” who died in the Tower of London and for being the mother of Henry VIII, the much-married monarch who broke with the Catholic Church and divested himself of so many wives.  The “two little princes” are an enduring historical mystery.  Because of their sex, both brothers preceded Bessy in the line of succession and the young brothers disappeared abruptly when Edward IV’s brother Richard of Gloucester seized power in a show of force and proclaimed himself king.

Young Bessy, as the clearest remaining Yorkist successor, quickly becomes a pawn of numerous marriage overtures designed at gaining legitimacy for kingly aspirations.  Even her young uncle, who is rumored to have killed her brothers, may have tried to gain a church dispensation to marry his niece in the hopes of producing heirs to the throne.

The Lancastrian and Yorkist power struggle ends on Bosworth Field in a military encounter in which Richard III is slain and Henry Tudor, the Lancastrian, is the victor.  Henry then marries Elizabeth of York and becomes Henry VII and the couple are the eventual parents of the well-known portly King Henry VIII, slayer of wives.  Some of Bessy’s other children go on to become foreign heads of state including daughter Margaret, Queen of Scotland, and daughter Mary, Queen of France.

This is a great read with a lot of both personal and political intrigue.  Recommended for fans of historical fiction, true crime, and devoted monarchy watchers who appreciate mini-series fare.

Lisa Kobrin is the reference and local history librarian for the Alamance County Public Libraries. She can be reached at lkobrin@alamancelibraries.org.