World of Confusion – Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

I really wanted to like this book, and it started off appealingly, but as I read on it became more and more disjointed. I suspect that was the author's intention, with the book partially set amidst a geological and political disaster, but I eventually just lost interest. I skipped through to the end, and I was never really clear on where it was all going. The end didn't clarify or wrap up anything for me. It was disappointing. I was hoping to discover a new Latina voice I could embrace.

This is a family story of three generations of women of Guatemalan heritage living in Boston: elderly grandmother Candelaria, her daughter Lucia, and granddaughters Paola, who disappeared and is now back and calling herself Zoe, while living as part of a bizarre women-only brainwashed cult; the second daughter is Bianca, who became an archeologist but was pushed out of her Ph.D. program after an affair with her program advisor; and the youngest, Candy (short for Candelaria) a recovering heroin addict and film buff, who works in an art house cinema. The granddaughters' lives become intermeshed through their attachments to men and others. There's a kind of magic realism quality to the book, but it's more nightmarish than mystical. 

This was a novel I chose as one of my Mark Twain American Voice in Literature candidates to read and rate in the initial round of that selection. Unfortunately I cannot recommend that it goes forward in the competition.

A Family Odyssey – Kantika by Elizabeth Graver

This is a beautiful, moving work of fiction that is primarily based on the life of the author Elizabeth Graver's grandmother, Rebecca Cohen Baruch Levy (born in 1902), and other family members. Graver incorporated family stories and photographs, but created a narrative that incorporates what she has conceived of their inner lives and intimate experiences. 

The Cohens were Sephardic Jews who left Spain as a result of the Inquisition and settled in Constantinople, Turkey. For several hundred years, under the Ottomans, they prospered financially, living a refined upper class lifestyle, and practiced their religion. After World War I, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the development of modern Turkey (which was declared a republic in 1923), their fortunes declined, and the relatively secure position of Jews changed. The Cohens lost their money and business (partly due to Rebecca's father's poor business practices and gambling), and they eventually were forced to move away from what had become Istanbul, and resettle in Barcelona, Spain, living in much reduced circumstances.

The rise of Fascism and other right-wing movements in Spain leading to the Spanish Civil War made life dangerous for Jews. Rebecca, whose first marriage was a failure and who became a widow with two sons upon the death of her husband, traveled to Cuba to meet Sam, a widower, and potential second husband. Sam and Rebecca married and traveled to Queens, New York, where they joined his mother and disabled daughter. Her sons eventually joined them and they had children together. 

The novel recounts all this in rich detail and we share in the author's description of how she imagines Rebecca's thoughts and feelings, through the following decades of her life with Sam, the tragedies of World War II, the loss of family members, and especially the challenge of caring for and encouraging Luna, Sam's daughter. 

It is a remarkable story, painful in many places, but ultimately triumphant. Rebecca must have been a truly extraordinary person and a true "woman of valor". 

This is the fifth of the eight novels I plan to read for the 2024 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and certainly one of my two favorites thus far. I hope to complete the final three by the mid-May deadline. 

From the Mines Onward – American Ending by Mary Kay Zuravleff

Yelena was the first of her family to be born in America, in 1899. When we first meet her in 1908, she is living with her struggling parents and younger siblings in Marianna, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town southwest of Pittsburgh, though in their isolated and impoverished circumstances, it would seem light years away, though it is perhaps only 20 miles distant.

Yelena's family are Old Believer Russian Orthodox, a highly conservative sect, which doesn't allow married women to cut their hair, dancing or card playing, though all the adults, especially the men, indulge heavily in vodka. Roles are highly defined, and the men and their sons, some barely teenagers, work in the dangerous mineshafts from the early morning hours until they stagger home for dinner and then drink themselves into a stupor. The women cook, clean, sew, and perform other household tasks in primitive conditions, and there is never enough money, especially after the men indulge at the taverns. Tension and violence, domestic and otherwise, is high, due to the possibility of a mine cave-in at any time.

The town is also strictly broken down into ethnic and religious enclaves: the Russians, Poles, Italians, and "Blacks" each have their own neighborhoods. The Russians have brought a strong anti-Jewish attitude with them and they, and the Poles, their Catholic rivals, still believe that the Jews were Christ-killers.

The children, for as long as they are allowed, attend school together where they are taught by an Irish schoolmistress from New York. Yelena and her immediately younger brother, Kostia, are two of the school's brightest pupils, but they are weighed down with chores. Still, they attempt Still, they attempt to learn as much as they can. Their mother, Katya, values education, and in fact speaks several languages, and reads and writes in a beautiful script. Her husband Gregor is illiterate, though not unintelligent.

When Gregor and Katya immigrated from Suwalki in Russian Poland, they left behind their two oldest daughters with Katya's parents. Katya saves and saves to bring them to America and once they finally arrive, Yelena's role in the household is forever changed, and she resents that. She is also forced to leave school before the fifth grade, though she continues to try to educate herself.

The book progresses through her remaining child and teen years, and her early marriage to Viktor, one of a set of brothers also from Suwalki. He was the eldest, born abroad, though his younger brothers were born in America, so were citizens from birth. Hard work in the mines, food allergies and asthma, which were not well understood, have made his health precarious. Like Yelena, he is as well-read as a person of limited schooling can be.

Yelena and Viktor press on to make a life together. They leave Marianna, eventually moving to Erie, where there is other work, but it is still a struggle with Viktor's poor health. Meanwhile, Yelena has become an avid supporter of the women's suffrage movement, and has a hero in Rose Winslow, formerly Ruza Wenclawska, a suffragist and labor movement leader, also from Suwalki.

In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, and it was ratified in 1920. Yelena is at home with her two young children when a census worker arrives to interview her. The young woman, a college girl working the census as a summer job, is surprised that Yelena, whose name she Americanizes to Elaine, as a married mother of two, is just 20, her age. The two women could not be more different. Yelena tells her that she is a natural-born American but when the woman finds out that Viktor is a still unnaturalized alien, she changes Yelena's nationality to alien, much to Yelena's shock. The law of the time, it turns out, was that American women who marry foreign nationals were no longer citizens...but a different set of rules applied to men.

...that law was the Expatriation Act of 1907. It said that any American woman who married a foreigner would assume his nationality. The 1922 Cable Act partially reversed the 1907 law, but it wasn't until 1940 that all aspects of the 1907 law were rescinded and women and men had independent citizenship that could not be stripped away by marriage. These immigration laws as they applied to the period of this book were explained in an appendix after the last page, with the 1940 information here my addition.

This novel was also one of my Mark Twain American Voice Prize in Literature choices to read and rate. I hope it will continue forward in the judging. It was vividly written, deeply felt, with strongly crafted characters, and provided a historical and geographical context that made it highly accessible. The author based this novel on the experiences of her own family in Marianna, now, per Wikipedia, a town of around of 400 residents. A major explosion killed over 150 miners in 1908, and is described in the book. The mine passed through several rounds of ownership and eventually closed in 1988.

Caught in a Web – The Dissident by Paul Goldberg

A very hard book to read, and like, in my opinion. Another of my choices to read and rate for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, I had very different expectations, based on the brief synopsis provided by the prize organizers (and the rather deceptive jacket copy). 

Set in 1978, as the Soviet Union was beginning to disintegrate, it is a story about Refuseniks, especially one in particular, Viktor, a Jewish man who is stuck in Moscow, since the government has refused his visa request to emigrate to Israel. Of course, this was a common situation at that time with many Jews seeking to leave for Israel or the United States. I knew a few who managed it, and spent some time getting a taste of their world in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, visiting the shops and restaurants. 

Since it is the Soviet Union, he gets caught up in the impenetrable web of a KGB murder investigation, after he comes upon the scene of the crime, and is seen leaving the site. Viktor's hero is none other than Henry Kissinger, certainly a highly controversial figure on his own, but who is supposed to be arriving for a state visit when the murder, which involved an American, took place. The investigation must be resolved before Kissinger's visit, as it will be a diplomatic issue.

As Winston Churchill said, Soviet Russia is "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.", and that is certainly true of this novel. Perhaps obtaining a view of that warped world was the author's point, but I just couldn't go along. 

In my Mark Twain reviewer's scoring form, I said that this book did not represent an American voice, but while that's not entirely correct, the form does not provide a lot of space to elaborate. The author is a Russian immigrant who came to the United States as a teenager, so while you could say his is one of many hyphenated American ethnicities writing in the United States today, with the setting of this book in Moscow, it is very far away from what I find to be a relatable tale or an accessible point of view. 

A Sweet Treat – Dangerous Curves Ahead by Sugar Jamison

A mostly-lighthearted romance novel with a few twists to make it more interesting and unconventional. 

The main character, Ellis, is a former attorney who practiced in a high-powered firm in the city but returned to her much smaller university town where she has opened an apparel business focusing on the needs of plus and other hard-to-fit women. Ellis, an attractive woman of plus dimensions herself, has recently broken up with a man who put down her appearance and made her feel bad about herself.

Ellis has a very conventionally attractive but emotionally immature older half-sister, Dena, a feminist college-professor mother, and a scientist father who is loving but somewhat on the Spectrum. Ellis was adopted by her parents, who are very supportive of her many accomplishments.

Mike, the man she falls for, has a ladykiller reputation, and had briefly dated Dena in the past, though the relationship never advanced to sex. Dena also moves from relationship to relationship, always seeking attention and affirmation from men.

Ellis and Mike meet (actually re-meet) in an adversarial encounter. How that evolves, along with Ellis's business, is the story, and it's a fun (and sexy) one. 

The audiobook version was entertaining and well-performed. 

Perfectly Titled – Onlookers: Stories by Ann Beattie

These somewhat-connected stories are set in Charlottesville, VA in the aftermath of the 2017 White Supremacist riot and during COVID. The privileged characters that inhabit them are mostly unlikeable and feel almost entirely one-dimensional. 

I was interested in reading this book since the setting is a familiar one to me from multiple visits during business trips of the 80s and 90s, and what happened there in 2017 was especially shocking against that cultured, liberal environment. 

That being said, I have never been a fan of Ann Beattie, but I thought after so many years I might change my opinion. I had always found her writing to feel very detached and cold, filled with people who don't seem to connect, but now I get the feeling that that is reflective of her worldview, and I find that very sad.  

Trapped in Their Own Web – Hope by Andrew Ridker

This novel by Andrew Ridker was one of my choices to read and rate for this year's Mark Twain American Voice in Literature award. Our group of readers was presented with a lengthy list of nominations. Each person must choose several books to read and rate (rather than review). Once this reading period is over, the selections that garnered positive ratings will go on to the next round. 

This book captures a unique cultural segment of American society – the contemporary secular Jewish family...not about the Orthodox or the various groups of Hasidim in Crown Heights, Williamsburg, or Borough Park, not about the Holocaust, not about mid-twentieth century Brooklyn or the Lower East Side of Manhattan, or about the immigration of Eastern European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century, which are subjects that have been endlessly covered by many authors over the years, and are usually what we find in books about Jewish people.

While the milieu of upper middle class Brookline, a close-in suburb of Boston, will not be familiar to many, Ridker gets inside it so thoroughly that we feel we know these people, nearly all of whom are Jewish. The author very skillfully takes the characters from what first appeared to be clichés to something much deeper and more profound. The writing is exemplary. It addresses the moral ambiguity of modern American life without preaching. 

In brief, the book covers one year in the life of the Greenspan family. Husband and father Scott is a respected cardiologist, wife and mother Deb is a former dancer who is devoted to liberal causes, daughter Maya works in publishing in New York, and son Gideon is a pre-med student at Columbia. Each of them is faced with a personal crisis that threatens the entire family's status quo and shakes their stability, but the chain of events is set off by financial problems that Scott tries to solve by falsifying the information he provides for clinical trials, which he thinks will pay him the money he needs to extricate himself and his mother, Marjorie, from poor financial choices...until he gets caught.