Two Thirds of a Whole – Small World by Laura Zigman

I found this novel very moving: a story of two middle-aged sisters, both recently divorced, who also carry the pain of a sad childhood which they shared with another sister who was seriously disabled by cerebral palsy and died at just ten years old, along with their parents' divorce, and their father's decline into depression.

Joyce, the narrator and younger surviving sister, is an archivist who works on projects for a company that creates family histories from documents, photographs, videos, and other materials. Sometimes the family histories are to celebrate an event like a wedding, bar mitzvah, or anniversary, but sometimes there are other purposes involved. Since the divorce she lives alone in an apartment in Cambridge, MA where she works from the home office she has created in the second bedroom.

Lydia, the older sister, a graphic designer and fine artist, has been living in California for thirty years, but now that her marriage is over, she's decided to come home to New England. Joyce invites her to move in, at least temporarily, and take over the other bedroom.

The sisters work out a companionable, though not very communicative life together, and things seem smooth enough for a few months, until their quiet, never-there upstairs neighbor moves out and a couple moves in, bringing an array of belongings and unusual equipment. Then the noise and disruption begins...

Joyce participates in a neighborhood web group called Small World, but she also writes poems that are inspired both by what she sees posted there, along with her observations. She keeps this to herself. The poetry is an interesting and often very touching adjunct to the narrative flow of the book, and I found it very expressive as a way of understanding Joyce's character.

The sisters have a lot of secrets, about their shared childhood trauma, and about their present. Their communication difficulties are one of main drivers of the narrative, and it isn't until many of those are revealed, that there can be an examination of their bond and a resolution to their conflicts.

All in all, a very contemporary look at how childhood and family dynamics make us who we are, and how we view ourselves and those closest to us. Highly recommend.

A Tale of Two Eileens: The Switch by Beth O'Leary

Such an easy to enjoy novel, set in London and a small village in the Yorkshire Dales, about two women, twenty-nine-ish Leena and her seventy-nine year old grandmother Eileen.

Leena is a high-octane rising-star executive at a consulting company in London, known for her outstanding presentations. She's in a relationship with Ethan, something of a male counterpart. Eileen is supercharged too, but as the get-it-done, list-making center of village activities, serving on every committee and a friend to all. Her former husband, Wade, left her for a dance instructor, but she's doing just fine without him.

The two form a sandwich of a relationship with Marian, Leena's mother/Eileen's daughter. What they all share is their deep grief over the recent loss of Carla, Marian's younger daughter, to an agonizing death from cancer. Leena and Marian are currently estranged.

Leena has a panic attack and meltdown at a presentation, and her kind (fortunately) boss, Rebecca, forces her to take a two-month leave of absence so she can heal and regroup. Leena confides in Eileen, who urges her to visit in the village. They decide, on a whim, to switch places for the two months: Leena will stay in Eileen's village cottage and Eileen will go to London to Leena's apartment, which will be a chance for her to grab a taste of her youthful dream to be an independent woman in the city.

While the overall plot is somewhat predictable, many unlikely and surprising events ensue, and the result is a contemporary, colorful, entertaining, and heartfelt story that most readers are likely to enjoy (and maybe envy a bit). I definitely recommend Beth O'Leary's The Switch.

The Eternity and the Unlikeliness of Love: Find Me by André Aciman

An incredibly beautiful novel, full of the lyrical writing and exquisite descriptions that make Aciman's work so vivid. Each character is as completely rendered as in a Sargent portrait and every setting is as detailed as a Church landscape, though in Rome, Paris and New York. Even something as ordinary as the purchase of fish in a market takes on a special beauty.

The novel examines the nature of love and its complexities. The relationships explored are both romantic and familial. A young woman and an older man fall in love as the result of a chance meeting, and the woman cares for the everyday needs of her dying father, a younger man and older man create their own bond of love, and the young man, now older is reunited with the love of his youth. The stories are complex and interlocking, yet simple...they are about the power of love and how it fulfills us individually and in our relationships.

Righting Wrongs – The Girl Who Wrote in Silk by Kelli Estes

When the topic of the Chinese-American experience in contemporary literature arises, the authors most likely to come to mind are Amy Tan and Lisa See. Kelli Estes's first published book, The Girl Who Wrote in Silk, makes the perfect shelf-mate to Tan's and See's works.

On the West Coast, and in other parts of the Far West that depended upon the labor and services of the Chinese, prejudice against them in the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth was intense. White culture completely dismissed the humanity of the Chinese and violent episodes took place. In some places, Chinese people, citizens or not, were forced out of their homes and driven out of the towns they lived in, including Seattle, where parts of The Girl Who Wrote in Silk are set.

The novel weaves back and forth between two stories. One is set in the late nineteenth century and its heroine is Liu Mei Lien. The outrages against the Chinese force Mei Lien (Liu is her family name, according to Chinese custom), her shopkeeper widower father and her frail grandmother to flee Seattle on a ship bound for China, according to an expulsion order from the city of all Chinese in February, 1886.

When it becomes clear that the Chinese passengers are in grave danger, Mei Lin's father forces her to jump off so she can save herself by swimming to a nearby island. There she is rescued by a kind white man and her story ensues.

The coordinating story takes place in our current decade and concerns Inara Erickson, a recent business school graduate, who has inherited a large family estate on that same island. Although her wealthy father, who owns an international shipping company, wants her to accept a job in business, Inara is insistent on following her own dream, following in the footsteps of the aunt who left her the property where she had hoped to establish an inn. She takes her aunt's dream farther by planning to turn the estate's buildings into a small luxury hotel and embarks on renovations.

Mei Lin's and Inara's stories are bound together when Inara discovers a beautiful, intricately bordered silk sleeve hidden in an old blanket beneath a wooden stair tread that has comes loose. How it got there and who had embroidered it became a mystery Inara has to solve, and her research leads her to Daniel Chin, a professor of Chinese history.

The book alternates between the two narratives, and gradually the details of the past and present mesh, through complex circumstances, into a well-rounded conclusion.

Estes has done considerable research into the painful backstory of the Chinese community in America, and deals very successfully with difficult issues, on one hand racial prejudice, and on the other, complex family relationships and loyalties. She portrays her characters with sensitivity and insight, and they, particularly Mei Lin, come to life.

While this is specifically a story about Chinese-Americans and the overwhelmingly white community they live in, it is also a bigger story about the United States and resonates with the issues that are threatening our country today. Estes couldn't have known when she was writing the novel prior to its 2015 publication just how prescient her book would turn out to be.