About a Book

Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise asks: how much should a reader trust an author’s interpretation of what happens in his or her characters’ lives? In a mind-bending work, Choi slowly explores the question via oftentimes annoying characters. The book is divided into three section, each one a send up of the last, forcing the reader to ask how much of the previous section was real, how much was a faulty interpretation by the narrator? In the first section, we meet a group of teenagers enrolled in a small, elite performing arts high school in the American south. The teens come across as mature for their ages, gallivanting about town in cars and enjoying sex with different partners. In the next section, we learn that those characters from the first part of the book dwelled within a story written by another character named Sarah, and we then have the truths Sarah told us unpacked and called into question by another character named Karen. What is the truth? By the book’s finale, a third ...

Perry T. Cook in Leslie Connor ’s All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook grew up in a unique setting: the Blue River Co-ed Correctional Facility. His mother Jessica, convicted of vehicular homicide, gave birth to and raised the smart, curious, loyal Perry there. Connor’s novel kicks off with scenes from inside the prison. It quickly changes to show Perry’s life outside the prison when a concerned district attorney, Thomas VanLeer, insists that prison is not the right place for 11-year old Perry to reside. VanLeer moves the boy into his home, giving him a new family in the form of VanLeer’s wife and step daughter Zoey, a friend of Perry’s from school. Throughout the book, Connor does the work of showing the people inside the prison, and the VanLeer family, as complex characters. VanLeer is the villain here, but Connor makes the effort to show why he does what he does. Jessica is a sympathetic character, but is shown with her warts and all. At its heart, the novel shows ...

Eleanor Oliphant is an instantly likable character in this first novel by Gail Honeyman , who brings a sense of “something is wrong with Eleanor” to the pages. The titular heroine is a bit of an isolationist: sure, she has a 9 to 5 job, a relationship with the convenience store clerk who sells her vodka, and weekly phone chats with her mother, but she’s a bit off, a bit guarded in all of these situations. In conversation with the IT guy at work who fixes her computer, we see her narrate how she answers his questions after considering what would be normal behavior in a social situation. Eleanor is outside the norm, she knows it, and she lets us in on how she chooses to act normal, even when sometimes her attempts are misses.  The beauty of Honeyman’s work, aside from the loads of humor she brings to it, is that Eleanor is on a journey. We meet her at 30 years of age, when a stranger’s collapse in the street ropes Eleanor into a further relationship with the IT guy....

If You Love Me: A Mother’s Journey through Her Daughter’s Opioid Addiction , Maureen Cavanagh Working mother and Marblehead , Massachusetts resident Maureen Cavanagh glanced over the article in the local Salem newspaper detailing a local honor student’s arrest for prostitution, heartbroken at the story. Her sadness turned to disbelief when she realized the story was about her own daughter Katie, who struggled with an opioid addiction. In I f You Love Me: A Mother’s Journey through Her Daughter’s Opioid Addiction , Cavanagh tells her story of concerned mother who can’t at frst separate herself from her child’s addiction, to an advocate for her child’s health, who has to separate herself if she is going to survive and have her own life. Cavanagh’s prose at times reads like reportage, barely resembling an artful take on her journey through her daughter’s addiction. She holds nothing back, however, telling the story in the same way you might imagine she would tell a good f...

In 2004 at age 19 Garrard Conley entered Love in Action, a Christian fundamentalist gay-conversion program , designed to lead him away from acting on his homosexuality. Eventually he escaped, and wrote about the horrors of the program in Boy Erased . Conley’s memoir is steeped in the mental gymnastics he needed to do to live in small-town Arkansas with his loving Baptist parents and come to terms with his sexuality. The text is cerebral, and Conley does a good job of guiding his reader through the conflicts between his upbringing and his nature. When he struggles, contemplating his own suicide for example, the narrative feels urgent and scary. The actual events inside Love in Action are sparse, and the majority of the book is dedicated to the inner struggle between faith, family, and his gayness. The kick off point for Conley’s entering Love in Action, his rape by a boy at his college and that boy’s subsequent outing of Conley to his parents, is explored throughout the book...