SAVING THE FIRE: A Novel, multiple prize-winner ITAMAR VIEIRA JUNIOR's follow-up to Crooked Plow

SAVING THE FIRE: A Novel (Trilogia da Terra #2)
ITAMAR VIEIRA JUNIOR (tr. Johnny Lorenz)
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The highly anticipated sequel to the Booker-shortlisted international sensation, Crooked Plow

Moisés lives with his father, Mundinho, and his sister, Luzia, in Tapera do Paraguaçu, a rural village in Bahia. His other siblings have left, and their mother vanished. Tapera, what remains of it, is a community of farmers, fishermen, and potters of Afro-Indigenous origin, overlooked from on high by a forbidding seventeenth century monastery, from which the church still rules over all they survey. With their mother long vanished, Luzia provides what she can by way of care and affection for her brother, but the long hours she works at the monastery, and the whispers about her strange powers, limit her capacity and she dreams of a family reunited and of liberty, of freedom from decades of suffering and decades of secrets.

Epic and lyrical, with the power to both enchant and outrage the reader, Saving the Fire shows us that the ghosts of a family's past are often indistinguishable from the shadows of a nation. Masterfully, Itamar Vieira Junior blends the intimate journeys of his characters with faithfully rendered elements of Brazilian life. It's a story permeated by the spectre of colonialism, the scars of which still show, and still ache.

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My Review: Book two of a trilogy started by Author Vieira in Crooked Plow (link is to the Foreword Reviews review, as I have not read the book)...shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize...this story won the 2024 Jabuti Award for Best Novel (his second win, after 2020's for Crooked Plow). The name might not mean much to Anglophones, but the "tortoise" award is most of a century old and quite prestigious in Brazil. Jorge Amado won the inaugural award in 1959 (first of several); Clarice Lispector in 1978; João Gilberto Noll first in 1994; serious, heavy-hitting writers who deserve more renown in the US on literary merit, as well as on the principle that understanding other cultures is best begun by reading their favorite stories.

Continuing his exploration of rural Bahia, Author Itamar creates the village of Tapera do Paraguaçu to play out this polyphonic novel. An Afro-Indigenous family, broken and hag-ridden by tenacious, toxic African-religion superstitions, the Catholic Church's dominance in the community...and the very common trauma of sexual assault from Catholic priests...all stacking atop political and social marginalization plus dispossesion from the land that feeds them. The state of Bahia is a very old colonizer locus, thus the heavy influence of African-tradition religious activity as morphed by centuries of Catholic persecution. It's an old church technique, branding indigenous religion's flaws and faults as superstitions while hiding (in Brazil's case) behind absolute civil immunity for criminal acts. Of which there are plenty in this story.

Moisés da Silva, our primary PoV character for the first chapter, and his sisters are struggling along with everyone else jusy to find enough to eat. He chooses the common path of running away to the city in order to reduce the famiy's load; his sister Luzia (narrating the second chapter) remains, garnering a reputation as a witch because she's visibly disabled. She's working a paying job in the local monastery's laundry, which puts her in harm's way across several axes. All the other siblings, in common with the rest of the community, scramble to make the family's ends meet. Maria, the only other da Silva sibling we spend significant time with, had an "easy" path of marriage, taking her away from the family in the third chapter. Marriage is not ever an escape!

It has the intended effect of poverty. People who struggle to stay fed are less likely to foment rebellion, that's the behavior of those who can no longer even do that much. It's also a means of preventing families from developing the kind of intimacy that comes from being able to articulate your pain to each other, discovering how similar in effect you are to those around you. The opening scene throws you in medias res into the desparate and painful this life we're vicariously sharing truly is. People driven to these extremes aren't able, never having been taught how, to communicate and share their pain.

It is a lake of fire. It is life lived while the fire consumes you...living next to the living entity of the River Paraguaçu, unquenched in their burning, desperate in their thirst, locked away without the burning walls ever collapsing enough to set them free just ablaze. Wait...there are over four stars up there...what the what? It's dark and sad and terrible!

It's true and powerful and, in its survivors' acts of self-empowerment from the first pages onward, deeply inspiring. Humans gutting it out, battling injustice, refusing to be deprived forever...a modern take on The Grapes of Wrath, Brazilianized. In the story's structure the fourth and last chapter melds all three previous points of view, brings all the toughest troubles tohgether, provides the da Silva faily a jumping off point into the always-uncertain thing we call the future:

Time passes, but we don’t exhaust the world of its mysteries, and when we unveil the truth, we unveil just a part.

TAXI DANCER: A Novel, based on a sad, depressingly relevant true story

TAXI DANCER: A Novel
MARIVI SOLIVEN
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "Welcome to the electrifying underworld of California’s Depression-era taxi dance halls, where a dance could cost you a dime, a chance at romance, or a bullet in your back.”—Rick Bonus, Professor and Chair at the Dept. of American Ethnic Studies in the University of Washington

Based on a true story, Taxi Dancer is a gripping historical novel by Marivi Soliven that illuminates the hidden world of Depression-era Filipino taxi dance halls, weaving a forbidden interracial romance with a high-stakes murder mystery to explore race, desire, survival, and the Filipino American experience in 1930s California.

“If we can’t marry white girls, we can at least dance with them.” In response to Depression-era California laws that criminalized interracial marriage, Filipinos established taxi dance halls where they could mingle with American women. When Filipino farmworker Eli and American taxi dancer Lucinda fall in love, they hope to move to Washington State where they can legally wed. Their plans are derailed when Eli is arrested for the shooting death of a dance hall owner. As Lucinda fights to exonerate Eli, she uncovers a murder conspiracy orchestrated by Mamie Savage, a rival dance hall owner and Sal, her Filipino bartender. The capital punishment trial brings to light abhorrent secrets concealed by the conspirators, the victim, and Lucinda herself. Inspired by true events in San Diego’s Stingaree district.

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My Review: Laws about whom you are allowed to marry are always popular among the "FREEDOM FREEDOM—not for you for me" religious or otherwise intellectually impaired sort. I get that the state has a need to know with whom its citizens and residents are forming households. Beyond registering those households formed, there's no need to poke further into their business.

That's not a popular opinion in these United States in the year of our lord two thousand twenty-six. It's being shoved down our throats that some people, white men especially, deserve more of the benefits that come from freedom than other, darker and/or female people, do. This is not new, nor is it confined to the US. It's a nasty, unjustifiable piece of cruelty that's been on the run for decades and that rollback of privilege is now taking root. Therefore the demographic and actuarial reality that fewer white males are being born thus diluting their godlike, "god given" dominion over...them...is fading. The present dangerous pass in public life is down to the death throes of the established order being played out with maximal ferocity because, once gone, there will be no way to get them all back.

Exhibit A: look at every "AI" controlling person's color and genitalia.

As proof it's not a new thing, look at the reason this book exists. It's telling the story of a statutorily "inferior" man forgetting his appointed place and having sex with a white woman. Stick to your own kind, race purity is paramount so you getting a white woman pregnant is not to be tolerated! This panic, fomented by the likes of Stephen Miller among others, has deep roots in white nationlism and authoritarian corporatocracy. The Filipina author of this story based it on a tragedy that occurred in San Diego, California; I was surprised at how totally unfamiliar I, a native Californian, was with this aspect of the state's ethnic history.

It was the first of several revelations. Like everyone of my generation, I'd at least heard of (in my case seen) They Shoot Horses, Don't They? so was aware in a vague, general way that there were things called "dance halls" and the dancing was a form of socially accepted foreplay conducted for profit by unsavory people. I had not put that together with the "shocking" idea that the races (stupid term) can mix! Panic! Horripilation! In structuring her story on the bones of a real, dreadful moment in San Diego history, Author Soliven uses the time-honored epistolary method for relevant passages from official records, newspaper accounts, and suchlike demonstations of the story's authentic roots, interspersing the imagined—I'd say better described as "recaptured"—dialogues. It makes Eli and Lucinda and Amado and all the other men and women in the story come alive in sharp relief. Like a change in lighting from fluorescent ceiling fixtures in linoleumed hallways into soft lamplight on carpeted upholstered comfortable spaces.

As the story unfolds the Filipino words and phrases become more than Google fodder, the sounds and the feel of the words in my mouth become part of a truly immersive journey into a cultural state of mind. I had not expected to experience this because I am very unfamiliar with more than the broadest outlines of the milieu. In US colonial history the Philippines loom large, after all General MacArthur had roots there and he was a huge figure in my early life; but that's not the Filipino people, their lives, their needs and wants from coming here. As I spent more time with these fictionalized people and moved between chapters through the epistolary bits, I got more and more into Author Soliven's characters in their raw form. It made me appreciate more and more her careful work of fleshing the factual bones with forms so real I was gripped. I cared more what was coming next in their story after each reminder of the facts.

It all leads to tragedy. All stories do, as death is always without fail the end of The Story. In this case, Amado is shot and killed in his successful dance hall for stupid, petty reasons (at the literal beginning of the book, it's not a spoiler)...but the system's wicked, cruel restraints are, as so often, the levers used to move the structures a bit more in the direction of Justice.

We're still working on fairness. It appears to be a Sisyphean task.

THE DYING LIGHT, ANN CLEEVES' Matthew Venn/Two Rivers series #4

THE DYING LIGHT (Two Rivers #4)
ANN CLEEVES
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Dying Light is a searing new novel featuring DI Matthew Venn, brimming with energy and taut with claustrophobic tension, as the detective peels back layer upon layer to discover the dark secrets this family is keeping.

A scorching heatwave marks the start of the summer in Devon. Detective Matthew Venn is called in to investigate a puzzling death, when the body of a young woman, Lottie, is found in the swimming pool of a luxurious holiday home. The girl’s best friend, Hannah, whose family owns the house, is missing. The girls had arrived in Devon a few days ahead of the family to celebrate the end of their school exams, and had managed to make waves during their short time there; they disrupted the folk music festival at the neighboring farm, with Lottie posting incendiary videos on social media mocking what she snobbishly considered to be a parochial community.

When further tragedy strikes, Venn and his team begin questioning a community filled with secrets. Hannah’s father, Paul Armstrong, is a rising political star, a fact that quickly draws intense media scrutiny to the case, not least because there are many who would want to take him down. With the summer heat come holidaymakers, and it emerges that some of them may have more connections with the Armstrong family than first thought.

Caught between a powerful family's secrets and a powder keg of local tensions, Venn and his team must navigate a treacherous path. He knows all too well that the real answers lie not in what people say, but in the silence that they keep . . .

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My Review: Mean girl goes after easy target, makes already angry people angrier, gets killed.

Another case where Matthew ought to close the case with "person or persons unknown" and stamp a seal on it. Who cares if this nasty little pisher Lottie's dead? Let's take the gene-pool cleanse as a piece of luck and get on with solving terrible crimes.

Hannah, Lottie's buddy and the daughter of the man whose home Lottie was staying in, is missing. He also happens to be a big-shot political scum. Hop to, Matthew and scoobygroup...I mean, team. The locals whose police dollars are funding this investigation already resent Hannah's outsider family for "ruining" (ie moving into and making more expensive) their community. Like all resort-ifying communities the battle lines are sharply drawn. The problem for Jen, who took the initial report regarding Lottie who's her son Ben's age, and Ross who's still irked at not being seen as the genius he isn't, and Matthew himself (in the throes of a serious upheaval in Jonathan's life), is how to tiptoe down a superthin line between the sides while still extracting information that will allow Hannah, the missing young woman, to be found alive?

Oh dear.

More and more complexities and interconnections...Hannah's local boyfriend,the dead girls' mutual from the US, whose unfriendly parents are staying at the local boyfriend's parents' glamping resort...yes, it's all a bit much in a short review but honestly it's paced with Author Cleeves' usual skill and attention to misdireaction...I mean detail, of course I do. Quite a bit of time is, annoyingly, going over what feels the precise same detail with the same people. Look closer.

Jonathan loves Matthew or he wouldn't have married him. Right now, though, Jonathan is a wreck because he's set up a meeting with his birth mother. This will stress any marriage...and it's not been *that* long that Matthew's religious-nut mother was widowed and thus could at least start to rebuild bridges with her queer son; so as always, like life, the stressors are not neatly sequential.

Series fans will be delighted that Lucy and her dad make an appearance.

That's as always the series mystery's greatest appeal for readers. The puzzles are nice but the people who stay, who come back, who thread through the series make the weather. Sunny and fair here in North Devon (which is how you know it's fiction), among interesting, relatable regulars and starkly weird contrasting outsiders. Don't start here, start with The Long Call. (And write nastygrams to ITV/Britbox for canceling the TV adaptation.)

THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS, exploring the alt-hist "what if Wilde hadn't played the fool for Queensberry?"

THE WEIGHT OF ANGELS
JOHN BOYNE
Henry Holt & Co (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed?

When the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite." The most celebrated playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution, and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiraled into public disgrace, humiliation, and an early death.

But what if he had simply ignored the insult? What direction might his life have taken? This is the premise of John Boyne's extraordinary new novel, The Weight of Angels. Rather than dying in penury in Paris at age forty-six, what if Wilde had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes of the first part of the twentieth century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as dramatic, tumultuous, and exhilarating as the first?

In imagining the life that Oscar Wilde never had, John Boyne has written one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the iconic Anglo-Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path.

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My Review: I am not a big fan of Author Boyne. I came within an ace of deleting this widget. Because I've learned to be super-scrupulous in reading the whole text of something my urge is to ignore/delete *before* I do it, I saw the open-sesame of the offer: "what if Wilde hadn't played the fool for Queensberry?"

Sold.

You would have to go some to get me not to finish this story. The entire course of Anglophone culture would've changed without this famous sodomite...what an ugly word...being a complete idiot and suing a nasty little waster for saying a true thing in a vicious, pointed way. Wilde was fucking the man's son, a little anger and hatefulness was to be expected in that time and place. Of course it went very badly indeed for Bosie, but broken eggs∈omelette....

Author Boyne has this version of Oscar continue to be abrasive and obnoxious to the world at large (because genius y'know), continuing to flaunt...and I use this word in its strictest sense...his sexuality while continuing to produce literary genius for the enthralled masses. I know this is a hard swallow fo y'all "the way it is is the way it is and so it must only be this way" folks when the subject is history. The alternate history genre comes from the nineteenth-century thought experiment, a technique of gaming out what might happen in a multifactor scenario. War colleges in particular, giant corporations, political operatives, all use thought experiments...counterfactuals colloquially...to help with decision making. Applying the technique to fiction delights me.

Of course the hurdle he faced in bringing this scenario to life is writing a genius's words that were never spoken. I'm feeling charitable: the effort he put into the research, the absorption into Wilde and his world was so extensive, that I was able to suspend disbelief.

“Are you deliberately trying to be rude?”
“No, it comes quite naturally to me.”

It's the sort of line you or I would be proud as hell to skate off. It would not end up in The Big Book of Oscar Wilde Quotes.

Much as I absolutely loved "Oscar's Law" and, in honesty, felt it was a very reasonable conjecture on Author Boyne's part, it contributed to my growing sense of unease about the "Mary Sue"-ness of the Wilde in this story. Some of his Forrest-Gumpian meet-everybody-impress'em-all quality is just projecting his actual past into an unlived future. It does not take away one bit my unease at the way it reads.

Another qualm the Mary-Sueness of it all did not help the story is the sheer number of people who float through the six-hundredish pages. If one is not versed in the dramatis personae of the early twntieth century, this story will bore you rigid with "who was that? why should I care?" feelings that result from putting too much of one's research on the page. It clutters up the reading experience, though I'll say it delighted me personally. His take on Lady Thelma Furness versus Wallace Simpson...*chef's kiss*

It was a successful read, an enjoyable trip...for me. I suspect others won't entirely agree. The last words properly belong to Oscar Wilde hinself, summing up this imagines life succinctly and well:

“I wanted to be a writer. And I became a writer. That is how I spent my life. Sometimes loved; sometimes scolded. Sometimes celebrated. Sometimes loathed. Sometimes a force for change; sometimes my own worst enemy. But I was always read.”

As is meet and right.

TRAD WIFE, disappointing suspense story I was all set to revel in

TRAD WIFE
SARAH LANGAN
Atria Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Good Neighbors comes a chilling tale of a journalist's descent into horror as she uncovers the dark secrets behind a trad wife influencer, blending suspense with a critique of modern femininity and the manipulative forces of social media.

Every day, millions watch Mia Wright, the “trad wife” queen, on her idyllic 300-acre farm. With her handsome husband, seven perfect children, and a life of from-scratch meals and pastoral bliss, she’s an icon of modern femininity. But behind every perfect image is a secret. And in this case, the secret is a horror.

Desperate to save her tarnished career, journalist Jenny Kaplan arrives at Black Swan Farm to profile Mia. Jenny is ready to write a scathing exposé, determined to expose the deception behind Mia’s curated life. But soon, Jenny has more to contend with than staged videos and picture-perfect poses. There’s something wrong at the farmhouse. Something slithers through Jenny’s dreams, and at night, the children sing strange nursery rhymes.

She’s losing time. She’s losing her hair. She starts to worry that she’s losing her mind.

There is a horror at the heart of Black Swan, and it’s waiting just for Jenny. Trad Wife will make you question what’s real and what’s just a perfectly curated deception…

Will you see the lie?

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My Review: Kind of resembles Yesteryear from the outside, with a malevolent animating force protecting Mia the trad wife and punishing Jenny the exposé-hunting journalist.

Jenny's been disgraced so is looking to this sitting-duck trad wife minor celeb to rebuild trust she lost from her audience of me-clone readers. Yes, I'd read Jenny's hit piece to revel in the fakery and façade-busting of someone whose presentation of self I strongly dislike and disapprove of.

Except there's a reason Jenny lost it all. There are many things Author Langan kinda tosses in and around that could be deeply offensive to people in their oddly missing narrative purpose in the story. I'm thinking most strongly of the sexual abuse of a minor. The cancer that's chucked into the grinder is pretty bothersome, too, though not for as powerful a reason.

Most troubling to me, however, as the craft failures throughout: action stopping for Jenny to follow an obsessive, destructive rumination of Jarron (her ex) enough times I wanted to give her my therapist's name was chief among these. I'm familiar with obsession and its attendant foreclosures of attention. As the PoV character's frequent emotional state, it just won't move things forward in a horror story, a cardinal sin; even in domestic suspense, it ends up making Jenny feel a bit too victimish as she's doing it to herself.

Almost as unhappy-making is the amount of time I'm reading Jenny's notes in italics immediately after the action she took notes on finishes. It is another way to stop the action dead. I was mildly amused once, maybe twice, by including call-outs to the Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions in their entirety. But here again, the action comes to a screeching halt. There are enough moments where this occurs for me to find it obtrusive and a problem for my desire to continue the read.

But I did, and finished it because Black Swan Farm was a nicely evoked backdrop for what should've been a faster-paced suspenseful story of comeuppance and redemption.

JOHN BERGER: From Life, and what a life it was!

JOHN BERGER: From Life
TOM OVERTON
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A magisterial biography of novelist and critic John Berger, whose work—including Ways of Seeing and the Booker-prize winning G.—revolutionized the critical tradition in the twentieth century

John Berger (1926–2017) served in Britain’s wartime army before attending art school. The young artist became a critic and broadcaster, cutting a swathe through the staid world of post-war Britain, demanding political engagement in all things. In 1972, he came to prominence with Ways of Seeing, a TV series and book that inspired generations to look more closely and think more deeply about art.

Committed to the passionate exploration of life in all its forms, unbounded by convention, he applied himself to a panoply of genres, media, and subjects. His career defies definition. His work reimagined the relationship between art and society; human and animal; living and dead. He charted the disappearance of peasants from the world; documented migrant labour; explored the AIDS crisis; and was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s, as he was to the War on Terror that followed. Berger was deeply and vocally committed to the Palestinian cause.

Through working on Berger’s archive at the British Library and fifteen years of getting to know his family, friends, lovers, and collaborators, Tom Overton has produced a portrait of an artist and storyteller who defined and transcended his times.

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My Review: First, read this:

You lived through enough zeits for there to be many geists.Ways of Seeing is part of a moment of experiment with televisual equipment all around the world, from The Hour of the Furnaces in Argentina, Nam June Paik in America, to Harun Farocki and Cristina Perincioli in Germany. Not experiments your producer...remembered knowing anything about.

A friend writing his friend's biography either is wielding one of the Long Knives in anticipation of the famously horrible Night of them returning, or is barely stopping short of a public act of fellation. The staccato rhythm of the above sentence supports either interpretation in its sibylline recounting of Berger's wide field of cultural vision.

Considering how many, many, many coital acts are presented as factual in this extended celebration of the interesting and salacious life of a man who thought deeply and was very willing to detail the trails his thought had brought him down. An artist, a Booker-winning novelist, a public intellectual with a strong leftist bent...he created the riposte to Kenneth Clark's deeply conservative and Eurocentric Civilisation, Ways of Seeing, in the same year he won the Booker...a career highlight for anyone, even a wunderkind polymath who never left the cultural radar after exhibiting paintings in the post-War gallery scene of London until his death as a grand old man of Culture in France in 2017.

Author Overton has worked on and with Berger, his children, and his archives on multiple fronts. It's expertise one feels as the story of John Berger, polymath and bounder, unspools. His 1972 Booker acceptance speech...well...what a moment. It's a master class in how to make a statement as a principled person, while using the system's kindness against its failings and cruelties to others. As one would expect, there are illustrations, though goodness knows there could be an entire photo essay on John Berger's œuvre.

I hope a few of y'all, who have not heard of Berger before, will discover him; and the rest of us who remenber some bits and fragments of his art(s) career will gain insight and context on him, on how he came to think, and what he came to mean to a world that had then and has now a limited attention span for those who don't think outside the box.

They disassemble it, reuse the best bits, and chuck aside the dross with both hands.

THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT: A Memoir of Three Loves, more from Hepola post-Blackout

THE ONLY THING THERE IS TO WANT: A Memoir of Three Loves
SARAH HEPOLA
The Dial Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The New York Times bestselling author of Blackout excavates the romantic entanglements that defined her adulthood—an electrifying and unflinching account of the ways we choose love, it chooses us, and how those choices build a life.

“I’m scared I only want what I can’t have,” I said.

“Oh baby,” he said. “It’s the only thing there is to want.”

Sarah Hepola wanted so much: a big career; travel and adventure; deep relationships; passion. Having realized so many of those desires, she also grieved the ways her life was not what she’d always imagined it would be. Did I want too much, she wondered. Did I make the wrong choices? Love the wrong people?

In The Only Thing There Is To Want, Hepola revisits three complicated love affairs from her past, seeking to understand how they might have kept her from the life she’d envisioned, but also made her who she is. Examining her own decisions, Hepola probes the question: Is love ever really a choice?

This dazzling portrait of the mirages of modern romance captures the paradox of desire: wanting propels us forward and holds us back. Funny, achingly tender, and fearlessly intimate, The Only Thing There Is to Want is about discovering the beauty in the life you’ve built.

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My Review: "Is love ever really a choice?", the synopsis poses.

No.

That's it then, we're done here, no further questions your honor.

You're the same person sober as you are drunk only masking better. Author Hepola is candid about her love for these men being...ill-considered...but without insobriety to blame for them, she sits with the uncomfortable reality that she makes questionable choices. It's a major moment in an adult's life. Face up, take stock, look carefully at what you are actually doing not the story you tell yourself about what you're actually doing...it can never be simple when the subject is as primal as Love. The stories are simple, we need that to make sense of the wildness of Love.

But go into it, make that fearless and searching inventory of you life, the story crumbles and with it the wall between your Self and your illusions, the stories you tell to yourself about yourself. Like the ones about too-young guys who need you, married guys who want you, and remote guys you want.

It's all there, it's all totally relatable, it's not one bit more romanticized or disingenuously justified than anyone else's baggage; it's a good idea, do it in public so you can't hide from the consequences. Someone out there *needs* to read this book, to know they are not alone or even unusual.

Well-aimed at a market that will not shrink any time soon, presented in a very unflattering warts-and-all top light, it is indeed a book many will need. I don't think I'm one of them because I've been in therapy for, like, ever and these are the techniques of being in a theraputic collaboration.

I hope multitudes feel drawn to Author Hepola's story of how Love deceived her, and I don't mean the men she loved I mean the emotion Love...leading her into emotional traps, through strength-sapping swamps of self-pity, through the powerfully seductive pitfalls of main-character syndrome. (It might not be in the DSM yet but it will be.)

Love powers the world, we're told. but no one extends the analogy to how power is made: burning irreplaceable resources and polluting the planet in ever-more toxic ways, or using rare commodities that can fuel your power generation at the cost of massively dangerous leavings that can kill for generations. Only very rarely have people used renewable, ever-cheaper, and limitless ways of making power.

Time to switch to renewables, though at huge cost, for all our power needs. Love perhaps most urgently of all.