Author 'Nathan Burgoine posted this simple, direct method of not getting paralyzed by the prospect of having to write reviews. The Three-Sentence Review is, as he notes, very helpful and also simple to achieve. I get completely unmanned at the idea of saying something trenchant about each book I read, when there often just isn't that much to say...now I can use this structure to say what I think is the most important idea I took away from the read and not try to dig for more.
Think about using it yourselves!
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
Rating: 3.25* of five
The Publisher Says: In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA MY FRIEND MARK. THANK YOU.
My Review: Quirky neighbors living in a supremely hardscrable era, gettin' by and gettin' along with the help and kindness they so generously give without expecting a return. Thus, of course, assuring they get one.
In other words, Norman Lear's wet dream. Author McBride can write his socks off. The lovely prose masks the sitcom-from-1972 plot. I expect to receive brickbats for breaking orthodoxy, but there it is.
Riverhead Books (non-affiliate Amazon link) only asks $12.99 for your lefty-liberal uplift.
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North to Paradise: A memoir by Ousman Umar (tr. Kevin Gerry Dunn)
Rating: 3.25* of five
The Publisher Says: The inspiring true story of one man’s treacherous boyhood journey from a rural village in Ghana to the streets of Barcelona—and the path that led him home.
Ousman Umar is a shaman’s son born in a small village in Ghana. Though his mother died giving birth, he spent a contented childhood working the fields, setting traps in the jungle, and living off the land. Still, as strange and wondrous flying machines crisscrossed the skies overhead, Ousman dreamed of a different life. And so, when he was only twelve years old, he left his village and began what would be a five-year journey to Europe.
Every step of the way, as he traveled across the Sahara desert, through the daunting metropolises of Accra, Tripoli, Benghazi, and Casablanca, and over the Mediterranean Sea aboard a packed migrant dinghy, Ousman was handed off like merchandise by a loose network of smugglers and in the constant, foreboding company of “sinkers”: other migrants who found themselves penniless and alone on their way north, unable to continue onward or return home.
But on a path rife with violence, exploitation, and racism, Ousman also encountered friendship, generosity, and hope. North to Paradise is a visceral true story about the stark realities of life along the most dangerous migrant route across Africa; it is also a portrait of extraordinary resilience in the face of unimaginable challenges, the beauty of kindness in strangers, and the power of giving back.
I RECEIVED A COPY FROM THE AMAZON FIRST READS PROGRAM. THANK YOU.
My Review: The original Spanish-language title is Viaje al país de los blancos which literally translate to "trip to the country of white people."
It is both more accurate and better reflective of the experience that the author endured. In racist white countries like ours, or like Spain, we tend not to think much about the grit and determination it takes to leave your home, your family, your culture, in order to get more stuff...like food, medical care, consumer goods...in the teeth of gale-force headwinds of hate. I'm bitterly ashamed of all y'all who voted in 2024 for an increase in this reprehensible, cruel, and ultimately futile behavior, across the globe.
Amazon Crossing (non-affiliate Amazon link) only wants $2.49 for a Kindle edition. Definitely well worth such small change for a short, good read.
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Cold nights of childhood by Tezer Özlü (tr. Maureen Freely)
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: The Bell Jar meets Good Morning, Midnight, by one of Turkey’s most beloved writers.
The narrator of Tezer Özlü’s novel is between lovers. She is in and out of psychiatric wards, where she is forced to undergo electroshock treatments. She is between Berlin and Paris. She returns to Istanbul, in search of freedom, happiness, and new love.
Set across the rambling orchards of a childhood in the Turkish provinces and the smoke-filled cafes of European capitals, Cold Nights of Childhood offers a sensual, unflinching portrayal of a woman’s sexual encounters and psychological struggle, staging a clash between unbridled feminine desire and repressive, patriarchal society.
Originally published in 1980, six years before her death at 43, Cold Nights of Childhood cemented Tezer Özlü’s status as one of Turkey’s most beloved writers. A classic that deserves to stand alongside The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight, Cold Nights of Childhood is a powerfully vivid, disorienting, and bittersweet novel about the determined embrace of life in all its complexity and confusion, translated into English here for the first time by Maureen Freely, with an introduction by Aysegül Savas.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I am always, always delighted that I'm not a woman. I'm even more delighted now that I've read this book. If you've read the publisher's comps with as little pleasure as I have, be warned: They are spot-on.
Seriously, straight women, if you dislike men this much, be a lesbian. There is no reason to endure what seems, from y'all's discourse, to be a neverending stream of controlling abusive relationships.
Transit Books (non-affiliate Amazon link) charges $9.99 for an ebook edition. At least it's got interesting settings.
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Hidden in Snow (The Åre Murders) by Viveca Sten (tr. Marlaine Delargy)
Rating: 3.25* of five
The Publisher Says: The splendor of the Swedish mountains becomes the backdrop for a bone-chilling crime. On the day Stockholm police officer Hanna Ahlander’s personal and professional lives crash, she takes refuge at her sister’s lodge in the Swedish ski resort paradise of Åre. But it’s a brief comfort. The entire village is shaken by the sudden vanishing of a local teenage girl. Hanna can’t help but investigate, and while searching for the missing person, she lands a job with the local police department. There she joins forces with Detective Inspector Daniel Lindskog, who has been tasked with finding the girl. Their only lead: a scarf in the snow.
As subzero temperatures drop even further, a treacherous blizzard sweeps toward Åre. Hanna and Daniel’s investigation is getting more desperate by the hour. Lost or abducted, either way time is running out for the missing girl. Each new clue closes in on something far more sinister than either Hanna or Daniel imagined.
In this devious novel by the bestselling author of the Sandhamn Murders series, discover what it will take to solve a case when the truth can be so easily hidden in the coming storm.
I RECEIVED A COPY FROM THE AMAZON FIRST READS PROGRAM. THANK YOU.
My Review: When what you need is a well-executed (!) murder to solve, Viveca Sten as translated by Marlaine Delargy will deliver what you're looking for. It won't break new aesthetic or technical ground. If that's where you want to go, know that going in. Characters and, imporyantly, settings are sufficiently drawn to make me care that they survived...or didn't...and since ma'at must be served, we know where we're headin' before we start.
I'm already reading the second one, that I bought for myself.
Amazon Crossing (non-affiliate Amazon link) wants a piddlin' $2.49. Value for entertainment ratio 3:1.
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My Friends by Hisham Matar
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return, a luminous novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile
The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.
One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.
There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would jeopardize their safety.
When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zowa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.
A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author at the peak of his powers.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Beautiful writing, like: "The question is, my boy, and it has always has been the most important question, how to escape the demands of unreasonable men" and "It’s hard work hiding things, you have to watch yourself, how you walk even, how you eat and sleep and I am terrible at it, you know it." All the sentences I liked were much on this model. The gestalt, unfortunately, never rose above my appreciation for the author's writing talent.
The story left me...unmoved. You look at stories in the light shone by the world at the time they're read, and I read this during the Israeli genocide of the Gazans. My symapthy for this privileged whiner was severely attenuated.
Random House (non-affiliate Amazon link) charges $12.99 for an ebook edition.
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This space is dedicated to Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50, or "the Pearl Rule" as I've always called it. After realizing five times in December 2021 alone that I'd already Pearl-Ruled a book I picked up on a whim, I realized how close my Half-heimer's is getting to the full-on article. Hence my decision to track my Pearls!
As she says:
People frequently ask me how many pages they should give a book before they give up on it. In response to that question, I came up with my “rule of fifty,” which is based on the shortness of time and the immensity of the world of books. If you’re fifty years of age or younger, give a book fifty pages before you decide to commit to reading it or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100—the result is the number of pages you should read before making your decision to stay with it or quit.
So this space will be each month's listing of Pearl-Ruled books. Earlier Pearl-Rule posts will be linked below the current month's crop.
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Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy (50%; p241)
Rating: 3.5* of five (for this re-read)
The Publisher Says: Barbara Gowdy's outrageous, hilarious, disturbing, and compassionate novel is about the Canary family, their immoderate passions and eccentricities, and their secret lives and histories. The deepest secret of all is harbored in the silence of the youngest daughter, Joan, who doesn't grow, who doesn't speak, but who can play the piano like Mozart though she's never had a lesson.
Joan is a mystery, and in the novel's stunning climax her family comes to understand that each of them is a mystery, as marvelous as Joan, as irreducible as the mystery of life itself.
In its compassionate investigation of moral truths and its bold embrace of the fractured nature of every one of its characters, Mister Sandman attains the heightened quality of a modern-day parable.
I GOT THIS BOOK DECADES AGO, AND HAVE NO MEMORY OF HOW.
My Review: I read it in 1996 or so, loved it, and felt a re-read would be a fun thing. Queer representation has come a long way in thirty years.
I'm not as excited and delighted as I was in my 30s, and got more and more uneasy with the characters' poor communication skills, so I pulled the ripcord at 50%. It's pretty well-written so I'm not warning you off. I'm just not that guy anymore.
It's out of print; there's an AI-generated audio version, should you wish to participate in the theft of authorial work.
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A Valley to Harness: A Novel for the World's Revolution by Jason A. Bartles (37%)
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: The climate crisis is here, and no refuge is safe. In the late 2050s, Henry seeks safety in Sediment Valley, an Appalachian retreat promising peace, prosperity, and a place to bake his delicious sweets. But the corporate powers of SustainAble have other plans for Sediment Valley and the geologic power it hides.
Henry soon meets Colson, a reserved butler for the founder of Sediment Valley, and Brisa, a tech genius with an outgoing spirit. Unbeknownst to Henry, both Colson and Brisa have concealed their motivations for leaving the violence of the outside world.
When they discover the true, terrifying plans for the valley and its inhabitants, Henry, Colson, and Brisa must learn to trust one another to save themselves, their loved ones—and the world.
Three isolated heroes face impossible odds. Can they work together to liberate the valley? Or is it already too late to act?
A Valley to Harness welcomes readers, new and returning, to the speculative future of The World’s Revolution.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: Ambitious, tendentious, and ultimately can't avoid the risk of didacticism.
I agree with the author's story's thrust (do not trust tech bros and other Aynholes) but am tired of being thrust into with his rhetorical spear. I found nothing to leaven the dough I'm being asked to chew, just more cogent points. This is a novel; tell me a story that I can enjoy at some higher emotional, not solely fear-driven, level.
Two Doctors Media Collaborative, LLC (non-affiliate Amazon link) thinks $3.99 is a fair price for a Kindlebook.
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To Be Loved: A Story of Truth, Trauma, and Transformation by Frank G. Anderson MD (43%)
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Trauma blocks love. Love heals trauma.
Frank was just six years old when he learned there was something wrong with him. Seriously wrong. But no one told him what it was. Instead, between attending weekly therapy sessions, navigating the passion and violence of his home life, and reading between the lines of dark family secrets, he was left to figure out for himself what the world expected him to be.
Despite an unstable childhood, his remarkable intelligence, caring nature, and desperation for love and acceptance carried him from the top of his high school class to the elite residency program at Harvard University, where he ultimately became one of the world's leading experts in the treatment of trauma. Along the way, his encounters with those suffering from abuse, addiction, and mental illness inspired a sense of purpose...and an earth-shattering awakening of his authentic self.
Ignited by this newfound identity, Frank embarked on a profound—sometimes painful—and redemptive journey that brought the love and acceptance he always longed for.
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In To Be Loved, renowned trauma expert Dr. Frank G. Anderson shares the complicated experience of growing up gay in an Italian-American home that was at once fiercely loving and culturally close-knit while at the same time unaccepting, abusive, and rife with secret shame. With compassion, humor, and disarming honesty, Frank invites the reader into his formative experiences: coming out amid the LGBTQ+ carnival atmosphere of 1990s Provincetown, finding love and forming a family within the staid Boston suburbs, and coming home to confront his family's legacy of abuse. By forging paths for forgiveness, he found that his truth and tenacious spirit were stronger than his trauma.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: My rating reflects what I found to be an off-putting digressive style, one I felt was better suited to fiction than self-help via memoir. My Pearl-Ruling the book reflects how well the author, not much younger than I am, was at evoking the awful experience of being Othered by those you rely on for your existence, for your idea of Self.
Too much for me amid the Satanic Evil takeover of so much of the world by fascist scum.
Bridge City Books (non-affiliate Amazon link) does not want you to buy a Kindlebook, at $22-ish. A hardcover is the same price.
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