The Night Watchman

by: Louise Erdrich

I picked this up last fall when one of my local bookstores put it on sale – I’d been eyeing it for a while, then it won the Pulitzer, and the next time I went book shopping it was 30% off. I really love it when things come together like that!

This story’s main character is Thomas Wazhashk, a Chippewa council member and member of the Chippewa Turtle Mountain tribe in North Dakota. He works as a night watchman in a jewel-bearing plant, which he campaigned to bring to the town near the reservation to create job opportunities, and is a community leader and advocate. Set in the early 1950s, Thomas is working to stop a termination bill recently introduced in Congress, which would get rid of the Turtle Mountain reservation, as well as long-lasting federal support for the tribe. This book is a fictional retelling of Erdrich’s grandfather, and his community fight against the termination bill in real life.

However, main character is a very loose definition here. In reality, this is the story of a community and a culture, with the point of view fluidly shifting in between a complex cast of characters. The two most commonly heard voices are of Thomas and a young woman named Pixie, who works at the plant in order to support her family, there are many POVs characters are either members of the tribe or on the reservation, sometimes for just a chapter or a page, sometimes for a lot longer. (It’s told in third person, past tense.) It is more the story of a community and a culture than of any one person, which is important for what the book sets out to accomplish.

TNW is written with the Chippewa world view as the default, to the point that the few non-Chippewa POVs we get feel very discordant and strange in the world of the book. Erdrich does a truly excellent job of setting the Chippewa POV as the default, while still acknowledging that white culture exists and both influences and pushes in on Chippewa culture. What “everyone knows,” what “people say,” is time and time again set to a Chippewa default, without the need for caveats.

She knew, as everyone around her knew, that the soul after death sets off to a journey to the next life.

People said that only the most powerful medicine people could fling that twisted mouth.

pp. 279 & 419

And it’s not just the characters who do this; when the book moves to a more third-person objective narrator, this is the worldview of that narrator and therefore the book. It forces the (non-Chippewa) reader to slowly disengage with what they assume as the default, what they think everyone knows, and enter into a world where they’re the visitor. This is something that many books do, and try to do, but I’ve rarely read one that does it so well. In particular, it never feels like the audience for this book is white Americans, which would inherently center a non-Chippewa worldview. A lot of new concepts and some words have to be picked up by context clues, and I’m sure I just missed some things entirely. It’s not excluding anyone; it’s just not apologizing for what it is, which is a Chippewa story.

There’s an element of magical realism throughout the book. (Magical realism may not be the right term, given that it’s happening within the context of a living religion, but it’s the best that I have.) For the Chippewa characters, ghosts and spirits and omens appear, animals speak in human languages, all accepted without hesitation or surprise. I really liked this; I love magical realism and I think it’s one of the most effective ways to immerse someone into a different worldview, because it really forces the reader to accept things without necessarily understanding the underlying reasoning; they have to figure that out for themselves.

While the other two second-wave Native American renaissance books I’ve read, There, There and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, both focus on individual struggles with identity, TNW is the story of a culture more than a person. Though Erdrich spends a page acknowledging the difficulties of defining yourself as Native American in the time Thomas grows up in, for the most part, the characters in the book are very secure in their Native identity. Instead, what this books does – and does so well – is portray a culture in conversation, with itself, with its past, future, and present, and with the environment and broader cultural context it exists in. This was absolutely my favorite part of the book. It, moreso than any other piece of media I’ve engaged with, paints the picture of a Native community as a breathing, living, modern culture. Not that works like “Rutherford Falls” and the abovementioned books haven’t, it’s just that this book in particular pulls the reader into the conversation as it happens, forces the reader to look at the shaping forces, both internal and external, and to see the complexity of this conversation from so many angles and viewpoints.

…she had asked him to make the grave house because she knew he did it the old way. Except, Thomas wondered, was this really the old way? Biboon said that his father remembered a time when the dead person was carefully wrapped in birchbark and then fixed high in a tree. It seemed better.

pg. 321.

The final part of this book that I very much wanted to discuss was its very feminist bent, particularly in the viewpoints of its female characters. There are a wide variety of women, who all wanted different things and who lived very different lives. Within the conversations they have with each other are breathtakingly honest observations about the realities of women’s lives. There’s some strong parallels drawn between the white people’s treatment of the Native Americans and men’s (including Chippewa men’s) treatment of women, both stemming from the fact that the “other” – Native Americans and women, respectively – aren’t viewed as human by the more powerful group. They exist in some other category, somewhere between object and subhuman. Erdrich subtly but consistently differentiates between the experience of the men and the women, and of the white man and the Native Americans (I don’t think we get any white women as POV characters in this book.) At the same time, the injustices particular to women are allowed to stand on their own, to be their own thing with their own considerations in navigating the world.

Jack would have tampered with her slightly, just enough so that when somebody else came along she’d have that shame, then more shame, until she got lost in shame and wasn’t herself.

pg. 296

I definitely think this book was an excellent choice for its Pulitzer and I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time. I also think it’s a really important addition to the growing body of modern Native American literature, especially in conversation with works that are more focused on individual journeys.

Comfort Me With Apples

by: Catherynne M. Valente

I was really excited when I saw this going around BookTube (I watch a lot of Booktube for background noise, though I usually don’t take book recs from it.) I loved Valente in her The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland days, lost track of her work after, and have this year discovered that she’s now writing adult fiction. This has been a very exciting find for me.

The blurb for this book, and the YouTube descriptions I saw (based on it) were – odd? Needlessly complicated, I think, particularly for a 100 page book. Comfort Me With Apples is a feminist retelling of the fairytale “Bluebeard,” very much in the tradition of Angela Carter. That’s, I think, all that really needs to be said about the plot if you know the Bluebeard story. If you don’t, it’s a story of a newly married woman who begins to find concerning things in the house she shares with her oddly secretive husband.

I loved this book. I genuinely think it may be Valente’s best. It’s kept in the style of a fairy tale, so instead of using the plot to flesh out a much bigger story (a la Ella Enchanted), Valente is keeping the fairy tale structure and approach, down to simplifying her sentence structure (a la Gail Caron Levine’s Princess Tales series.) There is more exploration of the main character – Sophia – and more internal dialogue than you would find in a traditional fairy tale, but it does still very much feel and read like one. I should say that I am a huge fan of fairy tales, feminist retellings, and Valente’s writing, so there was very little chance that I wasn’t going to like this book.

It is told in presence tense third person and billed as horror – I have a super low horror tolerance, and while I felt the tension of the book, it didn’t fill me with dread or scare me. I don’t think horror is an incorrect classification, but the goal of the book is not necessarily to scare you.

I was made for him.

pg. 84

This book definitely exceeded my expectations. It’s so crisply structured. It’s fast-paced and plot-driven, as fairy tales should be, while keeping the reader invested in Sophia. There’s two reveals in the book, one that is the traditional Bluebeard reveal, and one that is not. For that latter, the reader is given everything they need to reach the reveal on their own, trickled out organically in the preceding pages. Every detail mattered, or had a secondary meaning, and the book knew exactly how much tension and meaning it could contain, ending at exactly the right moment and length. One of the more satisfying parts about reading was finishing and sitting for a moment thinking about how perfectly everything fit together, while re-examining details and finding new meanings.

Surrounded by the secrets her house has kept from her, she tries and tries to see the shape of things happening to her.

pg. 66

The problem, however, is there’s very little I can say about this book, or even quote from it, that isn’t a spoiler. It’s a fantastic and tense look at how society treats women – but any more than that will have to wait for a spoiler-specific post.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend this book! I literally read it over lunch and then in between periods at a hockey game, so it’s not a huge commitment (though I want to get my own copy and reread it slowly now!)

Finding Latinx: In Search of the Voices Redefining Latino Identity

by: Paola Romas

I found this book at a queer, feminist bookstore, read the prologue, and was incredibly excited. It’s an exploration of Latino(x) identify across America, with the author going on a road trip to talk to Latinos throughout the USA and explore Latino communities.

In actually reading the book, I had very mixed feelings, however. Candidly, I quickly got about halfway through it, put it down for multiple months (although part of this was just putting down most things that weren’t very light reading), and finally came back to finish it this week.

It is absolutely an exploration of Latino identity, and an argument for why Latinx may be a better umbrella term than Latino. And I cannot say enough about the people Ramos found to interview for the book – a ton of incredible people, many of whom were doing amazing advocacy, community support, or activist work. The people selected and the interviews given by Ramos were absolutely the best part of the book, and very much hit exactly at Ramos’ thesis, that Latino identity is much more diverse and complex than we as a culture and society recognize it to be. I also think the places she picks are strongly representative of this richness and variety, inclusive of both places you probably already associate with Latinos (LA, for example) and places you may not (Poughkeepsie, New York.)

Ramos also makes an intentional effect to seek out, and listen to, Latinos representing as many different Latino identities as she can. She talks to indigenous peoples whose families migrated from Central America, Afro-Latinos from the Caribbean, LGBTQ+ folk, recent immigrants and people whose families and communities have been in the USA for generations. No book can represent everyone in a community, but that did not stop Ramos from trying, and with that effort she brings to light stories and people who are often forgotten or excluded from the general perception of the broader Latino community/umbrella. She also uses this as a platform to highlight why some people who fit under the Latino umbrella may not identify that way, such as the indigenous peoples of Mexico/Central America. In many ways, this is a landmark book and should be treated as such. This isn’t something I’ve seen explored in anywhere near such breadth in any type of media before, but it is vitally important to the culture and society of the USA.

That being said, I still struggled with several things about the book. It’s written in a very journalistic manner, and I think ultimately would be better approached as a cohesive collection of articles rather than a single story. Each story/chapter is told as if it’s framing an argument, and every quote or interaction or piece of art is presented as hugely meaningful and symbolic – something that makes sense in a short article, where you’re trying to get a point across in a very limited number of words. In a book, however, when everything is significant, it has a muting effective, and ultimately nothing becomes significant. Reframing my approach from “this is a book” to “this is a collection of articles” allowed me to re-engage in the latter half of the book.

On that note, while Ramos’ stated thesis is that the Latinx experience is incredibly diverse, much more so than we give it credit for, because of the writing style, and because so many chapters ended on a intentionally strong hopeful note for the future, it constantly felt like the book was trying to find some Unified Theory of Latinx. It was not! But the constant, “here is a problem and here are the shining stars working to change things, the future is bright for Latinx people” felt like it was trying to crescendo to a point that Ramos was not trying to make. Even when I changed my approach, it still felt like the book was going somewhere I knew it wasn’t.

Finally, my expectations going into this book were just not aligned with what the book actually was (and that’s not on the book!) I thought this was a book about Latinos for Latinos, and instead it very much felt like the primary audience was non-Latinos. Certainly not in a way that excluded Latinos, but Ramos spent a significant amount of time exploring the more easily digestable, counteracting common biases, and introducing people to Latinx communities. I wanted, instead, a more more complex and nuanced dive into Latino communities and cultures, focusing on fewer stories but doing more with each one. This is not a good or bad thing, this just an “is” thing that took me a while to figure out. I do, however, wish Ramos had arranged the book by people instead of by location and community. I felt like the people in this book were represented so brilliantly, and certainly reflected on their communities, but there just wasn’t space to truly portray something as complex as a community. I ended up being disappointed when I got to the chapter portraying the area that I grew up, even though I was riveted by the story of the person Ramos interviewed.

Ultimately, though, when I think about what the book set out to do and what it did, there is no other conclusion but to say that this book is a smashing success. It touched on so many different Latinx communities and people, giving insights into the complexity of their relationship with the broader American culture, the oppression and difficulties they face, and the triumphs they’ve experienced and are creating. It really did explore and ultimately redefine Latinx for me, in a way no other book or piece of media has done. I hope Ramos and other content creators keep exploring this subject – honestly, at least one of my issues with the book boils down to “there just isn’t enough representation, and this book can’t be everything to everybody.”

I think this book would be an excellent pick for anyone looking to explore or learn more about Latinx identity in the USA, and I strongly recommend it as such.

For All the Tea in China

by: Sarah Rose

I first heard about this book on the podcast Gastropod, and I was fascinated. But I was also living in New Zealand at the time, and couldn’t easily access a copy. I finally got around to reading it this year, and I’m so glad I did!

This short nonfiction is the story of the East India Company’s efforts to steal tea from China to cultivate for profit in India. (By tea, I mean, the plant, and the Chinese techniques for growth, propagation, and processing of the leaves.) The person who actually performed this historic – and massive – bit of corporate espionage is our protagonist, Robert Fortune, a botanist who travelled widely in China in the 19th century.

There was a time when maps of the world were redrawn in the name of plants, when two empires, Britain and China, went to war over two flowers: the poppy and the camellia.

pg. 1

I really loved this book. It was engagingly written and well-researched. It leans a little towards creative non-fiction – Rose often takes us inside Fortune’s mind, and others, instead of keeping the narrative voice strictly disconnected. However, she uses a lot of historical evidence to back this up, and acknowledges when she is just speculating, versus pulling from (quoted) letters and writings of Fortune. It worked for me, especially to keep the connection between the reader and Fortune.

There is a tiny bit of Eurocentricism that comes through in her writing – for instance, there’s a section when she’s comparing sanitation technology and practices between Britain and China and says something like, no sane man would chose to live in China indefinitely or something, when what she clearly means is that no sane British man would chose to give up the comforts he was accustomed to in Britain. That being said, there is a lot of effort to highlight the culture, history, and advances of China whenever relevant, to include areas in which China was far ahead of Britain (both historically and contemporary to the story), and to point out the British empire’s massive disrespect of non-Western cultures and the ways that harmed their colonies and their own efforts.

Rose was also excellent at contextualizing events and the historical time period. The book is incredibly short (only 245 pages, including prologue), but manages to cover a lot, and everything that it covered really built my understanding of the events in the story and their impact on the world stage, continuing towards modern day. I learned a ton about the British Empire, the colonization of India, the East India Company, and Chinese-British relationships. It was very broad, but did such a great job of highlighting the points you needed to know. I particularly loved learning about the East India Company – which, as the world’s first international global corporation, was facing a lot of issues strikingly familiar to the workforce today.

In the end, Fortune’s first plants may have been doomed by collective corporate incompetence.

pg. 185

Rose’s writing itself is engaging, with a tiny touch of the wry. She does a good job of keeping things moving forward with entertaining storytelling, balanced with acknowledgments of the devastation and tragedy that arose from the East India Company’s, and British, actions. I think this could have easily gotten dry, or dismissive, or really dark, but it does none of those things. She also does a great job of capturing the beauty of China (I very much want to go back after reading this!) and Britain as a culture and as an empire.

What Fortune found in Wuyi Shan was Britain’s reigning temper: the thrill to conquer, but politely.

pg. 164

This is such a great introduction to key world events that aren’t really covered in American history classes. I actually want to do more of a deep dive into this period and events now – before this, most of my knowledge of the East India Company came from romance novels. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn a little more about British colonization of the East (or tea!), or if you’re looking to try out non-fiction and want something shorter, engaging, and easy to read. If you’re already familiar with the events, this might be a little too general to really capture your interest, though.

The Liar’s Dictionary

by: Eley Williams

I found this with a bookseller recommendation at a local bookstore, claiming it was hilarious – I read the first few pages, had to agree, and ended up buying it.

The Liar’s Dictionary is two stories told in parallel, taking place in two different timelines. For transparency, this is one of my least favorite framing methods (and for whatever reason, it’s also really popular right now. I swear I see it in like every other book I pick up.) I somehow completely missed that when I read the blurb of the book, and it took me a while to figure out one was set in 1899 and one was set in present day. Both stories involve employees working on Swansby’s Dictionary, a massive multivolume effort undertaken in the 19th century, (Peter Winceworth’s story, told in third person POV) which has since massively flopped and is generally considered a cultural relic of a sort in the 21st (Mallory’s story, told in first person POV.) Winceworth and Mallory, somewhat coasting along in life, are both confronted with circumstances that shake up their lives a bit.

The connecting point between the two characters is mountweazels, fake words inserted into dictionaries as protection against copyright infringement. Right away, you can feel Williams’ love of English words – there’s 26 chapters, each titled by a word that corresponds to that letter of the alphabet, from A-Z. And there’s a really delightful humor pervasive throughout the book, sometimes in your face (there’s a fantastic scene with a pelican that make me laugh out loud multiple times, and sometimes in a more subtle way that required you to pay particular attention to the writing, like this very relatable gem that reminded me strongly of Wodehouse:

Winceworth had an unqueer desire to delay the inevitability of his working day for as long as possible.

pg. 48

When I was looking for a photo of the book, I saw an NPR book calling this a dual love story, and I don’t think it’s that. Both main characters are either in a relationship or develop feelings for another person, but the driving action of the story is definitely self-exploration and reflection. That doesn’t mean it’s devoid of action – there’s a nice bit of tension and some action, particularly at the latter half of the book. I will note, some of the events in both timelines were a little too similar – for the most part, the story felt super relatable to everyday life in a very funny way, so the occurrence of two unlikely events, one in each timeline, just didn’t feel entirely believable.

The book also examines the fluidity of the English language. There’s a gentle nod towards the changing uses and definitions of words between the two time periods, which was nice to see, and some excellent history tidbits around words and dictionaries I will leave for you to discover. Additionally, one of Winceworth’s key characteristics was a propensity for making up words to fill what he felt were obvious gaps in the English language. I flagged so many of them, but my favorites (after much consideration) were susposset and widge-wodge.

susposset (n.), the suspicious that chalk has been added to ice cream to bulk out the serving

widge-wodge (v.), Informal-the alternate kneading of a cat’s paws upon wool, blankets, laps, &c.

pp. 76 & 166

Williams’ writing was in an odd place for me. She is a great writer, but uses a lot of literary writing techniques to impart seriousness or beauty that I would often recognize as techniques while writing – the bones were just a little too obvious and it pulled me out of the story. But she is also hilarious and occasionally writes something just so incredibly beautiful that I had to stop and appreciate it for a moment.

…knowing the sky was never truly grey, just filled with a thousand years of birds’ paths…

pg. 125

I was much more invested in Winceworth’s story than Mallory’s, and the pacing for both ended up feeling more like a short story pacing than a novel – there wasn’t a lot of time given to the resolution after the climax of either story and I wanted just a little bit more time to exhale with the characters. I also think some of the side characters in Winceworth’s story would have benefited from a little more time to flesh out. I loved Winceworth’s character, though, and while I found Mallory to be not as engaging, I think she was incredibly relatable in an “early-mid twenties, still figuring things out” kind of way.

I found many funny or lovely quotes in this book, and if you’re looking for a funny, lovely, light novel, and like a sly sense of humor with some laugh-out-loud moments, I completely recommend it. If you’re wanting something that’s a deep character study, or if you don’t like short story format and writing, then alas! this may not be the book for you.

Peter Green and the Unliving Academy

by: Angelina Allsop

This is a middle-grade book that was sent to me by the publisher TCK. I picked it out to review in January 2021, read a few pages, thought it looked really cute and exciting, and then… my work life, which had calmed down for a few months, got crazy again. So now it’s January 2022 and I have finally read the book. (I feel genuinely awful about that, but please know it was purely a reflection of my workload and not of the book.)

The good thing is that I not only was looking forward to jumping back into this book, but I then really enjoyed reading it. It’s a middle-grade fantasy novel about a boy who dies and goes to the After Life, where he’s placed in an orphanage/boarding school to continue growing up. But to do so safely, his memories have to be taken from him until he graduates. The memory loss works a lot like amnesia; for instance, he knows what a family is and that he has one; he just can’t remember his family. As Pete works out how to exist in the After Life – dealing with werewolves, vampires, and other students, and while figuring out who he wants to be – he’s also struggling to remember something about his past life. Something vitally important.

The book is written in limited third person, told from Pete’s point of view. The writing is excellent and I think incredibly well-targeted to middle grade readers. The pacing was outstanding – such a good balance of a fast-paced, adventure filled book that still had all the plot elements connected and left room for character growth and for the reader to catch their breath when needed. Even though it has a lot of horror elements, like werewolves, vampires, and a boarding school in a creepy mansion, it’s definitely not horror and doesn’t ever try to make the reader scared of the dark (this fraidy-cat appreciated that!) It’s longer than the average middle grade novel, but because of its writing and pacing, remains very accessible.

I loved Pete – he was a very polite 14 year old and I have a soft spot for polite characters that go on adventures, like Cimorene from The Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Especially in the first half, you can see him trying to put himself in other people’s shoes as he interacts with them. And while sometimes his politeness helped him, it wasn’t treated as a means to an in-story reward, just something to do to be considerate of others. I didn’t love the way he noted every pretty girl or beautiful woman he saw, but there absolutely were well-rounded female characters in this and…honestly, that’s probably something a lot of 14 year old boys would notice.

I also really liked the way the book handled character flaws. There are some werewolves in the school, who are good when they’re humans and bad when they’re wolf/monsters. In the school’s culture, the monster behavior isn’t held against the humans (who are expected to take reasonable steps to prevent their monster side from hurting someone else.) The students are similarly allowed within the story to be deeply flawed without being evil or needing a tragic backstory to justify their more flawed character. They’re just human, sometimes good and sometimes not.

The book also touches lightly, but deftly, on some of the more…philosophic themes, I think is the best way to put it. The region where the school is located in called Purgatory. It’s very boring and staid (the school is an exception) and people cannot stay there long-term with their memories from Life, which is why the students need to lose theirs, temporarily, to finish growing up. Multiple characters give their opinion on why Purgatory exists as it is, each of their reasoning differing slightly, and they made up my favorite quotes from the book.

But this place is also for people who needed time to change and just never got a chance to when they were alive. They get to use this time to become whoever and whatever they want without their memories getting in the way.

pg. 28

It was meant to be a temporary place, a lovely place to wait for those you love to come to you.

pg. 243

There was a scene or two in the middle that I thought were a touch oversimplified, and a lot of the information is presented with the assumption that the audience has a kid-like acceptance of “Oh, okay, this is how it is now.” If those aren’t your cup of tea, than this sadly might not be the book for you. But if you like middle grade adventure fantasy, are looking for a book to help a middle grade reader feel more confident with length, or want a deftly thought-provoking yet action-packed booked, I strongly recommend it!

(I am passing along my copy to my middle-grade cousins to read and will be keeping my eye out for the sequel! This is a smaller publisher, so here’s the Amazon link if you’re interested in the book.)