Do you reckon?
Three books in which the past is well and truly dealt with.
It’s a new year! And we gotta move the heck on with our lives, looking forward, not back, etc. etc. Except that, of course, sometimes the past needs to be reckoned with. And in these three books, it is reckoned with in degrees ranging from “Ah, we shall put this old past to bed, finally,” to “Find shelter, take cover, and save yourselves!”
One of these books is fairly gentle, and two are the opposite of gentle, but, never fear, I will warn you accordingly.
And I’m still taking recommendations for the best book you read last year! I am hungry for these recommendations, and any genre will do! Plus, I will give them to EELS readers in a nicely bulleted list with zero flowery prose attached. It’ll be tough, but we all have to stretch ourselves from time to time.
If you’re new here, guess what! There’s an archive spreadsheet to see all my recommendations from this year in one handy spot! If you’re a subscriber, you can have it!
🌸 Tom Lake
Ann Patchett, 2023
This is the gentle one (though there is a scene involving a lot of blood, and one pretty painful athletic injury). Tom Lake, it turns out, is not a person, it is a place! And also a memory of a summer spent acting in a play—and also spent in a tumultuous relationship with a fellow actor who would go on to become an extremely famous movie star. This brief episode in the narrator Lara’s life is an episode that her three grown daughters cannot and will not let go until she tells it to them, in detail, while they pick cherries at their family farm during that first weird spring of the pandemic.
In an effort to keep the daughters from cherry-picking (clever, Ann) the things they think they understood about this seemingly dreamy couple of months that they did not, in fact, live through, Lara desperately tries to make them understand a few things. One, her choices are her own. Two, her experiences are her own. Three, well, a bunch of other things that it’s good for all of us to think about as we reflect on Then vs. Now.
Plus, I’ve gotta get to a bucolic Michigan landscape, stat.
Recommended for: Literary fiction lovers. Anyone who just likes a good reflective novel, or anyone who has been in the theater, or anyone who is really, really into Our Town.
🔥 The Poppy War
R.F. Kuang, 2018
I am delighted that Kuang’s hit the big time with her subsequent works Yellowface and Babel, which I have not gotten around to reading yet. I’m sure they are splendid. However, the Poppy War trilogy is where she made a name for herself, and let me tell you, it is not messing around. It’s a historical fantasy set in a fictional Asia that is only a barely concealed China vs. Japan situation, with the addition of mystical powers. There are gods and fire and poison and mysterious empresses. It’s really intense and thoroughly awesome.
As she’ll tell you herself in the foreword or afterword or one of those things, she was inspired by the idea of a protagonist who makes all the wrong choices—and also a certain TV show I’m obsessed with, but I don’t want to mention it here or you’ll get the wrong idea as to what the vibe is like. The plot also hinges on another real-life historical event that I can’t tell you because it’ll give too much away, but whew. Rin, and Kuang, are reckoning with a lot of past. You’ll be going down some Wikipedia rabbit holes. Godspeed.
Recommended for: Those who were always secretly rooting for Azula (you know who you are).
🪢 The Trees
Percival Everett, 2021
Hmm, what to tell you about this one, which I read because my pal Gabe recommended it a few EELSes ago, and I was intrigued. And also because everyone is always talking about Percival Everett at all times.
Well, I can tell you that The Trees is kind of funny, but also about lynching? I know that is an exceedingly strange sentence to hear, but let’s just say there’s a lot of irony going on in this book. The irony flows through it like sap through a pine! There are some murders of some white men who are descended from some other white men who have been involved in a high profile lynching of a real-life Black man you have heard of. The murders are a way to reckon with the past, but they grow into something that is not the reckoning anyone intended.
Warning: Things get pretty gross, and there are descriptions of carnage, both fictional and, I suspect, true. It’s all very biting, very moving, and very clever.
Recommended for: Those who can handle the above!
And now, a bonus recommendation that is on theme!
🏚️ In the Dream House — Carmen Maria Machado, 2019
Recommended for: “For those who like nonlinear story-telling that explores the intricacies of loving the wrong (abusive) person, the horrors of which are only made palpable with pop culture references and wit (you know, the kind that only comes from time and healing).”
Recommended by: Morgan, who loves shouting at the kids who ice skate outside her house when they should be in school, and also loves making peanut sesame noodles and telling me about it. The last three books she loved were The Book of Hope, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and The HealthyGirl Kitchen.
If you’ve got a recommendation, by all means, give it to me! You can do so by hitting reply to this email, shouting your truth, and we’ll get it going.
That was the thirty-fourth EELS! As always, send any and all questions, feedback, and shouted book recommendations by hitting reply.
📚 Susan