phantomtomato

The other book I finished during my voyage through the southwest was How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum, translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. This was book [checks notes] #17 from the “Women in Translation” rec list. It’s about an estranged mother and daughter; as the mother peers through the windows of her adult daughter’s house from across the street, she ponders what went wrong in their formerly loving relationship.

How to Love Your Daughter is a cerebral kind of novel that swims back and forth between Yoella’s present, desperately reaching after the daughter who’s walked out of her life, and Yoella’s recollections of raising Leah.

The twists and turns of their relationship are subtle, almost too subtle. Both characters come off slightly neurotic, fussing about every minor interaction and seeming, to me, to invent problems where none really existed. In the end, it’s not so much a long-deteriorating relationship, which is what I expected, as it is Yoella making one decision that forever alters Leah’s perception of her.

“No one warned me my love could destroy her,” Yoella says about Leah at one point and that’s the core of it. Yoella adores her daughter, almost beyond reason. And it’s that very willingness to put Leah above everyone and everything else that eventually pushes Leah away from her, which is such a perfect tragedy.

I saw another review that said this book was both too long and too short, and I think there’s some truth to that. There are drawn out middle sections which don’t necessarily add much, but the ultimate break and subsequent efforts at reconciliation by Yoella don’t get as much room to breathe as might have benefitted them.

However, the ending is an exquisite microcosm of the tension of the whole novel, leaving you wondering about unreliable narrators and perceptions. Some people felt that Yoella gets off too easy—I would recommend rereading the section where Leah talks to Yoella about her reality/fantasy of Dennis writing her a letter.

I don’t know that either Yoella or Leah comes off as really sympathetic here, but they do come off very human, full of flaws and self-justifications and irrational reactions. And maybe sometimes it’s just human nature to create a tragedy where there didn’t have to be one.

It seems timely to read about America’s past experience with unjust detention of people based on perceived threats to national security, so last night I finished Together in Manzanar by Tracy Slater, a true story about one of the families in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. The situation of the Yonedas was somewhat unusual as they were a mixed-race family—Karl Yoneda was a Japanese-American citizen and his wife Elaine was white and Jewish.

The Yonedas make for a very interesting case study in what happened in the camps because a) their mixed-race family status (including their 3-year-old son, Tommy) made it clear how little the American military had really thought about this plan, given how thrown-off they were by the mere existence of mixed-raced families; and b) Karl and Elaine had been vocal social activists well before they were imprisoned in the Manzanar camp, speaking up for labor rights, racial justice, and participating in Communist advocacy. They had the language, tools, and knowledge to speak up and speak out, and they did.

Slater has done her research and provides a thorough list of sources at the end of the book, which include interviews with the Yonedas’ grandchildren as well as their own diaries and news clippings.

Together in Manzanar provides an in-depth look at the politics within the Japanese-American community at this time, both leading up to the camps and within. It ably tackles the question of “Why did they go? Why wasn’t there resistance?” (There was.) For the Yonedas in particular, the importance of an Axis defeat was difficult to overstate: as horror stories of German atrocities in Europe began to trickle out, they knew that a German or Japanese take-over of the United States would almost undoubtedly lead to Elaine and their son Tommy going into a death camp.

It provides a three-dimensional look at the discussions on the ground at the time, as well as following up with details from interviews Karl and Elaine gave many years later reflecting back on their statements and advocacy at the time.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing style, but this is one of those books you read for content, not style. It jumps around from perspectives in a way that’s occasionally confusing, but I also appreciated getting some more background information on some of those in the camp who opposed the Yonedas’ view on cooperating with the US government. Slater does a good job showing how each person highlighted got to their perspective and why the tension both within the camps and in the world generally at the time put everyone so on edge.

The book is also helpful for reminding us of the names of the hateful racists (architect Karl Bendetsen) who propagated this plan and then later tried to lie about why it was implemented or how bad it was. It’s also a useful reminder that when these people were released, they didn’t get to just waltz back into the lives they had been living before being imprisoned. Many of them were forcibly resettled further into the US, away from the coastal cities where they had lived, and forced to restart their lives from scratch, away from their communities and businesses.

It just seemed like a particularly relevant time to remember this.

Yesterday on a lovely walk through then neighborhood I reached the end of The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso. This is fantasy/action novel, set in a world in “prime” reality, beneath which sits ever-descending “echo” layers of reality. The further down you go, the stranger and more dangerous things get. At a New Year’s party, things get unexpectedly tricky when the entire party is pulled down through the echoes.

Our protagonist is Kembral Thorne, a “hound” whose job is to retrieve people, animals, and other things that are pulled or “fall” into the echoes. This party is Kem’s first step back into society after having her first baby two months earlier.

Of course, when things start going wrong, Kem can’t help but get involved. It’s her job.

I’ll say again, I do love queer lit with adults. YA is great and I’m so happy that teens today have access to so much queer lit, but online queer book recs can skew very YA. Here, Kem is very much someone at least in her thirties—she’s got a baby, she’s reached a senior role in her career, and her concerns reflect this position in her life. While she and her quasi-rival Rika have the sort of skittish interactions you might expect from people who are into each other and unwilling to admit they are into each other, they don’t reach the level of comic avoidance or overwrought drama of teens or young adults.

I liked the ebb and flow of Kem and Rika’s relationship. These are two people who already have history and have kind of already had their big, relationship-ending squabble before we even get to this party, which is fun to unravel over the course of the evening. They have some cute moments, some artificially-amplified angst, but are generally enjoyable.

The worldbuilding here is fine. It’s serviceable for what the novel is doing, but we don’t really get a look at much else outside of the party except when Kem ventures out into the echoes, which becomes increasingly less frequent as they descend. There’s some fun stuff, some spooky stuff, some aesthetic stuff.

The book pushes a little hard on maintaining the status quo when the status quo isn’t that great (I think it could have made this more believable with more discussion, but the book is really more about the action than the political debate) and I did think one character’s fate was a cop-out, especially given the former. Violent change to the system is wrong but we’ll all shrug and smile when this criminal we couldn’t nail down conveniently dies without a trial.

On the whole, I enjoyed this one, but it’s nothing earth-shattering. I put the next book on my TBR though because I do want to see what Rika and Kem get up to next.