Books: The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria

I tend to be obsessed with novels and documentaries about epic disasters—partly, like many people, to gawk at the sheer enormity of a catastrophic event, but mostly to find some level of personal, emotional understanding of what the people who were caught in it experienced.

The Andrea Doria was the epitome of Atlantic ocean-liner luxury in the middle of the century ... until this date—July 26—in 1956 when it was broadsided dead-on by the ice-cutting prow of the liner Stockholm in thick fog and then it slowly sank 45 miles south of Nantucket. And while The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria documents in great detail both the mechanics of the catastrophe and the harrowing stories of the passengers and crew, it does so with distracting clumsiness that's in desperate need of an editor.

There's a definite art to creating emotional, memorable relationships between a reader and even a handful of key players among the 1,100+ passengers on an ocean liner. Erik Larson (who wrote Dead Wake about the sinking of the Lusitania and is perhaps best known for writing Devil in the White City) sets the bar high with deftness, poetry and a smartly curated understanding of the human experience. Unfortunately, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria struggles and fails to reach that bar. To wit: Chapter 2 is little more than paragraph after relentless paragraph describing the lives and backgrounds and travel purposes of 100+ people. The paragraphs are all well-researched and filled with interesting information—but they're overwhelming, and they contain so many superfluous details and tertiary names that they become a numbing blur by the time they finish plodding by.

It's this clumsy, belabored lack of editing that makes the entire book feel somewhat like a high-school paper that's padded to reach a minimum number of pages. In perhaps the most egregious example, there's a paragraph that all but dominates page 72 with an excruciatingly detailed litany of 47 foods that may or may not appear on an evening's dinner menu. Honestly, does ANYONE find useful narrative value in knowing that First Class passengers "could choose from a variety of vegetables, including potatoes (mashed, boiled, roasted, or fried), cauliflower, roasted tomatoes, or sauteéd endive"? And for all the breathless descriptions of the ship's Mid-century Italian-chic décor, there isn't a single photo of its magnificent interior among the 16 pages of photos ... two of which are just full-page stylized print ads about the ship.

All that said, if you train your eyes and brain to skim past ponderous lists of beverages and games available in First Class—and, curiously, the names of the two helicopter pilots who eventually helped rescue the passengers—this is a gripping, detailed (though again: way too detailed in places), incredibly good read. It fully delivers in telling why-and-how details of the physical destruction of the collision and the passengers' and crew members' stories of terror, survival, heroism, cowardice and every attendant emotion in between—though because of the staggering volume of character introductions in Chapter 2 it's nearly impossible to remember who people are when they meet their fates on the sinking ship.

The Andrea Doria and its sinking were the last gasps of high-style ocean travel as passenger airplanes (literally) appeared on the horizon and dramatically cut transcontinental travel time and expense. To underscore this historical importance, The Last Voyage of the Andrea Doria nicely frames its narrative around the publication of A Night to Remember, which documented the sinking of the Titanic 40+ years before the Andrea Doria joined it at the bottom of the Atlantic. It's a clever, efficient way to compare and contrast both sinkings, offer historical and cultural perspective, and incorporate details of yet another epic catastrophe to keep me enthralled.

Books: Unsheltered

I love novels where the past meets the present—especially if they involve a touch of mystery, scandal or even the supernatural—so I was eagerly looking forward to reading this one when it was recommended online based on my obsessions.

And while it definitely features the past meeting the present, it's all in the context of historical curiosity about a property occupied by a family in the later 1800s and then one in the 2010s. I was disappointed by the lack of juiciness as I read, but once I shifted my focus to the author’s exploration of relationships linking the characters, their families, their changing circumstances and the shared spaces they occupy in separate centuries, I guess I did settle in and enjoy it.

That said, the novel contains a lot—as in A LOT a lot—of gratuitously chatty dialogue and even a mind-numbingly endless dinner scene where an entire family debates the merits and shortfallings of a wide range of economic models and policies. (We get it Barbara: You did tons of research that you didn't want to go to waste as you cemented characters into their archetypal molds. But sheesh.)

It's also a work of historical fiction involving people and municipalities that have been largely forgotten, a fact I wish I'd known before it was mentioned in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. Because the historical characters are fascinating, and the free-thinking "utopian" community where they lived was anythying but and created a dramatic dichomoty of religious dogma vs scientific discovery and the covert subterfuge of Victorian mores as a backdrop for the narrative.

 
The title of the novel clearly stems from ongoing themes of crumbling houses, dire economic circumstances, social acceptance vs social ostracism, and the political abandonment of the citizenry by a Presidential candidate who shall not be named here and is not named in the book but is very indelibly described and pilloried.

 
I finished the novel with an overall feeling of meh, but I realized my mind never strayed as I read it. So I was clearly invested. Barbara Kingslover knows how to weave a compelling narrative (or two in this case), but she sure likes to dwell and dwell and dwell in the weeds when her characters have conversations.

 
If any of this sounds interesting to you, by all means read it. But if you found my observations here bland and uninspiring, you'll find those same reactions tenfold in the book.

Theater: Next to Normal

Next to Normal—a searing, brilliant, Pulitzer-winning rock opera examining the lives of a family whose mother is desperately struggling with bipolar depression—opened on Broadway 16 years ago today. The show beautifully captures the swings between the ridiculous highs and the soul-crushing lows the disease brings to those of us living in its fogs and terrors ... and to the selfless teams of people who care for us.

I’m fortunate enough to have seen the original production, very soon after I’d been diagnosed as bipolar and had found myself caught in a rather terrifying struggle to wrap my confused, exhausted brain around the fact that mental illness was no longer a mysterious entity in other people’s lives; it was MY life, and I had no idea how to manage it or what potential and very real horrors to expect from it.

The musical is rough to experience from any perspective, but seeing it for the first time tore me apart ... and then put me back together with its closing anthem, “Light,” which features an almost casually placed lyric that is at once devastating and hopeful and never fails to sneak up on me and emotionally gut me even though I know it’s coming: “The price of love is loss / but still we pay / we love anyway.”

Back when I saw the show on Broadway, selfies were new and weird and shameful—and for you young folks, it was the Middle Ages when our smartphones had cameras that faced only one way and didn’t let us see on our screens what our selfies would look like so we just had to hold our phones in the air and hope for the best—so I took this one-try selfie as quickly and discreetly as I could to ensure an entire city of complete strangers wouldn’t judge me. It turned out rather well, although I cut off the last letter of the sign. Which means as far as any of you know, I actually just saw a knockoff production called Next to Norma.

I've been invited to be the Bipolar Person in Residence and talk to the casts and audiences of Next to Normal productions at multiple theaters over the last decade. And while I hope it was helpful for the actors as they rehearsed and found their characters' realities, it was extremely helpful for me to have an opportunity to articulate the swings and uncertainties and terrors of living with a mental illness—both so I could explain any weirdness I've personally exhibited and to help the actors help their audiences better understand these realities.

I also maintain a blog of my journey, struggles, triumphs, thoughts and research into bipolar disorder and mental illness in general at TMIpolar.blogspot.com

While every bipolar mind is different and therefore every moment of Next to Normal doesn't exactly mirror my experiences, every note and every word of the show is brilliant and hits brilliantly close to home. And that closing anthem—sung by the characters not to each other but to the audience and to the present and to the future—encapsulates the struggles and hopes I live with every day in astute prose and powerful, emotional, wall-of-sound vocals:

Day after day,

We'll find the will to find our way.

Knowing that the darkest skies

Will someday see the sun.

When our long night is done,

There will be light.

I'm dreaming of White Christmas

White Christmas is the dumbest, plot-hole-iest, staggeringly-implausible-storyline-iest movie ever made—and I adore every second of it. I used to host a party every year in Chicago and invite only the friends I knew were able to shut up for 120 minutes so we could all enjoy its ridiculous awesomeness together in peace. And then I usually watched it again on my own. And maybe one more time. I have yet to watch it this year, but when I do I might invite a few devotees to watch it with me who can do it QUIETLY AND RESPECTFULLY.

All that said, it still drives me NUTS that Rosemary Clooney runs (well, clomps in four-inch stilettos) away from Bing Crosby in a self-righteous fit over a laughably stupid misunderstanding that she could easily clear up with a simple question and then boards a train with a little satchel in which she's packed all her clothes, wigs, makeup, gowns, those ridiculously slouchy white sequined oven mitts she wears in "Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me" plus four of the Vermont dancer boys. And then she happily—yes: happily, despite the white-hot fury she had about Bing's appearance on TV that was so toxic it prompted her to sneak away from Vermont in secret—watches Bing's appearance on TV, suddenly has a mis-misunderstanding revelation, sneaks back to Vermont in the dead of night with her sensible orthopedic Army-issue oxfords in tow, ties up her understudy and throws her in a pile of horse manure (probably) and somehow absorbs all the "Gee, I Wish I Was Back in the Army" choreography out of thin air from some secret backstage rehearsal room in that drafty barn that apparently a cast of 1,000 people had mysteriously never even known about.

But those gowns!

And don't get me started on that overplayed "Sisters" number—it sure gets a LOT of mileage for having only one verse and an enormous dance break where Rosemary and Vera-Ellen basically just stand on stage and smile dewily at Bing and Doofusface (also: Don't get me started on Danny Kaye, the poor man's Donald O'Connor) while presumably the rest of the audience watches and thinks they're being somehow entertained by all that standing around.

But those gowns!

And Bing Crosby somehow croons “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep” after chugging a throat-gagging quart of buttermilk and Danny Kaye sings a COMPLETELY random song called "Choreography" even though he dances like an ostrich going through a middle-school gangly-boy phase and that mercilessly repetitive "Mandy" song has about eleven words that are all stupid and WHAT THE HELL IS THAT “MR. BONES” SONG? (It's a horribly racist throwback to minstrel shows, that's what it is.)

But those gowns!

From the Department Of Lies About Cute Boyfriends I Would Totally Date: Rosemary Clooney's and Vera-Ellen's "ugly" brother Benny (the one Bing Crosby unimaginatively calls "freckle-faced Haynes, the dog-faced boy" when they show him Benny's photo) is actually super-cute Carl Switzer, who had played Alfalfa in the Our Gang/Little Rascals films. So calling him ugly is nothing but CHRISTMAS LIES AND HOLIDAY PROPAGANDA.

But those gowns!

Did I mention Rosemary Clooney's ridiculously slouchy white-sequined oven mitts that turn "Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me" into a very fancy Easy-Bake Oven infomercial? I think I did, though they can never be overmocked. You should definitely call the police every time you see them.

But those gowns!

Special mention also goes to that fingernails-on-chalkboards “Snow” number where Vera-Ellen sings in clearly not her own voice about washing her hair with snow—which, I’m sorry, would be completely ineffective and unhygienic—and then they all make some grade-school-art-class mountains-and-pine-trees diorama that they shake some kind of readily-available-on-their-cramped-club-car-table fake snow on and every time they do it my mind goes right to the scene in The Breakfast Club where Ally Sheedy shakes her own dandruff on a drawing to make it look like it’s snowing.

But those gowns!

And then Vera-Ellen—who does the entire movie in funnel-collared outfits tailored to hide whatever the hell is wrong with her neck—descends from the sky in her tearaway Ostrich Barbie outfit and executes some wicked nerve taps WITHOUT EVEN WEARING TAPS, A FACT THAT SHE DISPLAYS REPEATEDLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY TO THE CAMERA.

But those gowns!

And the general is clearly on a laudanum binge in the attic of his hotel-theater as every U.S. war soldier past, present and future swarms all over the entire property and fills every hotel room not already taken by the swarm of singers, dancers, directors, and costume and tech crew members, and when they all finally—and purportedly GENUINELY—surprise him with their heretofore apparently invisible presence they seat him at the table of honor behind a three-foot-tall cake that completely blocks his view of the show that they put together ESPECIALLY FOR HIM TO SEE.

But those gowns!

Books: The Couple at Number 9

I have many thoughts about The Couple at Number 9, the first of which is that I need to vet recommendations I get from Audible Books before I buy anything there. It gave glowing reviews and breathless descriptions about the book’s suspenseful, exciting narrative, but it really hid the negative comments. I usually check multiple sources before I start a book, and I clearly didn’t do that here.

My short opinion is I was really engaged in the story, but some elements of its telling were tedious and/or distracting enough that I ended up feeling pretty neutral.

Like Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code), author Claire Douglas sure knows how to spin a riveting, Gothic tale filled with ancient (well, ancient to the year 1980 here) secrets, tantalizing clues, and deliciously jarring plot and character twists.

But also like Dan Brown, she’s never met a cliché she couldn’t slap into her copy over and over ad lazyam. Cheeks are always rosy, old books are always dusty, time is always in the nick of, nouns always have bland, meaningless adjectives (the red scarf, the ceramic mug, the unexpected surprise) … and every book, email and photo album is about to be closed until at the very last second the reader notices something out of the corner of his or her eye that he or she hadn’t seen in the just-finished process of examining it for enormous amounts of time.

And while I’m whining incessantly about Douglas’ fusilade of adjective-nouns, she spends pages and pages rehashing plot points or belaboring characters’ thoughts but she never really takes time to explain the points of her adjective choices.

For instance: She has a character walk through an “arched door” of an English cottage, but she never clarifies why that detail is important to the character, to the world she’s crafting or to her readers. She could say the arched door made the cottage feel inviting and safe against the horrors unfolding in the back garden. Or that the arched door reminded the character of his childhood home, which made him feel extra-comfortable moving into this cottage. Or that the arched door felt like a portal to the rich history the cottage no doubt held (which it very much does).

But no. It was just a door that happened to be arched. He could have just walked through the door and moved on to the more pressing narrative unfolding inside. Wearing his red scarf and carrying his ceramic mug, of course.

The hackneyed writing choices legitimately undermined my immersion into the narrative and the world of the novel. Despite being a lifelong writer and editor, I’m never that picky as a recreational reader—things like bad grammar and stilted language can effectively define characters and settings—so take what you will about the fact that I’ve spent so much time addressing it here.

One more complaint: The things that happened long ago in the past happened in 1980. The story takes place in 2018. That math doesn’t add up because I was in junior-high school in 1980, and that was just a few years ago. “Long ago in the past.” Harumph.

All that said, the story is pretty gripping. It starts with the discovery of two bodies buried in a garden behind an old English cottage, and lives and relationships and families and startling secrets start unraveling at increasing speed from there. As expected, things and people are never what they initially seem to be. Innocent conversations lead to massive revelations. Encountered strangers end up being markedly supportive and helpful or alarmingly devious and violent. Or they sometimes just add color and life to a shared moment. A separate narrative involving the hostile relationship between a son and his father in a distant city eventually becomes deeply intertwined with the cottage narrative.

In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say whether or not justice is eventually served, but I will say the thundering freight train of a plot ends on a predictable tying up of loose ends followed by a pfffft of another boring, belabored, meaningless cliché of an emotional gesture.

Cleverly though, the title has multiple meanings, most of which don’t become clear until late in the story. So I’ll give it that.

If you like a Gothic novel filled with well-realized characters and dark twists and turns and you don’t get distracted by pulp-fiction writing, I truly recommend this book.

But if silver linings, easy pies and flying time make you a little angry that someone got paid to write them, send me a note and I’ll summarize the plot for you. Mark my words.

Books: What Lies in the Woods

I love a book filled with dark secrets, haunting pasts, and jarring twists and turns ... and HOLY SHIT does What Lies in the Woods deliver.

 
On its surface, it's the story of three adult women who as childhood friends survived a brutal attack in the woods by a serial killer their testimony eventually sent to prison.

The killer's death from cancer while in prison brings the three women back together in the town where they grew up and where two of them still live. They'd stayed close through the years, but the killer's death opens old wounds, brings dormant memories back into the harsh light of day, reignites old friendships and casual acquaintenceships ... and unleashes unanswered questions and unraveled realities and out-of-nowhere jolts that just don't let up.

Reader, it's truly mesmerizing. It's all I could think about in the three days it took me to devour it. And writing this brief review is keeping all the delicious chaos, gory details and shocking betrayals swirling around in my head.

 
As always, I'm verty carefully avoiding key plot points and potential spoilers here, so I'll summarize the narrative as this: It takes place in and around a smallish Pacific Northwest town with an insular social and political history. Everyone has a surface persona and a carefully constructed personal narrative, but nobody is who you think they are. NOBODY. Even the protagonist has doubts about who she was, who she is and who she remembers being. But she's written in a way that I'd totally want to be her best friend if we ever met.

While author Kate Alice Marshall sure knows how to spin a gripping tale, she also knows how to create relatable characters and construct compelling prose that gracefully elevates what could end up sounding like pulpy melodrama in less-skilled hands.

 
She's also thoughtful enough to give you subtle reminders about who certain people and places are when they pop back into the narrative after long absences. One woman's father, for instance, doesn't make a lot of appearances early on and I'd initially forget who he was every time he came back. But Marshall always provides some helpful context with each reapparance—and without hitting you over the head with it.

 
This is a book I'll definitely read again—if only to find the Easter eggs hidden in early conversations and rehashed memories that suddenly have new, telling contexts as secrets start to unravel.

 
You should read it too. Because I'm just dying to talk about it at length with someone.

Books: Let the Great World Spin

In the weeks and months after author Colum McCann’s father-in-law returned from his harrowing ordeal escaping one of the Twin Towers and finding his way north from the destruction and rubble of the 9/11 attacks, McCann was struck by the sheer volume of personal stories and larger narratives intertwined in the events immediately before, during and after that day.

As he looked for a way he could possibly isolate and do justice to any of those stories to help make sense of the attacks and destruction, it struck him that there were just as many stories unfolding years and decades beforehand that could build a larger, deeper, more profound context illustrating the interconnectedness of lives and how they together collectively become the past that keeps the world spinning ever forward.

Soon after the Twin Towers were completed in the early 1970s, an aerialist named Philippe Petit managed the impossible feat of stringing a tightrope between the tops of the buildings in the dead of night and walking across it one morning, capturing the attention and fascination of every New Yorker on the ground below him. McCann uses this true-life event as the cultural linchpin for anchoring the fictional characters he brings to life in and around 1974, the year of Petit’s iconic stunt.

Each chapter in Let the Great World Spin is a stand-alone short story introducing a character, a friendship, a family, or an event that may be big or small: the childhoods of two Irish brothers who eventually emigrate to America, a woman regretting that she let her daughter follow her into a life of prostitution, a wealthy housewife in a grief support group, two relapsed addicts involved in a catastrophic car accident.

Some stories interact directly. Some characters pass by each other tangentially. Almost every character makes an appearance on the day of Petit’s walk.

Two characters over time establish themselves as the metaphoric twin towers linking all these lives … and when they eventually fall, they bring the lives and stories into an even more intricate orbit.

New York City itself is both a setting and a character driving these narratives through its distinct neighborhoods, segregated socioeconomics and vibrant melting-pot identity. The New Yorkers McCann creates and the lives (and occasional deaths) he guides them through are as disparate as they are fundamentally relatable, and through them—and the moments in history they occupy—he keeps their (and by extension our) worlds living, breathing, halting, progressing, collapsing, and always spinning from the past through the present and toward our collective uncertain future.

Books: Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874

I was hoping that Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 would be a breathless page-turner about the human dramas of conflagrant destruction, abject suffering and triumph over adversity peppered with tantalizing details about old Chicago buildings and neighborhoods that I recognize. Instead it’s a hyperwonkish examination of class inequality, political grandstanding, religious imperialism (particularly the emergence of “scientific” relief that favored distributing blankets, food and financial aid to the religious and the “worthy” newly homeless rich over assisting the chronically poor and the working class who were technically able to support themselves despite the fact that there was little to no work available in the months after the fire) and the simmering intolerance toward (particularly German) immigrants in the fire’s aftermath. 

It does draw some perennial parallels to Republicans' straw-man obsession with “big” government in its discussions of Chicago’s post-fire laws against rebuilding with wood (which made rebuilding almost financially impossible for low- and middle-class fire victims) and its curiously detailed recounting of virulently sabbatical opposition to German-immigrant beer gardens serving alcohol on Sundays, which temporarily drove the mostly single-issue People’s Party into power over the status-quo Law and Order party of native-born religious privilege. 

The book does frequently refer to one concept that will amuse modern Chicago residents, though: the idea that fire victims “fled the city” northward to the neighboring community of Lake View.

Today is the anniversary of the 1871 Chicago Fire, which historians are not opposed to believing actually could have been started by a cow kicking over a lantern in Mrs. O'Leary's barn—though, to be fair, there are many other credible, though less historically charming, theories as to how the fire started. 

During the 15 years I lived in Chicago, I saw it as my civic duty to read and learn as much as I could about my city and its history. I was excited to start reading this book when I found it, but—as the above review I'd initially posted about it says—it turned out to be more of a lengthy essay on the cultural and sociopolitical Zeitgeist that framed the fire than on the timeline and geography of the unfolding inferno and the human-level experience of surviving it, which I would have found far more meaningful.

In any case, upwards of 300 people died and thousands were left homeless and impoverished 154 years ago today and tomorrow. I mark this day on my calendar every year so I'm reminded to think about who they might have been and the horrors they most certainly endured. And I encourage you to a moment today in their memory to celebrate what you have while you still have it.

Books: Slaughterhouse-Five

On its surface, Slaughterhouse-Five (actual full name: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death) is a profoundly disjointed narrative of author Kurt Vonnegut’s experiences as a World War II prisoner of war told through the eyes and experiences of his fictional proxy Billy Pilgrim.

Vonnegut occasionally inserts himself into the narrative or acknowledges that the work you’re reading is autobiographical historical fiction, creating a meta universe that both draws you in and sets you outside the characters and plot.

Billy’s adventures unfold in short, jarring sentences and jump through time and literal space—which are key aspects of the novel’s postmodernist structure and spirit. Postmodernism in literature (which thrived in the second half of the 20th century, with this novel being written in 1969) broke away from linear, plausible storytelling to embrace logical impossibilities, ponder questions about existence, and often create imperfect character and story arcs that never get resolved.

It’s through this everything-at-once literary lens that poor, beleaguered Billy Pilgrim jumps randomly from surviving the cruelties of war and the (historically true) bombing of Dresden to wetting his pants in childhood fear at the top of the Grand Canyon to losing his wife in a string of bizarre circumstances after he survives a plane crash to being abducted by aliens, ensconced in an interstellar zoo, and mating with a fellow earthling and adult performer with the delightful name Montana Wildhack.

And it’s through this structure that Vonnegut processes the horrors he experienced in war and illustrates the disassociative struggles of living with PTSD.

The story is by its very nature absurd and peppered with droll humor and truly singular characters (many of whom appear in other Vonnegut works) with names like Kilgore Trout and Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. This being a novel centered around war, the frivolity is heavily balanced with often nonchalant accounts of death … always followed by Vonnegut’s “And so it goes” expression of existential futility.

The novel’s other recurring expression—”unstuck in time”—provides succinct, efficient shorthand for not only Vonnegut’s narrative structure but for the scattered aftershocks he continues to experience from of war itself, the upheaval it creates, the lives it redirects and the metaphorical slaughter it wields on his psyche … and by extension the world’s.

Theater: The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald was arguably ahead of his time when he published his novel The Great Gatsby in 1925.

America was still too deep in the weeds enjoying its Jazz Age freedoms, nouveau riche excesses and related pursuits of wanton indulgence to notice the cautionary tales about those very activities that Fitzgerald had embedded in his narrative. The novel was initially dismissed as boring and artificial—but with time comes perspective, and as America rebuilt itself after the Great Depression and then World War II, the novel’s wisdom, metaphors and objective warnings came into sharper clarity and made the novel a perennial staple of our collective literary curricula.

By the time the novel entered the public domain in 2021, it had seen countless adaptations for the stage and for the big and small screens … except as a musical. And once that source material became free, not one but TWO musical versions started their journeys to Broadway.

The version currently playing—launched on the shoulders of powerhouse Broadway royalty Jeremy Jordan and Eva Noblezada—got off to a rocky start thanks to some highly questionable choices in reframing the narrative. But in the five short months between its pre-Broadway tryouts at the Paper Mill Playhouse and its official Broadway opening, it underwent a massive overhaul that kept it more faithful to the novel and made it a massive hit.

Traditionally narrated by the outsider-observer Nick Carraway, it tells the story of the mysterious wealthy recluse Jay Gatsby, the hedonistic parties he throws, and the clandestine reasons he acquired his wealth so he could throw them. (I know the story is literally 100 years old, but I think the narrative and supporting narratives are pretty fascinating and I don’t want to reveal any spoilers to the six of you who don’t already know what happens.)

I got enough “meh” reviews for this show from friends that I put it on my backup list for my Belated Birthday Broadway Binge. But since three of my original picks closed early, Gatsby eventually climbed to the top of the leader board and I got a ticket.

And I really enjoyed it. I did find parts of it to indeed be “meh”—how many belty operatic “I Want” ballads does one small cast of characters truly need?—but it’s overall an indulgent feast for the senses.
For starters, the set is a breathtaking mashup of intricate Art Nouveau tendrils and soaring Art Deco geometries. (Producer Chunsoo Shin famously landed ridiculous amounts of investor money, which he poured directly into the uncommonly fabulous production design.) The costumes, choreography and orchestrations also got massive glow-ups from what audiences usually expect to experience.

I’m not a huge fan of the score. It has many extraordinary moments, but it feels a little ponderous at times. (The song “New Money” SLAPS though, and it more than makes up for any quibbles I have with anything else.)

Fitzgerald’s novel had a lot going on—as novels do—and I’ve seen so many stage and screen adaptations that over time I’ve honestly forgotten what storylines and plot points are original and what I’ve seen added or modified for subsequent narratives. This production includes everything I remember being germane to the story, with some additions that flesh out secondary characters and a bold dramatic update to an already shocking plot development.

Of the many iconic images/metaphors/themes in the work, Jay Gatsby’s obsession with the green light on Daisy Buchanan’s dock is arguably the most enduring. From a character standpoint, it represents love and longing for an idealized version of the past. From a literary standpoint, it represents the promises of the American Dream and the futility of yearning for the unattainable. (And for Brian and Stewie Griffin, it’s just the light from a gay gym called The Pump House. That Gatsby parody is peak Family Guy brilliance.)

The Gatsby musical features a gorgeous projection of the green light twinkling in the distance over rippling waters as its show curtain. And if I have one overarching criticism of the show it’s that all that significance, all that imagery and all that setup get explained to the audience so quickly and unceremoniously that I’m guessing the majority of people attending the show don’t get it. I was literally looking for the exposition to see how it was presented and I almost missed it.

And I hate to diss fellow performers—even the ones on Broadway who are presumably used to criticisms—but two actors in the show I saw felt extremely miscast. I’m not going to name names in case their moms are reading this, but their performances (though gorgeously sung) were so awkwardly anachronistic that they were literally distracting. They were perfectly OK, but they were NOT the green lights of my Belated Birthday Broadway dreams.

Theater: Maybe Happy Ending

Maybe Happy Ending first appeared on my radar in a dismissive review that said it’s about two robots who go on a road trip to see fireflies.

First of all, now that I’ve seen it I don’t see how ANYONE could be dismissive of it. And second of all, that plot description—while technically accurate—is exactly like saying Dorothy met a scarecrow and he could talk.

Now, robots and sci-fi are usually a hard sell for me. So the show wasn’t high on my list of priorities when I planned my belated birthday Broadway binge. But people whose taste I completely respect insisted I see it, and I’m so, so glad I did.

The robots in the show are humanoid workers and companions—not agents of combat or video-game characters as I’d feared—and their story is one of self-discovery and mutual attraction as they slowly come to terms with their growing obsolescence.

I like to see a new show as free of information as possible, so I’ll leave my synopsis there to avoid spoilers. But the two robots—played by the always impressive Darren Criss and by Helen J. Shen more than holding her own in her Broadway debut—share a story arc that is part standard romcom, part sci-fi-techy (in a way I whole-heartedly embrace), part self-aware meta and always ALWAYS endearing.

The score ranges from a cohesive collection of hummable show tunes and pop songs to numbers that sound like crooner jazz standards (sung by a one-man Greek chorus who is so handsome he’s almost a distraction). And the orchestrations are as delicious as he is.

The biggest takeaway—as least visually—is the set … and the ways it travels around framed by moving apertures that are so technically precise that they sometimes pull you out of the story as you wonder how they operate.

And the voices. I just want to sit in a room and have the actors sing to me for a couple hours.

Really. I can’t say enough good things about this delightful masterpiece of theater. Make a point of seeing it if you’re in NYC or (hopefully) when it finally tours.

I’m also giving a special shoutout to the Belasco Theatre. I was certain by now that I’ve been in every Broadway theater, but I don’t remember ever seeing an interior like the Belasco’s. It’s easily the most gorgeous, most resplendent space I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing a robot musical in, and it made the entire experience even more magical.

Theater: Death Becomes Her

For some reason I’ve never seen the Death Becomes Her movie. I’ve seen enough clips of it that I’ve gotten the general gist, but they clearly didn’t compel me to seek out and watch the entire film.

So aside from knowing some sight gags about horrific injuries, I went to the Death Becomes Her musical with a pretty clean slate.

And I came out with quite possibly a new favorite musical.

I think what kept grabbing me the most was the relentless evidence of quality in the show—especially the music and lyrics. The songs run a gamut from campy to ominous to ridiculous to self-aware to epic emotional meltdown. (SO MUCH emotional meltdwn.) Some are standard show tunes, some are jazzy, many are meticulously asymmetric, and a few are frantic patter songs along the lines of Sondheim’s “Getting Married Today” … but they’re somehow even more delightfully unhinged.

But those are just the classifications. Internally, the songs are rich with texture, voice and counterpoint (all of which shine in the gorgeous orchestrations), and the lyrics are an endless barrage of clever wordplay, brilliant character development, organic scene progression, and a seamless match to the tone and humor of the script (which wasn’t written by the lyricist).

Beyond that, the sets are exquisite when they need to be, ridiculous when they need to be … and Viola’s Gothic dungeon deserves its own Tony for looking like it extends miles into the back of the stage without ever giving you a glimpse of how its visual magic might be working.

Layer into all of that the women’s gowns and wigs (OHMYGOD!) and the script that keeps outdoing itself in humor and character definition (though don’t think too hard about the logistics of plausibly faking/not-faking deaths at the end) and the show just never stops being both thrilling and enthralling.

And then there are the actors. I’m 100% sure that histrionics is listed as an instrument in the score. The songs need to be chewed up and spit out as thoroughly as the book and the scenery, and the four leads just. don’t. let. up. These are crazy people in the prime of their careers and skills, and there’s no way they’re going to let one moment go under-the-top or unridiculoussed. They are truly running marathons for our entertainment, and they do it with undying (ahem) grace and charm. And crazypantsness.

I’ve had a another chronic flareup of insomnia on this trip, and my general baseline has been grogginess, lack of focus and even some unsteadiness on my feet. I’ve worried that I’d completely space out watching all my shows, but they’ve all been thoroughly engaging … ESPECIALLY this one. I truly can’t give it enough praise … especially for the way it kept me alive. Ahem.

Theater: The Outsiders

I can’t remember if I’ve ever read or seen The Outsiders (a 1967 novel adapted into a movie in 1983), but the plot seemed vaguely familiar when I saw this mighty stage version. And WOW does it pack an emotional (and visual and visceral) punch.

Written when the concept of “teenagers” was still finding its footing as a cohesive demographic beyond an age bracket, it’s a complex, touching, violent, heartbreaking coming-of-age story told through the lens of a brutal gang rivalry between the working-class Greasers and the upper-middle-class Socs (pronounced so-shiz, short for Socialites) in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma.

 
Ponyboy Curtis, the 14-year-old protagonist and a fledgling Greaser, maintains the Greasers’ point of view throughout the narrative, which in this stage adaptation explodes in a mix of gutteral choreography, an indie-rock score tuned to a wide range of intensities, thoroughly inventive staging (the floor is hilly and covered in dirt and a massive car drives through it at one point), and stage combat that is both brutal and balletic.

 
The show got its early buzz from an all-out gang rumble choreographed in flashes of slow motion and real time, murky dark and blinding light, and an orchestral score that throbs ominously and occasionally explodes in shrieks of terror … all while it’s literally raining onstage. It’s both gorgeous and gripping—and though it ends badly (as violent rumbles do) it generated cheers and applause from my audience.

The story and the characters are imperfect and complex, and the world they occupy is relentlessly unfair—and every visual and musical aspect of the show supports and amplifies those baselines. It’s all truly breathtaking. But it’s also built on a foundation of violence, brutality and profound heartbreak, so it might not be for everyone.

 
If you weren’t aware, every show that includes lifts or fights has an onstage lift call and/or fight call before the audience is let into the house. In the interest of absolute safety, these focused runthroughs ensure the intricacies of lifting and carrying people and/or believably fighting with them are fresh in the actors’ and dancers’ bodies. I’ve been in shows with enough stage fighting that our fight calls were 30 minutes long. Given the frequency (and intensity) of the fights in this show, I can’t even imagine how long and focused the fight calls are. But what they allow to happen live onstage is unforgettable.

Theater: Oh, Mary!

I want to be Cole Escola’s best friend.

 
They—meaning Cole—wrote Oh, Mary! in response to the idea that maybe Lincoln’s assassination wasn’t such a bad thing for Mary Todd … and then while reportedly never looking up more history than how to spell Abraham and Mary, they took the idea and ran it into the most ridiculous places most of us only wish we could imagine.

 
Cole and I desperately need to hang out some night, do each other’s hair, call boys and giggle, and crack each other up until dawn.

Speaking of cracking up, Oh, Mary! is exponentially funnier than I even dreamed. It’s slapstick meets droll humor meets bizarre characters meets massive plot twists meets very dubious history meets ridiculous wigs and costumes … all at a pace that doesn’t give the actors time to laugh at what they’re doing.

 
I’ve never been a very demonstrative laugher—people have actually accused me of not having fun or of being judgmental and dismissive because I wasn’t busting a gut with them in an audience. (Seriously.) I smile and chuckle, but that’s pretty much all my body ever does to show glee.

 
Reader, let me assure you that I laughed so hard I almost wet myself watching this delightfully ridiculous piece of brilliance.

 
Cole Escola originated the role of Mary and has since been replaced by Titus Burgess (who will soon be replaced by Jinkx Monsoon). I’ve seen Cole Escola perform so I know their pacing and humor and aptitude for ridiculousness, but this role felt perfectly tailored for Titus Burgess’ brand of ridiculousness. And I’m sure Jinkx Monsoon will chew the scenery with it too.

 
The show is profoundly clever, gaspingly hysterical and way more than any person’s diaphragm can handle. Go see it if you’re in NYC. Or just wait a bit—I’m sure every theater in the country will be snatching it up once the licensing begins.

 
AND I CALL DIBS ON PLAYING MARY.

Theater: Call me Izzy

A one-woman play about a battered wife in rural Louisiana who escapes her trauma by writing poetry, Call Me Izzy doesn’t give itself much room to explore plot points and character development outside of exactly what you’d expect.

 
And that’s pretty much all it does. No unexpected side narratives, no quirky character details, no monsoons or mortgage foreclosures or school shootings or other outside forces that could reframe the story in a fresher context … and no overlooked elements that the audience would tacitly expect after reading my 18-word summary above.

 
Don’t get me wrong; I very much liked it. It didn’t set me on fire, but I was never bored or upset that I didn’t feel whisked away to someplace I haven’t seen outside of a TV movie of the week.

 
The script is charming when it needs to be and traumatic when it needs to be. But you kinda know where it’s probably going to end before it even starts. (I’m not going to tell you if you’re right or wrong in the interest of avoiding spoilers, but I saw it ending one of three ways and I was only a little bit off.)

I think the show wouldn’t have much emotional traction without a familiar (and beloved) name on the marquee. Because OF COURSE we all root for Izzy, but we wouldn’t really care if we couldn’t also root for Jean Smart.

 
She’s everything you want to see and more, by the way. She brings Izzy a mix of humor, humanity, heartbreak and hopelessness (I swear I didn’t plan all that alliteration when I started this sentence) in a nuanced, emotionally controlled (and sometimes not controlled) performance that makes you want to hug her protectively and also shake some damn sense into her.

 
On a side note: She spent almost the entire show sitting down with her leg up and being helped to move between scenes by tech crew. I assumed it was because of an injury Izzy’s violent husband inflicted on her and it would eventually be addressed. But it never was. And when I got home and googled the show I learned that Jean herself was injured and forging ahead with the show nonetheless. Which is both impressive and profoundly kind to her many fans.

 
Another side note: Patrick Paige and Paige Davis sat right in front of me. So I got to see some Broadway royalty to kick off my Belated Birthday Broadway Binge!

Books: Lethal Passage

Erik Larson—perhaps best known for writing Devil in the White City—has a penchant for picking historical topics you didn’t realize you were dying to know more about, researching them to a granular level and then crafting in-the-weeds narratives that can test the patience of even his most ardent fans.
I’m saying this with more respect than exasperation; I recently—and eagerly—completed my second readings of both Devil in the White City and his Dead Wake (which I highly recommend) knowing full well there would be sections that would make my eyes glaze over. He crafts a great narrative and leaves you feeling smarter page after page, but I think we can all agree that his works can sometimes be … a lot.

 
Case in point: Lethal Passage examines the confluence of economic, legal, cultural, social and historic events leading to a bullied child with limited financial means acquiring a specific gun and shooting students and teachers at a relatively wealthy private school in 1988.

The premise didn’t sound like it could support a book of Lethal Passage’s heft, and though the topic doesn’t really interest me, I was curious to see what Larson did with his research and his gift for narrative to fill the book’s 300+ pages.

And boy, did my mind wander as I slogged through it.

 
I kept telling myself if he were recounting the note-by-note process of Stephen Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler and Hal Prince bringing Sweeney Todd from concept to Broadway, I’d be hanging onto every word. So if you’re fascinated by Old West history and mythology, Hollywood cowboys and gangsters, the noble birth and jarring radicalization of the NRA, the political ebbs and flows of the ATF’s powers and purposes, and the perennial legal absurdities that make it nearly effortless for anyone to buy a firearm, this is totally your book.

 
Granted, all of the above puts deep, nuanced context behind young Nicholas Elliott’s conditioning to think shooting classmates was his best course of action in response to bullying, his access to enough information to help him make an informed decision about which gun he thought was best for the job—and the best local retailer for buying it without issue—and his relationships with the adults he could trust to help him purchase the gun and modify it to operate with enhanced efficiency.

 
But hoo-boy.

 
Interspersed between his bloated history/context essays, Larson does cover how low-income-single-mom Nicholas was at an expensive private school and why he was probably the victim of bullying. He also recounts the history of the gun store, its owners and its place in the local gun-rights zeitgeist. And he introduces us to the students and faculty who will eventually live and die in the shooting spree.
Those stories alone are compelling, and as is his usual format he masterfully triangulates them from separate stories into a singular cohesive narrative. But that information would barely add up to qualify as a beach-read novella.

 
So he piles on the contexts and backstories and anecdotes and historical coincidences and nearly everything else he can come up with to flesh out his base premise.

 
As I said earlier: I don’t have a ton of innate fascination with Lethal Passage’s broader topic and themes. But I’ve read all of Larson’s books (except for his most recent, The Demon of Unrest) so I wasn’t going to let this one slip through the cracks.

 
I can honestly report I almost quit out of boredom multiple times, but I’m not at all suggesting you will. I’m more relieved than glad I can say I finished it. And while I don’t NOT recommend it, I think it’s fair to say it has a very limited, very specific audience … and if you think that audience is you, by all means give it a read.

Books: Dear Edward

“Don’t read Dear Edward on a plane!” a friend warned me. But I’d packed four books for my weeklong trip to Colombia and I’d finished the other three by the time we headed to the airport to go home. So I opened it once I’d checked in and gone through security … and I put it down reluctantly only when I had to.

People who know me know I lost my friend Miriam Wolfe in the 1988 bombing of the commercial airliner Pan Am flight 103. And once I’d processed and accepted her death, I discovered I’m not at all afraid to fly. So reading this entire book in one day as I flew across political borders and a massive body of water and changed planes in a cavernous international airport was concerning only in the fact that I occasionally had to stop to tend to other things on my journey.

I’m saying all of this—if you didn’t already know—because Dear Edward is about a massive commercial plane crash and the recovery journey of its sole survivor, a young boy. And if you can compartmentalize the occurrence of the crash—which author Ann Napolitano describes in almost abstract, clinical imagery because the horror and destruction are obviously part of the narrative but absolutely far from the point—you’ll find a beautifully emotional story about Edward Adler (the young survivor), his extended family, his community and literally the entire country sharing common journeys of grief, healing, support, understanding, magnanimity and ultimately joy.

Napolitano crafts the story in two alternating narratives: the interactions of the passengers and crew before and during the flight, and the interactions of Edward and his slowly expanding world in the days, months and years after the crash.

It’s a smart, effective structure for introducing readers to a number of passengers in small bits of narrative that are memorable and emotionally engaging without being overwhelming. And it works equally well for narrating the early weeks and months of Edward’s recovery, letting readers break through his fogs and reach his new understandings alongside him.

Napolitano has a gift for creating characters both on and off the plane who are archetypal enough to be recognizable and distinctive enough to be singular and memorable. An overwhelmed mother, a lecherous tech bro, a stoic soldier, a delusional romantic, a protective single parent … Napolitano introduces you to these familiar people in small bites and dappled brush strokes and gives them just enough unexpected backstory that you gradually come to know and care for them and become invested in the futures you know—and sometimes don’t know—they have.

And then there’s Edward. He’s a somewhat reserved pre-teen whose entire world is taken from him in an instant … right at the age when he’s already emotionally scattered and filled with insecurities, wonders and growing self-awareness. In lesser hands he could just come off as a mess, but Napolitano takes his hand and ours and walks us together through his anguish and sullenness and anger and hopelessness and discoveries of comfort—along with the misfirings in his pubescent brain—in ways that make him understandable, believable and sympathetic, even through his occasional unwise decisions and hostile behaviors.

Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of this novel is its thorough plausibility. It could easily drift into the mists of mysticism and magical thinking, but it stays true to the known world from its biggest plot points to the smallest gestures from the periphery characters.

As I’ve shared book recommendations with people, many have praised everything about Dear Edward and a few have said they could never read something so horrifying and heartbreaking. So Dear Edward might not be for you.

But if you’re even slightly intrigued—and if you’ve noticed that I read the entire novel in one day that included two long flights—I think you’ll be as enamored with it, its humanity, its imperfect emotions, its journeys of discovery and love, and its dogged young protagonist as I am.

Books: Monarch

I finished reading Monarch by Candice Wuehle over a week ago and I still don’t know what I think about it. While I was never bored and I regularly found myself eager to find out what happens next in the plot as I read, the book lingers in my brain as just … a lot. A lot of stuff that doesn’t usually go together, which is beautifully creative in itself, but that also doesn’t really connect in any meaningful—or Meaningful—way from an ironic-juxtaposition point of view.

Despite the massive library of books in my mental queue that I want to read, I was swayed by a random woman I encountered on a random scroll through TikTok who gushed so much about this book that I put it at the front of my line. Which is kind of out of character for me and my usual meticulous planning, but it certainly mirrors the abrupt barrages of chaos in the book’s premise.

I hate to give away plot points, but the book cover itself tells you that it’s a story about a young woman who ages out of the world of child beauty pageants and eventually discovers that she and many of her friends/frenemies/competitors on the pageant circuit have all along been sleeper-cell government agents who’ve been programmed to do covert (and never specified) missions that are immediately erased from their memories.

There’s obviously a lot more detail—and plenty of short-lived side plots—to flesh out an entire novel, but the protagonist’s journey of discovery from one world to the other is the only true throughline. And its absurdist connection between the two worlds never quite lands with me.

I worried as I got deeper into the story that it might have feminist-coded undertones that I just wasn’t catching, but aside from the references to the beauty pageants—which are delightfully droll and retrospectively appalling to the protagonist—her personal discoveries and the larger narrative themes are rather universal and arguably gender-neutral.

There are many, many references to circles and spheres and spirals that I worried were elements of symbolism I also wasn’t catching, but the narrator discusses them mostly in reference to the circuitous, slightly-off-linear way she tells her story.

The bulk of the story takes place in an unspecified area of the Midwest that is relatively close to Interstate 80 and Chicago, and at one point it involves a Hy-Vee grocery bag, so I’m guessing it’s in Iowa.

And during college the narrator lives in a dorm called Mayflower that’s pretty far from the campus and that looks over a river and beyond it the school’s fine-arts buildings, all of which sounds a hell of a lot like the University of Iowa. But her Mayflower has a tall bell tower—and it quickly becomes clear that her Mayflower is a metaphoric ship that takes her life to a whole new world. Which is what college obviously does, but for her it starts her journey into the aforementioned plot discombobulations.

On the plus side, Wuehle knows a lot of interesting things about a lot of interesting things, so the book takes you on mini educational journeys through the worlds of cellular preservation, photography and the development of film in darkrooms, makeup (of course), scientific taxonomy, training octopi, academic accreditation, catechismisc theory, and even Norwegian folklore.

And she’s a published poet, which certainly shows in the way she crafts sentences and summons allusions and shapes narrative imagery.

I also seem to be on an unintentional paranormal kick in my recent choices of literature. It’s clearly no secret that the child-beauty-pageant/covert-government-sleeper-agent narrative veers sharply outside the world of realism in the novel, which is all lighthearted fun. But then it VEERS. I powered through the last chapter just to say I’d finished the book.

I’ve been posting reviews of the books I’ve been reading both to help hold myself accountable to my goal to read at least one book a month and to put content on social media and my writing blog that isn’t about the you-know-who shitshow. In my innate need to not come off as mean to my fellow (and clearly more successful) writers, I try to focus on positive things—which I hope I have here—but aside from the novel’s unconventional way of describing how lives and people aren’t always what they seem—even to the people living those lives—I have to say the book is largely perplexing, I’m glad I finished it and I won’t be revisiting it again.

Do with that what you will.

Books: North Woods

If I were going to assemble my favoite literary themes and tropes into a novel like it was a Build-A-Bear at the mall, North Woods by Daniel Mason would tick all the boxes on my checklist: an ancient house with generations of occupants and fascinating stories, ghosts from that rich past lingering to make sure their stories get told and their lives don't end up forgotten, nods to historical events both to establish context and to celebrate our shared experiences, richly drawn (and inherently messy) characters who on some levels end up feeling like your favorite friends, a trust from the author that you'll connect the dots and follow along when you're given only scraps of tantalizing information, bread crumbs and Easter eggs that follow the house and the characters through literal centuries, nerd-grade information about very specific topics you find yourself wanting to learn more about, metaphors large and small that weave through the narrative without smacking you on the head ... and sentence after sentence after sentence of evocative, lovingly crafted prose that sometimes makes you stop and catch your breath because it's just so brilliantly gorgeous.

And if THAT'S not enough to tell you how much I love this book, try this: I read it in September and it's stuck with me so much that I just re-read it in the space of five days.

It's hard to fully describe what the book is about. On its surface, it follows the centuries-long story of a tiny stone hut built in the 1600s in Western Massachusetts as generations of people come and go through its doors and build onto it almost as if to create enough room to hold its ever-expanding history and the stories that echo through it.

The people who come and go are sometimes generations of families and sometimes unrelated buyers and sellers. Some of the stories exist in their own time and reach their logical conclusions and some echo through the centuries and continue to drive the various narratives. Some of the stories are told by an omniscient narrator. Some are first-person accounts. Some are heartfelt letters. Some are even metaphor-laden poems with sing-song rhythms and dark Victorian themes.

One chapter is a graphic, turgid description of lust and wanton, depraved sex between two beetles. (You will need smelling salts and a cigarette after you finish reading it, so be prepared.)

I can't recall ever reading a book twice in the space of a few months, but I'm so glad I did with this one; since I already knew the basic plot points, I could spend my second reading focusing on the gorgeous prose, the larger themes and the tiny details—a lost button, a rusty axe head, a forgotten note tucked in a family Bible, buried bones, the catamount (an old name for a large wild cat) sitting placidly on the book's cover—that trickle through the narrative, sometimes just for fun and sometimes with deeper meaning.

The novel is so packed with characters and moments and delicious coincidences that it's impossible to focus on just one thing to love ... or to worry about possibly giving away as a spoiler. There are twin spinsters I want to be best friends with. There's an unrequited love story that just breaks my heart. There are satisfying, well-justified murders. There's an exploration of worldly insights hiding in a schitzophrenic mind.

Above all, there's an underlying theme that time and nature and humanity are interconnected in both obvious and clandestine ways, that we're all part of a larger, beautifully messy narrative, that small details can tumble quietly through time and space until they snowball into overwhelming influences ... and that reading a beloved novel more than once can fill you with even more joy and wonder than you'd experienced before.

Books: All the Light we Cannot See

The masterful novel All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is, on its surface, a story about two pre-teens—one an orphaned German boy with a self-taught gift for building radios and one a blind French girl with a fascination for science and adventure and access to an entire museum of discoveries thanks to her father's job—whose separate worlds slowly collapse around them (and occasionally, tangentially intersect) in the early years of World War II.

The book is filled with imagery and metaphors and cultural references subtle enough that you don't have to get them to be engrossed in the narrative and beautifully relevant enough that they bring deeper meaning—sometimes profound, sometimes merely observational—to the lives of the characters, their changing circumstances, their collapsing worlds, and their dawning understanding of the cruelties and horrors of war.

Those cruelties and horrors of course extend to the Holocaust, which Doerr acknowledges with the most deft touches; Jewish characters pass in and out of scenes long enough to leave an impression and then sometimes disappear many chapters later with a dreadful understanding told in a few sobering, artfully constructed phrases.

The allusions to Light and Seeing in the book's title filter through the narrative in obvious ways (young Marie-Laure's blindness) and in ways that slowly dawn on you (the invisibilities and abstractions of radio signals that engross young Werner). And the metaphor of light—or lack thereof—lingers in the hushed, unspoken evils of Fascism, the sudden disappearances of beloved characters, and the illuminating discoveries of both children on their individual and tacitly shared journeys.

Doerr has a gift for creating characters you find yourself knowing intimately and caring about deeply ... and since they live in the crosshairs of a brutal war, some of their fates will break your heart.

He also trusts his readers to connect the dots between offhand comments, minor characters, historical references and other pieces of ephemera that slowly coalesce into richer understandings of the characters, the themes, the contexts and the worlds they occupy.

The novel is not new and it's been adapted into a Netflix miniseries so you may already be familiar with its general narrative, but I don't want to reveal any more plot details than what I've said here. The first three or four times someone recommended the book to me, the plot summaries they gave honestly didn't grab me. But I'm truly glad I finally listened. I was instantly engrossed in the book, and now that I've finished it I'm finding I miss the characters as though they were friends and family in a long-ago life in a terrifying chapter of our shared history.