The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID by Lawrence Wright

Four hundred lamps, each representing 100 lives lost to COVID-19 framed the Lincoln Memorial Pool, shortly after President Biden’s inauguration. This observance ends Wright’s look at 2020, the year that the pandemic took hold across the world. An award-winning writer, Wright writes grippingly about the medicine and politics that drove America’s disastrous response to the crisis. Despite the engaging prose, the narrative feels rushed, touching on themes with light strokes. The spread of the virus in prisons gets barely three paragraphs. A commendable achievement for being one of the early ones out of the gate but left me wanting more.

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

Discard the standard history texts. Smith gives us a peek at the true history of the United States and how its very vaunted success is built on the blood, sweat and tears of enslaved people. I remember Michelle Obama pointing out, in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, that slaves helped build the White House. It was a pivotal moment in my understanding of American history. Mostly history and travelogue, we receive lessons that are engaging and hard-hitting. Smith’s poetic descriptions can get heavy-handed at times but that’s a small price to pay for a gem of a book.

The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

 

A snowy Christmas eve, when the Family Chao’s dog Alf disappears, is when things finally completely unravel for Leo and Minnie Chao and their three sons, William, Ming and James. Leo’s murder, which drives much of the plot, happens exactly at the halfway point. While the crime is intriguing, the novel’s focus on the forcedly insular Chao family, struggling to make it in an all-white Wisconsin town, is the real highlight. The otherization of the Chaos–Chang refers to the children’s fable, The Five Chinese Brothers, as an analogous situation–combined with classic relationship dysfunction, turns out to be a volatile combination.

Ocean State by Stewart O'Nan

 

A solitary beach house becomes the focal point of this riveting novel set in Rhode Island. As always, O’Nan has his finger on the pulse of working class folks and it’s what makes an already gripping story stand out because of excellent characterization. Provoked by jealously, high-schooler Angel commits murder but the novel does not spend much time on gory details. Instead it brilliantly explores the effects of that crime – and of a sibling’s separate and closed-off life – on Angel’s younger sister, Marie. Throw in high school manipulations and classism, and you have the recipe for a hit beach read.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

 

Bald, Black and bold Opal Jewel and white English singer Nev were about as unlikely a musical duo as they could get in 1960s America. Yet their brand of panache worked at least for audiences. Years later, a reporter with a personal connection to the duo revisits Opal and Nev’s legacy and finds much tarnish hidden underneath all that sparkle. Racism, women’s rights, and the many subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways in which minorities are routinely made to feel like the other, feature boldly in these pages. Told in a chorus of voices, this is one technicolor riot of a novel.