Book Reviews.
This section exists because I love books. Need I say more?
You Exist Too Much
by Zaina Arafat struck a chord. A thoughtful mediation on the lines between desire and love, the novel traces the protagonist’s relationship with her mother and Palestinian heritage, as well as her relationship with her own sexuality and the girlfriend she cheats on repeatedly. //
There is a lot going on in this text between discussions of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, eating disorders, and a somewhat cliche detour to love addiction treatment in an in-patient program in Kentucky. At times, the structure of the novel skips around in ways that are not readily apparent and yet the novel’s core strikes a deft emotional chord. //
To me, the heart of the story is not about what it means to exist too much but, rather, what it means to allow yourself to exist at all—which vulnerabilities one has to let go of and which one has to hold onto in order to love and accept.
Rodham
by Curtis Sittenfeld delivers a personally inflected political saga the way she does best. In this novel, Sittenfeld imagines Hillary Clinton’s trajectory to the US presidency had she not married Bill.
// Working from this tantalizing concept, Sittenfeld writing is as compellingly clear as always but the book struck me as the inverse of her earlier work American Wife. It felt like a reinvention of a precious formula.
// That said, I enjoyed how her humanizing approach to a popular figure probes at today’s celebrity culture and raises important questions about age as well as gender.
The Immortalists
by Chloe Benjamin is an epic tale of four siblings and how their lives evolve after encountering a psychic who tells them when they will die. //
Alternating perspectives between the characters, I found this book to read more like four separate stories with the same locus and was disappointed their tales didn’t intersect more as the characters grew up. //
Individually, I enjoyed them but the overall scope and sheer multitude of themes (sexuality, OCD, Judaism, magic, to name a few) felt a little unwieldy.