The Storyteller's Death (Ann Davila Cardinal)

The Storyteller's Death
Ann Dávila Cardinal
Sourcebooks Landmark
Fiction, Fantasy/General Fiction
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Isla was eight years old and a thousand miles away when her beloved father died. She'd been sent to stay with her mother's relatives, the sprawling Sanchez family, in Puerto Rico as she had been every summer, and her mother didn't tell her about the death until she returned to New Jersey. Since then, her life has crumbled around her, as her mother escapes into alcohol and she struggles to stay afloat. Her only safe haven is her summers in Puerto Rico, in the home of her stern great-aunt and under the judgemental eye of her iron-fisted grandmother. Here, she loves listening to the vivid tales woven by her elders, stories of colorful ancestors and relatives and their seemingly larger-than-life exploits, adventures, and incidents, where truth and fiction often blend.
It wasn't until her grandmother passed away many years later that Isla began seeing those stories come to life around her, vivid recreations that play out daily.
Is it some sort of hallucination or daydream? Is her mind finally cracking under the many stresses of her life? Or has Isla inherited a gift - or a curse - that has passed down the Sanchez line for generations... and, with it, shouldered the burden of stories that the dead demand be shared with the living?

REVIEW: After a middling reading selection in July, I wanted to start August out on a better note, so I thought I'd switch up genres a bit; while The Storyteller's Death may technically have fantastic elements, it's more in the "magic realism" sense that shades into general or even literary fiction more than straight-up fantasy. (Also, this was part of a "great library read" via Libby.) By the end, though, I found the middling streak unfortunately continued.
The story, which is ostensibly told by an older Isla about her formative years and experiences, opens with an eight-year-old girl encountering the face of impending death; a relative across the street from her tia's house where she stays in summers offers hospice care to elderly, dying family members, and she ventures into the "forbidden" room... not that this is her first encounter with infirmity, what with her father hospitalized in New Jersey. There's promise in this opening, if no real hint of how any of it ties in to the concept that was promised in the blurb (the whole "stories coming to life around her" thing). But from there the story drags its feet and meanders through Isla's miserable childhood, her dysfunctional relationship with her alcoholic single mother and how it costs her opportunities for normalcy and friends, and how it's only in Puerto Rico that she has anything like the love and support and freedom she craves. Slowly, she comes to realize that there's a lot to the island, the Sanchez clan (more of a dynasty), and class and race divides than her half-white outsider viewpoint initially sees, a point first driven home when she befriends the son of a laborer and is firmly berated by her great-aunt for fraternizing with "those" people. More foot-dragging and meandering ensues, with some foreshadowing and a sprawling cast of relatives and friends and not-friends, and eventually Isla encounters her first experience living through a story after her grandmother passes away. The Sanchez family is not big on sharing secrets, let alone discussing potential mental illnesses or supernatural events, so Isla struggles to figure out what is going on and to whom she can reach out - not at all helped by the weight the Sanchez name carries, which makes reaching out to others problematic, even if it seems they might be the only ones with the answers she needs. Eventually, she figures out what's going on and what she can do about it, but the visions only grow more vivid with each new encounter, to the point where they can actually inflict harm, even if she can't physically alter events. Belatedly, she encounters the one story that proves most pivotal to her family and her current situation, a particularly stubborn tale that becomes a mystery she needs to unravel... a mystery where she and everyone else conveniently forget something previously established (that stories, or rather the memories encapsulated in the stories, can be colored or outright fabricated by the deceased storytellers, and thus can't be trusted to reveal unvarnished truths). At some point, someone mentions how the threads Isla unearths in her research begin to sound as tangled and implausible as a telenovela - which, unfortunately, predicts the ultimate truth she uncovers (I don't deal in spoilers, but let's just say I found it stretched credulity to the point of being almost cartoonish). Along the way, Isla does a fair bit of growing up, learning to find her voice and her place and what it means to be a Puerto Rican, a Sanchez, and - most importantly - herself.
There are several good parts in the story. It paints a vivid, textured picture of what the island was like in the 1980's, and the disillusionment that comes with discovering the complexities and darkness hiding in the family tree, as well as realizing, to quote how Douglas Adams put it in The Salmon of Doubt, "how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left". The living stories were intriguing, but - and admittedly this comes from the fantasy reader in me, who can't help poking at general fiction or crossovers looking for deeper magic - I'd hoped more would come from them, and more explored about the whole concept, particularly how they could be solid enough for Isla to be physically harmed by them even though she alone experiences them; that point ultimately felt like an excuse to lend urgency to solving the mystery, because the story that gets "stuck" involves a firearm with a potentially-lethal-to-her bullet. I found the whole thing felt just a little too long for the story it told, some of the revelations and resolutions a little too forced.

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July Site Update

Well, there's another 31 days of miserable existence I'll never get back... reading (generally) excepted, of course. The month's reviews have been archived over on the main Brightdreamer Books site.

Enjoy!

North of Boston (Elisabeth Elo)

North of Boston
Elisabeth Elo
Pamela Dorman Books
Fiction, Mystery/Thriller
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: As the adult child of a turbulent marriage, Pirio Kasparov has struggled but built a reasonably decent life for herself in Boston. The perfume company founded by her parents is doing well, and will someday pass to her if her stubborn Russian-born father ever relinquishes his control. Her best friend since boarding school days, Thomasina, isn't doing nearly so well, too frequently found at the bottom of a bottle, but Pirio does what she can to help her and her son Noah. Ned, Thomasina's ex and Noah's father, had just left a large commercial outfit for the freelance life aboard a lobster boat, with Pirio riding along to help bait traps and get him started (not that she has a particular interest in fishing, but she's always on the lookout for something new and interesting to try, and for all his faults Ned has been a great father).
Neither one saw the freighter until it was slicing Ned's small vessel in two.
While Ned was lost, Pirio managed to survive for four hours in the near-freezing waters north of Boston before being rescued. The news treats her as a novelty, while the Navy wants to investigate her unusual ability to endure extreme water temperatures. But Pirio can hardly care about those things, not with Noah's father dead - and not with that little itch in the back of her mind that the "accident" was anything but accidental. Disappointed by official investigations that seem content to brush the matter aside and spurred by her cynical and suspicious father, she starts poking around on her own. Little does she suspect what a hornet's nest her inquiries will kick up...

REVIEW: This debut thriller melds elements of commercial fishing, corruption, perfume making, immigrant diaspora, and the lasting scars of troubled childhoods and abusive relationships, set in a solidly realized Boston and starring an interesting, proactive, and somewhat flawed heroine. It also feels like the start of a series that never took off, and thus one that never got a chance to fully explore its characters or situations, making some parts feel oddly extraneous by the end.
Keeping a fairly good pace throughout, Pirio's incredible survival in frigid Atlantic waters gives her some local notoriety in the middle of a deeply personal tragedy; Ned and her school friend Thomasina may have been over as a couple, but the man always did right by his son Noah, also much beloved by Pirio, and the breakup was not exactly a one-sided matter. That notoriety gets her noticed by the Navy (a subplot that sorta sputters out after verifying something Pirio suspected but needed proof of before believing), and also gives her some "street cred" when she starts investigating the matter of who sank Ned's boat. At first, she thinks it's a tragic accident, maybe a "hit and run" as is not uncommon on a sea with many small vessels sharing space and shipping lanes with behemoths, neither of which can exactly brake on a dime. But when strange occurrences follow her first questions, she realizes that there's more to it than mere happenstance; Ned was targeted, and someone wants very much for the matter to be forgotten. Pirio is reasonably clever in her investigations, if sometimes reckless, though that's in keeping with her character. Along the way, she also has to help with Noah as his mother spirals into self-destruction and cope with her own headstrong father's mortality catching up to his outsized will and personality, one more complication in a relationship that has been nothing but complicated. Memories of her mother, a woman with her own problems but who left an indelible mark on Pirio's life (as well as a legacy of the wondrous complexities of scent; she was the one who started formulating the perfumes that would become the backbone of the family's minor empire), make her fractured family relations all the more bittersweet, though her quest to find justice for Ned helps bring some unexpected closure on that front. Along the way are numerous clues and dangerous characters, some close calls and dead ends, culminating in revelations that have far-reaching implications and put Pirio and her friends in far more danger than she ever intended. There are hints and potentials for romance, but for the most part the book is free of entanglements of the heart; she may feel some attractions, but knows her current quest must take precedence. The conclusion leaves some questions and threads loose in a way that feels intentional, as though Elo was leaving the door open for more stories about Pirio and her companions. Overall, it kept me entertained.

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Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man (Emmanuel Acho)

Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man
Emmanuel Acho
Flatiron Books
Nonfiction, History/Memoir/Politics
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Is racism really a problem in modern times? Can Black people to be racist? What about "reverse racism" against whites? Why can't we all just stop seeing color - won't that make the problem go away? Former football player and current sports commentator and podcast host Emmanuel Acho answers questions about race that many white people hesitate to ask.

REVIEW: If nothing else has become glaringly apparent in the decade since Barack Obama's presidency, it's that American racism is not only alive and well, it's become emboldened enough to step from the shadows and openly feast on whatever progress has been made since at least the 1960's. Acho does not pretend to speak to the experience of all Black Americans, but he does honestly and thoroughly explore a number of topics related to racism, from the personal prejudices and biases that seep into daily life and color decisions to the systemic racism built into the institutions that govern all aspects of our public existence, going all the way back to the nation's founding and persisting to the present day. He even addresses "that" word, its volatile history and if it's ever okay for someone outside the community to use it. It makes for an interesting, candid, and frequently depressing and infuriating look at the many faces, many forms, vexingly persistence, and adaptive mutability of a problem that underlies so many of today's challenges, challenges that threaten everyone but that share common roots.

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Democracy in Retrograde (Sami Sage and Emily Amick)

Democracy in Retrograde: How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and in Our Lives
Sami Sage and Emily Amick
Gallery Books
Nonfiction, Politics
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: It's no secret that the state of America's democracy is dire. Voting rights are under attack, the very notion of who is or is not a citizen has been thrown into the shredder, and the party that pushed a literal, televised insurrection has grasped the levers of power. Institutions and guardrails are being destroyed at exponentially increasing rates, and those doing the destruction aren't even trying to hide the anti-democratic, anti-Constitutional roots of their motivations. Is it too late to stop the complete collapse of the country we thought we knew? The authors offer ideas for finding hope and motivation even in the darkest times.

REVIEW: This book was published in July 2024. At that time, I would've agreed that there was, indeed, some chance of at least limiting damage from the bad actors who have successfully infiltrated the system and grasped control of the media narrative to push their messaging and drown out opposition. I'm not at all certain of that anymore, one year later. In any event, the authors explore ways to connect with like-minded individuals and build intentional communities - ideally in-person communities, as so much of the internet has been siloed into echo-chambers and ultimately compromised (many online public spaces being actually in the hands of private individuals pushing their own agendas and influence, rewarding outrage and divisiveness) - in order to work toward change. They discuss the different ways people can contribute: not everyone is a leader, but most everyone can likely find something useful to do, some place where their interests and passions intersect with a need. As usual, though, there are those of us who fall through the cracks; I lack access to in-person communities, for one, and for another I lack anything tangible to contribute. I'm also congenitally invisible, so even in the off chance I found a place to show up I'm not particularly useful except as an inert object. Still, ideas like these are likely the only way to turn anything around or, as I sadly suspect will be more likely, eventually rebuild anything from the rubble that will eventually be left to whoever or whatever manages to survive what's coming.

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