The Red Address Book and The Museum of Modern Love

THE RED ADDRESS BOOK by Sofia Lundberg is a wonderful work of historical fiction.  Lundberg introduces her readers to Doris, an elderly recluse living in Stockholm, who is desperately trying to capture her life story for a faraway great niece, Jenny, who is busy raising her family in California. 

By cleverly referring to entries in the address book, Lundberg shares Doris's life events, spanning the Great Depression, WWII, and the latter half of the twentieth century. It is difficult at times to accept the gullibility and rather short term “luck” (particularly in regards to finding shelter and support) that Doris experiences while facing dire circumstances. She travels between two continents and deals with the deaths of family members, physical abuse, prejudice against homosexuality, and star-crossed love. 

THE RED ADDRESS BOOK is certain to evoke emotion in its readers. Adult book groups should enjoy this debut novel which is a LibraryReads pick for January 2019.  

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN LOVE by Heather Rose is the first novel by this award-winning Australian writer to be published in the United States.  Rose is exploring the transformative power of art and I found this text caused me to be contemplative and reflective.   

I was initially drawn to the characters, Arky Levin (a successful movie score composer facing a life crisis) and Jane Miller (a recently widowed art teacher), who meet at an art exhibit.  There, Marina Abramovic offers performance art where she sits completely still all day and leaves open an invitation for others to sit across from her. That part of the novel is based on fact; the actual performance was called “The Artist Is Present” and took place over 75 days in 2010 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In the novel, Arky and Jane return repeatedly to join others in observing this form of endurance art where some participants are even moved to tears.  Overall, I was intrigued, but felt that the book began to drag a bit and honestly would tend to recommend Meet Me at the Museum first which also features bonding across cultures by more mature characters. 

Please note, though that THE MUSEUM OF MODERN LOVE received a starred review from Booklist and has won several awards in Australia, including the Stella Prize and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. Definitely consider it for adult book groups.

Diverse Books and What We Owe by Bonde

Recently, several of our librarians have been attending a Library Journal professional development class called Equity in Action: Taking Your Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives to the Next Level.  We are in the midst of conducting an Equity Audit on our fiction section, based in part on work done at Skokie Public Library and by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin. Initial results are fairly positive with good representation from lists like the CCBC’s 30 Multicultural Books Every Teen Should Know or School Library Journal’s 42 Diverse Must-Have YA Titles for Every Library.  I am looking forward to analyzing our own data in more detail over the next few weeks as well as participating in discussions about School Library Journal’s initial Diverse Books Survey and their Diversity, Cultural, Literacy Toolkit. I have also been reading books that offer a more diverse or #OwnVoices perspective and will be including those reviews here. 

To that point, WHAT WE OWE by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde is a relatively quick but extraordinarily emotional read, particularly if you are a mother or a daughter. Bonde was born in Iran in 1983 and fled with her parents to Sweden. She builds on that personal experience since her novel tells a story of Nahid, both as a young woman in pre-revolutionary Iran living though the revolution and as a mature woman dealing with a cancer diagnosis in her country of refuge, Sweden.  Nahid is filled with anger, including towards her adult daughter, Aram (“Maybe pain moves in a circle. Maybe I caused her pain to avenge my own.”) and she comments frequently on the ability to survive versus just live. At one point, Nahid comments: “Right and wrong, it’s so hard to know which is which as the years go… Sometimes I wonder if right and wrong are even the opposite of each other, or just two ways of expressing the same thing.” Nahid speaks of luck, too, and readers will be contemplating the sacrifices that a refuge makes (freedom versus roots), wondering if they would prefer a relatively easy life filled with good luck or the opportunity to build resilience due to facing and overcoming bad luck. In an almost journal-like format, Nahid reflects upon her life and that of her family, including recently deceased husband Masood: “If only we’d cried together instead of letting the pain turn into a thorn between us, maybe our lives wouldn’t have turned out like this.  Maybe then we wouldn’t have been so alone.” 

Book groups, especially, will find much to discuss in WHAT WE OWE which received starred reviews from both Booklist (“a must-read”) and Kirkus (“a startling meditation on death, national identity, and motherhood”).

Us Against You by Fredrik Backman

Earlier this month, Simon & Schuster’s Atria imprint released US AGAINST YOU by Fredrik Backman; it is the sequel to Beartown, a book which has generated some lengthy discussions at our high school. The stories in both novels take place at a small town where hockey championships are truly a focus and “kids get raised with the philosophy ‘the stats never lie.’ Either you’re the best, or you’re everyone else.” As the new novel opens, reverberations from a sexual assault by one of the key players are still being felt and there is talk of disbanding the team. “The idiots won’t say it was Kevin who killed Beartown Ice Hockey, they’ll say ‘the scandal’ killed the club. … their real problem isn’t that Kevin raped someone, but that Maya got raped. … Women are always the problem in the men’s world.”

The story is classic Backman (he also wrote A Man Called Ove and others), with much empathy for those with less power and with anger against the bureaucracy: “it is divided in the way that all worlds are divided between people: between those who are listened to, and those you aren’t” OR “sports are only sports until someone who doesn’t give a damn about sports has something to gain from them, then sports suddenly become economics.” Once again, Backman gives readers much to discuss in US AGAINST YOU which received a starred review from Library Journal.