Women's Work by Megan K. Stack

WOMEN’S WORK by National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack explores a “Reckoning with Work and Home” by relating events from Stack’s time living in Beijing and India.  During those periods she and her husband became parents. They employed housekeepers and childcare workers – “migrants who’d left their own children behind to work in the city, and ended up in my house.” This extremely personal and well-written text describes Stack’s feelings about work (she had been a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times) and motherhood, noting “Job, book, baby: I’d forced myself to choose the one I loved least. It was a terrible choice because I loved each of them.” WOMEN’S WORK also confronts the ideas of feminism and privilege as Stack strives to explore the lives, homes, and families of the women who worked for/with her and says, “Xiao Li, Mary, and Pooja will forever give me strength and push me forward to what needs to be done.” 

Stack recounts in detail her own experiences with post-partum depression, concluding at one point, “If a woman is in an intolerable situation, the answer is not to drug her so that she can tolerate it.  The answer should be – should be – to change the intolerable situation.” And, she honestly reflects on the role of men, particularly fathers and husbands (expat or not), who often fail to appreciate the ambivalence - even guilt - over the unsatisfactory compromises involved with employing domestic workers. In addition, she writes about Asia: “[China and India] represent our collective future; they are the stuff of the world’s dreams and nightmares. They are also places that have made statistical headway towards erasing women.” There is SO much to explore here and our students could certainly use this book as a Junior Theme research text or perhaps read portions for Senior Writers Seminar. I definitely recommend WOMEN’S WORK which received a starred review from Kirkus.

Novels Dealing with Friendship

TIN MAN by Sarah Winman is a tender, delightful read with a memorable last sentence…. “It was a moment in time, that’s all, shared with strangers.” Set in the UK, this novel gives us the story of Ellis, Michael and Annie.  Spanning decades between post-war 1950, through the beginning of the AIDS crisis and the mid-90s, TIN MAN explores the lives of two young men who have lost their mothers, who find a special friendship and a sense of family. Sarah Winman’s writing is gentle; yet, she evokes strong emotions in this short book which deals with art/beauty and passion, with kindness and insensitivity, with love and loss. 

Another LibraryReads selection for May, TIN MAN was short-listed for the Costa Novel of the Year Award and received starred reviews from Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. 

A similar quiet and contemplative novel, EIGHT MOUNTAINS by Paolo Cognetti was published in March in the US although it has already spent more than a year on the bestseller list in Italy.  Friendship between Pietro, a young boy from Milan and Bruno, an adventuresome boy who has grown up in the mountains is at the center of this novel which also deals with relationships between the generations, particularly those between fathers and sons. I originally thought that this title might work as a selection for our Global Voices Senior English class; however, the lengthy descriptive passages and relatively sparse dialogue likely would be less appealing for those students. The publisher recommends EIGHT MOUNTAINS for fans of Elena Ferrante and Paulo Coelho and it is indeed filled with nature and a beautiful book, particularly for those who know and love the Alps.

THE ENSEMBLE by Aja Gabel is also about friendship although this quartet is especially bound by their love of music and care for one another. Gabel herself is a former cellist and expertly captures the concerns and uncertainty as these string musicians try to establish their careers. The novel begins in San Francisco in 1994 as Jana, who plays first violin, starts to form the group with Henry, an immensely gifted viola player. Brit, an orphan, plays second violin and has a secret relationship with Daniel who is an older cello player and conflicted about choosing music given the poverty he faced as a child. Each shares a part of his or her life and the dueling egos, maturing talent and competitive disappointments experienced over the next 18 years.

Like its beautiful and eye-catching cover, THE ENSEMBLE is a performance to savor, appealing especially to aspiring musicians. This debut work received starred reviews from Booklist, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly and was another LibraryReads selection for May.