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VERA

Name: VERA
Author: Carol Edgarian
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5752-3

by Carol Edgarian ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2021

Even a memorable historical event can’t shake up a mostly bland story.

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The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 extinguishes all sense of normalcy for 15-year-old Vera Johnson, who must survive by sheer pluck and intelligence in the newly rattled landscape.

Olive-skinned, dark-haired Vera looks nothing like her blond sister, Pie. After all, Vera is the illegitimate daughter of San Francisco’s most successful madam, Rose, who made an arrangement with Morie Johnson, Pie’s Swedish mother, to raise Vera as her own in exchange for the physical comforts money can buy. Morie favors her biological daughter while not sparing the rod on Vera. Then Morie dies in the earthquake, leaving Vera to fend for herself and her sister. Having been an occasional visitor to Rose’s Pacific Heights mansion, Vera knows she will be able to find succor there. With Rose missing, though, Vera resorts to her internal drive to slowly craft a new life for herself, Pie, and a whole cast of colorful characters. Edgarian zooms the lens in on Vera, who narrates the book, and her immediate landscape, a choice that too often straightjackets the story. The novel shines in painting a vivid picture of early-20th-century San Francisco, including its rowdy politics, but it falls short of truly immersing the reader. Too often it reads like a daily chronicle of Vera’s doings, which gets claustrophobic. Rose’s mansion registers some damage but seems to escape the earthquake largely unscathed, a point that also strains credulity. Frustratingly, the plot takes a huge leap after the early post-earthquake days, barely skirting by Vera’s adulthood before we catch her again in old age.

Even a memorable historical event can’t shake up a mostly bland story.

Pub Date: March 2, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5752-3

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THREE STAGES OF AMAZEMENT
by Carol Edgarian

- BOOK REVIEW
RISE THE EUPHRATES
by Carol Edgarian

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MAAME

by Jessica George ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.

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After a loss, a young British woman from a Ghanaian family reassesses her responsibilities.

Her name is Maddie, but the young protagonist in George’s engaging coming-of-age novel has always been known to her family as Maame, meaning woman. On the surface, this nickname is praise for Maddie’s reliability. Though she’s only 25, she works full time at a London publishing house and cares for her father, who’s in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease. Maddie’s older brother, James, has little interest in helping out, and their mother is living in Ghana and running the business she inherited from her own father. When she needs money, she always calls Maddie, who shoulders these expectations and burdens without complaint, never telling her friends about her frustrations: “We’re Ghanaian, so we do things differently” is an idea that's ingrained in her. Her only confidant is Google, to whom she types desperate questions and gets only moderately helpful responses. (Google does not truly understand the demands of a religious yet remote African-born mother.) But when Maddie loses her job and tragedy strikes, she begins to question the limits of family duty and wonders what sort of life she can create for herself. With a light but firm touch, George illustrates the casual racism a young Black woman can face in the British (or American) workplace and how cultural barriers can stand in the way of aspects of contemporary life such as understanding and treating depression. She examines Maddie’s awkward steps toward adulthood and its messy stew of responsibility, love, and sex with insight and compassion. The key to writing a memorable bildungsroman is creating an unforgettable character, and George has fashioned an appealing hero here: You can’t help but root for Maddie’s emancipation. Funny, awkward, and sometimes painful, her blossoming is a real delight to witness.

A fresh, often funny, always poignant take on the coming-of-age novel.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-2502-8252-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

- PROFILES
Grieving Her Father, Jessica George Wrote a Novel

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Maame’ Is the New ‘Today’ Book Club Pick

- PERSPECTIVES
An Invitation to New Fictional Worlds

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WHAT WE CAN KNOW

by Ian McEwan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 2025

A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.

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A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.

McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.

A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.