enlightenment | Seattle Book Mama

3.5 stars rounded upwards. My thanks go to Net Galley and Simon and Schuster for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Eliza has always been close to her father, a man that runs a fleet of pearling vessels. Her mother is gone, so it’s only Eliza, her father, and her brother. Then one day, the fleet comes back, but her father isn’t with it. He’s gone missing! Did he fall overboard? No, not that anybody saw, but if he isn’t on the ships, it seems the logical explanation.

For a variety of reasons, Eliza doesn’t believe it. She is determined to find him herself; yet to do so, she must go places and do things that are absolutely unacceptable for a woman in Western Australia in 1886. Fortunately—and conveniently—a young German man wants to go these same places, and he accompanies her. From there, things proceed in about the way you might expect.

Other reviewers that came before me say that this story is beautifully written, but terribly sad. I steel myself, but though the story is melancholy in places, I don’t find it depressing. However, I am also less impressed than I anticipated.

The good: I love the setting, and the setting plays a large role in this tale. Australian pearl divers! I have never read anything like this before, and I learn some things. I have never thought before about how the pearls that jewelers sell are collected. Though I would imagine that the process has changed over the past 150 years, it is still interesting to me. Along the same lines, I appreciate the amount of detail in the author’s notes.

On the other hand, the character development is underwhelming. Neither Eliza nor Axel is much different at the ending of the story than at the start. Eliza is a bit wiser, and she has learned things about her father and brother that had been kept from her before, but I can’t call hers a dynamic character; Axel is even less so. The same applies to the quality of the writing. It isn’t bad, but after the buildup, I expected it to be better than this. But the worst thing is a plot twist, right within the climax, that is jaw-droppingly improbable. My mother used to warn me that if I roll my eyes up into my head, they may stay there, so I am grateful to have emerged from this novel with my vision intact. Ohhh, brother.

So for a bit I consider that this is a three star read, but the resolution involving Eliza and Axel is very nicely done, and it wins me back enough to round it up to four. I recommend this book to those interested in the setting.

Derek Black was the heir apparent to the White Supremacist throne, godson of David Duke, and the son of the founder of the largest hate site in the U.S. This gripping biography tells the story of his transformation, from racist wunderkind to social justice proponent. Thanks go to Net Galley and Doubleday for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

As a young person bent on following his family’s toxic legacy, Black felt that part of the secret to gaining support was in softening the language that went with it. Rather than spewing angry racist jargon around, he argued, Caucasians should instead point to their own pride in ancestry. Everybody gets to be proud of who they are and where they came from, right? So his people just happened to be proud of being from Northern Europe. And then it follows that of course they would prefer to be surrounded by others like themselves. Thus, the call for a Euro-American homeland was, he argued, a reasonable demand.

Later he would hear some of his own catch-phrases used by members of the Trump cabinet.

Derek had never known anyone that wasn’t white; his parents had seen to that. When he went to the New College of Florida, he escaped the terrarium in which he’d been home-schooled, and he came to know a more diverse set of people. This story tells us not only of his own inner struggle and evolution, but also of the painstaking manner in which his new friends cultivated him and became an undeniable part of his life. They invited him to Shabbat meals regularly, gradually breaking down his resistance. In time he came to see the contradictions between the ideology in which he had been raised, and the reality of the real human beings that were now part of his life.

I am amazed at the patience and perseverance of the young people that changed his thinking. I myself would have beat feet far away from a character like this guy, particularly given the enormous stake he had in remaining exactly who he’d been raised to be. Befriend this person? Why would anyone? But they did it, and they met with success.

Black was inclined to withdraw from public life, to fade into the general population as quickly as possible, but his girlfriend persuaded him that since he had made a difference in the wrong way, he owed it to the world to counter that with a more public repudiation.

Saslow is a Pulitzer winner, and his writing is tight and urgent. I didn’t put this story down often once I had begun it. At the same time, Black’s story is told so intimately that it feels a little strange to suddenly realize that Saslow is in it, and we don’t get much information as to how he got there. I would have liked to see a more natural segue from his development, to his conversations with his biographer. It felt a bit abrupt to me.

This, however, is a small concern. The book is fascinating, and you should get it and read it.