Earl, Honey, by D.S. Getson*****

Posted on January 6, 2023 by seattlebookmama

“Ever since Pa hit him in the head with the two-by-four, Earl had lived with blinders.”

If you can read that opening line and not be curious about what comes after it, check your pulse, because there’s a good chance you are already dead. As for me, I was drawn to it immediately, and I thank Net Galley and Matador Publishing for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

When we meet Earl, the year is 1921 (although occasionally, we skip forward to 1970.) Earl is in the courthouse watching his father’s trial:

‘I di’nt fornicate with no donkey. Es ist eine dirty lie!’ From the back of the darkly paneled room, he feels his pa’s rage like a ground tremor rippling its way through the crowd the crowd to the spot where he sits, surrounded by family. Well, except for Rose. She’s up front in a special seat…

‘And what about the other charge, Mr. Hahn? Is it true your daughter, Rose, is carrying your child?’

Boom. So right in the first chapter, you can plainly see that if you are someone that needs to know about triggers before reading a novel, this may not be your book. And that’s a shame, because the quality of the writing is phenomenal, from the riveting opening line, all the way to the last.

Earl’s pa does, in fact, go to jail; even if he wasn’t guilty as sin (and of it,) which he clearly is, everyone in town hates him with an abiding passion, most of all his wife and ten children.

“There wasn’t a man within a hundred miles of Sampson County who would stand up for Reinhardt Hahn.”

It is unusual for me to include so many quotes in a review, but as you can see, the writing is so clear, strong, and resonant that I cannot do it justice any other way.

As the title and first line suggest, the story is Earl’s, and we follow him through the remainder of his childhood and adolescence. At its end, I am thunderstruck when I read the author’s note explaining that the whole story is based on the truth. Earl was her grandmother’s brother; Reinhardt Hahn, or “Pa,” was her great-grandfather.

Friends, this is easily one of the best novels to come out of 2022, and I am convinced that the only reason it isn’t parked on the New York Times bestseller list is because it was self-published, and therefore it didn’t receive the kind of publicity that a major publisher could have provided.

I won’t say more; to do that, I’d have to fish out some more quotes, and they are even better when read in context. Highly recommended; D.S. Getson is an author to watch.

My Mother’s House, by Francesca Momplaisir***

Posted on August 27, 2020 by seattlebookmama

The year seems to be riddled with novels that are brilliant conceptually, but whose execution falls short of its promise. Such is the case with My Mother’s House. My thanks go to Net Galley and Bloomsbury for the review copy.

The story is told in the third person omniscient, and the most interesting character by far is the house itself. The house has had it with its inhabitants, particularly with protagonist Lucien, a man that’s evil and demented from the top of his pointy head down to the toes of his nasty loafers. Think of the worst thing one human being can do to another, and whatever you’ve come up with, Lucien has done it.

Our rotten old man is an immigrant, a resident of a mostly Caribbean neighborhood in Queens, New York. He brought with him the wife—nearly a child-bride—that he had set his cap for early on, for she is a descendant of the Duvalier family that ruled Haiti ruthlessly for decades. Once he has married her and moved her, however, he abuses her in much the same way he does every other female in his life, including the daughters they have together.

Do I need to tell you there are triggers all over this thing?

The house can’t take it anymore, all of the ugly within its walls. It decides that the only way to get rid of this bastard is to go down with him, and it sets itself ablaze.

One of the three stars is for this aspect of it, the animation of the house. This is where the story begins, with the house’s thoughts and actions, and I sigh contentedly, sure I am in possession of a great novel.

Alas, not so much.

I love a good horror story, but what makes such a story work is when there is an underdog to cheer for, or a victim to be rescued. This is part of Stephen King’s magic; not only does he provide visceral, original bad guys and monsters, but also some ordinary person that sees what is going on and tries to stop it. Whoever his good guy is, he develops the living heck out of them, and I feel as if I would know them on the street.

In contrast, Momplaisir gives me no possible good outcome; the only hope we have comes from the defeat and death of Lucien. That’s not enough to keep me turning the horrible pages of horrible deeds. I don’t just want to see the bad guy lose; I need a good character that might, against impossible odds, win.

Character development is also lacking. Although I learn about Lucien’s early life and the trauma that he’s endured, and which we know is often part of what warps a person, I never see him change internally. He is static all the way through, and since he’s the only important character, apart from the house, I feel cheated. His distinguishing characteristic is the need to count, because “I am nothing unless I count.” So all the way through, we hear him enumerating one thing after another, and to be honest, this device, though original, leaves me cold, and eventually it just becomes redundant. MAD Magazine—the original, from the 1960s and 1970s—would have had a field day here.

Unable to push myself all the way through the text, I seek out an audio book from Seattle Bibliocommons, and just to top all of it off, I dislike the reader intensely. The over-the-top dramatic voice would work in very small, shocking increments, but instead it is the main voice used, and by the end I just wanted to tell it to shut up. (Full disclosure: I actually did, not that anyone was there to hear it.)

In the end, I am left with a tremendously clever premise, a fantastic book cover, and then a whole lot of nothing. How dare the publicist or whoever wrote the teaser compare this work to those of Tana French and Jesmyn Ward? For shame!

You can buy this book now, or you can take that same exact amount of money and burn it in the fireplace. Same thing, either way. Or you can do the smart thing, and go find another book by someone else.

The Porpoise, by Mark Haddon*-**

Posted on March 19, 2020 by seattlebookmama

My thanks go to Net Galley and Doubleday for this much-buzzed-about novel, and I am sorry it took me so long to plow through it. Haddon is a gifted writer and it shows, yet for me, this one was more pain than gain; I read part of my galley and then, after publication, received an audio version via Seattle Bibliocommons. It’s for sale now.

Our protagonist is Angelica, the only child of the extremely wealthy Phillipe. Her mother, Maya, dies in a plane crash and her father, wild with grief, withdraws from the world. He substitutes Angelica for Maya, sexually molesting her from a very young age; he is magnanimous enough not to “penetrate” her until she is fourteen. What a champ. When she is an adolescent, a handsome young visitor tries to liberate her, but Phillipe makes short work of him.

The story is modeled upon a Greek myth, and a second story is told alternately with Angelica’s, rendering a complex story more so. The prose is beautifully rendered, and I think if I were a student tasked with writing an essay involving allegory in a novel written in the twenty-first century, I might have enjoyed using this one. However, as a popular read it is both largely unpleasant and a great deal of work. The one passage that I found deeply satisfying was around the halfway mark, and it involved the revenge of rape victims.

Those looking for skillfully written literary fiction will likely appreciate the artistry Haddon unspools, but I didn’t find a lot of pleasure in reading it.