Mini reviews

I'm going to be on the road for the next several days but before I leave I thought I would give you mini-reviews of a couple of books that I've recently read because who knows what I'll be able to remember about them by the time that I return!

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Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

This is a science fiction book that has action taking place over a couple of centuries beginning in 1912. In that year, Edwin St. Andrew has been exiled from polite society in England because he had the audacity to make some ill-considered remarks at a dinner party. Edwin was eighteen years old at the time and likely had no understanding of the possible consequences of such remarks in the society in which he lived. 

The family's solution to this embarrassment was to send him to Canada. He travels by steamship but when he arrives in the Canadian wilderness, he unaccountably hears a violin playing in an airship terminal! What could this possibly mean? Why, Edwin, it appears you have become a time traveler and have arrived in a different era altogether!

That violin player makes repeated appearances in different circumstances over a couple of hundred years. For example, two centuries later he turns up as a character in a book by famous writer Olive Llewellyn. Llewellyn lives in a colony on the Moon but she has written a book about a pandemic on Earth that includes a passage about a man playing a violin in an air terminal. 

Finally, we meet Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in Night City, who is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness and he uncovers all of these lives that have been turned upside down by some strange phenomenon.

I find it really difficult to describe the plot of this book in any sensible way, but it was an enjoyable read. Time travel has never been made to seem so ordinary and commonplace.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars 

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The School For Good Mothers

by Jessamine Chan

This book is based on every mother's nightmare - a moment of inattention, one bad decision that could ruin her and her child's life forever. Such a moment of inattention by Frida Liu landed her in the "School for Good Mothers," a place no mother in her right mind would ever want to be.

Frida Liu is a bit of a disappointment to her Chinese immigrant parents. She seems unable in her career to be worthy of the sacrifices they have made on her behalf. Her marriage, too, is a disappointment, her husband, Gust, now having abandoned her for his younger mistress. There is one perfect thing in Frida's life and that is her toddler daughter Harriet. But then Frida has one very, very bad day and risks losing everything that is important to her. She risks losing Harriet.

In order to avoid such a catastrophe, a judge says that Frida must go to school to learn how to be a good mother, and by that he means a good upper-middle-class mother. Desperate to ensure that her daughter will not be taken from her, Frida agrees to go to the school while her ex and his new girlfriend care for Harriet. At the school, she meets other desperate women whom the state has separated from their children and learns their stories. The writer tells these stories with a dark humor that does not entirely obscure the serious problems that they explore.

The subtext of this novel for me was the complete lack of support for parents of young children which we provide through our supposed representative government. One would think that the most important job of a society would be to ensure the safety and well-being of its children by supporting parents and providing any assistance that they might require in the performance of their most important job. That that doesn't happen in our society is a serious failing that has far-reaching consequences.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars