Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, by Barbara Demick: I’m always fascinated when a book is decades in the making, especially when the journalist understandably assumed that there was no way to investigate/put together the truth. Demnick was a journalist in China for years and met multiple families who were forced to give up one or more children after having more than one in the era of the “One Child” policy (forced, or in some cases, subjected to the kidnapping of their children). Some of those children, including the one featured, were adopted by American families, and the advent of consumer DNA testing revealed the connections. In this case, one twin was allowed to remain with her family while the other was taken and later adopted by a family in Texas.
Oona Out of Order, by Margarita Montimore: This was very cute, built on a great concept: on New Year’s Eve of her 19th birthday, she transports decades into the future, living her next year at age 51, with each subsequent year a surprise leap in time. The plot was more of a highlight than the writing.
Pedro the Vast, by Simón López Trujillo: A novella about, at the surface, humans dying or being infected by mycelium (the original Spanish publication predates The Last of Us as a TV show but not as a video game). For me it was too fleeting and disjoint.
Patient Zero and the Making of the AIDS Epidemic, by Richard A. McKay: This is something of a rejoinder to And the Band Played On – particularly in its far more nuanced portrait of Gaetan Dugas – but I preferred How to Survive a Plague. Patient Zero reads like (what I’m assuming it was) a dissertation that was only partially revised for a general audience.
The Emergency, by George Packer: Every so often – okay, at least twice ever – I read a book and come away thinking, “Here’s an older guy who was told not to say something/that something was offensive/that times have changed and got mad and wrote a whole book out of spite” (the other being The Human Stain, though I appreciate the degree of potential pettiness that led Roth to write an entire backstory to justify a passing remark). Tonally, it felt off; in some ways (not the aforementioned, though!) it reminded me of Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, with a strangely juvenile feel.
