All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung: The author’s deeply personal story of her adoption and subsequent reconnection with her birth family. Lovely writing but I wished the scope had expanded beyond the first-person experience.
A Separation, by Katie Kitamura: Kitamura’s style always feels distant, at an emotional remove. I admired the ideas (though here I wanted more about mourning “wailers”) but didn’t feel a strong connection.
Mount Verity, by Therese Bohman: Atmospheric – set in Sweden in the 80s and 90s – and spooky, with the disappearance of the protagonist’s older brother as its precipitating event. I enjoyed this, although some of the major plot points/relationships seemed to evaporate without explanation.
The Mosquito, by Timothy C. Winegard: This was a bit of a slog. It felt like the author set out to write a history of how mosquitoes influenced history and instead got bogged down (ha) in a pretty cursory history of many of the major conflicts of ancient and modern human civilization. Very much breadth over depth (also, the final chapter was a weird paean to Bill Gates).
Beckomberga, by Sara Stridsberg: Beautiful writing, difficult subject matter – suicide, child sexual assault, institutionalization, neglect. I was incredibly confused in the initial chapter trying to figure out who was who and their relations to one another; turned out I just needed to read the Kindle equivalent of the back cover summary to orient myself. The fragmentation and time shifts worked, I thought, in this novel about a psychiatric hospital in Sweden (which did exist until its closure in 1995).
