Front Street, by Brian Barth: Examination of the rise of tech giants in San Francisco alongside the increase in homelessness. Really interesting in parts, and I appreciated his willingness to interrogate his own motives, but…at times there was a little more autobiography than needed. One thing I would have appreciated was a list of the featured people – with so many different names and details to keep track of, I sometimes lost who we were following.
Bluebird, Bluebird, by Attica Locke: It took me a little while to get invested in this, but it was a solid mystery and I’ll read its sequels.
Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses, by M.G. Sheftall: Devastating; Sheftall interviewed hibakusha – survivors of the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan – and told their stories from the day of and days following the attacks. There were some digressions about history that were useful in understanding Japanese culture in the 1930s and 1940s (like the foundations of state shintoism, the Meiji Restoration, and the increase in Catholicism in the pre-war years), while others felt unnecessary (beat by beat narration of the bombing from the perspective of the soldiers flying the Enola Gay), and I wished that there was less jumping from one story to another, but an important book.
Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses, by M.G. Sheftall: See above – the most galling thing to read about in this volume was the firebombing of Tokyo. We hear, rightly, about the inhumanity of nuclear weapons, but firebombing is equally ghoulish.
The Wedding People, by Alison Espach: I enjoyed this! It was very funny despite the gloomy initial premise, and the characters were extremely well drawn. The only thing that took me out of the story was that occasionally it felt like the narration slipped from being in the protagonist’s view (albeit third person) to being in the head of one of the other characters.
