A few stand-outs in sea of good reads for trying times

Just as the fields outside are blanketed with fresh white snow (even though many of us thought it was spring, ha), my king-size bed is blanketed with all the books I want to tell you about, along with a fuzzy black mini-Aussie dreaming of whatever fuzzy black mini-Aussies dream about.

“Framed,” “Confessions,” “Intermezzo,” “Northwoods,” “All Fours,” “The Grey Wolf,” “The God of the Woods,” “The Mistress of Bhata House,” “Fly Girl” — all good reads, in my opinion, and if I run into you at the Old Brick Store, the Shelburne supermarket or on a trail somewhere, I would be more than happy to discuss any and all of them, but alas, space is limited, and so I will tell about my favorites.

My book group recently read “The God of the Woods” by Liz Moore, a mystery that takes place in the Adirondacks and involves a missing 13-year-old camper from a prominent and important family. It’s a fun read, especially for those who have visited or hiked in the Adirondacks, but for me not as good as a previous book by the same author called “Long Bright River.”

Like “The God of the Woods,” “Long Bright River” is a suspense novel, but deeper, and darker. Instead of the Adirondacks as a backdrop, we have Kensington, a Philadelphia neighborhood slammed by the opioid crisis. The main characters are two sisters: one (Kacey) in the throes of active addiction, living on the street; the other (Mickey) a police officer patrolling the same streets, a 4-year-old son to take care of, torn between worry about her homeless sibling and her work on a force riddled with corruption and prejudice.

The action begins when Kacey’s disappearance coincides with a series of murders in Mickey’s district. Mickey becomes determined to find the person responsible, as well as her sister, from whom she has grown, over the years, estranged.

This novel is a compelling and cleverly woven mystery, but it it’s more than that in the way it takes on the complex, devastating and often controversial topics of addiction, prostitution and police corruption, as well as the deep connection of sisters, of family, even in the most trying of times and circumstances.

“Long Bright River” is well written and thought provoking; not an easy book to read, given its general subject matter. Writes The New York Times Book Review, “(Moore’s) careful balance of the hard-bitten with the heartfelt is what elevates (this novel) from entertaining page-turning to a book that makes you want to call someone you love.”

Lauren Groff’s “The Vaster Wilds,” a New York Times bestseller and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2023, is a sparkling masterpiece of a novel. “Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale,” says NPR.

It is so good I almost felt my jaw literally dropping as I turned the pages. It reminded me at times of the movie, “Revenant,” in which a frontiersman (Leonardo di’Caprio) is attacked by a bear and left for dead and must fight to stay alive in the wilderness and somehow find his way back to civilization. Both that movie and this novel had a huge emphasis on solitude, and also, nature — its beauty, timelessness, comfort and terror.

Unlike “Revenant,” in “The Vaster Wilds,” the protagonist is a female, a servant girl escaped from a colonial settlement. The novel begins: “The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles. In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl combed into the great and terrible wilderness. Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight. Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster.”

One hardly sees another human in this book. There are a few flashbacks that help clarify who this child is, some of what she has been through and what has made her run, but they are sketchy, suggestive. The principal, over-riding relationships are the girl with the wilderness and the girl with herself.

Poetic and exquisitely written, I highly recommend this novel. It is truly stunning. Life-changing, the way it makes one think of the body’s desperate, unrelenting, animal drive to survive — despite pain, hardship, cruelty, betrayal, uncertainty and loneliness. Unforgettable, in its descriptions of the natural world, and how that dripping, blustering, thundering, brilliant, shimmering, backbreaking, soul-restoring world is brought to life for the reader.

Before I sign off, here’s another beautiful line: “For, inches beyond this face and in the profoundest sufferings of her body, the world went on in its grand and renewing and wholly indifferent beauty.”

So many good books, so little time. Hope you are taking care of yourself in all the current madness of human civilization. Reading helps. Till next time.