Olga Dies Dreaming, by Xochitl Gonzalez
Olga Acevedo is a wedding planner for the wealthy. She’s built her business from scratch, and has been very successful since she realized that the key to profitability is fleecing her clients in ways big and small. She’s currently sleeping with the father of one of her brides, though a neighborhood guy has caught her eye. Olga’s brother Prieto is a congressional representative for their home neighborhood of Sunset Park. He says the right things, but people are noticing that he doesn’t always vote the right way to help his neighbors or Puerto Rico, and they’re starting to ask why. His positions are particularly fraught because Olga and Prieto’s mother, Blanca, is so dedicated to the cause of Puerto Rican independence that she abandoned her family to fight for it. She communicates sporadically through letters to Olga, and when she finally resurfaces, makes it clear she isn’t pleased with her kids’ paths. What does Olga owe to a mother who demands absolute loyalty to her cause? What does Olga owe to herself? She struggles with the answers against the backdrop of the 2017 hurricane season — which unleashed two devastating storms on Puerto Rico — and the utter failure of the U.S. government to respond adequately to the destruction. That subject matter (as well as a brief incident of sexual assault) is necessarily heavy, but it’s well integrated with the lighter moments of Olga’s story.
Babel, by R. F. Kuang
At 545 pages, this work of fantasy/dark academia/alternative historical fiction requires a big time investment. But it pays off. The novel’s imaginative conceit is that the British Industrial Revolution was aided not by coal, but by silver — the power of which is behind everything from trains to lights to the integrity of building structures and is magically manifested through the act of translating two similar but slightly different words from different languages (called “match pairs”). The center of translation is Babel, a college of Oxford University. That’s where Robin Swift ends up after being taken from Canton, China as a young boy and educated by a rich professor whose motivations and relationship with Robin are, at first, unclear. Robin bonds with the other three translation students in his cohort: Ramy (from Calcutta), Victoire (from Haiti via Paris), and Letty (from England, and daughter of an admiral). And he learns — from the man he eventually discovers is his half brother — that there’s an underground resistance at work, fighting against the fact that the students’ language skills are being used to the advantage of Britain’s richest, never to the far less advantaged citizens of the students’ native countries. Robin begins to wonder what he owes to a system that has elevated him into the elite yet left the people in his homeland to suffer because of colonialist and racist beliefs. I finished this more quickly than I anticipated because I was turning pages so rapidly, and the ending is both inevitable and powerful. This one will stick with you.
The Appeal, by Janice Hallett
This is a high-concept mystery that works. It’s set in a small English community and has the genre’s familiar elements: a big cast of characters, quirky context (a local theater group called the Fairway Players, replete with petty resentments and hierarchies) and motives galore. But the story is told entirely via primary source documents, including emails and text exchanges from the victim, community members/suspects, and the two young lawyers, Femi and Charlotte, charged with sifting through it all and figuring out the culprit. It’s unclear at first who their law firm is representing — and it’s also unclear who the victim is until fairly far into the book. The cast includes Martin Hayward, head of the theater group, and his wife Helen (star of every play!), whose granddaughter has just been diagnosed with a rare cancer that will require an expensive, experimental treatment from America. Fundraising kicks off in earnest, organized by the hyper-efficient Sarah-Jane McDonald, a theater group member who is constantly annoyed by the group’s clueless minutes-taker, nurse Isabel Beck. New to the theater group are Samantha Greenwood, a colleague of Isabel’s who is back in the UK after a stint doing medical aid work in Africa, and her husband Kel. Samantha is immediately suspicious of the legitimacy of the cancer treatment and pursues her suspicions like a bulldog; hijinks (and murder) ensue. Fun, fast-paced, and satisfying.