Three Great Books #35
Kicking off summer reading with three page-turners.
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
I’m a total sucker for time travel stories and this one is a funny, moving delight. In the near future, the UK government has secretly acquired the technology to travel through time, but the effects on the human body are unknown. So officials have fetched people from the past who they know from the historical record were going to die anyway (thus avoiding any chance of affecting the future) and are studying how their bodies react to the stress of a new temporal environment. Our unnamed narrator is a civil servant with a new job — serving as a “bridge,” or a kind of babysitter/cultural interpreter — for one of a handful of these new arrivals. Her charge is Lt. Graham Gore, a (real-life) naval officer who was lost on an 1845 Arctic expedition after his boat was stuck in the ice. She finds Gore to be charming and a total hottie, so you know where this is going. They have great chemistry, but she’s ultimately beholden to her bureaucratic minders, so when complications, hidden agendas and danger emerge, she’s got some choices to make. I loved this, and it’s going right to my “to be reread” list.
The Return of Ellie Black, by Emiko Jean
The missing girl thriller subgenre is pretty crowded, but this is one of the best recent entries. It begins with a disheveled young woman running out of the woods near Olympia, Washington, telling the hikers she encounters that her name is Elizabeth Black. One of the first to hear the news is Chelsey Calhoun, a detective in the small town of Coldwell Beach a few hours away, who led the investigation into the disappearance of teenager Ellie Black two years ago. Once Chelsey verifies that this is indeed the same person and reunites Ellie with her parents, she tries to find out what happened — and pretty much hits a brick wall. Ellie has clearly been abused but doesn’t want to talk about what happened to her. Chelsey has her own complicated history with this issue; she’s adopted, and her teenage sister Lydia went missing years ago, killed by her boyfriend, an event that shattered her family. The story of what happened to Ellie and other missing girls emerges from multiple perspectives, including that of Ellie herself. I couldn’t stop reading this and the final twist worked for me, though some may find it jarring.
Victim, by Andrew Boryga
Javi is in high school in the Bronx when he learns that the most difficult circumstances of his life — his father, a drug dealer, was killed in front of him in Puerto Rico — could be his ticket to ride. A college admissions counselor advises him to write an essay that plays up the most negative parts of his life and how he overcame them. In other words, from kids like Javi (that is, not white, rich, or otherwise privileged), the colleges want a trauma plot. Javi writes a somewhat emotionally untrue essay, which gets him into the (fictional) elite college Donlon. Javi aspires to be a writer, but can’t quite work up an appetite for the research and reporting that journalism requires. So, prompted by the social activist he’s wooing, Anais, he finagles a position as the first ever Latino columnist at the school newspaper. When Javi runs out of somewhat exaggerated material, he starts making stuff up, and when questioned, going to great lengths to deceive or silence his handful of skeptics. This, as you can imagine, isn’t sustainable long-term, and when he decides to write about people close to him, things get bad in a hurry. Pretty much everyone is skewered in this satire, especially the people who are so eager to assuage the guilt at being privileged that they accept Javi’s falsehoods at face value. This is a hilarious, speedy, sharp read.