"The Final Play" by David Baldacci

An audio book. A novella.

US college footballer Swift has broken a record set by Ruggles decades before. Ruggles disappeared down the players' tunnel and was never seen again. A wig and gown had been found down there. Swift's clever science friend North is curious and investigates. They find the dead body of Linda Daltray in her wig shop. They track down Vilacheck, a player who had been somewhere down the tunnel at the time. He owns a bar - how did he get the money for it? Molly, North's friend, arranges a meeting with Gloria, 75 y.o. widow of the college benefactor. She admits to having an affair with Ruggles. She says he didn't like football that much.

North tells the police where to dig to find the body. He accuses his father of involvement with Ruggles' death. His father's girlfriend of the time was Linda's mother - who subsequently bought a shop. She lured Ruggles down the tunnel. His father says that when he confronted Ruggles, Ruggles said he wanted to sneak away and give up football. His father shoots Swift (a flesh wound, but bad enough to limit his sport career) then kills himself.

4 years later, having got a PhD at MIT, North returns. Swift and Molly marry.

No.

Other reviews

• Kartik Narayanan (I have so many issues with it concerning the characters, the plot, the setting — basically everything. ... inserting words like quantum, time shift etc do not elevate the book ... The main character cannot be awesome suddenly just by imagining he is a photon undergoing quantum tunnelling. ... the only saving grace is that it is short.)

"The expanded earth" by Mikey Please

An audio book

On July 2nd - "The Descent" - people shrank to 10% of their height. Many people didn't survive the shrinking (pacemakers, artificial hips, cochlea implants, etc, didn't shrink). Millions of years ago, therapods suffered the same shrinkage. Elizabeth Godwin runs a research project in the New Forest about plankton being a superbeing - their dead and living bodies forming a binary code. She wants to conect with it, with God. A young researcher Lazlet wants to work with her. He creates a connectome so people can connect with a pool of plankton. Religious fanatics take over the project, taking Lazlet away.

There are various little, independent stories - "Elsewhere". All astronauts but one die. She returns to earch with a memorystick containing data about July 2nd. On an island, battling parties stop arguing because there's so much more land now. Some people see the collective plankton as a God correcting the faults of mankind.

Giles wakes, shrunken. He wants to find his daughters - Eva, who has a weak heart, and Sadie. Seeking a phone charger he finds a tent village of survivors. They build a car needing 6 to drive it. Cats and dogs are frightening. Alwyn is killed with a scalpel by a woman in red (actually it's paprika, to keep animals away). Children have set up their own tribes and try to kill the adults using fireworks, etc.

Matilda (a paramed) and Bob (Police) attend a traffic accident where people's clothes are left, and there's a shrunken body. They visit a nearly building. Shrunken Godwin is there. She thinks her experiment might have caused people to shrink in the range of a km or 2, and is worried that Lazlet will cause an event that will affect the world. She thinks that in a coma aren't affected so she advices people to take barbituates. Matilda and Bob try to inject as many people as possible as the predicted event gets close.

Giles returns to the building where he worked. The women who killed Alwyn is there. She says that Richard isn't a priest. He's fanatical about the end of the world and is killing people. Giles finds his fully grown daughters and Matilda, who's an ex-lover?

Oh, it's the first part of a trilogy. It has elements of SF and fantasy that don't always mesh - wouldn't small people have such high-pitched voices and such different ears that communication with normal sized people would be difficult. I like several of the ideas.

Other reviews

• echoesinanemptyroom
• potsandplots (The Expanded Earth contains two central stories. One is set before “the descent” (where humanity shrank), and the other is in essence a quest, where a disparate group of adults is shepherding a gaggle of children to safety. ... This quest aspect of the story is strangely reminiscent of Watership Down. ... The other thread offers an explanation of how the descent occurred. Hubris and science gone wrong. An eccentric scientist, their research derided, stumbles upon something incredible. This work is appropriated by people who don’t understand its significance, triggering a cataclysm. These events centre around Matilda, a paramedic, as she tries to cope with, understand and contain the initial shrinking outbreak. ... While these are the two main threads, there is a third strand that is arguably even better. A potpourri of stories from around the world, giving wider context to the tale and showing us glimpses of what is happening away from the main story )
• goodreads (3.83 rating; 1,015 ratings)

"Midwife on the Orient Express" by Fiona McArthur

An audio book.

Prologue - a 12 year old Lucas sees his mother drown in the sea in Australia.

Now he's a world-famous infertility doctor. It's 23rd December. He's with his 80 y.o. grandmother Winsome in Venice, waiting to catch the London train. She's done the trip several times. Now a widow, she's hoping to meet Max again.

Australian Kelsie by chance is waiting there too. She left Lucas at the altar 15 years before, when she was 18, because she suddenly had career ambitions. It was his grandmother's example that had made her dream of doing this journey one day. She's manager of a Maternity Unit.

They're both attractive and single. They meet. Lucas is still grumpy. Winsome sees an opportunity to do some matchmaking. She sees that Max, now a widower, is on the train.

A passenger, Anna, gives birth. Kelsie and Lucas are impressed by each other's handling of the breach birth, and sleep together. After, Kelsie thinks that Lucas (still) doesn't respect her abilities enough, and he doesn't want to be led up the garden path again. He's helicoptered from Calais to a patient in London who thinks she's about to give birth. Kelsie and Winsome talk. Kelsie decides that Lucas doesn't have a controlling personality.

Epilogue - Max and Winsome are married. Kelsie is giving birth.

No. Decisions and tension built round very little.

Other reviews

• goodreads (3.74 rating; 334 ratings)

"Tomorrow's woman" by Greta Bellamacina (Andrew McMeel publishing, 2020)

Her work has appeared in the Guardian, The Times, Vogue, London Magazine.

There's a 6+ page forward by Robert Montgomery. He writes

• "Greta writes in a kind of reinvented English where inanimate objects are filled with life"
• "As a poet, you should struggle and push against the walls of the language you write in; and Bellamacina does this to new levels, and perhaps more brilliantly than any poet of her generation, creating new phrasings in English, which make at first only musical sense"
• "poetry in English, to be new, needs to forget the English language as much as possible, the heavy weight of all its structured precedents, and especially the terrible dulling administrative English we are forced to use every day. Twenty years ago I began to look for a poet who could do that - when I found Greta, I finally found that poet"

The section headings sound promising - "Tomorrow's woman", "Pregnancy", "Love", "Loss, grief, and thunder". So, here are some extracts: all sentences -

• she has loved all the women she has heard/ in a throat hood/ behind an eye inhaling rain. (p.3)
• Hands like stolen trees/ stuck up in the fog,/ a library card to Jerusalem/ only human in waves// a courtyard of scarlet fire/ closed so far down into itself. (p.4)
• Our child hasn't learnt his knees/ or the broken dreams of the Internet.// There is only our unprescripted love,/ not even a word yet/ but for you it's Modernism. (p.7)
• The sea birds come to show their support/ spiring pendulums, dead and still alive -/ small airports of gathered whale processions/ and invisible life// living namesake threats. (p.10)
• Hair of a horse/ over a faded clock,// modern hair like rainfall/ hunched blackbird dampness// sun beast isles/ burning in its nest. (p.19)
• The bed remains ancient in its ritual of worship/ a personal attack against strangers/ made up of all its own Trojan wars/ hung in literature, undebated. (p.22)
• The Internet is full of eagles, they cry out from all the/ isolated fullness, pushing like bread// they remind you of a storybook. (p.30)
• Viagra water flickering through morning tea/ tribes of water burning the air,/ and white heat that is a renamed cover version of water. (p.34)
• Before there was anything/ there were the stars touching time with hope,// before there was anything/ love was still blind in the darkness,// all of wonder above you,/ where you put it, up high. (p.48)
• Shaking the locking organed funfairs// the daytime observes its place to the sun,/ bewitched by the size of the hills (p.57)
• We have become old dreams/ lying on hourglass traps/ boarded up like embarrassed commitments (p.76)
• We assure ourselves 7:59, O'children/ lifting up our children,/ embarrassed angels. (p.77)
• There is no allotment for this blue rehearsal// we have replaced our faces like old caretakers,/ overwinged by the thought of secret exits// bluer than the untangle of a ballroom. (p.86)
• The night continues to note down the morning dawn// it breaks slowly, gentle like a smile/ ragged with hand-peddles from a mountain seascape. (p.89)

"Phosphorescent" is my favourite.

"It was you" by Jo Platt

An audio book.

The blurb mentioned a Book Group and a woman opening herself up to new possibilities, so I started reading, but I got 25% through without feeling that it was going anywhere. So DNF.

Other reviews

• goodreads (3.78 rating - 2,074 ratings)

"The bean trees" by Barbara Kingsolver (Virago, 1989)

The main character Marietta (first-person - a girl living in the states) doesn't know who her father is. After 5 years working part-time in a medical lab she buys a cheap VW and leaves home, renaming herself Taylor Greer. On the way, in a bar, she's given a Cherokee pre-toddler. She calls her Turtle. She finds a hotel in Broken Arrow to stay in for a while, paying her way. Then she drives to Tucson, gets punctures, finds "Jesus Is Lord Used Tires" run by Mattie. Upstairs is a sanctuary for Guatamalan and Salvadoran refugees.

Lou Ann Ruiz (third person) is giving birth in 2 months. She's into horoscopes and signs. Ivy's her mother and her grandmother's close. Her husband Angel, an ex-rodeo, who lost half a leg in an accident, has left her. After the birth of Dwayne Ray she advertises a room. Taylor applies and moves in.

Turtle's first word is "bean" (it looks like what it will grow into) and she soon learns the words for other vegetables. Taylor's mother phones to say she's remarrying. Lou Ann gets a factory job. Angel wants her to go to live with him. Mattie is interviewed on TV about the sanctuary. Taylor becomes friends with 2 refugees who live with Mattie - Estevan (an ex-teacher of English; she rather loves him) and Esperanza (who wants children). They speak to each other in Spanish because they know different Mayan languages. Esperanza tries to overdose on aspirin. Taylor learns that their daughter was taken from them because they didn't reveal names of union members. Taylor says "Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner too. I come from a place that's so different from here you would think you'd stepped right off the map into some other country where they use dirst for decoration and the national pastime is having babies ... Half the time I have no idea what's going on around me here".

When Turtle is X-rayed the doctor says she has old compound fractures. Social services say Taylor has no claim on Turtle. She decides to try to find Turtle's relatives so she can get them to sign something. She offers to take Estevan and Esperanza - they're in danger of being deported. They set off early and are stopped. The couple say that Turtle's their daughter. They find the original bar but the owner etc has changed. They rent a lakeside cottage for the night. Turtle twice says "Mamma" where humans are buried. Was her mother buried? Does she think humans grow like beans? Estevan and Esperanza can easily merge into Cherokee Nation. We're led to believe that Taylor will leave Turtle with them (thinking Turtle would have a better life that way) but in the end they pretend to be Turtle's parents and sign adoption papers. Taylor phones her now-married mother for the first time in months. Then she has almost a conversation with Turtle, about the people back home. They pause in a library where Taylor identifies what Turtle calls a bean tree as wisteria. It came from the Orient. It thrives in poor soil thanks to rhizobia - bugs that help the plants. She phones Lou Ann, who isn't going to join Angel - she asked advice from his mother. She's found a boyfriend of African descent.

Chapters have titles which are the odd-page headers. There's an avalanche of happy news at the end - I guess the characters deserve it. Some symbolic loose ends are tidily tied up too. Themes include motherhood, language, finding a home, friends vs family. The prose is fast-moving, the style flexible -

• The clouds were pink and fat and hilarious-looking, like the hippo ballerinas in a Disney movie
• I began to suspect that sharing harmonious space with an insightful Virgo might require even greater credentials than being a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona
• she was looking at me the way you do when you first notice someone is deformed. In sixth grade we had a new teacher for three weeks before we realized his left hand was missing. He always kept his hanky over it. We'd just thought it was allergies
• White rocks sloped up out of the water like giant, friendly hippo butts
• the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds
• Cynthia was concerned about Turtle's tendency to bury the dollies, believing that it indicated a fixation with death, but I assured her that Turtle was only trying to grow dolly trees

I like it.

Other reviews

• Annie sauveur (I see its faults. A book about a white woman making a lot of half-hearted commentary on POC issues. ... it’s weird that she didn’t call the police—especially when she discovers that Turtle had been sexually abused. It’s a little strange that she just adopts Turtle and that’s the end of it. But I think that is who Taylor is. She is very straightforward, steadfast, and headstrong. Blunt, to a fault. ... In some scenes, she blends into the background, she asks and answers in ways that fit the other characters a little too well. ... The writing is magic.)
• Winona media (This novel is about great damage and great healing. From a rich mix colloquial language, off-beat characters, and an imaginative plot, a central theme of hope in the face of justified despair is skillfully developed.)

"some strange music draws me in" by Griffin Hansbury

An audio book. 2 alternating timelines.

1984 in Swaffham, USA. Mel is 13. She's overweight and will soon move to a new school though her friend Jules won't. They try to learn about sex by watching films. She's into Michael Jackson. Mel sees a trans - Sylvia - though she doesn't realise that at first.

Mel's sister Donna left home early with a man. Mel's father is useless. Mel attracts all the rage of her mother Irene. She seeks out the trans. There's a beautiful sunset that draws people from their houses. Sylvia befriends her. S/he hitched to NY when about 15 and mixed with Patti Smith's friends. Mel doesn't know if Sylvia likes girls or boys. She flirts. She doesn't know whether she fancies Sylvia or wants to be her.

2019: Max is suspended from work. He taught LGBT literature before it was common. Then the school boasted about him. But he was careless about pronouns. He's forced to have a sensitivity tutor. He realises that "today, weakness is a weapon". His mum has recently died. He's come back to sell her house. He's visiting sister Donna [ah, so Max used to be Mel] who he's not seen for a decade. Donna's husband Stetson is in prison for 5 years - drugs. They have a daughter, Dakota, 12, who's clued up about non-binaryism - she goes to a talk by a queen in a library. Donna asks Max if he'd like to look after Dakota long-term. He realises Dakota (who says she's pan - she's already told her mother) needs him in the way that he'd needed Sylvia.

1984: Sylvia "folded you into whatever she was doing.". She's maybe 23? She's planning to sell her dead mother's house. She was preparing a station wagon for the Demolition Derby, painting the driver's door white so cars don't crash into that side. Mel went there with Jules to watch. She introduced Sylvia and Jules to each other. Sylvia won the "most agressive driver" prize. Two men dead-name her (use her old, male, name). She has an interesting bunch of "outsider" friends. Sylvia and Mel talk about live. Sylvia says that trans are a minority within the minority of non-mainstream behaviours, and she only knew about male-to-female transitions. At 14 Mel has sex with a Harvard boy. She tells Jules about it and they come together. Sylvia's arrested for using a woman's toilet. Jules' parents put up "Wanted" posters and practice shooting. A rumour goes round that Mel and Sylvia made out. Boys challenge her to prove she likes sex with boys. Sylvia's house is set alight. Did Jules do it? She was jealous

Jules died in a car accident when she was 20. In 2019 Max tracks down Sylvia. She's divorced from a woman, working with LGBT people. She says that her house being burned down was the best thing that happened to her - with the insurance money she got herself through college. She admits that she caused the fire.

It didn't dwell on self-pity nor did it deliver sermons. As it says, "A small town can feel threatened by an outsider, and an outsider can come from within." and Queerness was a way to escape from a low-down life that was risky anyway. I liked "when she fell out of herself" but not the use of "audible" in"I swear I heard an audible crack inside my skull"

Other reviews

• Milo Todd
• goodreads (a 4.41 rating - 1,469 ratings)