Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

July 19, 2025

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat Fennessy spent all her life living in a housing project in South Boston. She raised her children there the same way that she was raised, with the belief that the Irish of her South Boston neighborhood were better than other people. The residents of South Boston have always lived a certain way and they want things to stay that way, and they want those they consider to be outsiders to stay out. But it's 1974 and change is coming whether they want it or not, and they can't stop it, beginning with the integration of the local high school that they all attended and that their children now attend. Mary Pat's daughter Jules is one of the students affected by the plan to bus white students to a Black neighborhood, but when Jules disappears just days before busing is supposed to begin, Mary Pat's focus switches to finding her daughter, whatever it takes. 

Gritty, violent, compelling. Dennis Lehane a great writer, no question. Mary Pat is not always a likeable character - she has a lot of hateful beliefs. But she is a bad ass who will fight for her child, even though you know she is on a collision course with disaster. Filled with morally ambiguous characters, class struggle, hypocrisy and broken dreams, it's a story of bigoted violent adults raising bigoted violent children. Sensitive readers should take note that there are scenes of violence, and brutality, child abuse, racism, drugs, crimes against women. Will appeal to fans to Don Winslow and Jeffery Deaver.

Busing protest in South Boston in the 1970s

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

October 15, 2024

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The Van Laar family own a large swath of land in the Adirondacks region of upstate New York, where they employ many of the local residents to run their exclusive summer camp. The camp is mainly for the children of their wealthy friends. But when their daughter Barbara goes missing from the camp, panic erupts immediately, because she isn't the first Van Laar child to go missing.

There were around 800 holds on this at the library, so I was skeptical about whether it would be worth the wait, but it totally was. I never went to summer camp, but if it was anything like this, I probably would have hated it. That said, this was a really enjoyable book as well as a quick read that kept me turning the pages. Good storytelling, interesting characters with many different viewpoints, and a dual timeline with two linked mysteries. The reader gets the backstory of many of the characters, which helps explain their actions and motivations. Many of the female characters could have been a little stronger, a little smarter, but they were a product of their upbringing and the time they lived in. The 1970s were a time when women were just starting to break out of the stereotypes of the 1950s and 1960s (aka the dark ages). Even when I graduated from high school in 1971, there were three acceptable career path for women who were college educated: teacher, nurse, or secretary, and those were only acceptable until you got married and had a family. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys a good story.

Pan, the god of the woods, source of the word panic

The Lost Girls of Willowbrook by Ellen Marie Wiseman

October 27, 2023

The Lost Girls of Willowbrook by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Sage Winters has always known that her twin sister Rosemary died of pneumonia when they were children. But at age 16, Sage learns that her sister didn't die and is living at the Willowbrook School, a school for children with special needs. She learns that Rosemary vanished from the school a few days earlier, and Sage is determined to go to the school to find her twin.

Based on a true story. My hair stylist's oldest sister was a resident at Willowbrook in the 1970s, which was how I originally heard about it. The first third of the book is mostly about how terrible the conditions were at the school, and it takes a while for the plot to get moving. The main character is pretty dense for someone who is supposed to be street smart. I started with this novel as an audiobook, but I switched to the ebook version because I could skim over the slower parts. The story moves a lot slower than in Wiseman's earlier books. Geraldo Rivera did a prize-winning expose about living conditions at the school, which were truly horrible, with most of the residents contracting hepatitis and other diseases due to the filthy living conditions and lack of care. Definitely has a YA feel to it. Meh.

Willowbrook State School, New York

Three Girls from Bronzeville: a Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner

March 11, 2022

Three Girls from Bronzeville: a Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner

Three African American girls grew up on Chicago's South Side in the historic Bronzeville neighborhood in the 1970's. They attend a good school and spend their childhood with the promise of greater opportunities, rights and freedoms than their parents and grandparents had. But as they begin high school, they go off in wildly different directions that include loss, displacement, drugs, alcholism, teen pregnancy, and murder.

The author is a journalist and novelist and the book is well-written. She published her novels under the name Dawn Turner-Trice, but when her marriage broke up, she began using her family name for her nonfiction writing. Turner went on to graduate from the University of Illinois, marry, and have a child, while her sister died young of alcoholism and her best friend went to prison for murder. It may have been a very different story if one of the other girls two had written it. 

Historic homes in Bronzeville

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

March 5, 2022

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

The Hildebrandt family is a fucked-up mess. The father is the assistant paster at one of those mega-churches, tired of his wife Marion, ogling one of the parishioners, and feuding with the youth pastor. The wife has a dark secret of her own (maybe more than one). They have four kids: the oldest is obsessed with sex and wants to quit college and enlist in the army and go to Vietnam; the daughter is in the middle of first love; the second son is 10 years old, brainy, drinks gin and sells 'Ludes at school; and the youngest, Judson, who is the only one with any redeeming qualities so of course, he's practically ignored for the whole book.

Annoying, unlikeable, uninteresting characters, focused on petty shit. This is supposed to be the first of a trilogy, but in my opinion, he doesn't need to write anything more about these people. Way WAY too long. Needed a good editor. Took too long to set up any kind of story (because there really isn't a plot). As much as I loved Franzen's first book, The Corrections, all of his books after that first one have been kind of boring. 

A mega-church

Velvet was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

September 21, 2021

Velvet was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Maite is a secretary bored with her job. She is addicted to romance comics and largely ignores the political climate outside her window. When her glamorous neighbor Leonora disappears, Maite searches for her and finds herself being drawn into Leonora's world of student protests and dissidents. At the same time, a mob enforcer named Elvis is also looking for Leonora, but for different reasons.

As much as I like the author's two previous novels, this one was disappointing. It was very slow moving and the characters were uninteresting. It did have a great cover - very noir-ish.