Book 19: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

I have no idea why this book caught my eye; it's not my usual genre (psychological thriller), and it's a story that ostensibly about a woman but told from the POV of a man and written by a man, which I find really suspect at the best of times (which 2019 is, quite clearly, not). But I put it on hold at the library and then had a firm deadline once I got it, since there are a million holds on every copy of the book in the system and so it's impossible to renew it. That deadline meant that I did in fact make myself read it before it was due, and I'm really glad I did.

The setup is that there's a woman named Alicia Berenson who's a successful painter who murdered her husband, and then simply stopped talking. She's found not guilty by means of insanity (or whatever the equivalent legal situation is in the UK, which is where the story is set), and now lives in a mental hospital run by the state. Our POV character is Theo Faber, a psychologist who's obsessed with figuring her out: why did she stop talking? Why did she kill him? What did the self-portrait she painted after her husband was murdered mean? The narrative cuts back and forth between Alicia's journal entries in the month leading up to the murder, and Theo's POV as he uses progressively more dubious means to attempt to unravel who Alicia was before she murdered her husband, including visiting her relatives and the relatives of her dead husband. I knew that there was something I was missing, some connection that the narrative wasn't giving me quite enough information to put together, until suddenly it all hit at once. I didn't have the time to reread the book from the beginning, but I did think that much like Gone Girl, it's the sort of story that would read extremely differently the second time through. If this sounds remotely intriguing, I really recommend it.

Grade: A

Book 18: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

This was another sci-fi/fantasy book club read. It's a novella rather than a novel, which is definitely a good thing, I think, for the size of the narrative. I could imagine a longer version of this story, but I think the limitation of where the story started and finished made it stronger and more interesting.

The book takes place in an apocalyptic future, where people moved underground in the far north after climate change destroyed people's abilities to survive further south. It's also a universe in which people could have body modifications, like animal tentacles or legs, that changed their physical capabilities, and there's constant real time monitoring of their physical well being via nanobots. The main people who have these modifications are the plague babies, who initially survived the epidemics and fled the surface, and are now returning to attempt to restore the earth and build a new kind of society. The protagonist, Minh, is one of those plague babies, who is frustrated by how developing technology is interested in traveling back in time as a means of escape and entertainment, rather than as a means of obtaining the necessary knowledge to rebuild their habitat.

She gets the opportunity to go back in time to ancient Mesopotamia and do research on the river basin. But of course the trip doesn't go exactly as planned, due to her travel partners being interested in slightly different things than she is, and to the chaos of time travel. It's not my usual kind of story, but I found it really compelling and unpredictable--even when I thought I could guess where the narrative would go wrong for Minh, what that eventually meant for her was completely different than what I expected. There's also a parallel story that's told at the beginning of each chapter that feels unrelated to the main narrative, and when those two paths finally come together it's really satisfying and also fairly shocking. I wouldn't have read this outside of my book club, but I'm really glad I did.

Grade: B