Rebecca Weekly

For February’s book club session we read Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller. The novel is an undeniably entertaining using humor and satire to explore the politics of censorship in a small Southern town. The premise is clever: after Lula Dean campaigns to remove “dangerous” books from the local public library, she installs a Little Free Library stocked with morally “wholesome” titles. Unknown to her, the books inside the covers have been secretly replaced with the very works she fought to ban. As neighbors borrow from the library, they encounter stories that challenge their assumptions and quietly reshape their lives.

The book shines in its accessibility and wit. Miller writes with a light, quick-moving style that makes the novel easy to fly through, and there’s genuine humor in the central conceit—an accidental underground circulation system for banned literature operating right under Lula Dean’s nose. It offers plenty of moments to reflect about censorship, community dynamics, and the power of the written word, which is part of why we were drawn to it as a book club. In a world full of extremely concerning themes, this felt escapist in the most pleasant of ways.

Unfortunately, the novel’s ambition is also its greatest weakness. Miller populates the story with a large cast of townspeople, each representing a different social issue currently shaping American cultural debates: historical monuments, generational divides between parents and college-aged children, sexuality and religion, white supremacy, antisemitism, spousal abuse, sexual assault, transgender identity, and more. Each thread appears briefly as a vignette tied to a particular banned book.

While the intention seems to be a broad portrait of how literature can affect many lives, the sheer number of characters and themes means that no single storyline has time to fully develop. Characters appear, confront a life-altering realization, and disappear again in just a few pages. As a result, it can be difficult to emotionally anchor to anyone in particular and their stories can come across as satirical rather than realistic, poignant, or even plausible.

In many ways the novel begins to feel less like a traditional narrative and more like a collection of linked short stories orbiting a single device—the little library. Each individual story hints at a potentially powerful novel of its own, but trying to tell ten such stories at once leaves most of them feeling compromised.

Because of this, the book sometimes reads like an extended satire, deliberately packing nearly every contemporary cultural debate into one small town. That satirical breadth has value—it highlights how polarized and overlapping today’s social issues can be—but it also keeps the story from achieving the depth or emotional focus that one or two of those narratives might have provided on their own.

In our book club discussion, this tension between clever premise and narrative overload overshadowed other topics that some of the vignettes might have elicited. We found humor in the characters, and some people reflected on a recurring theme that the strength t0 fight injustice requires the greatest sacrifice from the most disempowered in a population, a sad truth. I wish I could say the novel was a sharp satirical panorama of modern culture wars, but I think it was a story that tried to hold too many issues at once and at times it felt cacophonous.

Still it’s a fast, humorous read that sparks conversation, even if it sometimes sacrifices character depth in favor of thematic scope and I’m sure you will enjoy chatting about it with others as we did.

January’s read, Everything Is Tuberculosis, landed with the kind of narrative force that feels both investigative and deeply human.What Everything Is Tuberculosis does so well is invite us in gently through the author’s first person story, and then slowly reveal through weaving in history how much of our understanding of disease—and responsibility—is shaped by stories we’ve been told rather than the truth.

Interestingly I found it tickled some of the same subtle narrative sleight of hand as Why Fish Don’t Exist: the sense that the writer is turning a jewel in the light, showing us one facet and then another, until we realize the object itself is not what we assumed. Where Why Fish Don’t Exist questioned the categories we impose on the natural world, Everything Is Tuberculosis questions the categories we impose on people, suffering, and responsibility.

Both books remind us that the real danger lies not in chaos, but in the false order we cling to.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, Henry is the living contradiction that breaks the narrative open. He is powerful not in the sense of authority, but in the way he dissolves abstraction. The book’s political and scientific commentary could have remained academic, but Henry does not allow that. His life, observations, anger, and humor drag the story out of the realm of theory and into lived truth.

Henry embodies everything the book wants us to understand:

• Tuberculosis is not “a disease of the poor.”
• It is not “a relic of the past.”
• It is not “someone else’s problem.”
• And it is certainly not a medical issue separate from politics.

Through Henry’s eyes, we see how systems built on tidy categories—who is deserving, who is safe, who is someone we should care about—break real people. His presence forces the reader to confront the stakes not as statistics, but as human consequences.

One of the boldest parts of the book is its unwillingness to pretend that TB persists for biological reasons alone. Its persistence is a political choice—shaped by policies on housing, nutrition, immigration, incarceration, medical access, and global funding priorities.

It’s not that the world can’t eliminate TB. It’s that we haven’t chosen to. This is where the narrative connection becomes clear:
Everything Is Tuberculosis and Why Fish Don’t Exist both challenge the systems we rely on to make meaning. But while Why Fish Don’t Exist destabilized our assumptions about nature, Everything Is Tuberculosis destabilizes our assumptions about justice.

Our book club discussion homed in on the painful truths that public health had an important moment in the Covid19 pandemic, and that we missed that opportunity to gain trust in our systems by rushing “antidotes”, indemnifying pharmaceutical companies, and not empowering scientific review. Ultimately, what could have been an opportunity for society to understand that global health is human health actually further undermined faith in vaccines and the public health system.

For me this book created a sharpened awareness that if we want to improve the world, we have to be willing to see it without the categories that keep us comfortable. TB doesn’t persist because it’s inevitable. It persists because our labels make it easy for its victims to become invisible. Recognizing that is uncomfortable—but it’s also the beginning of changing it.

Rounding out the year, for our final book club session we read Apple in China. This book landed with unusual force for me, in part because it intersects so directly with my professional and personal life. I’ve spent my entire career in or adjacent to the semiconductor industry—in hardware design and development, electronic design automation, Infrastructure—where outsourcing, yield, and supply-chain orchestration are not abstract concepts but daily operational realities. My children are in a Mandarin Immersion school, a decision we made in part because of the years I spent watching how essential language and cultural fluency are to doing business across Taiwan and mainland China. With that backdrop this book became less a historical account than a parallel journey through an ecosystem I know well. Reading it now when I travel to China far less, but amid tariffs, export controls, and a rapidly shifting geopolitical climate, I found myself looking at the obvious choices made then through an evolving and more judgmental lens—especially as AI accelerates the stakes of global technological interdependence.

In the book Patrick McGee examines how Apple, once a quintessentially U.S.-based, design-driven company, came to rely almost entirely on China for manufacturing its most important products, particularly the iPhone. This evolution was not a simple story of cost-cutting or opportunistic outsourcing. Over decades, Apple invested hundreds of billions of dollars into Chinese manufacturing infrastructure, embedding itself so deeply that its operational success became inseparable from China’s industrial ecosystem. McGee argues persuasively that this investment didn’t just make Apple extraordinarily wealthy—it played a meaningful role in helping China build one of the most advanced manufacturing and technology systems in the world.

What gives the book its authority is the depth of reporting behind it. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with former Apple executives, engineers, manufacturing design specialists, and supply-chain insiders, McGee reconstructs the behind-the-scenes decisions that shaped Apple’s China strategy. What emerges is not a single dramatic turning point, but a series of rational, incremental choices—each defensible on their own—that collectively created profound long-term consequences for global technology, corporate risk, and geopolitics.

At the core of the narrative is what McGee frames as a Faustian bargain: speed and scale in exchange for dependency. Apple chose China because, at the time, only China could deliver the combination of labor availability, cost structure, responsiveness, and sheer manufacturing scale required to produce iPhones by the tens of millions. Over time, this led Apple to shutter or neglect much of its manufacturing footprint elsewhere. What began as a mutually beneficial partnership evolved into something far more entangled. Apple didn’t just manufacture in China; it became structurally dependent on Chinese suppliers, logistics networks, and political realities, which then meaningfully changed both at home and abroad.

Crucially, the book emphasizes that Apple didn’t merely outsource production—it transferred know-how. Apple engineers worked shoulder to shoulder with Chinese factory teams, co-inventing manufacturing processes, refining yields, and solving problems at breathtaking speed. In doing so, Apple helped cultivate not just factories, but skills, systems, and human capital. McGee makes the case that this transfer of tacit knowledge—far more than patents or blueprints—laid the groundwork for Chinese firms to climb the value chain and eventually compete globally. From that perspective, Apple’s supply chain becomes not just an operational asset, but a training ground.

The geopolitical implications of this evolution are where the book feels most urgent. McGee argues that by rooting its manufacturing and much of its business in an authoritarian state with rising global ambitions, Apple introduced systemic risks—not only to itself, but to global supply chains and U.S. technological leadership more broadly. In this telling, Apple’s rise is inseparable from China’s emergence as a global tech power. The book reframes Apple’s China strategy not just as a corporate success story, but as a geopolitical event with nation-scale ripple effects.

At the same time, Apple in China does not go unchallenged. Some critics view its framing as alarmist, arguing that it overstates the extent to which Apple “trained” China or underplays China’s own domestic policies, state planning, and broader economic forces. Others note that while Apple accelerated China’s rise, it was hardly the sole driver. McGee also touches on labor conditions and ethical compromises, revealing how profit motives sometimes eclipsed responsibility—adding another layer of moral complexity to decisions often justified as operational necessities.

For me, the book’s greatest strength lies in how it complicates the narrative of globalization. Outsourcing and global supply chains brought Apple extraordinary efficiency and profit—but they also diffused control, leverage, and long-term strategic autonomy. Decisions made in the name of convenience and cost optimization ended up shaping global politics, technology competition, and national security debates. Supply chains, the book makes clear, are not neutral. They are strategy.

Reading this now, with AI reshaping both demand and dependency across hardware, infrastructure, and energy, the lessons feel especially salient. As AI systems grow more resource-intensive and geopolitically sensitive, the risks McGee outlines—concentrated capability, opaque dependencies, and misaligned incentives—are no longer theoretical. They are actively unfolding.

Apple in China ultimately asks readers to confront uncomfortable truths: that corporate decisions can alter global power balances; that efficiency can mask fragility; and that ignoring geopolitics is itself a political choice. For anyone working in technology—or raising the next generation who will inherit its consequences—this book is less a warning siren than a long, steady alarm. It doesn’t offer easy solutions, but it makes one thing unmistakably clear: the systems we build to move faster and cheaper can also lock us into futures we never fully intended to choose, so buyer beware.

For October’s book club session we read Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. Honestly, this book was not great, which is a rare takeaway for me (reading is one of my favorite pastimes and I cannot think of a time I didn’t finish a book I started or find something genuinely enjoyable about it). True to form, I will start with what I loved: the author’s imagination. The world-building in this novel is inventive, playful, and frequently smart in quiet, understated ways. The central premise—a sentient space station serving as a diplomatic and social hub for dozens of alien species—is fresh and full of promise. Each species is given its own logic, culture, communication style, and relationship to humanity, and the book shines most brightly when it allows those differences to collide.

Some of the most engaging moments come from seeing humanity reflected through alien eyes. Humans are perceived as emotional, volatile, and strangely self-destructive—qualities that both fascinate and alarm the station’s nonhuman residents. These observations feel sharp and thoughtful rather than judgmental, and they offer a compelling lens on first contact, cultural misunderstanding, and the uneasy power dynamics that emerge when humans are no longer the dominant or even the most rational species in the room. I also appreciated the glimpses of Earth-side politics: the factions, opportunists, and shadowy interests eager to control or manipulate humanity’s role in this new interstellar ecosystem. Those threads hinted at a much larger, more complex story unfolding just beyond the page.

Another standout element is the station itself. Station Eternity isn’t merely a setting—it’s a character. Its sentience, emotional responses, and symbiotic relationships with its inhabitants add a layer of intimacy and strangeness that sets the book apart. The idea of a living structure that cares, reacts, and occasionally misjudges its residents is one of the novel’s most compelling achievements, and I found myself wishing the story had lingered there longer.

Where the book faltered for me was in its central murder mystery. Rather than feeling integral to the story, the mystery felt like an imposed framework—one that went through the expected motions of bodies, suspects, and reveals without the investigative rigor or narrative momentum that makes a mystery satisfying. The clues didn’t accumulate in a way that invited real engagement, and the eventual solution didn’t feel earned so much as delivered. For a novel so rich in speculative ideas and alien psychology, the mystery itself felt oddly flat and underdeveloped, as though it had been bolted onto a much more interesting science fiction novel rather than arising organically from the world.

To be fair, I’m not a devoted murder-mystery reader, and it’s entirely possible I wasn’t the ideal audience for that aspect of the book. But even accounting for that bias, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Station Eternity would have been far stronger if it had trusted its own strengths more fully. The politics of alien coexistence, the emotional isolation of being human in a mostly non-human society, the station’s evolving consciousness—those elements felt alive, layered, and full of unrealized potential. Instead of elevating them, the mystery often seemed to weigh them down.

In the end, Station Eternity struck me as a fascinating world trapped inside a less-than-fascinating plot. I didn’t dislike it because it failed to imagine boldly—it absolutely did—but because it seemed to pull its punches on the very ideas that made it unique. I came away wishing Lafferty had written a different book set in the same universe: one more focused on the strange, political, emotional, and philosophical implications of shared space, rather than a mystery that never quite justified its place at the center of the story.

For September’s book club session we read Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides. This book is both an epic of endurance and a quiet indictment of war itself. In recounting the January 1945 raid on the Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines, Sides tells a story that feels almost mythic in its bravery while remaining grounded in the brutal physical and psychological realities faced by those who lived it. This tale is not clean in the recounting of heroism or triumphant in its declaration of victory. It is a story of bodies pushed beyond reason, of men surviving on will alone, and of courage that emerges not in spite of horror, but directly because of it.

At the heart of the book are the prisoners of war held at Cabanatuan—American and Allied soldiers who had already survived the Bataan Death March, an ordeal so punishing it stripped thousands of their lives and nearly all of their dignity. By the time the narrative reaches the camp, these men are no longer soldiers in any conventional sense. They are emaciated, diseased, and traumatized, surviving on starvation rations and living with the daily expectation of death. What Sides captures with devastating clarity is not only their physical decline, but the fragile psychological scaffolding that keeps them alive: routines, friendships, shared memories, and the stubborn refusal to surrender hope, even when hope feels irrational.

Interwoven with this narrative of slow annihilation is the story of the rescuers—U.S. Army Rangers, Alamo Scouts, and Filipino guerrillas—moving through enemy-held territory with the knowledge that time is running out. As General MacArthur’s forces advance across the Philippines, intelligence suggests that the Japanese may execute their remaining prisoners before retreating. The rescue mission is conceived not as a strategic necessity, but as a moral one: a declaration that these men, long written off as lost, still matter.

The planning and execution of the raid reads like a war thriller, but one weighted with consequence. The Rangers crawl for hours through open grasslands, exposed and silent, knowing that a single mistake could doom not only themselves but the prisoners they are trying to save. Filipino resistance fighters—too often sidelined in World War II narratives—play a critical role, guiding the Americans, securing escape routes, and risking reprisals against their own communities. The raid itself is swift, violent, and terrifying. It succeeds not because of overwhelming force, but because of discipline, coordination, and an almost unbearable willingness to accept personal risk.

The most haunting moments come after the gunfire fades. The prisoners are too weak to flee. Many must be carried on improvised stretchers or supported as they stagger through the darkness. The rescuers, already exhausted, refuse to leave anyone behind. In these scenes, Sides reveals the profound moral weight that underpins the entire mission: the belief that abandonment is a greater failure than death itself.

Ghost Soldiers ultimately becomes a meditation on endurance—on how much suffering the human body and spirit can absorb, and on the bonds that form under extreme pressure. Yet it never romanticizes war. The bravery on display exists alongside unspeakable cruelty; the rescue shines all the brighter because it emerges from such darkness. What makes the book linger is this tension: awe at human resilience, paired with horror at the systems and decisions that made such suffering inevitable.

Like Unbroken and other narratives of survival under unimaginable strain, Ghost Soldiers is a tribute—to those who endured captivity, to those who risked everything to bring them home, and to the power of remembrance itself. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, books like this and Man’s Search for Meaning remind me of how small any trial I endure is by comparison. We can be stronger than we know—ultimately how you endure is your choice. I highly recommend this book—it rescues not only men from a prison camp, but a chapter of history that deserves to be held, examined, and never forgotten.

I’m woefully behind on posting because life has been busy to an extent that I find hard to capture in words. I’m sitting here on New Year’s Eve, at a coffee shop, delightfully unencumbered by…anything, and finally taking my many notes and thoughts about books I’ve read this year and writing them up.

For August, our Book Club read the terribly popular Project Hail Mary. This book is, at heart, a celebration of the belief that science—applied rigorously, creatively, and with a sense of humor—can solve almost any problem. It is also a quintessential example of Andy Weir’s particular brand of hard science fiction: meticulous technical speculation, nerdy joy in discovery, and a tone that invites the reader to marvel alongside the protagonist. For those of us who grew up as space-admiring/aspiring nerds in the 1980s (myself very much included), the novel is a deeply lovable romp through physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering—even if its emotional and psychological dimensions sometimes feel underdeveloped. As with The Martian and Artemis, Weir’s emphasis on scientific accuracy and problem-solving captures hearts and minds, even when the characters themselves can feel more functional than fully realized.

The story takes place in a near future—close enough that all of the science feels contemporary—where junior high school science teacher Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on the interstellar spacecraft Hail Mary with total amnesia. He soon learns that he is the sole survivor of a three-person crew sent twelve light-years from Earth to the Tau Ceti system on a one-way mission to save humanity. Earth’s sun has been infected with Astrophage, a microbial life form that feeds on stellar energy and migrates between stars via infrared emissions known as the Petrova Line. As Astrophage dims the Sun, humanity has only a few decades before agricultural collapse, mass famine, and eventual extinction.

Grace’s task is brutally simple in concept and terrifying in execution: determine why Tau Ceti is unaffected by Astrophage and send that information back to Earth via unmanned probes. The Hail Mary itself is a sacrifice ship—there is not enough fuel for a return journey—and the novel alternates between Grace’s present-day struggle to survive and his gradually returning memories of how he became involved in the mission at all.

Those memories introduce Eva Stratt, arguably one of the most interesting characters in the book. As the UN-appointed director of Project Hail Mary, Stratt is granted total authority and legal immunity, and she uses it without hesitation. Her moral calculus is chilling but compelling: conscription of unwilling experts, international coercion, and even the nuclear bombing of Antarctic ice shelves are all justified if they buy humanity more time. Stratt is not portrayed as cruel, but as ruthlessly pragmatic—someone who accepts the moral cost of survival without flinching. In contrast, Grace’s role in these flashbacks highlights one of his central flaws: his passivity. He enables Stratt’s choices through cooperation and intellectual brilliance, while systematically turning a blind eye to his personal responsibility for their ethical consequences.

At Tau Ceti, the novel truly comes alive when Grace encounters an alien spacecraft—the Blip-A—and its sole surviving pilot, a spider-like Eridian engineer Grace names Rocky. Rocky is easily the most interesting character in the book. Sightless, reliant on sonar, encased in mineral armor, and breathing an ammonia-rich atmosphere, Rocky is both profoundly alien and instantly relatable. His intelligence, perfect memory, extraordinary engineering skill, and deeply ingrained sense of cooperation make him a natural counterpart to Grace. Where Grace improvises and theorizes, Rocky builds. Where Grace jokes to deflect anxiety, Rocky responds with earnest curiosity. Their growing friendship—built through painstaking communication, shared scientific puzzles, and genuine affection—is the emotional core of the novel.

Rocky is on a parallel mission: Astrophage threatens his home system, 40 Eridani, just as it threatens Earth. Together, Grace and Rocky investigate Tau Ceti’s Petrova Line and the planet Adrian, narrowly surviving catastrophic accidents and even exposing themselves to each other’s lethal atmospheres in acts of mutual sacrifice. These scenes underscore one of the book’s strongest themes: cooperation across difference as a survival strategy, not just for individuals, but for entire species.

Grace’s recovered memories reveal the final, damning truth about his own character. After the original crew members—Martin DuBois and Annie Shapiro—are killed in an accident, Stratt forces Grace onto the mission against his will. When he refuses to volunteer, she drugs him with an amnesia-inducing agent and has him loaded onto the ship unconscious. Grace’s shame over this cowardice haunts him in the present timeline, particularly as his actions in space repeatedly demonstrate extraordinary courage, ingenuity, and self-sacrifice.

The ultimate scientific breakthrough—the discovery of Astrophage’s natural predator, Taumoeba, and the engineering of a nitrogen-resistant strain capable of saving both human and Eridian stars—perfectly encapsulates Weir’s thesis: complex, existential problems can be solved through persistence, experimentation, and collaboration. Yet the emotional resolution is more ambiguous. When Grace realizes that his solution may have stranded Rocky, he chooses to abandon his own chance at survival to save his friend. It is the bravest decision he makes in the entire novel—and one that finally feels unambiguous, indicating he has grown through the harrowing experience and friendship he built.

The novel ends with Grace living on Erid, teaching science to young Eridians—a full-circle return to the role that once gave him joy. Earth, we learn, has been saved; the Sun has recovered. But the state of humanity itself remains unresolved. The mission took nearly the entire window before agricultural collapse, and Grace’s choice not to return conveniently spares him from confronting both his earlier cowardice and his complicity in Stratt’s morally catastrophic decisions. In that sense, the ending feels emotionally evasive, even as it is narratively satisfying.

Ultimately, I loved Project Hail Mary. As hard science fiction, it is enormously fun, generous to its readers, and infused with genuine wonder. But I also wished for more: more confrontation, more internal reckoning, and a deeper evolution of Grace as a character. He begins and ends the story in essentially the same emotional place—defined by teaching, avoidance, and intellectual problem-solving—while the most compelling moral and emotional arcs belong to Rocky and Stratt. It’s an incredibly fun book, but one that hints at richer counter-narratives it never fully explores.

For July’s book club, we read The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History by Erik Durschmied. The book explores how seemingly small, unpredictable events often involving chance, error, or even stupidity, drastically altered the course of major historical events. The book argues that battles and conflicts are not solely decided by the brilliance of generals or the strength of armies, but are also were significantly influenced by what Durschmied calls the “hinge factor”. 

While military history is in no way my typical fare, I enjoyed this book. Each chapter is in a sense standalone with all the pay off at the end when he walks through the what could have been if not for the “hinge factor”. What is probably least enjoyable about it is the lack of a takeaway chapter to chapter and the lack of value for human life.

If there are themes you can draw it is that unexpected factors, such as bad weather, miscommunication, or individual errors are far too often the reason why glory was attained…NOT the skills or lack thereof. Durschmied examines battles from the Trojan War to the Gulf War, showcasing how the hinge factor played a role in each. 

What I enjoyed most was the challenge of traditional military narratives. By emphasizing the impact of chance and error, the book challenges the perception that military victories are solely the result of strategic brilliance. There is no consistent theme from the battles he selects: in some cases indecision saves the day, and in others decisiveness wins. The book is written in an engaging style, each chapter standing on its own, and what it lacks in greater context historically is something I found I wanted to follow up upon (lots of Wikipedia surfing and even a Great Courses set of follow ups to learn more). 

The most interesting examples of battles that were subject to “the Hinge factor” included:

• The Battle of Agincourt: The muddy battlefield, a result of bad weather, hampered the French knights’ mobility, contributing to their defeat by the English archers
• The Battle of Waterloo: Napoleon’s failure to secure victory was partly attributed to the lack of nails for spiking cannons, preventing his artillery from being effective against Wellington’s forces
• The Battle of Balaclava: The disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade was the result of a poorly worded order, highlighting the dangers of miscommunication and stubbornness
• The Battle of Tannenberg: A slap in the face of a Russian officer by a German officer years before the battle indirectly influenced the outcome of the battle
• The Battle of Tanga:  A swarm of angry bees caused the British forces to panic and retreat, demonstrating the impact of unexpected natural events.

I won’t say I’ll become an avid reader of military history, but this was a unique foray into the topic and I enjoyed it.

Frances “Frankie” McGraw is a young woman from a privileged background raised on California’s idyllic Coronado Island. At the tender age of 22 she’s told “women can be heroes too” and that idea changes her life. In the world she inhabits, she’d never considered there could be a different path to life than marriage. Most of what she has been exposed to is women who raise children and spend their spare time in the country club. Her desire to earn the respect of her parents and follow her beloved brother into a warzone leads to her (rashly) signing up to the Army Nursing Corp. It isn’t a decision that is welcomed by her parents. They are horrified–they do not want for her war and bravery. That is for their son to do, not their daughter, but the die has been cast, and it cannot be undone.

Frankie, like many of the troops sent to fight, is little more than a child when she arrives in Vietnam a few short weeks later. While she apparently has a nursing degree, she is inexperienced and totally unprepared for the realities of war–she cannot even start an IV. Frankie is thrown into her first MASCAL (mass casualty incident) pretty much immediately and is soon questioning whether or not she’s cut out for the job. 

Frankie does make it through however mostly by builds strong bonds with the women she’s serving with. Thanks to their support and guidance, Frankie finds her place and becomes resolute in her mission to do some good, to bring comfort to the injured and dying, and to help the Vietnamese people caught in the middle of the conflict.

Kristin Hannah paints vivid images of war. The operating room, the injuries she describes, the villages and atrocities…each are at times horrific. Against the backdrop of war, Hannah manages to depict lighter moments too; the camaraderie between the women, the celebrations when people finished a tour and that unbreakable bond between the people who were there. Those ‘lighter’ moments never felt too jarring, it’s a reality of war and even during those moments of “downtime” the threat of danger was still present.

I found that the story seemed to happen to Frankie while she was in Vietnam–she managed to survive without really growing. And maybe that is inevitable for a character going through a crucible. She was poorly trained and in a desperately risky situation, and yet, she survives and improves as a nurse. She falls in love multiple times, and while tragedies occur, she lives, she loves again, and she continues in some sense to bumble through her experiences making similar mistakes over and over again. It is really only in part two, when Frankie returns home, that she begins to learn the lessons from her time in the war.

Frankie is in no way prepared for the reception awaiting her at home, and maybe it is that rude awakening that finally forces her to confront reality. It’s well documented that those returning from Vietnam were treated as pariahs; they were labelled ‘baby killers’ and were spat at for their service. Many were left with life changing injuries, struggling with PTSD, yet they were shunned and left with little support. The learning for me was that for women like Frankie who served, the military itself gave them nowhere to turn to. “They weren’t there” was the refrain every time Frankie sought support.

Women who served in the war had seen many of the same horrors, they’d lost people they loved, suffered injuries, and been left traumatized, found themselves written out of history, their service erased. For women like Frankie, there was nowhere to turn to, and no place where they belonged, and in many ways I feel that injustice is what Hannah is attempting to rectify in this novel.

Frankie’s reintegration into ‘normal life’ is in some sense more distressing than her time in Vietnam. It’s like watching someone slowly drown. She makes some bad decisions, can be frustratingly naive, and isn’t always easy to like, but it’s clear how much pain she’s in and how alone she feels. Despite how bad her decision making and luck seem to be, Frankie continues to love, show empathy, and find the ability to forgive others, which occasionally struck me as deeply unlikely.

Despite some of the frustrations with Frankie’s personality and journey, The Women was an enjoyable read. It’s a powerful story about a distressing period in history – Hannah does not shy away from the crimes committed and the uncomfortable truths about what America did. At the heart of the novel is a story of humanity, telling the tale of the heroic women who made huge sacrifices for their country.

Hannah put significant time and research into this book, maybe to the detriment of the character development of her protagonist, but certainly for this history-loving individual, I enjoyed reading an alternate view of the war.

For April’s Book Club we read Semiosis by Sue Burke. I really enjoyed this novel. We have been alternating between fiction and non-fiction this year, and I thought this novel (Ms. Burke’s first) was well-researched across botany, physics, psychology, and most-importantly self-consistent with the dynamics she created even though there were unexplained elements of the societal rifts that I would have loved to see explored more deeply.

On its face Semiosis is a First Contact-Whodunnit-mashup following the story of human refugees from Earth colonizing a planet which they name Pax. The compact they create is one that encourages peace, valuing life and equality, but the struggles of the novel do not enable these noble edicts to persist for long. Intriguingly, there isn’t one protagonist in this novel, or one antagonist. Initially at least you are rooting for the human colony as they wrestle with the planet’s flora and fauna.

Burke evokes an ecology that is alien but familiar with an inventive population of predators and prey: vicious ground-eagles, giant toxic slugs and the fun, easily domesticated fippokats. As the generations on the planet evolve, the slow and stealthy ways of the plants are realized. These are not the flora and fauna of Earth with millennia of additional evolution. These plants can nourish and support the humans or poison and attack them. Plants which have learned over millennia how to domesticate and recruit the animal-life of the planet for their ends. They too are colonists, engaged in turf wars which can turn vicious.

Humans have to take sides determining who to ally with in the plant wars. Octavo the botanist is the first to realize the compromises involved in survival: “We wanted (to) find a happy niche in another ecology. Instead we found a battlefield.”

But the battles aren’t limited to humans and plants. As the generations evolve and adapt to the planet, they increasingly rebel and we go from plants attacking humans to humans attacking one another. This part of the novel could have benefited from more psychological development. The way the community evolves into aggression from such an extreme initial commitment to peace and equality in just one generation is hard to imagine, but there is a strong undercurrent of control, manipulation, and dishonesty, which make the children determine that to survive they must move past the initial generation and their false compact of hope and peace.

As interesting as the humans and their generational evolution is, the most fascinating character is the giant bamboo plant that comes to dominate the lives of the colony from generation 2 onward. So crucial is it to the humans’ survival, they name it after an early colonist: Stevland. In return for their ‘gift-centers’ or latrines and their irrigation labour, it provides an array of fruit and plant tools.

As is the case on Pax, Stevland can alter human physiology and behavior by way of chemicals. It communicates with colonists, and earns its own passages of narration. Initially Stevland’ s voice is clinical, arrogant, and dry. Think Hal the computer-plant, “With the burn of light comes glucose to create starch, cellulose, lipids, proteins, everything I want… In joy, I grow leaves, branches, culms, stems, shoots, and roots of all types. Water flows through the repaired foreigners’ pipes like veins in leaves, freeing me from rains and seasons so I may develop at will.”

I found this voice disturbing at first, with its insistent ‘I’. But that monstrous ego grows on you. Stevland has I would argue the most interesting character arc where ‘he’ faces crises and changes. When a human ‘moderator’ scathingly advises him to grow a sense of humour, he takes it literally. By year 107, its ‘humour root’ enables ice-breaking jokes and sarcasm, which makes his initial interactions with Sylvia and Tatiana almost unrecognizeable. During one tense passage, Stevland communicates with surrounding lesser plants:

‘”Pests.” “Bad.” “Bad.” “Bad.” “Bad.” “Bad.” “Bad.”, they answer one by one. My humour root observes that they have little to say but are talkative nonetheless. I am glad I grew the humour root. I can endure unpleasant situations better.’

Moral ambiguity, aggression, tribalism, and peace are found throughout the novel, but I was particularly struck by Stevland’s journey on this. He is arguably the novel’s most cunning and manipulative antagonist: a plant that out-thinks humans and knows it is better. Stevland the bamboo is initially an enemy who domesticates the humans to their greatest ally trying to defend and protect them, while still having his own agenda and objectives.

Despite the colonists’ quest for Pax, this novel is punctuated by violence, murder, and war, but even with that the novel maintains a strong sense of hope. It’s neither dystopian, nor utopian, but as complex as the business of life. The community’s idealism energizes the narrative as they struggle with the messiness of both human nature and alien beings. First Contact isn’t one breathless moment but a challenge that unfolds over decades, much like the relationships explored. Unpredictable, urgent, occasionally bloody, the story is page-turning with characters and themes that embed themselves deeply in one’s consciousness. I highly recommend even if you aren’t a sci-fi person.

For Book Club in March we read Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell. It was an interesting narrative, picking up on themes from his original book, the Tipping Point, but updating it to cover the Opioid Epidemic, Medicare fraud, teenage suicide, bank robberies and a slew of other maladies that have infected society.

While I deeply prefer to get my scientific research from peer-reviewed journals, Gladwell has a way of creating mass appeal on topics, and assuming it is done to invite learning, inquiry, and debate, I’m for it. Far too many narratives are seeking to tell folks who to blame for troubles in life, and I find those kinds of books appalling.  

Fundamentally, Gladwell tries to imply causality from data he cherry picks out of various stories, and sometimes he may have a grain of truth in there, but the research is not particularly thorough. I found in a pulp fiction sort of way that the novel was eminently readable. I found nuggets and factoids about our collegiate admissions processes and the Opioid Epidemic fascinating, and I’m not at all sorry I read the book, but I would have loved a more detailed and thorough analysis so that the conclusions and insights would have more weight.

Anyway, it was a quick read and won’t disappoint in giving you dinner table trivia to discuss for fun debates with friends, but there are definitely better researched books out there.