The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

This was long listed for the National Book Award and while I do not 100% read that list, I do pay attention to it. I think if I had read this in one or two settings I would have rated it higher--it was a little confusing in the shifting between time periods if you read it over a longer time interval--I just kept being a little disoriented, but the writing is rock solid and the story is very well constructed. Over several decades, from the early 2000's to the near future, this book follows the lives and evolving friendships of four Black women in America—Desiree, Nakia, January and Monique. We meet the women in their early 20s as they kickstart careers and navigate romantic relationships; we see them through their late 20s and early 30s, reassessing and reconfiguring jobs, values and how to best support each other; we ease with them into midlife, which is at times calmer waters and at others heavy with unforeseen tragedy. Desiree’s sister, Danielle, steps in and out of the narrative as well. The strength of this novel is getting to experiencthe protagonists’ thoughts as they handle problems—social discomfort, jealousy, conflict avoidance—and the minor strains introduced to friendship due to differing sexual orientations, socioeconomic statuses and mental health conditions. The novel seems to espouse that friendship is about overcoming and about changing with individuals as they change. It has an ending that is very hard to read in 2026 America where American citizens are being gunned down by the government.

Weapons (2025)

I was able to watch this on a recent flight with an excellent in flight screen, and while I am not a fan of the horror genre, this was very well done and genuinely creepy. I may be in a decided majority, but I love watching movies in the air, especially when I score a seat with a large screen. It just makes travel so enjoyable. One thing is that it’s not overly difficult to read the inciting incident of the movie as a school shooting allegory. In this case, 17 children got out of bed at 2:17 a.m. and ran into the night, their arms slightly outstretched and look identical. They are captured on doorbell cams, which is a great way to see that they wer not led away by someone, but rather that they seem possessed. It’s a chilling image, one that tears a neighborhood apart, revealing the rage and horror behind the picket fences. So the teacher Justine Gandy, who is young and earnest, comes into school the next morning to find her entire classroom absent. Well, not entirely. One child, a quiet kid named Alex , didn’t leave his house that night. Why? Instead of going down that investigative avenue to its end, the town chooses to weaponize its hatred for Gandy herself, labeling her a witch. She must have done something. Or she must know something. The movie unfolds in a kind of controlled chaos, and comes to a surprisingly unexpected end. It is both terrifying and enjoyable simultaneously.

Boustany by Sammi Tamimi

This is a love letter to Palestinian food and the Palestinian people-- the author, who I first discovered when he co-authored a book with Yotam Ottolenghi called Jerusalem, lives in London, but his food is firmly rooted in the Middle East. This is a bit of a love letter as well as a book full of food--there are stories to go with every recipe, and also at the beginning of each section. This is a deeply personal book, laced with longing and a loving nostalgia. You can almost picture the author's grandparents’ boustan, or garden, and feel the joy he experienced spending time there as a child. He shares cherished family recipes, offers up dishes from the various ethnic communities in Palestine, and expresses enormous pride in his people’s culinary heritage. It is all vegetables all the time. There are a lot of dairy products used, but they can often be eliminated or replaced with plant based alternatives if that is how you roll.

Frankenstein (2025)

No matter how you feel about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this rendition of an all too familiar story is a triumph. Somehow Guillermo del Toro manages to make something that feels almost new, and definitely rich and strange, and yet it is crafted out of a story we all thought we knew well. I haven't read the original in quite some time, but my son who has both a photographic memory and a recent reading was very impressed with the adherence to what Shelley wrote. The 21st-century movie does veer off the 19th-century source however. Mary Shelley’s novel was complete as of 1818, and the movie is set in 1857, which, because the author died relatively young (brain tumor) is several years after the author’s own death. Placing the tale squarely in the Victorian era grounds it in period trappings more sumptuous and therefore consistent with the over-the-top tastes of the director, it also allows its visionary scientist Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) to place electricity more fully at his disposal when animating his creature. This is a half hour too long, but otherwise amazing.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

This book, longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025, is a quiet book looking at inner life. It is a compact story that depicts two days in the life of Thomas Flett, a young man who earns his living as a shanker –which I did not know what that was, but it is a man who rides a horse and cart up and down the beach netting for shrimp. It is a hard life, and it has taken its toll. At just twenty years of age, he looks and acts like a man who is considerably older. His bones ache, his mind aches, and he shambles. And while he more or less accepts his lot, there is more than a small part of him that yearns for something more, something better. He has dreams, small managable dreams that seem attainable to the reader and yet we lose hope that he will take the plunge. This is an insight into this sort of poverty and the toll it can take on your spirit. It doesn't make Thomas mean, but you could see where that would happen, and it is certainly happening in the 21st century, where there is no chance of a better life and the blame is sorely misplaced. This is a look inside a psyche and it is a quiet one at that.

The Perfect Neighbor (2025)

This is a familiar story with an inevitable tragedy, this one told almost exclusively through police body cameras. In 2022, a white woman named Susan is living in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Florida began frequently calling the police to complain about children playing near her house. Each time the police come, the other adults and children in the neighborhood inform them that the allegations are either exaggerated or completely false. The police give some warnings, make notes on the situation, and leave. They are know what is going on, they name it amongst themselves, but they are unfailingly polite to both the complaintant and the community they serve. Although the police never make any arrests or notice any issue with the children being accused or their parents, the calls continue and there is a lot of sighing about the situation. This white woman will not let up. And then, one day, she acts. It is a familiar enough story, one that rarely makes anything or anyone change thier mind, but occasionally justice is served.

Next Year In Havana by Chanel Cleeton

This is one of Reese Witherspoon's Book Club choices and I am in the midst of slowly reading all of those, which is a fun endeavor. It is also the first in a series of books that look at this family across family members and over decades. The book shifts between present day and the time of the Cuban Revolution. The past focuses on Elisa, who is the daughter of a sugar plantation owner who falls in love with a revolutionary. The present is Marisol, who is her granddaughter. After the death of her beloved grandmother, she travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity–and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution. The past is Havana, 1958. The Perez family supports Batista and is forced to leave Cuba for Miami, but hope to return one day. Elisa believes her lover has been killed, but she leaves Cuba pregnant with his son. Miami, 2017. Freelance writer Marisol Ferrera grew up hearing romantic stories of Cuba from her late grandmother Elisa, who was forced to flee with her family during the revolution. Elisa’s last wish was for Marisol to scatter her ashes in the country of her birth. Arriving in Havana, Marisol comes face-to-face with the contrast of Cuba’s tropical, timeless beauty and its perilous political climate. When more family history comes to light and Marisol finds herself attracted to a man with secrets of his own, she’ll need the lessons of her grandmother’s past to help her understand the true meaning of courage.

Little Amélie (2025)

I read in a review of this sumptuous animated movie--which is nominated for an Oascar--is based on the autobiographical novel by artist Amélie Nothom, who was born in Japan to Belgian parents. It is a story that is marked by threes. Amelie is the third child, and the story takes us from her birth to age three. This is the age at which, in Japanese culture, a child descends from the realm of the gods into the world of the everyperson. The word for this infantile holiness is okosama, or “lord child,” and the movie takes us through the spirit of this very earliest coming-of-age with whimsy, cross-cultural commentary, and sometimes fantastical time. Baby Amelie is slow to develop and she is a bit of a worry for her parents: she is slow to walk, slow to talk, and hard to sooth. But once she does, prompted by a bite of Belgian white chocolate from her grandmaman, she does so with an almost instant proficiency. The film takes the idea of early childhood awareness, the phenomenon that children are far more privy to the dynamics of reality than they are able to voice, and provides its lead with the vocabulary to match. She operates out of loving obligation, immeasurable curiosity, and even spite, refusing to speak her brother’s name due to the ever-so-typical brotherly hassling. Amelie also sees visions of things that are not and cannot be, in a way that adds a magical quality to this gorgeously animated film.

An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin

This is a detailed review of the 1960's through the eyes and experience of the author and her husband, who recently died. Let me start by saying that while I did not love this book, most people I know who have read it did. The author is an excellent writer, and her husband of 40 plus years and she had non-overlapping but equally impressive careers that involved the presidents for a bulk of the decade, so it is an intimate look behind the scenes at government in action at a time of great change for the country. My first bone to pick with this is the title--this may have been motivated by trying to tell a story about the love of your life, but that is not at all what it is. It is a recounting of the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies from the inside. Dick Goodwin worked with the Kennedy campaign, and then within the White House as Kennedy's speech writer, but also spearheading some of the major public policy projects of the Kennedy administration. There are some fascinating behind-the-scenes insights and observations that are definitely one of a kind perspectives. She went through her husband's voluminous boxes of memorabilia from this era to write this book, and she did so while he was alive, so he could both comment on an clarify as she developed and evaluated the material for the book, and the uniqueness of that comes through clearly. I would recommend it and I might have liked it better if I hadn't just read Robert Caro's The Passage of Power, which minutely covers this era as well.

Left Handed Girl (2025)

This entry into the International Film category by Taiwan was shortlisted for an Oscar, but learned today that they did not make the cut. It is well worth watching, none-the-less. The title centers on a cultural superstition, that left handed people are sinister. I-Jing, an angelic appearing five-year-old who has just moved back to Taipei with her mom and older sister, gets literal firsthand experience when her grandpa admonishes her for using her left hand for everything – it’s not natural; it’s the devil at work, he says. ‘The left hand is the devil’s hand’. I-Jing, a sweet five-year-old who has just moved back to Taipei with her mom and older sister, gets literal firsthand experience when her grandpa admonishes her for using her left hand for everything – it’s not natural; it’s the devil at work, he says. The scenery, all shot on an iPhone shows both a glitsy and a gritty Taipei. It summons the frenetic energy and sensory experience of Taipei. There are bright red Chinese characters overtaking the glass windows of a pawn shop; the pleasant melody of trash-collecting trucks; lush trees against grimy buildings that can nearly make you smell the specific essence of a bustling, wetter city. It pairs the kaleidoscopic fragments of the city with the splinters of imperfect people – poignantly and tenderly showing what it means to be a family in Taiwan. The story goes like this. Shu-Fen has set up a night market noodles stand, and her volatile daughter I-Ann left high school and works at a betel nut stall, where she’s sleeping with her boss. I-Jing, played by a very charming Nina Ye, starts a new school and, with the wonder only a child can have, tests out the potential of this newly anointed devil hand. The story that unfolds is a familiar one, but the telling of it is what makes this stand out.