The last book of 2021! I was pleasantly surprised by Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, so I am glad to finish up the year with a good book. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is based on the real-life Katharina Kepler, mother of famed Imperial Mathematician Johannes Kepler, who was accused of being a witch in early 17th century Germany.
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It took me a long time (yes, two weeks is a long time for me) to finish reading The Light of Days for two reasons:
Infinite Country is a heartbreaking portrait of living undocumented in the US and of a family living in separate countries. The novel tells the story of 15-year-old American-born Talia, who has been raised by her abuela and her father, Mauro, in Colombia, and who must escape from a correctional facility so that she can fly to the US to be reunited with her mother, Elena, and her older siblings, Karina and Nando. Infinite Country also tells the story of how Talia’s parents ended up in the US, why her mother and siblings are still there, and why Mauro and Talia are on their own in Colombia. It explores why people immigrate to the US and how (white) Americans are so callous in their treatment of immigrants.
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I have read two of Curtis Sittenfeld’s previous novels; the first was American Wife, which is based on Laura Bush’s life (the wife of George W. Bush), and Eligible, which is a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Cincinnati. I enjoyed reading both of those novels; they are both character-driven, interesting reads, although Eligible ventures into absurdity towards the end. I had been very interested in reading Rodham since it was first published last year, not so much because I am a fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton, but because by now I trust Sittenfeld to write a good book. And Rodham is a good book. I cannot tell you how close Sittenfeld’s Hillary Rodham is to the real Hillary Rodham Clinton, but it is a super fascinating “what if?” novel that I highly recommend. The premise of Rodham is this: What if Hillary Rodham had never married Bill Clinton?
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Believe it or not, this is the first time I’ve done a reading challenge. I decided at the beginning of the year that I wanted to expand my reading horizons, and the Indigo 2021 Reading Challenge certainly helped with that. I read genres that I never read before (self-help and true crime) and genres that I don’t read enough of (memoirs). I’m really glad I did the reading challenge, but I think I’m going to take next year off and focus on my TBR pile (which keeps growing, and growing). Here are the books that I read, you can find my reviews for almost all of them on this blog:
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