The World Gives Way

 by Marissa Levien

This book is set in the future, I assume.   It is about a space ship, rigged to look like the earth, which has been traveling for about 100 years with the destination a distant planet.

The main character, Myrra, is one of the many contract workers who are obliged to work for 50 years before they get their freedom.  She had been sold into contract work after her mother, a contract worker, disappeared.  She was five years old.  Many contract workers seem resigned to their fate but not Myrra, she is working to save money, or get married to someone who can buyout her contract and free her.

Initially she worked in a laundry and later a bakery.  As the book opens she is working as the housekeeper and babysitter for a wealthy connected couple on the ship.  One day she is summoned in the middle of the night to the penthouse by the wife of the family.  The woman commits suicide by jumping off the building, leaving Myrra to care for her daughter.  Before she dies she hints that her husband is dead and that Myrra should help herself to money/cards in the vault.

Myrra goes to her bosses office area and finds he has killed himself in the tub.  As she needs a palm print to open the safe she cuts off his hand.  She is careful to take a card that she thinks was a card for unknown accounts of his.  She sets off with the baby and tries to get out of New London before she can be caught.  Before she leaves Myrra learns that her employers probably killed themselves because the ship was going to collapse soon because of a hole in the hull that could not be repaired.

The deaths are discovered quite quickly and two security officers are sent to find her to charge her with murder and or kidnapping.  She doesn't go to the city they think she will go to.  They go to an underwater city but it starts to collapse because of earthquakes and they only barely escape.  They eventually track Myrra down and she tells them what happened and that the world is going to end but they don't believe her.

Eventually the earthquakes and collapses continue and it is announced that the ship is in danger.  The older of the two security people  decides to leave to return to his family. The other security officer, who is now an orphan as his adopted father died in a building collapse, decides to try to find Myrra.  He knows there is no point arresting her, he just doesn't want to be alone.

They eventually travel through a fake desert and reach the inner and outer hulls of the ship.  They meet someone who knows Myrra's mother and she is able to find out that her mother didn't really abandon her, she was arrested and taken to this hull area to work there.  The young security officer calls his real parents, who are in prison for a variety of crimes, they don't seem to have changed and won't believe him when he tells them the world is going to end.

As the book ends it appears the world will collapse but Myrra and Tobias are glad to be together at the end.

This was an interesting story, very well told.  It did a great job of describing this "created" earth and of the building tension as the story and the catastrophe developed.  I was hoping for a more positive ending but don't know how one could have happened given what was going on and so quickly on the ship.

However, the deaths of the two people are disc

China Room

by Sunjeev Sahota

This is another of the books on the longlist for the Booker Prize this year.  It is the story to two people, a woman (Mehar) and her great-grandson.

Part of the reason I enjoyed the book was the author's beautiful descriptive language.  The other reason was the engrossing, somewhat bizarre story.

The story takes place in the Punjab.  Mehar is engaged at a very young age, in an arranged marriage.  When it takes time for the wedding we find that three brothers in the same family will all be wedding on the same day.  The men's mother is the boss of the family.  In the culture the women are to keep covered including their faces.  In a bizarre situation the women never get to really know which of the three men is their husband.  The only time the husband's come to them is to a room, totally in the dark, where the men have sex with them and leave.

The mother in law treats all three brides as dirt and bosses them around.  Mehar thinks she knows which man is hers but it turns out she is wrong.  She is actually the bride of the oldest brother.  However, a brief encounter with one of the other brothers outside the house convinces her that another of the brothers is her husband.  They start meeting on the sly and seem to fall in love and enjoy having sex together.  The question has to be asked if this man was indeed her husband why didn't he just arrange meetings in the dark room on a regular basis.  It is bizarre that they women would not be allowed to have normal daily interactions with their husbands, not being "kept in the dark".  We do learn that the mother in law was apparently not allowed to marry the man she wanted to.

Eventually Mehar discovers the truth.  She is distraught and starts to cut herself and get ill.  She shuns her husband and he respects her wishes. She continues to have liaisons with the other brother and they plan to run away to Lahore.  Mehar gets pregnant by her lover.  The mother in law knows what is going on.  

At this time the fight for Indian Independence and Independent Punjab state is gaining strength.  The mother tells her eldest son that he should offer his brother as a soldier.  The man and Mehar are caught just as they are planning to leave.  Mehar is put in a room with locked bars, we don't know anything of her life after that other than she has 5 more children from her actual husband.  Mehar often wonders what happened to her lover, if he is alive or dead.  Her husband visits him in prison but doesn't tell her he has seen him.

Mehar's husband does seem to forgive her infidelity, he gets the house painted her favourite colour, he is willing to accept her rebuffs at first.  You have to wonder if she ever came to accept/respect him.  However given the locked bars on her room I am doubtful.

The second part of the story is about the young university student, great grandson of Mehar.  His parents had moved to England.  They and the boy are scarred by the verbal and physical attacks on them because they are immigrants.  The boy is on a summer break from uni.  He is a drug addict.  He stays with an uncle for a time and is misdiagnosed with dengue fever.  His aunt doesn't really want him around because of neighbourhood gossip,  He agrees to go to the old family home on a farm.  The house where Mehar was imprisoned.  His uncle sends him food.  He reluctantly starts to clean up the place a bit and deal with his withdrawal symptoms.  He is befriended by a local woman doctor and a local teacher.  They visit him, help him get the place painted etc and become friends.  The boy know that the room he is sleeping in was where his great grandmother was imprisoned but he doesn't seem to be interested in finding out the story although he does hear local gossip.

At the end of the story the boy wants to tell the Doctor he loves her but discovers she probably is having a relationship with the teacher, at least that is what the local gossips say.  It doesn't matter because the female doctor has been assigned elsewhere and he has to return to uni, where he has had failing grades.

We learn at the end that he does go back and has a couple more drug relapses but eventually gets clean. It was an interesting story, just surprised the young man wasn't more interested in getting to know more about his great grandmother.

I think the book is about isolation and imprisonment, real or psychological and unrequited love and the consequences.

The Madness of Crowds

 by Louise Penny

I looked at a couple reviews of this, the latest Louise Penny book.  The descriptions included: "her darkest book" and "difficult to read".  I think I have to agree on both counts.

This was a very powerful book, more than just a mystery, I think it ventured into social commentary and discussion of the value of a life and what could justify murder, who can you trust, and can you trust yourself.  She said that the book was partially triggered by people suggesting she write a book about the covid pandemic.

The book takes place just after the pandemic and people in Three Pines are rejoicing in being able to socialize again, hug again.  Armand Gamache is given a strange assignment.  He is supposed to coordinate security for controversial speaker who will be coming to speak at a local university gym.  This doesn't seem to be an appropriate job for him and his team.  The speaker is travelling with her Assistant who has been a best friend since childhood.

When Gamache does research and finds out that the speaker has a fanatical views and is very popular on social media and amongst fringes of society he gets concerned and tries to get the Chancellor of the University to stop the event.  She pleads that universities need to air all opinions and won't cancel.  We later find out that the speaker is a fried of hers and that the Chancellor actually booked the hall but under a fake name.  The speaker is a statistician, who was hired by the government to write a report.  The report is so shocking the government refuses to release it.  So the woman takes her message to the Internet and gains a big following.  She is proposing that the way for the economy to grow after the pandemic is to eliminate all the vulnerable (handicapped and aged).  This strikes a nerve with Gamache and his son-in-law who has a daughter with Downs Syndrome.  The son-in-law has been wrestling with his feelings about having a handicapped child.

At the event there is high security, people are searched for weapons.  Gamache, because he wants to protect Jean Guy for the message of the speaker and the support she gets from the crowd, orders Jean Guy to stay outside the doors of the venue.  But Jean Guy does go inside.

While the speaker is speaking a firecracker goes off. This frightens the crowd.  Shortly after gun shots are aimed at the stage.  Gamache falls on the speaker to protect her.  They discover the shooter is a local man, not known to police, they don't initially know how the gun could have gotten into the building.  When Gamache finds out Jean Guy did not follow his instructions he is furious.

As the story goes on various people who are interviewed don't tell the police the truth.  For example a local retired academic, who is known as something like the bad saint, does not tell them he was at the event, standing next to the gunman and did nothing to stop him from firing.  We later find out that this academic, early in his academic career, was working for a scientist who conducted devastating experiments, bordering on torture on psychiatric patients.  This work was funded by the FBI.

An additional character in the story is a young Sudanese woman who is visiting Three Pines.  She is a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.  Everyone of course expects her to be saintly because of all her work fighting for refugees, women and children.  However, she is very ascerbic.

As the story goes on we learn that the Speakers mother was a victim of these scientific experiments and committed suicide after she came home from the treatments.  She left behind the Speaker, her handicapped sister and her husband.  A few years later the sister dies, Gamache comes to suspect she was murdered and the father commits suicide.  He sends a letter to the Chancellor (who at that time was a close friend) asking her to give the letter to his daughter.  He does not admit to killing the daughter.

Gamache tells the Chancellor to take the speaker and her assistant and have them stay at her place for their safety.  Instead she brings them to a New Year's Eve Party in Three Pines.  The assistant is found murdered, bludgeoned, just after midnight.  They are trying to figure out if she was killed on purpose or was mistaken for the speaker.

In the end it turns out that the speaker actually killed her assistant when the assistant confessed she had smothered the woman's sister to get the women freedom.  There is a confrontation in which the speaker has a gun on Jean-Paul and he has a gun trained on her.  He is tempted to use it on her and she seems to be seeking "suicide by cop".  Added to all this conflict we also learn more about the Sudanese woman and the murders she committed to escape capture and save others.

The book is very intense, Gamache and Jean-Paul wrestle with whether they are being truly logical in handling this case or whether their emotions are colouring their judgment.  Gamache of course always thinks he is logical so the thought that he might not always be is a test for him.

It isn't just about murder, it is about the right to life, is murder ever justified? when you see something bad happening and you don't act, how we expect "good" people to be saints, and they're not necessarily.  It is about lies, truth, loyalty we think we owe to friends, emotion, logic and the insanity of crowds, a commentary of current social media.  She threw everything into this story,