I saw a book-based Six Degrees Of Separation challenge at Chonky Books, thought that it looked fun and decided to give it a try.
I pulled up my books on LibraryThing, sorted them to get to five-star reads and flipped to the middle of the list to find a book to start from.
It was harder than I thought it would be to come up with links between six books but it was also fun. It gave me an excuse to browse through books that I haven’t read in a while and re-read my reviews.
So, here’s my first ever six degrees of separation which goes from an American ghost story through to African Science Fiction. I think it’s an interesting set of books. I hope you do too.
Growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls – a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place – Jake Baker spends most of his time with his uncle Calvin, a kind but eccentric enthusiast of occult artifacts and conspiracy theories.
The summer Jake turns 12, he befriends a pair of siblings new to town, and so Calvin decides to initiate them all into the “Saturday Night Ghost Club.”
But as the summer goes on, what begins as a seemingly light-hearted project may ultimately uncover more than any of its members had imagined
I read ‘The Saturday Night Ghost Club‘ in 2021, expecting a YA horror novel. Instead, I got a more mainstream novel that stood out because all the ghosts in the story were real. They were the memories that haunt us. They were also ghosts of things that the children in the story have yet to experience for themselves: evil and tragedy and sorrow, that can’t be let go of and which refuses to release us. It was a boy’s coming-of-age story that was also the story of his discovery of the traumatic past of his likeable but odd uncle and how it links to his uncle’s fractured present. It was a story that was low on horror but high on empathy, grief and hope.
I used the title to make the link to the next book. Both book titles contain the word Night and that’s all they have in common.
Sheldon Horowitz – 82 years old, impatient, and unreasonable – is staying with his granddaughter’s family in Norway when he disappears with a stranger’s child.
Sheldon is an ex-Marine, and he feels responsible for his son’s death in Vietnam. Recently widowed and bereft, he talks to the ghosts of his past constantly.
To Norway’s cops, Sheldon is just an old man who is coming undone at the end of a long and hard life.
But Sheldon is clear in his own mind. He’d heard the boy’s Eastern European mother being murdered, and he was determined to protect the child from the killer and his Balkan gang. With an endearing combination of dexterity and daring, Sheldon manages to elude the police in what is hostile, foreign territory for him.
But what he doesn’t know is that the police and the gang both know where he’s heading.
MY REVIEW.
I read ‘Norwegian By Night‘ way back in 2015. It was my first Derek Miller book and it was on of the most moving pieces of fiction that I’d read in a long time. ‘Norwegian By Night’ was an accessible, enjoyable, realistic novel that navigated its way through the difficult waters of grief, memory, guilt, dementia, loss and personal bravery, while still providing a page-turning plot that made me laugh, cry and hope very much that everyone would be alright, although I knew they probably wouldn’t be.
It also made me into an instant Derek Miller fan so the simplest way for me to link to the next book was to go to another Derek Miller novel.
This topical and engaging story follows an unusual but likeable and relatable family as they leave their ex-pat life in Switzerland to make their home in Massachusetts.
Along the way it explores themes of identity, family, home and community by showing us:
What happens when our heart turns towards a home that only exists in memory.
How the young find and protect an authentic identity in a world of social media personas.
How difficult but necessary it is to try and design simple arrangements that make our world better.
MY REVIEW.
OK, so I gushed over this one. Here’s the first paragraph of my review:
“Read ‘Quiet Time’. It’s Derek Miller at his best giving us an engaging, I-need-to-know-what-happens-next story that is often funny and sometimes heartbreaking while still digging into topical big themes about how we live and how we define ourselves. He lets us look at those themes through the eyes of different generations with very different cultural backgrounds AND he does interesting things with the narrative form. If all that isn’t enough, the story is narrated by the wonderfully talented Bahni Turpin. Don’t miss out on this one.”
So you won’t be surprised that I made my next link by going to another book narrated by Bahni Turpin
It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War. Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant and talented, but she’s also a black woman working in an all-white boys’ club, and her career has stalled with routine paperwork – until she’s recruited to a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic, revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention.
In the year that follows, Marie will observe Thomas, seduce him, and ultimately, have a hand in the coup that will bring him down. But doing so will change everything she believes about what it means to be a spy, a lover, and a good American.
MY REVIEW.
I picked up ‘American Spy’ despite the eye-roll-making publisher’s summary because it was on Barak Obama’s 2019 summer reading list.
It was Wilkinson’s first (and so far only) novel and it was no respector of genre conventions. It asks what kind of person becomes a spy, what it says about them and what it means to be a black woman, who is neither welcomed nor valued by the white male establishment and yet chooses to make a career in the FBI in the 1980s. If you’re looking for a fresh voice, try this novel.
I used titles to make my next link, jumping to another book with American in the title although this America is in an imagined near-future.
Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. Telling her story is her nephew, Benjamin Chestnut, born during war – part of the Miraculous Generation – now an old man confronting the dark secret of his past, his family’s role in the conflict and, in particular, that of his aunt, a woman who saved his life while destroying untold others.
MY REVIEW.
I read this in 2018 and it’s stuck with me ever since. It’s a fine and chilling piece of speculative fiction, imagining where America could go, but It lives in my memory because it is the story of Sara T Chestnut – who calls herself Sarat. Sarat is a bright, curious young girl from Louisiana who is broken and finally destroyed by a war she had no part in making and a need for revenge that she cannot let go of.
Sarat is neither hero nor saint. She is strong, brave, bright and fierce. She has also been fundamentally ruined by the war she has lived through. What she does is literally atrocious. Why she does it is completely understandable.
It is this ability to help me understand Sarat without turning her into an object or either worship or contempt, that makes ‘American War‘ a great novel.
I decided to make my final link to a book a century further into the future than ‘American War‘. It’s another book with war in the title and the ruin it causes in its heart.
The year is 2172. Climate change and nuclear disasters have rendered much of the earth unlivable. Only the lucky ones have escaped to space colonies in the sky.
In a war-torn Nigeria, battles are fought using flying, deadly mechs, and soldiers are outfitted with bionic limbs and artificial organs meant to protect them from the harsh, radiation-heavy climate. Across the nation, as the years-long civil war wages on, survival becomes the only way of life.
Two sisters, Onyii and Ify, dream of more. Their lives have been marked by violence and political unrest. Still, they dream of peace, of hope, of a future together.
And they’re willing to fight an entire war to get there.
I’m amazed to find that, even though I had ‘War Girls’ as one of my best reads of 2021, I’ve never written a full review of it, so I’ll do my best to give you a flavour of it here.
‘War Girls’ was labelled as a Young Adult book but, to me, it read like Science Fiction for adults that focused on the experience of young people put under unbearable pressure.
I thought it was Science Fiction at its best: strong, believable, human characters that you care about; fearless confrontation of the realities of being child soldiers in a brutal civil war; credible and terrifying future weaponry deployed in vividly described combat; a constant focus on the human cost of violence and hatred.
Mike Finn's Fiction 