Peachy Reads

Cassie is the flight attendant of the title.  She’s about as reliable a narrator as Rachel from The Girl on the Train .  Overindulgence in alcohol causes her to black out, not pass out.  After a one-night stand with a man she met on her flight to Dubai, she wakes up to find that he has been brutally murdered in the bed next to her.  She’s pretty sure she didn’t do it, but not 100%.  She runs from the hotel after cleaning up the evidence and it isn’t long after her return to the US that the FBI starts sniffing around her door.  The subsequent action leads to shady international investment funds, Russian oligarchs, an international chase, and a rather surprising ending.  Apparently this was made into an HBO miniseries, with some of the book’s details changed.  I think I may give the TV version a try.  It is a good story.

We know what we get with Carl Hiaasen.  It’s always over-the-top characters caught up in improbable capers in wackadoodle Florida.  This time he writes about a president who has a Winter White House in Palm Beach.  But satirizing a real president who is already over-the-top may be a bridge too far.  There are Burmese pythons who are unleashed at inopportune times to create maximum havoc, which is the bulk of the plot and where the title comes from.  But ultimately I found that the novel seemed almost too cartoonish for me to enjoy…  or maybe it was too close to recent reality.

Nature is therapeutic.  Certainly this is one thing I’ve learned during this pandemic year.  The author bonds with an 800 year-old English oak and recounts the psychological and healing powers of that connection.  This book has history, biology, and ecology.  The Oak Papers is a wonderful meditation on one man’s connection to nature.

This is an extremely well-written family saga of twin girls from Louisiana, so light-skinned that they could pass for White.  One does exactly that, concealing all clues to her African-American identity, severing ties to her family and her hometown.  The other twin embraces her heritage, returns home, and gives birth to a daughter so dark, that it shocks even the townsfolk.   This novel has way more complexities than I’ve hinted at here, and it is a wonderful study of race, gender, and identity.

This book seems something like a mix between Rosemary's Baby and The Shining .  The story opens with a tragic plane crash.  The pilot survives, though emotionally wounded with PTSD, and seeing ghosts of passengers who haven't made it to "the other side".  His recovery is complicated by the family's move to a New England village which seems to feature an overabundance of odd inhabitants who grow strange herbs and are overly interested in the family's twin girls.  This will not end well.