A Spark Of Light

The Lives Of Others

A woman’s right to safe and legal medical termination of pregnancy gets the religious-minded into a funk. Even in a progressive country like America, the Catholic and far right lobbies use their pro-life beliefs to attack and shut down abortion clinics. Ironically, their idea of life is an unborn foetus, not the well-being of the mother, or the medical practitioners they kill to uphold their misguided cause.

Jodi Picoult, whose books take up issues of the day, has written A Spark Of Light about this contentious subject, and structured it like a thriller. Interestingly, the narrative moves backward, which may take away the suspense, but is otherwise a gripping way of going into gradual flashback to determine what brings a disparate bunch of women together in one place.

A large part of the action and drama takes place in and around The Centre, the only women’s health clinic in Mississippi—which is a factual detail—where women can get legal abortions. The clinic is constantly surrounded by anti-abortion activists, who heckle the staff and patients, but do not resort to violence like protestors in other places. The kindly Dr Louis Ward, who performs the abortions, risks his life to help women, because, as a child, he witnessed the horrifying sight of his mother bleeding to death after an unsafe procedure.

Fifteen-year-old Wren, trying to be a responsible grown-up, has come with her aunt Bex to the clinic to get birth control pills. An older woman Olive, has come for a check up, Joy and Izzy have come for abortions for heartbreaking reasons of their own and Janine pretending to be a patient to spy on the centre.

A gunman, George Goddard breaks into The Centre, shoots dead the owner and a nurse, wounds Bex and Dr Ward, and takes the others hostage.  Outside, Wren’s father Hugh McElroy breaks rules to serve as hostage negotiator, keeping the impatient SWAT team at bay. There is a regular media circus going on outside, as Picoult cuts to the tragedy of Beth, a young woman hospitalized when she nearly loses her life after taking illegal abortion pills, and to the back stories of all the people caught inside the clinic.

Since the reader already knows how it ends, what keeps the page turning is the compassion with which the stories of the desperate women unfold.  Picoult is clearly on the side of the pro-abortion group, but she also tries to get into the mind of Goddard, who, like McElroy, is the single father of a teenage girl.

Women’s reproductive rights have always been under threat; as Dr Ward observes, “this was indeed some crazy world, the waiting period to get an abortion was longer than the waiting period to get a gun.”  Beth’s misfortune underlines this with a sense of mounting horror as a frightened young girl gets embroiled in a legal tug-of-war, which could lead her to jail, while the boy who cheated her gets away.

Race, class, religion and politics complicate what should ideally be a matter of a woman’s choice, after she has been informed of the risks. Dr Ward does this with clinical precision and lack of judgment.  There may be a surfeit of information and some cringe-worthy bits about how the procedure is carried out, but this is undoubtedly a story that needed to be told

A Spark Of Light

By Jodi Picoult

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Pages: 384

Florida

Stormy Weather

Florida is known as the pensioners’ paradise, where elderly people retire, to get the benefits of its beaches and warm weather.

However in Lauren Groff’s book, made up of eleven stories, Florida, it is place of unbearable heat, humidity and all manner of human misery. Four are about young women with families and an inability to cope with the normal challenges of daily life.

The first story, Ghosts and Empties, begins with the line, “I have somehow become a woman who yells.” The woman has lost the patience and the gentleness needed to raise kids. So while her husband puts the children to bed, she gets out of the house and walks around the neighbourhood, as “the neighbors’ lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums.”  Her own rage radiating off her, she observes other mothers, “bent like shepherdess crooks, scanning the floor for tiny Legos or half-chewed grapes or the people they once were, slumped in the corners”.

It may or may not be the same hapless woman in The Midnight Zone, who is left alone with her two sons on a camping trip, when her husband is called away urgently. She falls off a stool and hits her head, so the little boys have to look after her and hold fort till their father returns.

Even more discomfiting is Dogs Go Wolf in which two little girls are abandoned on an island, and while it seems like an adventure for a while, when starvation hits, the reader hopes they will miraculously be rescued.

In the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God story, Above and Below a young woman is reduced to homelessness.

The stories (some set outside Florida too) simply overturn all images of The Sunshine State and expose what lies beneath. There are storms, power outages, decay, snakes and ecological disasters waiting to happen. But most of all Groff breaks the mirror that shows women a fake picture of marital and maternal bliss.

Florida

By Lauren Groff

Publisher: Riverhead

Pages: 288

You Know You Want This

Random Acts Of Cruelty

Kristen Roupenian’s extraordinary short story Cat Person, published in the New Yorker, was so popular, that she followed it up with a collection of twelve witty and wicked stories, about strange people and the chaos of their lives--You Know You Want This: Cat Person And Other Stories. 

Cat Person was about a young woman meeting an older guy, who could have her dream man, but he turns out to be a nightmare. The stories in thebook are funny, kinky and sometimes shocking, like Bad Boy, about a couple who rescue a friend from a toxic relationship and put him up in their home, till his presence becomes an aphrodisiac for them.

In one of the best stories of the book, The Boy In The Pool, a bunch of women who used to have a crush on a young actor, who appeared in a forgotten movie, meet him years later, when of them tracks him down and pays him to appear for her friend’s bachelorette party. The story about teenage lust that can only disappoint in later years is as melancholic as it is witty. 

The Good Guy is a sad and somewhat perverse story about Ted, who is unable to commit to any woman, and explores the ugly and soulless side of modern relationships.  So is Death Wish, in which a man invites Tinder date into his foul motel room, and is appalled when the woman insists that he hit her.

In Sardines, an eleven-year-old girl makes a “mean” wish while blowing out the candle on her birthday cake and unleashes something she cannot control. In Biter, a girl has the irresistible urge to bite people.

Roupenian obviously does not bother about political correctness or happily-ever-after romance. Her characters are not in the least charming, which lends even her more fanciful stories an air of realism—in life, how many relationships are perfect? People may not actually bite, but so many wound by their acts of random cruelty.

You Know You Want This: Cat Person And Other Stories

By Kristen Roupenian

Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Pages: 224

Heads You Win

A Game Of Chance

Heads You Win, Jeffrey Archer’s first standalone novel after the sprawling seven-part Clifton Chronicles, is also an epic set in three countries spanning several decades.

In 1968, a Russian teenager, Alexander Karpenko, escapes with his mother Elena, from an oppressive KGB-led regime that killed his father in Leningrad. They have help from an uncle, to hide in a container, that would take them to the West. At the docks, they have to toss a coin to decide whether to go take the ship that will carry them to the UK or to the US.

Archer then follows both strands of the story, what their lives would be like if they went to one country or the other.  Alexander is bright, his mother, a skilled chef, is hard-working—and in both the stories, there are similarities as well as differences, but ultimately, it says that people make their own destinies, depending on how they deal with the opportunities offered to them.

It is an inventive idea, and a fast-paced read, in which the two Alexanders and Elenas leave their awful past behind; they make the best of the immigrant experience with their ambition and enterprise. There is a surprise twist in the end, as the two strands criss-cross and merge in unexpected ways.

Heads You Win

By Jeffrery Archer

Publisher: Pan MacMillan

Pages: 480

The Suspect

When Duty Calls

Fiona Barton’s third novel, The Suspect, also has as it protagonist, a senior and seasoned reporter, Kate Waters, only this time, she is on both sides of a scandalous story—a reporter and a subject.

Kate and her doctor husband Steve are worried about their older son Jake, who dropped out of college and left home ostensibly to explore the world. He keeps in touch with his parents very infrequently, and they are not even sure where he is.

Then two British girls, Alexandra ‘Alex’ O’Connor and Rosie Shaw, who headed to Thailand for a gap year, go missing and their parents are worried sick too. When there is no communication from them for two weeks, they report to the police;  the case is picked up by DI Bob Sparkes and his deputy Zara Salmond. Kate has a cordial professional friendship with Sparkes, as they have often followed the same cases, she as a reporter and he as a detective.

Then, the girls are suspected dead in a guesthouse fire; the two sets of grieving parents have to travel to Bangkok to identify the bodies, and Kate goes with a photographer to cover the story. Much to her shock, she discovers that Jake happened to be at the same guesthouse, escaped with minor burns and then vanished from the hospital before she arrived. Another pack of journalists descend in a pack like wolves, including an obnoxious and pushy tabloid reporter, constantly snapping at Kate’s heels.

Kate, worried sick about her son, is at one point, hounded by her colleagues for the story, as the missing Jake goes from victim to hero to suspect.  Due to the obvious conflict of interest, Kate is pulled off the story, but as a mother, she carries on with the investigation, with the help of her protégé Joe. The young reporter admires Kate, but has to often file stories hurtful to her, because, he has to stay ahead of the competition. While Kate goes through sleepless nights and the agonies of a mother with a missing child, she also understands the professional compulsions of the scoop-hungry reporters pursuing her, since, she admits, under different circumstances, she would have done the same.

Bob Sparkes, coping with the imminent death of his beloved wife, has to keep his professional head on, and investigate the case since British nationals are involved; the Thai police turn out be corrupt, inefficient and hostile.

What went on as the seedy Thai hostel, run by the formidable Mama, is reported by Alex in emails to her best friend, Mags, and these eventually turn out to be a valuable resource for the investigation. On her social media pages, however, she was all cheery and ‘having the time of my life’ happy, so her parent never suspected the sordid truth.

Amidst the sorrow and rage of the girls’ parents, there is a who-dun-it to be solved, and a huge moral choice Kate Waters is forced to make.

The suspense is not too strong, it is the emotional core of the story that makes it worth reading—the lonely suffering of parents when they realise their kids have grown out of their reach and there is nothing they can do to understand their minds or motives. All they can do is offer unconditional love,  even though it is seldom returned.

The Suspect

By Fiona Barton

Publisher: Berkley

Pages: 416

On The Come Up

Ghetto Girl

The Hate U Give, the first novel by Angie Thomas, a scathing account of racism, seen from the point of view of a teenage black girl, was a huge bestseller, and a hard act to follow. But her second, On The Come Up, is every bit as powerful and affecting as the first, and has an equally sassy sixteen-year-old protagonist Brianna. 

The book is set in the same black ghetto of Garden Heights as the first--and the incident of an innocent black boy being shot by a white cop and the riots that follow, is referred to here.  Brianna’s story has startling similarities with the recent Bollywood movie, Gully Boy; she too wants to take the hip-hop way out of poverty.

Brianna’s rapper father Lawless was gunned down by gangsters, and went into the hip hop hall of fame. To cope with the trauma, her mother Jay took to drugs and abandoned Brianna and her older brother Trey at their grandparents’ home.  She returned, however, and stayed clean to look after her kids, but it is a hand to mouth existence.  When she loses even the low-paid job she had, the power is cut off because they can’t pay the bill, and the fridge is almost empty. Jay has to swallow her pride and accept food given as charity at Christmas.

Trey is the dutiful son, who interrupts his education to work in a pizza parlour and support his family. Brianna has inherited her father’s talent for rapping, and hopes she will make it big. She wins a rap contest at a popular joint called the Ring, that launches her, but she needs much more to reach real stardom.

Thomas has not just captured colourful ghetto speak, she has populated Brianna’s world with marvellous characters, like her Aunt Pooh and her boyfriend Scrap who become drug dealers for want of better opportunities. Brianna’s best buddies are Sonny and Malik, called the Unholy Trinity by their mothers who are also friends and always willing to help each other. There is a shady agent, Supreme, who has no qualms about selling the image of blacks as hoodlums to white music executives who want to perpetrate the stereotype for profit. As Supreme tells Brianna, “You know what white kids in the suburbs love? Listening to shit that scares their parents… You scare the hell outta their folks, they’ll flock to you like birds.”  

An incident at school unnerves Brianna, but also gives her instant success, through a song she uploads—On The Come Up.  Two guards at her school snatched her bag to search and when she resisted, they threw her on the floor and handcuffed her. It is captured on video, that obviously racist act and Brianna’s incendiary song leads to a riot at the school, and she finds herself sucked into the very situation she was fighting against—having people believe she is a ghetto rat and drug dealer.

Angie Thomas was a teen rapper herself, so her portrayal of this cut-throat world is accurate and moving, peppered with raw humour. Brianna navigates with strength and grace through tough times, a broken heart, a budding romance and the struggle to make it on her own terms.  A heroine like that is hard to find. Brava!

On The Come Up

By Angie Thomas

Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins

Pages: 465