The Shadow Land, Elizabeth Kostova
Kostova is one of my favorite writers, and although she is not as prolific as others, having written three novels, what she has written is absolutely amazing, and I don’t say that lightly. Many people know her for her first novel, The Historian, which reportedly took over ten years to research and write, and interweaves the story of Dracula with a present day narrator on a train ride through Eastern Europe, and which I read eight years ago. The Shadow Land also takes place in Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria, as a young American woman moves there to teach English and is confronted with a strange situation: after bumping into a family getting into a taxi, she finds among her things a bag of theirs containing an urn with ashes in it. As she tries to return it, she starts to receive strange, threatening messages, and realizes that her possession of the urn might not be an accident, as the family who it belongs to now seem to be in hiding. Kostova’s novels are just the right combination of page-turning-thriller-but-not-too-scary, and even though this novel boasts more than 500 pages, I finished it in a few short days.
My Time Among the Whites, Jennine Capó Crucet
Capó Crucet, a first generation Cuban American whose parents fled Cuba in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, tells the story of trying to fit in in places that are determined to keep you out. Her memoir of her “unfinished education” recounts stories from her childhood, university years, and adulthood as she struggles to make sense of the world around her after leaving the cocoon that was Miami. I would be interested to read a continuation of this memoir (maybe she should have waited another decade to publish?) as the title is the catchiest thing about this book that leaves readers disappointed as Capó Crucet hints at parts of her life that she is not yet ready to acknowledge or reveal.