The Baker's Secret by Stephen P. Kiernan

This WWII survival story centers around 22 year old Emma.  She bakes bread in a small village in Normandy France.  The people are suffering from both from physical brutality and hunger during the German occupation.  She is ordered to bake 12 loaves of bread daily for the Nazi occupiers.  Her acts of resistance begin by adding straw to the flour she is given which allows her to make 14 loaves.  Those two extra secret loaves will not only feed her neighbors but allow her to set up an informal bartering system that allows many of the village needs to be met. Still there is more fear then hope in her daily existence - a sense that no one really cares what happens to the people of France.  There are some beautifully written passages in this story although it often seems to lack the weight of internal struggle found in similar books like The Nightingale .  Still it is well worth the read.

Louisa by Louisa Thomas

The subtitle of this book is "The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams" - that would be John Quincey Adams, third President of the United States.  Her life was indeed extraordinary.  She was British marrying an American from a founding American family.  She lived in Paris and Russia while JQ served in various diplomatic capacities as representative of a country that much of Europe still did not know existed.  She had four live births after multiple pregnancies and only one child out lived her.  She wrote three autobiographies that don't always square with the historical record. There was much to make an exciting story but this book is not that.  There were many interesting historical side trips that were enlightening but seemed impersonal.  I think Thomas missed the boat.  This would have been great historical fiction. Use all that historical research to make Louisa an inside observer to our early, clumsy history. Flesh out the complicated relationship between her and JQ.  She had opinions about the great question of slavery and women's rights so early on.  Historical fiction would have allowed revealing conversations between Louisa and the Grimke sisters or Jefferson or Abigail Adams or even JQ.  Yea - she missed the boat on this one.

The Last Painting of Sara De Vos by Dominic Smith

Sara De Vos is a 17th century artist in Holland.  Both she and her husband belong to the St. Luke's guild of master painters until things go horribly wrong.   In the 1950's, Australian Ellie Shipley  comes to NYC to work on her PhD in art history.  Her speciality is women artists of the Dutch Golden Age but she earns money repairing old paintings for a less than honest antiques dealer.  When she is asked to make a copy of a De Vos painting, she welcomes the challenge to put all she has learned to work.  The copy is perfect except for one minor flaw.  In 2000 in Sidney, Australia, Marty de Groot has come to confront the woman who decades before made a copy of a painting that was  stolen from his wall 50 years ago - a painting that had been in his family for 300 years.  Three lives all connected to one painting.  You may think you now how this story goes but maybe not.  That being said it is really only a bit of a mystery and more a story of discovery.

The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories by Anthony Marra

Still in Russia.  Still in Chechnya.  Still crazy good writing.  These  nine stories are connected by characters, a painting and the Siberian landscape.  After the first few pages, I was prepared for another deeply sad, beautifully written deep dive into a dark part of Russian/Ukrainian history.  It took me couple of beats to realize that I was smiling at his sarcastic humor.  This book is funny - dark - but funny. Half way through I created "A Constellation of Vital Characters".  I am really done with his take on Russia but oh so ready to hear more of the voice that writes "We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space." I mean, really.

A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza

Often as I read this novel I thought that this is a story about a family which is like every other family - same sibling rivalry, same disappointed parents, same love-hate connections.  But then this is a Muslin family that emigrated from India that must maneuver the minefield of post 9/11 America.  These are Americanized girls who must choose hijab or no hijab.  Layla, the mother, struggles to preserve the customs of her youth and still celebrate the choice of her eldest daughter Hadia to go away to medical school.  But the central tension is around the youngest child Amar.  From the very beginning, he is the son his sister's dote on but who cannot man up to meet his father's expectations. Just like in Exit West, there is the struggle of every immigrant to preserve their unique identity at the same time they look for a place in their new home.  The tricky part of this book is multiple narrators and the jumpy time line.  Never my favorite.

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The first sentence in this novel made me think I was in for a fun ride, " In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals".  It never was quite as much fun as I'd hoped.  The parents are theoretically going to Singapore for business.  They are not.  The men are family friends who could be trusted.  They are not.  They are criminals - well one of them is.  Nathaniel tells the story of he and Rachel from his adult perspective, once he learns the truth (?) of his parents.  The "Moth" and the "Pimlico Darter" as the two men are affectionately (?) known are a little dangerous, a lot quirky, and never quite who you think they are.  Is this a spy novel? Just like The English Patient and The Cat's Table, I'm never quite sure what it is I am meant to understand.

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

Unsheltered is two stories, two families separated by a century but united by a house.  The post civil war story is based in reality.  Fictional character Thatcher Greenwood has moved with his extended family into a broken down house in Vineland, a real life Utopian community started in New Jersey by Charles Landis.  Greenwood's neighbor is also a real person, Mary Treat, who is a self taught naturalist who often corresponded with the likes of Darwin. Their friendship and a mutual respect for the ideas of evolution strain Greenwood's marriage and his job as a science teacher.  In the contemporary story, Willa Knox and her extended family are living in the same broken down house and slowly climbing down the ladder of success.  Educated and hard working, fate has dealt them more difficulties than they seen able to easily manage.  But it is this family that provides commentary on the current political atmosphere. Trump is never named but the identification couldn't be clearer - quote by quote.  The only positive feeling that one might glean from this novel is that we were able to overcome one miserable era in our history and should be able to do the same with this one.  Or maybe it's a political metaphor - if the house we live in is too broken down, it can leave us feeling unsheltered.