Pepe, I also found the Ingallses were in my mind while reading Nomadland - so interesting to have read that and Prairie Fires close together.
59. Mothering Sunday, Graham Swift
Atmospheric, intense novella which shows what a skilful writer can do in a short work. It's 1924 and Jane, a housemaid, is in bed with her employers' friends' son. He's the son and heir - poignantly, the only surviving son and heir from his group of contemporaries. She's a reader, a noticer and imaginer. I don't especially like the way that Swift writes young women, and I think my enjoyment of this was reduced reading it so soon after Waterland, which covers some quite similar themes, but it's a great example of how to effectively use the awkward novella form.
60. The Girl with the Louding Voice, Abi Dare
I was really ready not to like this - too popular, a title with "girl" in it, and what I knew of the plot sounded unoriginal. But it totally won me over. Adunni, Dare's heroine, was a character I couldn't turn my back on; a great creation who you root for from the beginning. I enjoyed the great sensuous descriptions and being transported in my mind's eye to a busy hot street market, or the cold and clinically clean mansion of a rich couple. As for the plot, Dare is clear that, while the exploitation of vulnerable young women is a tale as old as time, it's also a very real contemporary issue, and that we should not be blind to the human individuals behind the awful statistics. I don't like books which set out to be uplifting, nor do I appreciate misery fests, but this one balanced well for me - the sadness and difficulties were there but balanced by humour and kindness. The overall effect, for me, was similar to that of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, and like that excellent book, it inspired me to read more around the real life situations which inspired the book.
61. Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
Gifty is a neuroscientist at Stanford; she spends her days getting mice addicted to a sugary drink, then electrocuting them at random before cutting into their brains to explore what is happening there.
I tried ... not to humanize them, because I worried it would make it harder for me to do my work.
It's clear that this isn't the only area of her life where Gifty is compartmentalising. She keeps acquaintances at arms length, ghosting dates and spending most of her time in the lab, where she exchanges friendly but minimal greetings with her lab partner.
Into this controlled world comes a phone call from her mother's church pastor - Gifty's mother has stopped answering the phone and hasn't been seen at church. Her mother has a history of severe depression, stemming partly from the death of Gifty's beloved big brother, who died of a heroin overdose after initially becoming addicted to painkillers after a sports injury.
As the book jumps back and forth between Gifty's past and her account of her attempts to care for her mother while progressing with her scientific project, there's something almost too neat about Gyasi's choice of heroine. With her evangelical upbringing, family history of addiction and mental illness, and talent as a neuroscientist, she sits perfectly in the middle of a web of questions about how neuroscience, psychology and philosophy (including religion) interact - about whether the brain, the mind and the self (or what Christians would call the soul) are one and the same, and why. What makes it work is that Gyasi doesn't get too tied up with the abstract - instead, while she asks these questions, she explores the personal aspects. Like Dare in TGWTLV, she makes her characters into people, not just representations of the themes that she wants to explore. The relationships between Gifty and her mother, and the relationships with absent brother and father, are tenderly explored - there's a scene where Gifty helps her mother in the bath which just breaks your heart - and it's this human element which makes the more cerebral bits of the book hang together.
DNF. The Sudden Appearance of Hope, Claire North
Gave up on this because it was too complicated and I wasn't enjoying it. Title sounds like one of those quirky, uplifting type books but actually its a high-concept thriller/romance (Claire North is the author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) about a woman who people forget as soon as she leaves their sight. In the bit I read, she was on the run through a series of glamorous locations after pissing off a scary big corporation by stealing something from them. I think it's probably pretty good but I just wasn't enjoying it.