An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Every so often there are stories on the news about a person who is freed after spending years behind bars, the evidence finally proving that the convicted man or woman was innocent all along. There are plenty of smiles as the person walks out of prison but then I wonder what happens the next day? The person's old life is gone, there is no going back. While the innocent person was sitting in a prison cell, the world moved on and the newly freed person is left to flounder in a new, unfamiliar world. Such is the case with Roy Hamilton in An American Marriage.

Roy and Celestial are a young couple, just starting their married life together when police break into their hotel room and wrestle Roy to the ground. He is arrested and convicted for a crime he didn't commit. The fact that he is innocent is just that, a fact. Roy has an alibi but the jury simply doesn't believe it. As one character puts it, it was a case of "wrong race, wrong time." Now the story we perhaps want to hear is how Roy and Celestial stuck together like glue through thick and thin, but Roy and Celestial's marriage is just a year-and-a-half old. Their union hasn't had enough time to set yet and neither of them is quite sure how to be married when they are not together.

This is a story with no possible winners. Celestial tries to be a wife but she's working hard in Atlanta, Georgia, driving a few hundred miles to Louisiana to visit her husband in prison, and then he complains that she isn't cheerful enough. Meanwhile Roy sits in prison hearing stories about the business his wife is building, a business they had dreamed of starting together. They are out of sync and neither is to blame.

Tayari Jones's writing is beautiful and devastating. The pain the characters feels bleeds through the page. I finished the book around one in the morning because I couldn't put it down.

One other thing I have to mention is a passage I loved in which Celeste's father, Franklin, explains to Roy why when Roy asked for Celeste's hand in marriage Franklin didn't say yes. Franklin explains that Celestial was his daughter, not his property and her hand was not his to give. How very feminist and modern of Franklin Delano Davenport!

The Fever by Megan Abbott

  

Megan Abbott is one of my favorite authors writing today. My introduction to her writing was with the book Dare Me. I picked it up expecting a quick, funny read about mean girls and instead got a psychological thriller about female friendship and competition. The Fever is another book that touches on female friendship and competition, though in a wholly different way.

Deenie is going about her regular teenage life – going to school, hanging out with her girlfriends, and experimenting with boys – when her friend Lise has a seizure in class. Otherwise healthy and happy, the sudden seizure shocks everyone. Then Gabby, another of Deenie’s friends starts developing tics and faints during a school performance. It isn’t long before other girls start displaying unusual symptoms, all of which are unexplained.

Parents of course want an explanation. There are plenty of ideas, all of which are stupid. Some blame the HPV vaccine. This is of course is a red herring, not least because the vaccine is known to be safe. But also, as one health official points out, because the same batch of vaccine was distributed to several different towns so if the vaccine were the cause one would expect to see sick girls in multiple towns not just in this one town. Another theory is the dead lake in town with the fluorescent algae blooms. This sounds plausible until you remember that only teenage girls are getting sick and not anyone else. 

Aside from the mystery illness, The Fever is about female desire, change, and friendships. Parents of sick girls comment how much their daughters have changed, seemingly overnight. They want to blame a vaccine or an environmental poison but the onset of adolescence seems the far more likely culprit. Deenie is confronted with the realization that she may not know her friends as well as she thought.

I enjoyed The Fever. It is slow to start but picks up steam towards the end. A Megan Abbott book is always a treat.