I had my first DNF (did not finish) book of 2020 – the memoir The Yellow House. The premise seemed interesting – it’s the author’s story of living in New Orleans East, and the deep history of the home her mother bought in 1961 and raised her and her eleven (she’s the youngest) siblings in. The house is destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, and she eventually would have gotten in to how that loss affected her, and the meaning of home and place.

But the writing felt cluttered and didn’t flow. There was a lot of necessary detail, and I was following it, but it wasn’t holding my interest. I’m frustrated I used a prime reading day (commute day!) to try to read this, but am glad I DNF’d at page 63 and didn’t spend much more time on it. (Reading on commute day was part of the problem – I had a very disruptive/distracting passenger sitting by me when I started it.)

My next read was the novel All This Could Be Yours. In the beginning of the book, Victor, the seventy-three year old father of Alex and Gary, goes in to cardiac arrest at his condo in New Orleans with his wife, Barbra, at his side. This family drama takes place over the course of a day, with chapters devoted to different people and their musings about what a horrible person Victor is and all the drama they have going on in their personal lives.

The daughter, Alex, comes in from Chicagoland, and wants to use her father being in the hospital as a chance to find out why the hell he was so horrible – but her mom, Barbra, won’t share anything. Barbra is cold, focused on getting her steps in, and not opening up to her daughter about the past (but she does tell the reader a lot). Gary, the son, is missing-in-action in LA, but his wife, Twyla, is there, and she ends up having one of the craziest stories of all. And there are other minor characters – the EMT who picks Victor up, his girlfriend, a friend of Twyla, and the two grandchildren.

I love family dramas and I really liked this book, although some of it made me feel hella icky. I love family dramas because it gives me the chance to look at a group of people and try to understand why they treat each other why they do. Why is Barbra not interested in her children or grandchildren? Why does Twyla try so hard to help this disjointed family? Why are people so obsessed with material things? In real life, I make a specific effort not to wonder why people do things, but I can, in books.

After that, I read Anyone, a science fiction novel about a technology called the flash that allows you to transfer your consciousness in to someone else’s body, making their mind go blank, and the body you left behind go blank as well, until you switch back. There are safe and legal ways developed to do the flash, and it’s used for many enterprises (labor, warfare, entertainment), but there’s also a flash black market, where people transfer into another body just to abuse it or commit a crime. The novel focuses on the scientist who develops the flash in current day, Gabrielle White, and on Annami, who is set out to right things with how the flash is used, twenty-five years in to the future. The chapters go back and forth between the two timelines.

Both stories are incredibly interesting. This novel was unputdownable, and kept me on the edge of my seat, always trying to figure out what was going on (but not in a confusing, annoying way) and what Annami’s endgame was. This is my first five-star read of the year!

Next up, The Warehouse, a science fiction dystopian thriller about people who live and work at Cloud, an online store that seems to be taking over the world.