As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Syrian Canadian Zoulfa Katouh is a lovely debut novel about eighteen-year-old pharmacy student Salama Kassab, who volunteers at a hospital in Homs, Syria, caring for those injured, including six-year-old Ahmad who died of internal bleeding, at the hands of the Syrian military.

Salama's father and her brother Hamza were imprisoned by the government the year before after going to a protest, and her mother killed a week later by a bomb. Salama hopes to escape the country with her pregnant sister-in-law, Layla, an artist. 

Salama has PTSD, which takes the form of an imagined companion, Khawf, who frequently tells her what she must do to survive, even if it's a painful, and potentially horrific, choice. She finds love with Kenan, who has two younger siblings, thirteen-year-old Yusuf and nine-year-old Lama. She secures passage, eventually for all of them, out of Syria, with it to be via boat across the Mediterranean to Italy, from Am, whose sister she treated in the hospital. Salama finds out her father died and brother still held in prison, counter to her hope that they both no longer being tortured.

The book takes a unexpected turn as it comes out that Layla being alive was imagined by Salama, just like Khawf a figment of her PTSD. Layla had been killed by a sniper five months before. Salama then is told in her head by Khawf that the hospital about to be bombed, rushes there and tells Dr. Ziad to evacuate, saving many. Salama, Kenan, Yusuf, and Lama take the boat and jump overboard, leading to the Kenan's siblings safely in Germany with family, and Salama and Kenan in Toronto. It's an excellent book, with many events taken from real atrocities suffered by Syrians and inflicted by the dictatorship.

Joyride by Susan Orlean

Joyride by Susan Orlean is a memoir on her life and career as a nonfiction writer, with books including The Orchid Thief, The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, On Animals, and her first, Saturday Night. 

Orlean starts with her path as a writer. She graduated from the University of Michigan, then moved to Portland and worked at Willamette Week as her second writing job there. She went to Boston and worked at the Boston Globe, also as her second writing job there, and then New York City. She eventually wound up at The New Yorker, first doing freelance pieces before she became a staff writer there. 

There's fascinating anecdotes about journalism in years past, with large expense accounts, frequent travel to write stories, and often open-ended timeframes for time to complete them and how frequently staff writers had to publish. She also covers how access as a writer was different in the past, she wanted to write about working in missile silos, asked the military if she could visit, and did so with little difficulty.

Orlean describes her book Saturday Night as a wild experience of being passed to different editors, some of whom were interested in the book and others who were simply assigned to it. She twenty-five years ago wrote The Orchid Thief, expanded from a magazine article into her second book, which became the basis for the movie Adaptation, with the Charlie Kaufman-written screenplay about making the movie from the book. In researching Rin Tin Tin, she notes finding late in the research process a volume of material that expanded the scope of the book. When she wrote The Library Book, it coincided with her moving from a country home in Hudson Valley, New York to Los Angeles. 

The "writer on writing" content she provides is fantastic. On subjects, she writes:

• Writers fall into two categories, those who have something they want to say to the world, and those who believe the world has something to tell them, with her in the second camp. 
• Two categories of story subjects she loves are "hiding in place sight" and "who knew?" 
• She likes to write about subjects that are passionate about something, especially if it likely wouldn't be covered by other writers.
• Every person has an unimaginably rich world inside of them. She loves the idea of describing a world, it may not be a celebrity world, but it's a world nonetheless. 
• When you pick a topic, you declare it matters. Writing is then learning about that topic and sharing it, including your thoughts on it, with others.
• Editors or bosses she worked with said that her stories being about obscure topics made them require great execution to be successful.
• Subjects at times would feel an attachment with her, she's asking in depth about their lives.

On her writing process, she notes that:

• She reads her work aloud, listening for the cadence of the words.
• A lesson taught to her about writing that it involves reporting, then thinking, then writing. 
• Her work is something that anyone could do, putting in the research and reading the archives to be able to describe something, but they don't. 
• It was her job to do the research, think about it, and then tell the story.
• Another lesson she was taught is stories don't need a huge conclusion, they should leave readers falling forward, finishing the tale in their heads.
• The engine of her stories is the drive from ignorance to knowledge. 
• To manage the volume of material from researching books, she put information on index cards and spread it all out, then grouped them together. It's assembling a coherent whole. 
• She doesn't use a tape recorder, rather takes notes. 
• Writing a book is about fulfilling a daily word quota. 

It's an informative and compelling book and Orlean also covers being a speech coach for the Democratic National Convention, including trying to convince Senate candidate Barack Obama to tweak a speech.

Frostlines by Neil Shea

Frostlines by Neil Shea is a work of nonfiction subtitled A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic. Shea writes a series of chapters with each on his time in an area north of the Arctic Circle.

 The book starts with him watching narwhals talk with each other, or tusking, in Canada's Admiralty Inlet. In a a chapter about wolves on Canada's Ellesmere Island, he notes how the animals were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park in the mid-1990s. 

He writes of the Northwest Passage, and how forty-one ships made the voyage through the Passage in 2023 and thirty-eight in 2024. Covered in one chapter is the decline in caribou herds across the top of North America. In another, he shows a  classroom in Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, where a freshly killed caribou is butchered for the students to see, and the parts all parceled out to the Nunamiut people. 

Shea as well covers Greenland and the Norse people who vanished from there in the mid-fifteenth century. The last chapter is on the border between Russia and Norway, stretching 120 miles, stopping at the Barents Sea. He writes about the Norwegian town of Kirkenes and how people used to cross the border in both directions, but now after the invasion of Crimea, then Covid-19, then the invasion of Ukraine, traffic has largely stopped.

Where the Lost Wander by Amy Harmon

Where the Lost Wander by Amy Harmon is a work of historical fiction that tells the story of John Lowry and Naomi May on the Oregon Trail. She's a young widower from a white family, he's half-Pawnee, raised by his white father, without his mother.

John was retained to travel the first part of the journey west by Naomi's travelling party, which included her immediate family of mother and father Winifred and William May and brothers Warren, Will, Webb, and Wyatt. Also part of the group was the Bingham family and Caldwell family, whose son Naomi had been married to. 

The group set out in 1853, and people that made the trip west were in search of a better life, and found many hardships along the way, and encounters with both Indian and illness sometimes fatal. John and headstrong Naomi, who draws and paints, fall in love and John and Naomi marry. At the start of the book, Naomi's mother, father, older brother Warren, and the Binghams are killed by Indians, and Naomi and her youngest brother Wolfe, who was born during the trip, are taken by the tribe. 

John comes across the massacre, sees that Naomi has likely been taken, and goes in pursuit of her. He comes across a group of Shoshoni, including his sister, Hanabi and the chief, Washakie. John learns about a different group of Shoshoni, led by Pocatello, with a reputation for killing white people. Washakie tells of a coming meetup of tribes and there Washakie and John state their case for the release of Naomi and Wolfe, but a vote of the various leaders results in Naomi being released and Wolfe kept, to be raised by a woman, Weda, in Pocatello's band who lost her own baby.

Naomi goes with John and Washakie and his people, but from the death of her parents and brother, and taking of Wolfe, she retreats into herself, lost in grief, hence the Where the Lost Wander book title. Wolfe is brought back to them by Weda as he's sick and she hopes they can heal him. Instead, Wolfe dies in Naomi's arms. He had been loved by many and Naomi and John left Washakie and his people and rejoined Webb, Will, and Wyatt and formed a life. It's a solid book and while still fiction, it's interesting how it based on real people.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

The Wedding People by Alison Espach is a lovely novel that tells a story about Phoebe Stone, who arrives at a Newport, Rhode Island resort hotel with the intention to take her life.

Phoebe had been left by her husband, was going nowhere at work, and found her cat dead, leaving her in a broken state. Upon arrival at the hotel, she finds herself the only guest not part of a week-long wedding party, and becomes quickly intertwined with Lila and Gary, the respective bride and groom to be.

Lila is used to being the center of attention and Gary older, and has a daughter, Juice, from his wife who got cancer and died. Espach writes of how people have a part to play at the wedding, and that includes telling the bride how perfect everything is. Phoebe comes in and doesn't feel a compunction to lie given that she was going to take her own life. She forms relationships that matter with Lila, Gary, and Juice.

Events wind up having Phoebe be tapped as the maid of honor, and the toast she writes is lovely. She was going to say, "a wedding is a huge waste of money, but it's also true that this wedding will never be a waste. Because I came here to die. And now look at me. Lila, every day this week, you gave me a reason to get up in the morning, to put on a beautiful dress and be part of something, and for that I will always be grateful."

At the end, Espach writes this about Phoebe, to be alive, she must leave this hotel, despite the uncertainties of everything. Walk down the long hallway of that mansion come winter, not knowing what will become of her, which is a thing that does scare her. But she also feels a thrill imagining the candles she'll light at night. Frank, the nineteenth-century yellow dog, who will sleep on her bed as she writes. The snow dusting the ocean.

It's a lovely story of someone falling into a situation and then how the characters lives touch each other. The book is immensely entertaining, but most of all has heart.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrick Backman

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman is a novel that tells the story of seven-year-old Elsa, who is different than other kids and often picked on at school. 

Her best, and only, friend is her grandmother, seventy-seven years old and crazy—as in standing-on-the-balcony-firing-paintball-guns-at-strangers crazy. At night, Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas, where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.

When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s adventure begins. Her grandmother’s instructions lead her to an apartment building full of drunks, monsters, attack dogs, and old crones but also to the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms, and new friends from her grandmother's world, including Wolfheart. The story is an odd one, but finishes nicely, and is about being different, having family, friends, and protectors.