Reading · Writing Life - Alexandra Sokoloff

Five on 5 is my new favorite book thing: “a monthly bookish party where Bookstackers share their top 5 reads for the month on the 5th of the month.” Today Simi Sidhu Writes hosts, with the optional theme of “fractured families.”

I didn’t catch the theme of this Five on 5 until I’d read my books for the month! But inevitably some of them fit the Fractured Family trope anyway.

I actually was book shopping looking to comfort reread Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic — but got intrigued by the storyline of Hoffman’s The Story Sisters instead – which I’d seen one of you Bookstackers recommend. I started reading… and let me tell you, it was quite the act of will to put it down to do my own writing this week!

The Story Sisters is very obviously influenced by the classic memoir of schizophrenia: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which also centers on a troubled teenager who creates her own seductive internal fantasy world and subsequently suffers mental collapse and institutionalization. Hoffman’s spin on the story includes three sisters, the two younger dominated by their charismatic, dangerously wild sibling. It begins with a horrific inciting incident of abduction and abuse that Elv can only survive by retreating into fantasy. Her mother fails to (refuses to) read any of the signs, and the father abandoned the family long ago, bringing on tragic consequences for all three sisters as Elv pulls them all into her imaginary world.

It’s a contemporary (ish) fairy tale with gorgeous imagery and three distinct sisters who feel completely like real people.

I have always had an obsession with books and film (TV, songs, poetry, plays) about the primal and witchy power of teenage girls: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Witch, A Wrinkle in Time, The Craft, John Proctor is the Villain, etc . This archetypal feminine energy is the undercurrent of my Huntress Moon books and I’m steeped in it again as I write Book 7 in the series… I feel strongly that this feminine power and rage is rising to a tidal wave in response to the patriarchal takeover of our government.

The Story Sisters now joins that best-of list for me. Mild SPOILERS in this footnote - but please read it if you’re hesitant to pick up the book because of potential triggers. 1

This month my in-person book club read the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Trees, by the great Percival Everett. Not a fractured family story but close - a fractured nation story — with Everett’s signature blistering condemnation of the US’s still unmitigated racism. Two laconic, seen-it-all Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation wrestle with a bizarre serial killing case: racists are being murdered and mutilated in the exact manner that martyred Emmett Till was murdered and mutilated by racists in 1955. Also present at each scene is the abused corpse of a young Black man – a corpse that keeps mysteriously disappearing from the crime scenes.

Is it the ghost of Till? Is it an elaborate, multi-state campaign of vigilante justice? Is it magical realism? The answer is nothing you’ve ever seen before in a book, I bet.

This relatively short, page-turner of a crime novel is satirical and frequently hilarious – which makes the third- act gut punches that much more profound when they come. In one chapter a character writes all the names of known US lynching victims, including massacred Chinese. Pages and pages of the real names of real people. It stops the reader dead, and compels a slow reading of all names. THAT is writing.

I would love to see this story on the screen – Donald Glover (Atlanta) springs instantly to mind to adapt and direct because of the surrealism… then again I’d love to see what the brilliant Ava DuVernay (Selma) would do with it.

An important, immersive book – most highly recommended.

This is my book journal page for the book:

I saw someone had one of these book journals on one of my online book groups and I seized on the idea. And I see Simi Sidhu, our lovely hostess for Five on 5 today, has a free one to download for subscribers… just saying…

This kind of journaling is a natural for me. I’ve used a collage book to illustrate my writing since my early days as a screenwriter — before pitch decks became the thing we called them mood books or look books. It got me plenty of jobs, back in the day!

How I use a collage book for World Building and Thematic Structure

Sometimes my collage books expand beyond the book, too – Craig and I are working on this board for our upcoming road trip thriller The Grapevine:

More about The Grapevine

I don’t journal every book I read – that would be insane, not to mention career-ending. But with the ones I do, I’m really benefiting from the handwritten notes I’m taking. It completely activates active reading. And as with any project worth doing, the journal is taking on a life of its own. I think I’m gonna need a bigger book!

After my bitter, bitter disappointment with Yesteryear, which I wrote about here and here and just about everywhere else, I also read or partially read a slew of other Trad Wife books.

I’ll go back to some of them, but for now - hands down the most suspenseful, most harrowing, most revelatory, most important one of them is -

You want to talk about fractured families? This riveting and brutally honest memoir exposes how families are being fractured all over the country, but particularly in rural areas and the South. Levings plunges us into the real-life hell that high-control religion imposes on the families in its grip, and how entire systems work to keep wives submissive in the home, children stunted by fear and abuse, and whole families trapped in the poverty of too many children for a single income. Mental illness goes untreated; women are forced to sign contracts permitting their abuse to ensure they have no legal recourse for prosecuting their abusers; and hundreds of thousands of women and children in the US are being denied basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness - not to mention the joy of a true spiritual life.

This is what the theocratic Heritage Foundation plans for the entire nation, and it’s already made great strides toward making The Handmaid’s Tale a legal reality. Tia Levings had to flee her house with her children to save all their lives.

There is so much to unpack about this book that Bookstacker Elle of Elle Reads Library Books and I are planning a deep dive buddy read. Stay tuned!

I’m really looking forward to all the Bookstack recs today. Please drop more in the Comments! And let me know if you keep a book journal…

Five on 5 - June fiction

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