TENDER MERCIES by Rosellen Brown

“Then how peculiar and painful, to walk across the threshold of his own house and to reclaim it from the anonymous care of strangers.”

Anyone knowing me more than a minute knows that Rosellen Brown is one of my favorite writers. Tender Mercies should be a standard for a novel of tragedy told from two perspectives. Published in 1978, it holds up like the finest delicate china.

Laura and Dan’s lives are shattered when an accident rips the marriage and Laura’s body. Brown is able to throw you back and forth between Dan’s wrenching guilt and Laura’s frozen tragedy with astounding emotional close-ups that are almost too painful to read, too brilliant not to—Brown is a writer of unfathomable depth.

I’ve read this book about a dozen times.

CAUCASIA by Danzy Senna

“Before I ever saw myself, I saw my sister. When I was still too small for mirrors, I saw her as the reflection that proved my own existence. Back then, I was content to only see Cole, three years older than me, and imagine that her face—cinnamon-skinned, curly-haired, serious—was my own. It was her face above me always, waving toys at me, cooing at me, whispering to me, pinching me when she was angry and I was the easiest target. That face was me and I was that face and that was how the story went.”

Danzy Senna’s novel of being biracial, of divided loyalties, of sisters cleaving to different parents, touches on all my thematic shiverings. Caucasia is beautifully written, presenting usually untouchable topics with a pitch perfect pen.

FINAL EXAM by Pauline W. Chen

“My very first patient had been dead for over a year before I laid hands on her.”

Like a groupie meeting (um, insert your age-appropriate rock star here) meeting Pauline Chen, author of Final Exam made me all teary. Hers is a book I listened to first on audio and then read in print. Through her book I understood what being a (good) doctor mean and what facing death as a doctor meant. I used her as a model for my character (Lulu in The Murderer’s Daughters) as she brought to the page the heart, intelligence, warmth and soul you’d want in your doctor. A book which taught and kept me turning pages with wonder.