The Book of Speculation Book Review

I took a break from serious writing for a week or so and I have suffered for it in the past week. My life has been so hectic. I think I got about four hours of intermittent sleep last night because it took me so long to fall asleep, and then I would have a wild dream and wake up, and then the process would start over. At ten minutes to four this morning I woke up and could not go back to sleep, so I got up at about five and got in the shower and made breakfast and began my day.

That's why I'm sitting here writing a blog at 6:53 AM.

For those who don't know, I run a book club locally. I run it through the Meetup app, which charges about $80 every six months if you want your group to be allowed to have more than 50 members. In the beginning I paid it because, although I knew a lot of people would never show up, I didn't want to only accept 50 members and have three people show up if I could have 150 members and have twenty people show up. And in the first meeting (in January) I did have around 15 people show up. Slowly it has dwindled to the same seven or eight people coming to the meetings, but we haven't had a group bigger than five people at a time since, like, February. This in spite of having nearly 200 members in the group on the app.

Ultimately, my decision was to purge the inactive members. So I sent out an email to every member in the beginning of August explaining my intent. I said I wouldn't delete anyone who had joined in the last month and therefore could not have come to a meeting yet, or anyone who had attended a meeting since the first one. I got exactly two emails from people expressing a desire to stay, so I am now in the process of purging everyone who doesn't fit the criteria and good grief. I have purged over 100 members already and still have more to go.

Meetup has no "mass delete" feature, as I've had the misfortune of learning. I would love to have the capability of clicking on my member list, selecting everyone who has never RSVP'd to a meeting, and mass removing them in a few quick clicks. As it is, I have to go to my member list and click each individual member's profile to check their attendance history and remove them. It's been time-consuming and a hassle, but it's necessary, I think. I would much rather have a small group of active members than an enormous group of people who never show up.

Speaking of book club, our book for August was The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler. It was pretty unanimous (of the four members that attended our meeting) that this book wasn't great. One girl went so far as to say, "I read this book when it came out in 2015, and I disliked it so much that I refused to read it again this month." (I don't mean to call her out, but seriously, don't do this. If you haven't read the book recently, at least take enough time to refresh your memory before attending a book club meeting. We spent a portion of our time discussing aspects of the book that were easily answered, she only brought them up because she read the book two years ago and couldn't remember any details.)

So, the spoiler-less version of my review for The Book of Speculation is: Three stars out of five.

General summary of thoughts: It was an entertaining read with some interesting ideas and folklore. It was well-written and had some interesting characters. I learned a good deal about carnivals (assuming the info in the book is accurate) from reading this. Simon Watson is a fantastic example of an unreliable narrator. However, Erika Swyler doesn't trust her readers to connect dots and spells everything out sort of plainly. Conversely, there are a couple of important questions that never really get answers. The ending is too abrupt. I felt as though this book needed another chapter (or two) at the end so the reader doesn't wind up feeling as though they've collided with a brick wall.

SPOILER ALERT!!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!!

1. It was an entertaining read with some interesting ideas and folklore. The book begins as a modern-day story narrated by Simon Watson, a man in his early thirties living in Napawset, New York. We learn early on that his mother drowned when he was seven and his father was mentally and emotionally absent until his own death from a stroke twelve years later. Simon has a younger sister, two years old at the time of their mother's death, named Enola. Simon basically raised Enola. In fact, it was his mother's last request of him before she took her own life.

We also learn that his mother, Paulina, was a "mermaid" and high-diver in carnivals who could hold her breath for eleven minutes at a time. She taught Simon this skill as well. We learn that Simon lives in the same house where he grew up, a house precariously placed on a bluff and in major disarray as Simon's absent father never taught him how to properly maintain a home. Enola has skipped out and, like her mother, travels and performs in a carnival.

Chapter two begins a new narrative, one occurring in the 1700s, of a mute boy conceived of an affair and left in the woods as a toddler by his mother's husband. Many years later he stumbles across a traveling carnival and gets taken in as the "Wild Boy." He will eventually be named Amos by the carnival's fortune-teller.

As the story progresses (days at a time for Simon, years at a time for Amos) Enola comes home for a visit and Simon begins to date the daughter (Alice) of his next-door neighbor (Frank), who was also the best friend of both of his parents when they were alive. He loses his job as a librarian due to budget cuts. In the mail he receives a book from an antique bookseller named Churchwarry who found it in a storage unit he purchased "on speculation." Churchwarry sends it to Simon because Simon's grandmother, Verona Bonn, is named in the book as one of the carnival's performers (the book turns out to be a carnival log owned by the ringleader, Mr. Peabody).

Amos progresses from Wild Boy to "Apprentice Seer" and learns how to read Tarot cards from Mme. Ryzkhova, a Russian fortune-teller. One night during a thunderstorm Amos finds an unusually stunning young girl with long black hair named Evangeline and she tells Peabody she "cannot be drowned." She becomes the mermaid act. Amos falls in love and uses the Tarot cards to communicate with Evangeline, who eventually falls in love as well. Mme. Ryzkhova, who recognizes Evangeline as a rusalka, tries to warn Amos that Evangeline will drown him but Amos refuses to listen. Mme. Ryzkhova cannot bear to watch Amos die a foolish, love-stricken death so she leaves the carnival. She leaves her Tarot cards for Amos and tries to place a protective prayer upon them, but due to her anger and ill will towards Evangeline she accidentally places a curse on them instead that "she and all her line be wiped out" and "may they never drown another man." Amos can feel the spirit of Mme. Ryzkhova in the cards and refuses to cleanse them with sage as you are supposed to do after every reading.

Simon uses his freedom of unemployment to become obsessed with this book and the connection to his family. He learns that, for four generations, the women in his family have all been swimmers and breath-holders and have drowned on July 24th. His mother, Paulina; her mother, Verona; her mother, Clara Petrova; and Clara's mother, Bess Visser. As the reader, you learn that Bess was the child of Evangeline and Amos, and Evangeline drowned herself when Bess was only a couple months old. This string of deaths on the same date causes him to worry about his sister, Enola. This obsessive worry leads to the near-ruination of his relationship with Alice and the ultimate demise of his childhood home as he tries to solve the mystery and save Enola in the ten days before July 24th.

2. It was well-written and had interesting characters. Aside from the obvious fact that nearly everyone in the book was a circus performer, there are some other really interesting things about the characters in this book. Mme. Ryzkhova, for example, became part of the traveling circus by walking out of an alley and telling Mr. Peabody that she would travel with him as his seer because "it was in the cards." Later in the story we learn that her father was seduced and drowned by a rusalka in Russia and she and her mother were forced to move so that her brothers were not drowned as well. She takes in Amos and treats him as a son, even giving him the name that she had hoped to give to her son should she ever have one.

Alice is an interesting character as well. I went back and forth on whether or not I liked her. From Simon's POV (as he is the narrator) she comes across as very bitter and mean and selfish. But from a different perspective, she's just trying to protect herself. She loves Simon and wants to be with him, but when he loses his job and begins to behave erratically, forgetting their dates and obsessing over the book and his sister, and tries to borrow $250,000 to repair his house from Alice's father, Alice stands up for herself and for her father and doesn't back down.

Alice's father, Frank, is a character who seems as though he won't play a big part. He's just the best friend of Simon's dead parents, Simon's next-door neighbor, a man who was almost like a second father to Simon as he was growing up. One plot twist I didn't see coming in this book was where Frank comes over to help Simon, who has sprained his ankle when a pothole opened up in the floor of his house, patch up the hole until the contractor can begin repairs. Frank sees the state of the house's interior and loses his mind, demanding that Simon get his stuff and get out until Frank can repair the house. A stunned Simon demands to know what right Frank thinks he has to order Simon out of his own house, and Frank confesses that he was in love with Paulina and loaned Daniel (Simon's father, Paulina's husband) the money to buy the house for Paulina in the first place. Paulina was ready to settle down and Daniel had promised Paulina a house in exchange for marrying him. Frank loaned Daniel the money in order to keep Paulina nearby and they maintained an affair until Paulina and Daniel wanted to have children, when Paulina ended it. Frank immediately becomes a more (and also less) sympathetic character while Simon's idyllic view of his mother (and also the view of her the reader has until that point, thanks again to Simon being an unreliable narrator) crashes down around him.

Doyle, Enola's boyfriend, is an interesting character as well. He clearly adores Enola and would do anything for her. He follows her to New York to check on her brother when Enola continually gets bad readings about him in the Tarot cards, and "saves" Simon one morning when he thinks he is drowning. Like every other man introduced to these half-rusalka women (Simon not excluded), Doyle does everything he possibly can to please Enola, even forcing Simon to leave her alone when Enola is upset with him and effectively working as the mediator between the siblings.

3. There are some questions that never get answered. Mainly, why the hell did Paulina give her Tarot cards to Frank? Did she know that they were cursed? If so, why not destroy them herself? Was she trying to pass along the curse to Frank instead? If she didn't know they were cursed, was she trying to give Frank a consolation prize because she knew she would drown?

Also, both in the scene where Evangeline drowns and the scene where Simon nearly drowns, the horseshoe crabs tangle themselves up in their hair and clothes and pin them to the bottom of the river or ocean. In Simon's case, drowning was definitely not something that he planned to do. In Evangeline's case as well, for that matter. She simply accepted it willingly once it was already happening. How, then, can Simon or anyone else say for certain that Paulina's death was a suicide?

4. The ending is too abrupt. God, is the ending too abrupt. It's practically jarring, the way this book ends, and not in a pleasant sort of way. Chapter 29 ends with Alice saving Simon from drowning (on July 24th, by the way - it's a pure coincidence that the women in his family have only had daughters until his birth, and it turns out that sons are not exempt from the curse at all) and him announcing that he can't stay in Napawset, that he has somewhere to be. Chapter 30 opens in third-person POV from Churchwarry's perspective. Worried about Simon after all the things Simon has told him over the phone, Churchwarry has done some research of his own and traveled to Napawset to see Simon. He encounters Frank and asks Frank if he has relatives by the name of Peabody, and Frank answers that he does. Churchwarry has discovered he is the last living descendant of Mme. Ryzkhova, and they agree to go for a beer together. Then, we're in Alice's POV. She, Simon, Enola, and Doyle are traveling to Savannah, Georgia together (where, presumably, Simon has found a job - he spends a good deal of the book pining after a job at a historic library there but whether or not he got the job is never explicitly stated) and they spend an asinine sum of money on fancy paper so that Simon can re-create the book Churchwarry sent him (which he burned when he believed it to be cursed, before realizing it was the Tarot cards all along and having Doyle pickpocket them from Enola so he can sink them in the ocean). We learn that Alice and her mother have learned of Frank's affair but her mother has decided to stay with him, though she will make Frank grovel for awhile. And that's it! Chapter 30 is six pages long and most of it is inner monologue and speculation (Churchwarry thinks about how it would take a lifetime to build the kind of feet required to walk barefoot on the Napawset beach, how poetic it is that mermaids would end their family curse by sinking it in the ocean, and how uninquisitve Frank is. Frank thinks about Paulina's death and blames himself. Alice thinks about why she's giving Simon a second chance.) It is definitely uncomfortably abrupt. It almost feels as though Swyler was just ready to be done already. And I'm a writer, so I totally get that. The first draft of my work-in-progress ended really abruptly as well. But you can't really leave it like that. It isn't fair to your art or to your reader. Or to your characters, for that matter.

And there it is, my personal review of The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler. It has a lot of good reviews out there, and I'm definitely not sorry that I read it. I had no difficulty getting through it, unlike several other books I've forced myself to finish. It's a decent book. I just feel as though there was a good deal of room for improvement. This being her debut novel, perhaps the next one will be better. We'll see!

Have you read The Book of Speculation? Tell me in the comments what you thought of it!