内容摘要：“After this law, we can be a whole package with each other. A real couple. A legal couple. I’ll be able to take care of him because he’s alone here,” he said.

“After this law, we can be a whole package with each other. A real couple. A legal couple. I’ll be able to take care of him because he’s alone here,” he said.

Another member of the chorus is Lily, who describes herself as “witch by training” and prostitute by inclination. She learned her magic from a Roma woman who settled in the town, “caught roots” and married a local. Lily adores her beautiful granddaughter, Millicent — her long legs, blue eyes and “the shine off of her like the sun on the water of the lake.” They go for long walks in the meadows, gathering wild garlic, dock leaves and sorrel, but lately, the girl has fallen under the spell of Augie Penrose, the ringleader of the drug dealers, and Granny knows in her heart it will not end well.Bobby, Lily, Millicent and all the others — each one sees the town and its residents, including the newcomers from Eastern Europe, from a different perspective. Together, they narrate a gripping story that is heartbreaking, funny and occasionally raunchy of a beaten-down but resilient community that embodies the best and worst of humanity.

The book ends with a monologue from Bobby’s preternaturally wise and forbearing wife, Triona, who is puzzling over a dramatic plot development in the last chapter. “There’s more to that story, a lot more I’d say, but it’ll be told elsewhere, I’m sure.” If she is right, then perhaps Ryan is already planning the third installment of a trilogy. What a gift that would be for readers everywhere.“Fireweed” by Lauren Haddad follows lonely housewife Jenny, whose husband works long stints away at a farm. In Prince George, Canada, she lives alongside a widowedmother who the neighborhood looks down upon. An educated white woman goes missing along the highway, drawing national attention, but when Jenny’s neighbor, Rachelle, disappears next, no one cares.

What follows is a desperate search for self-absolution as Jenny first tries to ignore the situation, then obsesses about it. Haddad’s debut novel shows off her mastery of prose and physical description, infusing each page with believable realism.Poverty, misogyny, and racism take a front seat. “Fireweed” captures elements of “Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive” by Stephanie Land and

by David Grann, reflecting similar themes of self-discovery and disenfranchisement through a fictional medium.

A power imbalance between spouses reoccurs throughout Jenny’s closest relationships, her mother and friends demonstrating that the most desirable facet of womanhood is complacency. “Women were always responsible,” Haddad writes. “For what we did, what other women did. What men did — to us, because of us.” A feeling of powerlessness invades the book, overwhelming and inescapable. It shows just how lonely prejudice can make a community.Khalid Nassar, 61, sits with his wife, Khadra Abu Libda, 59, and his grandchildren for lunch, with fabric covering the hole in a wall of their destroyed house in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Coming home after months — or more than a year — of living in tents or other shelters, families have no means to do any serious rebuilding. So they find little ways to settle in.Apartment buildings that were reduced to hollowed-out skeletons have been draped with colorful bed linens serving as walls — as if the houses have been turned inside-out. Families dig chunks of concrete and mangled metal out of the interior to make them semi-habitable. Rooms look like fragmented movie sets, with furniture arranged in any intact corner, while the remaining walls are shattered.

Clothes hang to dry outside a destroyed room belonging to the Nassar family in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)Clothes hang to dry outside a destroyed room belonging to the Nassar family in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)