G. J. Berger's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2024
• 2025

Sixteen-year-old Adeline Siow and her single mother live together in 1972 Singapore. Mother is part owner of a high-end department store. Beautiful, bratty and smart, Adeline attends a private girls school. She and her mother have a unique talent. Through thoughts and hand motions, they can make fire emerge from their fingertips. Mother dies suddenly in a massive home fire when Adeline is away. Soon Adeline learns that her mother led a secret life as leader of twenty or more Red Butterfly girls, each of whom came from poverty and abuse but now can wield the fire power. Madeline’s mother was the “conduit” for the Red Butterfly goddess to interact with the real world. Madeline is the only survivor with her mother’s bloodline to sustain the fire goddess’s power.
Wen-Yi-Lee masterfully transports readers into the chaotic multi-cultural island nation, just seven years old. Wealth and poverty run side by side, and unclaimed bodies float in waterways. Male-centric gangs with other magic or special skills originating in far off places grab for women, drugs, territory, and power. They seek to crush competition and scoff at the Red Butterfly girls. The prose and pace of this fantasy novel match the quiet tiny flames that grow into all-consuming hot rages, then die down for a spell before the next burst of energy and action. Intricate sub-plots explore police activities, betrayal for money or favors, family relationships, and peculiar drugs. Madeline’s search for Mother’s killer and for her place in the Red Butterfly gang takes her on a stunning, sometimes tragic, journey from loner school girl to brilliant, avenging fire-wielding leader and sapphic lover. Her growth will make any reader, female or male, cheer.

In October 1945, Charlie Trammell comes back to the US after harrowing years as a medic in WWII. Charlie, a 25-year-old Black man who from boyhood read classic authors and worked to enhance his vocabulary, narrates this novel. His beautiful story telling comes out of a hard family background in brutally racist Virginia and his own keen observations and deep thinking.
Charlie’s cousin, Margie, has invited him to her Sugar Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles. Prominent Black entertainers, doctors, land owners live in Sugar Hill mansions. Relatively new to the neighborhood, James Mann owns one of the grandest estates and frequently hosts the most lavish parties. No one knows much about Mann or the source of his wealth. The characters and events parallel The Great Gatsby set two decades before.
On the surface, Sugar Hill has the look and feel of wealthy white homes, and a few whites still live there. But, as Charlie tells us, “Everybody here is sleeping through the racism.” Racism lurks in many forms—police ignoring, even encouraging, violence on Blacks, the unchecked nastiness of white neighbors, a lawsuit and pending trial that could evict all Blacks from their Sugar Hill homes.
Through Charlie’s telling, Lurie masterfully presents the emotions and lives of Blacks “born into quicksand” and trying “to get out the best way they could” with their “choices determined more by . . . dark pigment than . . . bright intellect.” Lurie adds sub stories of romance and friendship. Mann does all he can to find the girl he loved as a teenager. Margie’s marriage to an insurance executive is a roller coaster. Charlie falls for a strong publicist. Page-turning story lines combine with strong characters struggling to find a decent life in an ugly time and place. Author Notes summarize the real anti-Black eviction case and Sugar Hill’s history.

Dickey Chappelle (1919-1965) was America’s first female professional war photographer. This fictionalized account honors her life, devoted to showing the brutal human costs of armed conflicts. “I want to get the picture to end all wars,” she says at a late-career speaking engagement. Dickey rises above her peers from early on. MIT offers her a full scholarship; she’s one of the first women admitted there. She quits school to become a pilot, but bad vision blunts that goal. She trains with the US Marines and, though only five feet tall, keeps up with them in most exercises. She is the first American woman to parachute into combat, comes under fire at Iwo Jima and is later imprisoned and tortured by Russians in Hungary. On assignment to Cuba, she meets the young mesmerizing Fidel Castro at his mountain hide-out and then again after he had turned into a murderous dictator. Many times she risks her own life and career to help victims of war or freedom fighters. On her fifth and last mission to Vietnam, she berates a group of young marines abusing a Viet Cong prisoner.
Robuck takes readers into Dickey’s family life, with a doting mother, devoted aunts, and her husband Tony, overbearing, philandering, and often jealous. A college photography instructor, Tony does help her view and record the world through camera lenses. Dickey remained childless, giving her freedom to go where she pleases and bond with refugee children in many places. Robuck intersperses her own writing with news articles, interview transcripts, and Dickey’s taped recordings. Author notes help sort out where Robuck deviates from verifiable facts. Robuck’s original sources and stunning war settings, combined with prose and dialogue that match Dickey’s intensity, make this a grand must-read.