“You Just Have to Read This…” Books by Wesleyan Authors: Meyerson ’04, Card ’04, and Fink ’77

In this continuing series, we explore a selection of the latest books by Wesleyan alumni. The volumes, sent to us by the alumni authors themselves, are forwarded to Olin Library as donations to the University’s collection and made available to the Wesleyan community.

Amy Meyerson ’04, The Imperfects (HarperCollins/Park Row Books, 2020)

Generations of secrets loom large in this novel about the dysfunctional Miller family. When the eccentric family matriarch, Helen, passes away, the items she leaves behind—including a 137-carat diamond hidden in her bedroom—stir up old resentments, new tensions, and plenty of questions among her daughter and grandchildren. As the family races to determine whether they are the rightful heirs to the precious gemstone, they make startling discoveries about Helen, who immigrated to the United States from Austria, and her family’s tragic past.

A fast-paced and engaging read, The Imperfects is based on the true story of the Florentine Diamond, which went missing around 1918, after the fall of the Austrian Empire.

Amy Meyerson ’04 is an associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California. The Imperfects is her second novel. Her debut novel The Bookshop of Yesterdays, an international best-seller with translations in 11 languages, was featured in a 2018 Connection article.

Maisy Card ’04, These Ghosts Are Family (Simon & Schuster, 2020)

Maisy Card’s debut novel, These Ghosts Are Family, leads readers through a winding and complex Jamaican family history. Abel Paisley, the book’s central figure, has a massive secret: As a young man, he faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend before starting over in the United States. Thirty years later, facing his own mortality, he decides to share his shocking truth with the women in both versions of his life, upending their worlds as well as his own.

Written in vivid prose and told in a nonlinear timeline, as well as through the perspectives of characters over eight generations, the novel is at turns painful, mesmerizing, amusing, and haunting.

Maisy Card ’04 holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and is a public librarian. Her writing has appeared in Lenny Letter, School Library Journal, Agni, Sycamore Review, Liars’ League NYC, and Ampersand Review. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

John Fink ’77, Think About It: Ideas and Inspiration for Today’s Hawai’i (Watermark Publishing, 2020)

Twice a week, from 2000 until 2019, John Fink ’77, the vice president and general manager of the KHNL and KFVE television stations in Honolulu, Hawai’i, shared one-minute editorials during evening newscasts. His segment, called “Think About It,” touched on everything from hyperlocal community politics to the ubiquity of technology. His new book of the same name features 200 of his editorials—“arguably,” Fink writes, “the ‘best’ editorials that still might resonate today, or [that] were especially poignant when they first aired.… Some themes might appear simply ‘local’ at first, but the underlying idea is to connect the reader’s mind and soul to show that everyone can truly make a difference while on planet Earth.”

Casually written yet informative, each editorial concludes with Fink’s “think about it” catchphrase, effectively inviting readers to continue the conversation themselves.

John Fink ’77 is a former sportscaster and served as general manager of the KHNL and KFVE television stations for more than 30 years. He continues to share “Think About It” editorials with a weekly column in MidWeek magazine, and plans to offer motivational seminars centered around the themes and ideas that motivated his editorials.