BookPage October 2023 by BookPage

OCT 2023

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

With the sinister Southern gothic Starling House, House author Alix E. Harrow is poised for a breakout.

CASSANDRA CLARE

AYANA MATHIS

GHOSTS & GHOULS

Find out which real and fictional libraries and bookstores most enchant the Shadowhunters author.

It’s been more than a decade since her bestselling debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. The Unsettled is a follow-up worth waiting for.

Our recommended Halloween reading includes creepy horror novels, urban fantasy and the best paranormal romances.

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OCTOBER 2023

features q&a | julia kelly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

interview | bob odenkirk & erin odenkirk. . . . . . 29

Visit Winston Churchill’s secret headquarters during World War II

The “Breaking Bad” actor and his daughter on their collection of children’s poems

feature | historical mysteries. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

feature | meet the author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Three mysteries set during fascinating eras of American history

feature | graphic novels & memoirs. . . . . . . . . . . 10 The illustrations set the tone in these thoughtful graphics

feature | latinx fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

reviews

Stunning, genre-bending picks for Hispanic Heritage Month

fiction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

interview | ayana mathis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

nonfiction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

The Unsettled is a gripping novel about searching for utopia

cover story | alix e. harrow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

young adult . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

A magnificent Southern gothic from the bestselling author

children’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

feature | paranormal romances. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 These witchy romances tackle complex emotions

feature | urban fantasies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

columns

Two urban fantasies blend social commentary with thrills

book clubs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

shelf life | cassandra clare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

lifestyles. . . . . . . . . . . . 4

The YA fantasy icon reveals her favorite fictional library

audio. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

interview | diana helmuth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

romance. . . . . . . . . . . 6

A rigorous, deeply entertaining exploration of witchcraft

feature | halloween. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

cozies . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

A gloomy forest, two haunted houses and a sinking city

whodunit. . . . . . . . . . .

behind the book | c pam zhang. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

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Inspiring the next generation of explorers! AGE 9 - 12

Spooky Stories of the World 9781837580033 Hardcover | $19.99

AGE 9 - 12

B O O K P A G E • 2 1 4 3 B E L C O U R T AV E N U E • N A S H V I L L E , T N 3 7 2 1 2 • B O O K P A G E . C O M

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Meet Phùng Nguyên Quang and Huỳnh Kim Liên, the author-illustrators of My Grandfather’s Song

Lost At Sea: Shipwrecks! 9781837580644 Hardcover | $19.99

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book clubs

by julie hale

Books on the brain In Strangers to Ourselves : Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us (Picador, $18, 9781250872913), Rachel Aviv examines the challenges of living with mental disorders and how those disorders can define who we are. Aviv shares personal experiences and talks to a range of individuals who deal with—and find a sense of self in—mental illness. Featuring riveting firsthand reportage, moving interviews and important research, Aviv’s compassionate, revealing narrative offers a glimpse into the secrets of the human psyche while tackling tough questions about psychiatric treatment and diagnosis. Judith Grisel mixes memoir and reportage in Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Anchor, $18, 9780525434900), a compelling investigation of drug use and the nature of dependency. Grisel, a forFrom neuroscience mer drug user who is now a neuroscientist, writes with to psychology, four honesty about her troubled nonfiction titles explore past and grappling with substance abuse. She also looks at the mysteries of the the unique psychology of the addict and provides possibilhuman mind. ities for escaping the cycle of dependency. The role of genetics in addiction and the brain’s response to drugs are but a few of the book’s rich discussion topics. In Mind on Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery (Penguin, $19.95, 9780241982853), Arnold Thomas Fanning offers a powerful, intimate account of a life spent wrestling with depression and bipolar disorder. Fanning’s first encounters with mental illness took place during his teenage years and left him ill-equipped to navigate daily routines. After spending time in an institution and living on the streets of London, Fanning found help in medication and therapy and achieved success as a playwright. In this poignant chronicle of living with illness, he shows that healing is possible. Max Fisher considers the ways in which Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms have impacted our daily lives in The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World (Back Bay, $18.99, 9780316703307). Bolstered by in-depth research and interviews, Fisher’s fascinating book traces the evolution of social media, the rise of sensational content and the strategies employed by popular platforms to attract users and make profits. Themes like communication, self-esteem and the human need for connection will get book groups talking.

A BookPage reviewer since 2003, Julie Hale recommends the best paperback books to spark discussion in your reading group.

lifestyles

by susannah felts

H 50 Years of Ms. 50 Years of Ms. (Penguin, $50, 9780593321560) comes along at a time when print magazines, and the newsstands that used to stock them like boxes of bonbons, are a vanishing breed. But really, this is no time for tears: Ms., which has advanced and amplified feminist perspectives on society from diverse angles like no other publication, thrives on in both print and digital form with the tagline, “More than a magazine, a movement.” And as founding editor Gloria Steinem writes in a foreword, “A movement is a contagion of truth telling: at last, we know we are not alone.” Back in 1972, the first issue sold out in eight days; in it, 53 prominent American women “shouted” their abortions. The book, including pieces by Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde and other heavyweights, provides an essential look back while making an impassioned case for the critical role of feminist writing going forward.

Finding Your Way Sharon Salzberg is a well-respected teacher of Buddhist meditation and mindfulness with many books to her name. Her newest, Finding Your Way (Workman, $15, 9781523516391), gathers bite-size insights derived from her decades of work in the field. As such, for readers who seek ballast in the midst of busy schedules, it’s a garden ripe for the picking. Passages touch on gratitude, the connection between joy and resilience, lovingkindness, self-talk, attention and more. “Comparison is disempowering. It disassociates us from our own potential,” she writes, offering a mental image to encourage slow, steady progress—a bucket filling drop by drop. Salzberg foregrounds other voices, too, sharing conversations and experiences she’s had with other thinkers and in spiritual places, making this book equal parts retrospective and informative, a beautiful gift.

How to Forage for Wild Foods Without Dying Foraging may be hot right now, but let’s be honest: It’s also intimidating, even in one’s own backyard. Ellen Zachos’ How to Forage for Wild Foods Without Dying (Storey, $16.99, 9781635866131) keeps things simple, focusing on 35 common plants that grow everywhere and won’t send you to the emergency room, pinky swear. Take dandelions—yes, those yellow flowers you’ve known since you were a kid. The leaves, flower buds and roots are all edible. Oxeye daisies? The leaves are your best bet. I had no idea milkweed pods were edible until now (they must be immature, and they must be cooked), and the same goes for magnolia buds and young cattail shoots, which apparently taste like cucumber. Foraging feels like one of those hobbies that could easily take over your whole life and you wouldn’t be mad about it; Zachos’ guide is a wonderful enabler.

Susannah Felts is a Nashville-based writer and co-founder of The Porch, a literary arts organization. She enjoys anything paper- or plant-related.

audio

H How to Stay Married Author Harrison Scott Key narrates his book How to Stay Married (Simon & Schuster Audio, 8.5 hours), the self-proclaimed “most insane love story ever told,” in which he spills the details of his wife Lauren Key’s five-year-long infidelity. “The truth will set you free,” he writes, then adds, “free to lose your mind.” Key’s deadpan delivery makes the wisecracks all the more hilarious and bitter and the heartbreak all the more aching. One chapter near the end of the book titled “A Whore in Church” is written by Lauren, and she reads her own honest words with a clear voice. With ample comic relief, How to Stay Married is an absolute whirlwind that’s embedded with hope and forgiveness. —Emma Rosenberg

JUMP

INTO A NEW AUDIOBOOK Macmillan Audio

READ BY THE AUTHOR

READ BY LAURA CARMICHAEL

READ BY NATALIE NAUDUS

READ BY THE AUTHOR

READ BY LIEV SCHREIBER

READ BY REBECCA SOLER & DAN BITTNER

READ BY SARAH MOLLO-CHRISTENSEN

What an Owl Knows Author, bird enthusiast and advocate Jennifer Ackerman (The Bird Way) reveals intriguing discoveries about owls in What an Owl Knows (Penguin Audio, 9 hours). Owls have graced international mythology, art and literature. Now science shows how increasing our understanding of these birds could have implications for medicine and even technology. Ackerman’s fondness for and fascination with owls is clear in her soft, enthusiastic narration. Ornithologists of all levels are sure to delight in Ackerman’s research and reflections in this book. —Maya Fleischmann

Leg In Leg (Tantor Media, 10 hours), Greg Marshall writes about his evolving understanding of his identity not only as a gay man but also as a disabled person. Out of a desire to prevent their son from focusing on his differences, his parents kept his cerebral palsy diagnosis a secret and led Marshall to believe that he just had “tight tendons” until his early thirties. Marshall, who reads his own work, transforms what could have been a fairly tragic tale—growing up as a disabled kid with chronically ill parents—into wry comedy, thanks in no small part to a fair amount of raunchy humor and a willingness to make fun of himself. —Norah Piehl

H Return to Valetto In Dominic Smith’s elegant multigenerational family saga Return to Valetto (Macmillan Audio, 9 hours), writer and historian Hugh Fisher journeys to Valetto, Italy, to visit his aunts and 99-year-old grandmother and tend to the cottage left to him by his late mother. When a squatter claims Fisher’s grandfather promised the cottage to her family in exchange for sheltering him during World War II, the ensuing investigations unearth troubling secrets. Edoardo Ballerini’s adroit narration conveys the subtle changes in the family, set against the splendor of Valetto’s changing landscape. —Maya Fleischmann

romance

by christie ridgway

H Every Duke Has His Day Suzanne Enoch delights in Every Duke Has His Day (Griffin, $18, 9781250842541), a comedic, charming and kisses-only Regency romance. Michael Bromley, Duke of Woriton and dedicated scientist, clashes with social butterfly Elizabeth “Bitsy” Dockering while both are out walking their poodles. In the confusion, they accidentally switch dogs and are soon forced to team up when one of the pooches is stolen. From there, Michael’s logical but narrow world is opened by Bitsy’s grace and warmth, while Bitsy encounters, for the first time, a man as interested in her mind as her smiles. This breezy romp is a sweet and pleasurable escape, with a secondary romance between the dog thief and his heartof-gold neighbor as well as a satisfying comeuppance for the mastermind of the poodle-napping. Though the dogs threaten to steal the show, with their fussy haircuts and big personalities, the well-deserved happy ending for Michael and Bitsy will leave readers more than satisfied.

Love at 350° In Love at 350° (Dial, $17, 9780593595183), a delicious kisses-only read by Lisa Peers, high school teacher Tori Moore lands a spot on a competition baking show and finds herself dazzled by chef Kendra Campbell, one of the celebrity judges. The pair make eyes and swap small talk that somehow seems serious, but they can’t go any further due to the competition’s strict no fraternization rule. So their romance is a slow burn—pun intended—that builds over time, finding an outlet with an exchange of heartfelt letters. The competition will have readers turning pages, hungry to know what comes next and who will be sent home. There’s sabotage afoot as well, lending the story a little mystery beyond how the likable Kendra and Tori will finally get together.

The Duke Gets Desperate In Diana Quincy’s Victorian romance The Duke Gets Desperate (Avon, $9.99, 9780063247499), an English aristocrat is shocked to learn that his familial castle has been willed to his stepmother’s cousin—the Arab American daughter of an Palestinian merchant. Anthony Cary, the Duke of Strickland, is appalled to have lost his home but even more so by Raya Darwish’s brash manners and her independent spirit . . . even as he reluctantly admires them. While archaeologist Anthony is more interested in the antiquities he discovers on digs, Raya decides to save the dilapidated castle with her business acumen and ingenuity. That she’s passionately attracted to the handsome but disapproving duke doesn’t help matters, but Raya refuses to surrender and return to America. As they come to know each other, the passion between them erupts in true enemies-to-lovers style, nearly setting the pages of this sizzling romance on fire.

Christie Ridgway is a lifelong romance reader and a published romance novelist of over 60 books.

cozies

H The Last Devil to Die Richard Osman tackles more than murder in The Last Devil to Die (Pamela Dorman, $29, 9780593299425), his emotional fourth installment of the Thursday Murder Club series. The sleuthing pensioners of the Thursday Murder Club launch an investigation when they learn that a friend of theirs, antiques dealer Kuldesh Sharma, has been murdered. Elizabeth, who usually spearheads the pensioners’ investigations, takes a step back in this novel to spend time with her husband, Stephen, while they grapple with his progressing dementia. Osman delivers some of the most poetic and emotionally resonant writing of the series with their storyline. The Last Devil to Die is equal parts well-plotted mystery, scintillating repartee and deep reflection on what it means to love and live. —Jamie Orsini

The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp Leonie Swann’s darkly humorous cozy mystery The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp (Soho Crime, $27.95, 9781641294331), translated from German by Amy Bojang, features a quirky cast of older characters who live together in Sunset Hall on the outskirts of a British village called Duck End. The residents have a tortoise named Hettie who discovers the body of housemate Lilith in the garden shed—a death the group has not yet reported to the authorities. Understandably, it’s a huge relief when the police come knocking and it’s not Lilith they’re concerned with, but rather their neighbor Mildred, found dead on her terrace from a gunshot. The group decides they’ll simply figure out who killed her and attribute Lilith’s death to the murderer as well. Swann assembles an unusual group of intrepid detectives and manages to find the fun among the fear in an engaging and offbeat tale of murder and occasional mayhem. —Linda M. Castellitto

The Paris Mystery Kirsty Manning’s The Paris Mystery (Vintage, $17, 9780593685549) transports readers to 1938 Paris. Australian reporter Charlotte “Charlie” James has just accepted her dream job: She’s the new Paris correspondent for a major newspaper. Her first assignment is to ingratiate herself with well-connected members of Parisian society at a lavish ball—where a wealthy investor is soon found murdered. Manning highlights the opulence and decadence of interwar Paris in this engaging and delightful mystery. The City of Light comes alive through her descriptions of haute couture and Parisian cuisine. Charlie is an engaging sleuth: intelligent, empathetic and a skilled reporter. Her relationship with Inspecteur Bernard, the French detective heading up the murder investigation, is also a highlight, as they quickly strike up a cordial working relationship that benefits them both. The Paris Mystery is a fizzy, fast-paced caper full of glitz, glamour and intrigue. —Jamie Orsini

Murder in the war room Julia Kelly’s first historical mystery takes readers into Winston Churchill’s secret headquarters during World War II. When Evelyne Redfern is selected for a position in Winston Churchill’s underground cabinet war rooms, typical new job nervousness is quickly replaced by horror when a colleague is murdered. Soon, the clever and charismatic Evelyne finds herself teaming up with handsome and cagey minister’s aide David Poole in an effort to solve the murder and root out treason amid the ranks—even as bombs fall overhead.

q&a | julia kelly

Evelyne and David conduct numerous interviews. How did you create such an in-the-moment feel for those encounters? I worked as a TV news producer for six years in New York City, and part of my job was to write the copy that my anchors would read. Writing words that are meant to be read out loud is a very different discipline than writing prose because you have to think about breath and tone and simplicity. (Case and point, that last sentence would be challenging to read off of a teleprompter!) That early training in TV writing still helps me to this day when tackling dialogue in my novels.

You’ve written multiple books set in England, and you’re an American Visit BookPage.com to read our expat living in London. Tell review of A Traitor in Whitehall. us more about your connection to the U.K. me not to give my characters those kinds of relaAlthough I grew up in Los Evelyne’s mother’s death tionships too. Female characters deserve rich, wasn’t properly investiAngeles, I have the good forcomplex interior lives and relationships that tune to be both American and gated. Is the theme of hisreflect that. I hope that, just as we’re starting to British by birth thanks to my tory repeating itself somesee more layered female characters in television British mother and American thing you are drawn to? and movies, there will be even more of a push father. Because of this, my A lot of my compulsion towards literary heroines with rich lives as well. to write about the past is family has always had a strong wrapped up in trying to connection to the U.K. I chose Police detectives greet Evelyne’s penunderstand the present. to study British history at unichant for mystery novels with patronizing dismissiveness. Do you think whodunits versity, and it seemed only Most of my research at uninatural to write about British versity was about the evolvare underappreciated? history when I began seriously ing role of British women in I will always defend genre fiction as deceptively pursuing a publishing career society, as well as changing sophisticated because, as a writer, you know while working as a journalist class structures. Those two that your reader will have certain expectations for your book. If you write a mystery novel, the in New York City. themes thread through a lot of my books because they’re Eventually, I decided to detective needs to have figured out the cenA Traitor in Whitehall move to London. As I explored still topics that feel very tral puzzle by the end of the book. However, Minotaur, $28, 9781250865489 my new city, I kept coming relevant today. there’s real challenge in writing a fresh, excitacross World War II monuing story that manages to surprise the reader Historical Mystery ments. I became curious, and Why did you make gossip along the way. as I began to read as much as I could about the an important element of the investigation? period, the book ideas began flowing. When I started writing about an amateur female While writing, did any part of the story or detective in 1940, I knew that one of the things characters surprise you? What was your research process like? she would inevitably have to contend with was When I sat down to write A Traitor in Whitehall, I really lucked out with living in London and men constantly underestimating her. Although I don’t think I had any idea what I was in for. having access to the Churchill War Rooms. (Note the male detectives working on the case dismiss From the very first chapter, Evelyne sprung to to other authors: It is incredibly helpful when her, her eventual sidekick David Poole quickly life almost fully formed on the page. It felt a bit understands that Evelyne has access to knowlthere is an entire museum dedicated to the sublike she was a runaway train and I was just along ject of your book!) The Imperial War Museum edge and information— for the ride. I think a lot of has a fantastic catalog available online as well like office gossip—that “A lot of my compulsion that comes from the fact as great books. I leaned heavily on an exhibition he never would. Being a that this is my first book to write about the past is written in first-person catalog for the CWR that showed everything, woman is one of Evelyne’s from the orange passes that workers would carry great superpowers. and I really wanted wrapped up in trying to POV, to the type of typewriter that was used in the to make Evelyne’s voice typing pool. Female friendships are understand the present.” shine through. She’s a determined, curious, When it came to researching the rest of the central to your story. Why does that sort of affection and loyalty book, I had the good fortune of having written intelligent woman who is also a loyal friend. I four historical novels set during WWII, so I had interest you as a writer? hope readers will fall in love with her the way My friendships with other women are such an a lot of prior knowledge that I could draw on that I have! —Linda M. Castellitto for the details of everyday life during the Blitz. important part of my life; it would be strange for

whodunit

by bruce tierney

Agatha Christie’s housekeeper is on the case! Reykjavík

The Traitor

In what must be one of the more unusual writing Emma Makepeace, the titular heroine of Ava Glass’ pairings of the past hundred years or so, bestselling well-received Alias Emma, returns for her next mission Icelandic novelist Ragnar Jónasson (Outside, The Girl in The Traitor (Bantam, $17, 9780593496848). Emma Who Died, The Mist) has teamed up with the current works for the British government intelligence service prime minister of Iceland, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, to craft MI6, in an exceptionally clandestine division known only Reykjavík (Minotaur, $28, 9781250907332), a mystery as “The Agency.” This time out, Emma takes over the about the 1956 disappearance of a teenage girl named caseload of a murdered colleague who met an untimely Lára from Videy, a small island near the titular city. and gruesome end: His dismembered body is found Thirty years after the baffling disappearance, which stuffed in a suitcase inside his apartment. The operative was investigating a pair of Russian oligarchs suspected has since become an infamous unsolved case, dogged reporter Valur Róbertsson and his sister, Sunna, believe of dealing in chemical weaponry, and Emma secures an they have the answer almost in hand. But apparently, invite to the über-yacht of one of the oligarchs. However, someone else thinks the pair are getting too close to the she is unaware that there is a potential double agent in solution, and soon their lives the Agency fold, and that her Imagine a real-life version are in danger. If you’re a fan cover has likely been well and of Nordic noir, you’re gonna thoroughly compromised. If of Clue, orchestrated in the love Reykjavík. Both writers by some chance she survives are in top form, and their tale manner of Agatha Christie and the long odds against her, she is deftly plotted and skilfully rightly earn her place in set in the English countryside. will rendered. And as one might the pantheon of superspies expect given Jakobsdóttir’s political bona fides, the mysalongside James Bond, John Drake and the first avenging tery makes good use of its 1986 setting and leverages a Emma, Mrs. Peel. I nominate Charlize Theron for the role crucial moment in Icelandic history as a poignant and of Emma Makepeace if there is ever a film adaptation of this series, which it richly deserves. powerful backdrop: the Reykjavík Summit, a pivotal meeting between Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan. A Cold Highland Wind

Murder by Invitation Only Imagine a real-life version of the board game Clue, orchestrated in the manner of Agatha Christie and set in the English countryside. And while there may not be a conservatory or a ballroom in the home of “murder party” hosts Mr. and Mrs. Wokesley, nor for that matter a Colonel Mustard or a Professor Plum among the guests, this version one-ups the board game by offering up a real live (dead) body—that of the aforementioned Mr. Wokesley. Luckily, Christie’s loyal housekeeper, Phyllida Bright, is in attendance and she soon steps up to lead the murder investigation. Given her credentials as confidant to the noted author and the fact that she is something of an amateur sleuth in her own right, the case should be easy for Phyllida. But as she interviews the shocked attendees, she realizes that nearly everyone at the party had motive and opportunity to kill Mr. Wokesley. Murder by Invitation Only (Kensington, $27, 9781496742568) is the third book in Colleen Cambridge’s series starring the housekeeper-turned-gumshoe, and the redoubtable Phyllida grows more confident and skilled with each installment. Murder by Invitation Only straddles the line between interwar historical fiction and intricate, Christie-esque suspense quite well, without the cloying cutesiness that can sometimes plague mysteries on the cozier side of things. And Phyllida Bright is simply a gem.

It is hard to imagine a better opening line for a Scotlandset mystery novel than that of Tasha Alexander’s latest Lady Emily book, A Cold Highland Wind (Minotaur, $28, 9781250872333): “At first glance, blood doesn’t stand out on tartan.” The spilled blood belongs to the gamekeeper of Cairnfarn Castle, Angus Sinclair, with whom Lady Emily had shared a spirited dance the night before at the village ceilidh. But in the cold light of morning, it is painfully clear that Sinclair will never again spill a drop of blood, nor will he dance another Highland Reel. Although the main thread of the mystery is set in the year 1905, a fair bit is told in flashbacks to 1676 that are narrated by Tasnim, a formerly enslaved Moorish girl nicknamed Tansy, as her given name is too much of a tongue twister for the pursed English lips of the 17th century. Tasnim has been reluctantly apprenticed to a widow suspected of being a practitioner of the dark arts, which is particularly unfortunate, as witchcraft was punishable by death in 1676 Scotland. As is always the case with the Lady Emily series, there is suspense galore, a colorful cast of characters, spot on period research and whimsical humor throughout—such as a pet crocodile named Cedric. For a time, there is little to connect the two storylines, which initially seem to only share the setting of Cairnfarn Castle, albeit some 229 years apart. You might well ask just how two such disparate Scottish plots could possibly resolve, and in response to this I will simply paraphrase the Bard: “Read on, MacDuff.”

Bruce Tierney lives outside Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he bicycles through the rice paddies daily and reviews the best in mystery and suspense every month.

feature | historical mysteries

What lies beneath Three mysteries take readers on a tour of fascinating eras in American history, excavating injustice and corruption along the way. The Golden Gate Amy Chua made a name for herself with her much-discussed 2011 parenting book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and now she’s written The Golden Gate (Minotaur, $28, 9781250903600), a jampacked historical mystery set in San Francisco in 1944. Detective Al Sullivan happens to be at the Claremont Hotel on the night that someone kills wealthy presidential candidate Walter Wilkinson. The high-profile murder leads Sullivan down an investigation that gives Chua ample opportunities to explore midcentury San Francisco and the many social and economic injustices of the era. Suspicion for Wilkinson’s murder falls on the granddaughters of wealthy socialite Genevieve Bainbridge. One of them, Isabella, was part of another Claremont Hotel tragedy in 1930. When she was 6, her older sister, Iris, was found dead in the laundry chute after a game of hide-and-seek, and as Sullivan delves into the case, he suspects there may be links between that tragedy and Wilkinson’s murder. Narrator Sullivan is a likable guide as well as a savvy investigator whose background gives him a unique perspective on the intersections of race, class and power that the case brings to light. His given name is Alejo Gutiérrez—he’s half Mexican, half Jewish American—and years ago, his father was forcefully “repatriated” to Mexico. The Golden Gate is an overly sprawling novel, but readers will be both entertained and enriched by its historical details. —Alice Cary

Harlem After Midnight Louise Hare’s second Canary Club Mystery, Harlem After Midnight (Berkley, $28, 9780593439289), begins with tragedy: A policeman gazes down at a grievously injured young woman lying on the ground in front of a threestory apartment building. Did she fall from the topmost window, or was she pushed? Hare rewinds her story to the days leading up to this disturbing discovery. Lena Aldridge, a singer from London, is still reeling from a recent voyage on the RMS Queen Mary where she discovered that a fellow

passenger was in fact her New York City-based birth mother, the wealthy Eliza Abernathy. While staying in Harlem with friends, Lena resolves to learn more about her beloved late father, Alfie. Will she find out why Alfie left New York for London and perhaps even connect with her mother? And who is the unfortunate young woman from the beginning of the book, and what does her fate have to do with Lena’s quest? Hare conveys the glory of the Harlem Renaissance, shines a light on New York’s painful history of segregation and emphasizes the value of learning about—and from—those who came before us. The resonance of family history and the dangerous potency of long-held secrets collide as Lena reckons with her past and strives to create a new path forward. —Linda M. Castellitto

Adventures That Move You, Since 1973

The Joy of Exploring Gardens 9781837580590 Hardcover | $22.99

H The Bell in the Fog Set in 1952 San Francisco, Lev AC Rosen’s The Bell in the Fog (Forge, $27.99, 9781250834256) is not only a solid mystery but also a glimpse into the trauma and camaraderie that marked the LGBTQ+ experience of that era. After being outed and losing his job with the police force, PI Evander “Andy” Mills is now offering his services as a detective to San Francisco’s queer community. His former lover James, a closeted naval officer, is being blackmailed with photos of himself with another man. For Andy, the case is bittersweet as James more or less ghosted him, giving him no explanation for the end of their relationship. The Bell in the Fog brings readers to the underground LGBTQ+ scene of the 1950s and explores the traumas and ever-present fear of exposure that queer people endured. Rosen balances this by also showing how the community supported each other: Andy is assisted by a trans performer, Lee, whose network of friends brings Andy vital information, and he’s also given medical care by Gene, a bartender who would have been a doctor had he not been outed himself. The result is an atmospheric historical novel as well as a gritty noir mystery that will thrill both readers who already love Andy Mills and those meeting him for the first time. —Elyse Discher

The Joy of Wild Swimming 9781837580606 Hardcover | $22.99

Your Trip Starts Here 9781837580064 Hardcover | $35.00

feature | graphics

TRANSPORTIVE GRAPHIC FICTION AND NONFICTION The illustrations set both the scene and the tone in these five thoughtful graphics.

H The Talk Like many little boys, Darrin Bell wanted a water gun when he was 6 years old. Unlike the white boys in his neighborhood with slick black water guns, he received a bright green one, accompanied by “The Talk” from his mom. She explained that “the world is . . . different for you and your brother. White people won’t see you or treat you the way they do little white boys.” It’s The Talk that parents of Black children are all too familiar with in America. Bell is a Pulitzer Prize winner who is known for his editorial cartoons and for being the first Black cartoonist to have his comic strips, Candorville and Ruby Park, nationally syndicated. The Talk (Holt, $29.99, 9781250805140), Bell’s striking debut graphic memoir, utilizes wit and emotional openness to chronicle the ways in which racism has shaped his life, from a police officer terrorizing a young Bell over his green water gun to protests in 2020 over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Most of the book is illustrated in shades of blue, with flashbacks in yellows reminiscent of sepia photographs. Hyperrealistic pop culture items placed throughout both unsettle the illustrations and ground the reader within the timeline of Bell’s life. The size of the book allows Bell to step outside the conventions of a four-panel newspaper comic strip, often removing the panels all together. But during several important conversations, including The Talk he has with his own son, Bell returns to an even grid of panels that emphasize how important each moment is. The deeply honest conversation Bell is able to have with his son is especially compelling when presented in contrast with a flashback of a much more limited conversation about racism Bell had with his own father. Witnessing their generational growth filled me both with empathy for Bell’s father and with hope for what Bell’s radical truth-telling can bring. —Emily Koch

My Brilliant Friend On a quiet street in postwar Naples, two young girls embark on a complex friendship that will encompass decades of strife, jealousy and fierce devotion. Since early childhood, Lenù and Lila have been each other’s protectors and confidantes. As they age, they are pulled in opposite directions—but they remain fixed points in each other’s orbits, for better or for worse. Chiara Lagani and Mara Cerri’s adaptation of the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend: The Graphic Novel (Europa, $26, 9781609459468), is

a brief and impressionistic rendition of the original. Lagani’s spare text (through Ann Goldstein’s translation) provides broad vignettes of the novel’s pivotal moments. The artwork is the true star of this adaptation. Using pencil, charcoal and pastels on coarse, off-white paper, Cerri reflects the harsh reality of postwar Italy—its grit, violence and fear. The materials used imbue the book with an aged appearance, as though Lenù herself had crafted it as a diary: Cerri often leaves original pencil sketches in place, and the reader can see exactly where the drawing was altered. It’s difficult to say if My Brilliant Friend: The Graphic Novel can stand on its own; most of its readers will likely be those who have read the original. That said, it is a unique and evocative tribute to a modern classic. —Mariel Fechik

Washington’s Gay General Some of the most interesting biographies give both the story of a life and the reason behind the author’s fascination. Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben (Abrams ComicArts, $24.99, 9781419743726) tells the story of the titular war general, who rose from Prussian obscurity in the 1700s to become a once legendary yet now forgotten leader—and why Eisner Awardwinning author Josh Trujillo found his life so interesting. Ambitious and idealistic, Baron von Steuben quickly rose through the ranks of the Prussian Army through a combination of genius, white lies and good old flirting. However, relationships with Prussian royalty weren’t enough to keep him safe from charges of impropriety, and von Steuben found himself fleeing his home country. After arriving in America, von Steuben shared Prussian army techniques with George Washington, eventually writing the Blue Book guide that laid the foundation for training American soldiers. Yet because of his romantic partners and his immigrant status, it was always a challenge for von Steuben to form a legacy that would be remembered. Thoughts from Trujillo (and, occasionally, illustrator Levi Hastings) weave in compelling modern conversations on queer identity and queer history. They don’t shy away from darkness: The book discusses the fact that von Steuben enslaved people and highlights how his relative wealth and status protected him from what other queer folk faced. Washington’s Gay General examines the same complicated questions of ideology and legacy that permeate the Broadway show Hamilton, and fans of the production will certainly find much to enjoy. For those who are less interested in early American history and who simply want to connect with their queer roots, Washington’s Gay General offers an accessible introduction to the life of Baron von Steuben and, through him, the queer people throughout history who have been hiding in plain sight. —Nicole Brinkley

feature | latinx fiction Roaming It’s spring break in 2009. Childhood best friends Dani and Zoe are finally spending a week in New York City like they’ve always dreamed. Accompanying Dani is her college classmate Fiona, a tragically hip art student whose uninhibited and self-possessed attitude attracts Zoe immediately. Dani wants to do classic tourist things: eat pizza and see Coney Island. But Fiona, who has been to New York many times, scoffs at the mere mention of tourism, and Zoe, caught in the middle, agrees. As the trio navigates a late-aughts New York, they will each have to reckon with something— whether it’s each other or something within themselves. Roaming (Drawn & Quarterly, $34.95, 9781770464339), cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s first graphic novel for an adult audience, is a slice-oflife story about growing up and growing apart. The Tamakis possess a talent for crafting stories of immense substance out of small, zoomed-in moments. Because of their specificity, these micro-stories speak to a much broader macro-story: Almost everyone knows a Fiona, has been a Zoe or has become frustrated with the hesitance of the Dani in their life. Jillian’s color palettes are spare and minimal, relying on thick black lines and one or two pastels—for This One Summer, a muted indigo; for Roaming, swaths of periwinkle, peach and white. The palette places a gauzy haze over the story’s heaviness, much like the function of memory itself. The magic of Roaming is that it will speak to the 18-year-old in every reader—whether they’re just out of college or at retirement age. Some things, no matter how much time has passed, never change. —Mariel Fechik

H This Country In 2016, New Yorker cartoonist Navied Mahdavian and his wife left San Francisco for a cabin in rural Idaho. Mahdavian was pursuing his version of the millennial American dream: living off the land in his own house while building a career as an artist. Most of Mahdavian’s debut graphic memoir This Country: Searching for Home in (Very) Rural America (Princeton Architectural, $25.95, 9781797223674) takes place on the six acres around that cabin. Mahdavian wanders with his dog, tends to the garden and learns the history of the land—both the stories maintained by his white neighbors and the deeper Indigenous history. Mahdavian falls in love with the landscape of rural Idaho (beautifully conveyed in his minimalist illustrations), even as gun-toting neighbors remind him that people like Mahdavian, who is Iranian American, are considered outsiders. Candid anecdotes showcase serious and occasionally threatening exchanges with neighbors who use racial slurs, yet also welcome him and help during crises. Mahdavian’s humor and thoughtfulness honors the kindness contained in these strange relationships while refusing to gloss over the harm. Poetic and personal, This Country meditates on what it means to create a home in the pockets of America where not everybody is wanted, due to their race or other aspects of identity. This Country is not one to miss for anybody interested in insightful explorations of America’s heartland. —Nicole Brinkley

Hispanic Heritage Month picks These stunning, genre-bending novels dwell in dreams and obsessions.

H Blackouts Justin Torres’ Blackouts (FSG, $30, 9780374293574), released over a decade after his brilliant debut, We the Animals, is in conversation with several other important works of literature. The story takes the form of a dialogue between two men, one at the end of his life and the other young and spry. Juan Gay lies dying in the middle of the desert, where he has brought the narrator, whom he affectionately calls “nene.” The two men discuss their lives, but most importantly, they discuss a book on Juan’s shelf, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns written by Jan Gay, whom Juan claims to have no relation to. With blacked-out passages and beautiful, surreal images woven throughout, Torres delivers a feverish, thrilling and e nv e l o p e -p u s h i n g novel. In addition to Sex Variants (a real book), Blackouts brings together several strands of both Latin American and queer literature, making for a moving metatextual conversation. The novel’s form is taken from Argentinian writer Manuel Puig’s 1976 Kiss of the Spider Woman. Another touchstone is Mexican legend Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel Pedro Páramo in which a man uncovers his family history from the ghostly inhabitants of a desert town. Early in the novel, Juan and nene wonder why they were drawn to each other, and Juan suggests it was their Latinidad, clarifying, “I don’t just mean ethnicity, or skin tone; the resemblance is deeper, it carries over to manner as well, doesn’t it?” Here, manner is a way of being and acting, a way of

holding memory, and Blackouts limns it intimately. Juan and nene see each other, they come together and they bring us with them. —Eric A. Ponce

H A Haunting in

Hialeah Gardens Hugo Contreras is a babaláwo (a practitioner of the Afro-Cuban religion Santería) who is drowning in debt, both spiritual and material. Though he’s attached to the premier Cuban botanica in Miami, Hugo has no real faith and no belief in himself. But Hugo’s gifts are real: He can see secrets and sometimes the future. So when his archnemesis Alexi Ramirez—the attorney turned debt collector who tormented Hugo throughout his wife’s sickness and after her death—finds his new home plagued by malevolent spirits, he turns to Hugo for help. Alexi’s offer is almost irresistible: Get rid of the spirits, and he’ll wipe out everything Hugo owes. Of course, nothing is ever so simple. Author Raul Palma excels at reflecting Hugo’s excruciating emotional states through flashbacks to his wife Meli’s illness and moments of body horror. A Haunting In Hialeah Gardens (Dutton, $27, 9780593472118) ingeniously uses metaphor and horror to explore the many dimensions of debt, including those that have precious little to do with money. “All devils dabbled in the business of debt,” Palma writes. This brilliantly constructed, spectacularly chilling and original debut novel is as fresh and inventive as the devil is inescapable. —Carole V. Bell

A QUESTION OF CHARACTER

interview | ayana mathis

Ayana Mathis’ The Unsettled is a gripping novel about the private hells in which we often find ourselves while searching for utopia. If you’ve been waiting with the book, in which Dutchess and bated breath for the publication Ava take turns telling the story of of Ayana Mathis’ next book, you’re their estranged family. Toussaint, not alone. The author herself was the novel’s youngest but most eager to finish The Unsettled, her perceptive narrator, tries to make sense of his own history as well as sophomore novel. However, as the chaos of the present. Mathis explains during a Zoom call, the book—and particularly While Mathis is no stranger to its characters—had other plans. multivocal narratives (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie follows the lives of “There’s a really lovely origin story about The Twelve Tribes of its eponymous matriarch, her 11 Hattie,” says Mathis from her secchildren and one of her grandond home in the Hudson River children), the voices that compose Valley, where she went to escape The Unsettled are markedly differrecord-breaking temperatures in ent from her first book as well as New York City. Mathis began writfrom each other. Deceptively brief ing her 2012 debut, which was a chapters carefully detailing Ava’s Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review New York Times bestseller and the and Toussaint’s trek through the of The Unsettled. second selection for Oprah’s Book streets of Philadelphia are interClub 2.0, when a friend suggested spersed with Dutchess’ no-nonvoices was no small feat. Dutchess Indeed, part of Mathis’ strugseveral of her short stories could sense dispatches from Bonaparte, and Toussaint came easily to gle to finish The Unsettled was work as a book. The Unsettled, Alabama, where she is fighting to Mathis. Ava, however, was much the effort to map out the actions however, had no such beginsave her small, all-Black town harder to pin down. Proud, impulof the adult characters whose from extinction. In each characdisastrous decisions drive much nings. In fact, Mathis can’t recall sive and prone to depression and of the book’s plot. At the nadir the exact moment she knew what ter, Mathis’ dexterity of voice is on prophetic trances, Ava is both of Dutchess’ nightclub singing full display. This is a riveting famshe was writing. “It was just a very pitiable and, at times, infuriating, long journey of becoming what ily story, and the people who tell it even to her creator. “She and I had career, she meets and marries Caro it is,” she tells me. “I was writing do so with finesse. For Toussaint, a terrible relationship for years,” Carson, a native of Bonaparte, a Mathis says, shaking her head. town partially inspired by Gee’s around inside of it for a really broken windows create “glass rain long time.” [that] sparkled like tinsel.” When “She refused to have a voice that Bend, Alabama. In the 1930s, the What The Unsettled became is Ava recalls meeting Toussaint’s was recognizable to me. She was federal government sold tracts of a gripping novel about mothers father, Cassius Wright, for the first very resistant.” land to its Black citizens as part of and children, past and present, time, she describes her immediEven her name kept changRoosevelt’s war on rural poverty. and the private hells in ate infatuation with the man who ing: Mathis was only able to find When Caro is killed by jealous local whites, Dutchess descends which we often something that fit into a near-catatonic state that find ourafter she grew to “I’m not concerned about likability in accept Ava as an selves while almost destroys both her and her searching for utocharacters. But I do want people to be individual, flaws daughter. Consequently, once and all. “I’m not pia. It opens in Ava leaves Bonaparte as a young mid-1980s Phil- able to attach to Ava, and I need[ed] to, concerned about adult, many of her life choices are likability in charmade to avoid returning home or adelphia, where in order to write her.” becoming like her mother. an unaccompaacters,” Mathis explains. “But I do want people nied 13-year-old named Touswas “the same tawny gold color all After a failed marriage, Ava reunites with Cass, who founds saint Wright sneaks into an abanover: eyes and skin and hair.” To to be able to attach to Ava, and I doned house with a stack of letters Dutchess, Alabama highways are need[ed] to, in order to write her Ark, a commune for Black people from his mother, Ava Carson, and “flat as a white woman’s behind.” more fully. I need[ed] to think of in search of self-determined livgrandmother, Dutchess. This Developing the kind of intimacy her as a full human being, not just ing. But soon, Ava is immobilized someone I’m angry at or judging.” image sets the tone for the rest of necessary to create these distinct by his increasing radicalism and

his sadistic means of controlling both Ava’s lover and her tormenmight not be the paradise for which Ark’s inhabitants. Despite Ava’s tor; her salvation, but also her his mother has been searching. best efforts, she and her mother obsession. Even in this way, Ava is Once he discovers this, he begins are more alike than different. not much different from Dutchess. making plans for their escape. As Mathis points out, “Both of “I think As Mathis says, “She’s much more of Dutchess as a [them] meet past, and Ava as a men with whom “A lot of this book is about the ways in present,” says they become completely and which people figure out for themselves what Mathis. “And is the utterly enamsurvival looks like. And not just what survival Toussaint bridge between ored, sometimes to the detriment the two of them, looks like, but what thriving looks like.” of their children. and he’s also the future. There needed to be They’re [also] both drawn to these prone to fantasies and ideals whereas her mother is obsessed nontypical Black communities a future.” that are trying to find something with this historical past. And they Although he is still a young boy, Toussaint’s insights about like freedom, and struggling with both in many ways sacrifice their what that is or what it might look lives to those enterprises.” the adults around him contextulike.” For both Ava and Dutchess, Still, Mathis warns against the alize their actions even when he the search—and the fight—for danger of simply designating charhimself does not fully understand home becomes paramount, yet a acters’ choices as good or bad. “A them. Despite Ava’s and Dutchess’ sense of home itself remains elulot of this book is about the ways in many failures, Toussaint’s love for sive. And in both cases, their chilwhich people figure out for themthem is persistent, and his desire dren suffer for it. selves what survival looks like. And to mend the rift between genCass, a former Black Panther not just what survival looks like, erations keeps the reader rootand disgraced physician, is ing for the survival of the also a complicated characentire family, even in their ter. While his beloved Ark darkest moments. bears some similarities to Near the end of our inter6221 Osage Avenue, the view, when I asked Mathis site of Philadelphia’s 1985 what she wanted readers MOVE bombing, both he to know, she offered words that could have been spoand his commune are more homage than historical ficken by Toussaint himself: tion. Mathis, a Philadelphia “What I hope is that people native, describes that bombenter the book in a spirit of ing as “an open, raw wound,” generosity so they can spend and says she is not attemptsome time with these peoing to tell its story in The ple, even though they might Unsettled. Instead, her novel hate them sometimes,” she says with a laugh. “But still talks “about what the impliremember that they are cations of something like that might be. What it means in people and remember how terms of Black people and infuriating the people we police interactions.” love can be. The people we Likewise, Cass Wright love hurt us more than anyis not a fictionalization of one else. And we are more MOVE’s founder, John Africa. privy to their failures than to anyone else’s.” In fact, Mathis turned to many places for inspiration With its chorus of interin her effort to complicate generational voices and its this handsome yet mercithemes of love, loss and legH The Unsettled acy, The Unsettled contains less figure. “I imagined him Knopf, $29, 9780525519935 as this super charismatic many of the things Mathis’ shyster preacher who is takloyal readers most enjoy. But Family Saga ing everybody’s money,” she there are also new characters says with a smile. “But as I wrote but what thriving looks like,” she to love and hate (or love to hate), him, I realized I wanted him to be explains. “And what that looks like and a story that is heartbreaking right about some things. . . . He’s for these people may not be what yet hopeful in ways that surprise right about all of the issues around it looks like on a television show and sustain throughout. More freedom. He’s right about the about the middle class.” than a decade in the making, it was This is especially true for Tousexploitation of Blackness. But he’s definitely worth the wait. —Destiny O. Birdsong a pretty bad guy.” Cass becomes saint, who realizes early that Ark

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cover story | alix e. harrow

Her old Kentucky home Alix E. Harrow had never written about her home state—until she left it.

Alix E. Harrow and her husband know a thing or two about creepy old Starling House, despite the fact that inexplicable and terrifying things houses. Before they were married, they pooled their savings seem to happen there. For instance, both of Arthur’s parents mysteriously and bought an abandoned house on several acres of land died within the house and Opal gets a strange, bloody cut on her hand the in Madison County, Kentucky, in hopes of bringing moment she touches Starling House’s gate—a cut that won’t seem to heal. it back to life. “It was such a wild Harrow was initially inspired by a wellknown John Prine song, “Paradise,” about choice,” Harrow recalls. “When “This book is sort of like the how strip mining destroyed the town of we closed on the house and walked dream of what if somehow, you Paradise in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. in, rain was coming into the second floor. We looked at each other and asked, ‘What “It’s like a tiny little Kentucky Chernobyl,” could find a way to stay?” are we doing?’ ” Nonetheless, over the next Harrow says of what’s left of that town. “Now seven years or so, the couple forged ahead, completing almost all of the it’s dead financially and ecologically. So, I was like, ‘What if it had survived? renovations themselves. And what if it was haunted more literally? And what about the people who It’s not surprising, then, that a mysterious, dilapidated house is the subwould still kind of cling on and love it despite everything?’ ” Like Prine, ject of Harrow’s third novel, Starling House. The book features a downwhose parents came from Paradise, Harrow has deep Kentucky roots. on-her-luck young woman named Opal McCoy who takes a housekeeping Part of her childhood was spent two counties away from Paradise. Prine describes how the coal company used “the world’s largest shovel” to dig job at the titular home, which has haunted her dreams since she was a girl. It’s an eagerly awaited, exceptional follow-up to the bestselling author’s coal, and Harrow’s father actually rode that same power shovel to the top of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, a portal fantasy set in the early 1900s, a mountain. (The shovel is called “Big Jack” in Starling House.) “Mountain and The Once and Future Witches, about coal is my family,” she says. “I never met suffragettes in the late 1800s who happen my maternal grandfather because he was to be witches. killed by a coal train.” “What’s funny,” Harrow says, speaking Her father, in fact, jokingly accused her from her home in Charlottesville, Virginia, of plagiarism because “I’ve just taken all of “is that all my other books have historical these pieces of my life and put them into a settings, so with this one, I wanted to do different collage.” She acknowledges that contemporary. But then, of course, when she incorporated many bits from her past I actually started to write it, I realized, oh, into her book, but is quick to clarify, “It is it’s all about the past, actually.” mostly details, not the overall shape of my The author is a pro at genre mashchildhood. I don’t want to give people the ups, having also written two “fractured impression that I was seriously impoverfables”—A Spindle Splintered and A ished or living on the edge of society, in a motel. I had a stable, loving household Mirror Mended—that romp through clasand all of that stuff. But the details—like sic fairy tales. “One of the fun things about writing a house book is that you get to play my first job, I graduated from college in with all the literary tropes and traditions the middle of the recession and I worked of haunted houses,” Harrow says. “But as a cashier at Tractor Supply in Allen then I also know the very literal experiCounty, Kentucky. So, there are a lot of ence of dealing with an old, rotten house. things that were just familiar to me. But, of course, there is a lot of air between me There’s stuff about patching drywall and and the actual characters.” glazing old windows that are jokes just for Interestingly, there’s no trace me and my husband.” Harrow describes her new novel as a whatsoever of a Kentucky drawl Southern gothic Beauty and the Beast, in Harrow’s voice. She attributes Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review with Opal as the beauty and her this to her mom’s influence as an of Starling House. employer, Arthur English teacher as well as her famGravely, the beast—described in the book as a ily’s move to Boulder, Colorado, for three years when she was 10. “You “Boo Radley-ish creature” whose face “is all hard can lose an accent fast when someone makes fun of you for it,” she says. angles and sullen bones split by a beak of a nose, Harrow began writing this book as she and her husband and two chiland his hair is a tattered wing an inch shy of becomdren moved from Kentucky to Virginia, and a sense of yearning informed the process—a feeling that’s hardly new. “I moved around quite a bit as ing a mullet.” Opal is desperate to get her younger brother, Jasper, out of their dingy hotel room and a kid,” she explains, “even within Kentucky. And then when we left for the dying town of Eden, Kentucky, so she Colorado, it was huge. I remember my dad literally saying to me, ‘Aren’t you a little young for nostalgia?’ I’m just a naturally wistful and nostalgic takes the generous-salaried job Arthur person. So I had in my head this idea of Kentucky and the idea of home.” offers. It’s a big step up from her shifts As she began writing Starling House, she realized that she hadn’t set at Tractor Supply Company, and Opal is beyond curious to venture inside any previous fiction primarily in her home state. “All my short stories

cover story | alix e. harrow white feminism in ways that I found sort were kind of about escape and going on adventures and going through of teeth grating.” Harrow concluded she magic doors,” she adds. “Like, finding a way out, which I now see pretty was ready for a change of pace, deciding obviously was a fantasy of mine. I think it’s very funny that it was only once my husband and I decided to leave that I wrote a book about stayher next villain would be a white woman ing.” She says she had always wanted to make a home in Kentucky, “but as “certain forms of ambition are not then I had children and the political climate darkened. I just could not specifically gendered.” find a way to stay, given the means and resources and ability to find The Southern gothic, Harrow says, proved to be the perfect somewhere safer and kinder and with more possibilities for my children. vehicle for this corporate showSo, this book is sort of like the dream of what if somehow, you could find a way to stay?” down because one of its central conflicts Before turning to fiction, Harrow earned a master’s degree in history can be “a huge nostalgia for a time that was just at the University of Vermont, then taught history at Eastern Kentucky ontologically evil.” Harrow mentions the divergUniversity. She first tried her hand at writing a fantasy novel in middle ing viewpoints of white Southern gothic writers and school, but then didn’t write fiction Black Southern gothic writers, noting, again until she was in her 20s, work“That’s why there’s so many different ing as an adjunct. She started writing versions of the story of Starling House short stories “as an experiment” and in the book—often it’s the same story “I loved it,” she says, laughing. told from a different perspective with A sense of history permeates wildly different ethics and takeaways.” Starling House: Harrow adds As Opal hears these conflicting tales, she keeps digging to get closer to the intriguing footnotes, as well as a bibtruth, despite mounting danger. liography containing both real and imagined sources. She also created Starling House incorporates other influences beyond Southern a very convincing fake Wikipedia page within the novel for Eleanor gothic, pulling from fairy tales and Starling, one of Arthur’s ancestors, a supernatural thrillers, with a touch 19th-century children’s writer who of horror. Harrow admits, “I’ve never wrote a book called The Underland been particularly faithful to one single genre. I’ve always been kind of a that Opal read as a child. That book plays a huge part in the novel, and messy reader. And when you come harkens back to Harrow’s master’s up with a book idea that dabbles in thesis on British children’s literature multiple genres, it’s almost like at the in the late 1800s and early 1900s and beginning of a history paper, when its ties to imperialism. you want to have your historiogra“I never had a creative writing phy. I always want to be doing tropes class or tried to pursue creative on purpose. If it’s cliche, it’s a cliche writing since middle school,” she on purpose.” says. “But the skills that you learn As Harrow describes her writing in academic historical writing are process, she sounds more like a hisbasically the same. You’re trying to torian than a fiction writer. Did she build an argument about the world, always know, for instance, how Opal you’re trying to make a narrative that would get along with Arthur? “Oh, I know everything from the start,” she makes sense based on little bits and replies, laughing. “I am not a casual pieces in support of your cause. All the research skills and all the orgadrafter.” She begins with a general nizational skills and the belief that synopsis and a chapter-by-chapter if you just keep writing, eventually outline before beginning to write. you’ll come to your point—all those “And then I draft the book and realize things are not as far away from ficthat the whole thing is wrong,” she tion as you would think. The same explains, “and go back and change it interests led me to history, which are with a new outline. But very rarely— basically just wanting to know why not never—but rarely, am I drafting H Starling House a scene and like, ‘Oh my God, it just the world is the way it is and how Tor, $28.99, 9781250799050 power works.” came out completely differently than The novel’s corporate villain is I planned it.’ ” Fantasy Gravely Power, started by Arthur’s She also notes that she is not a ancestors, which is lobbying to obtain the mineral rights of Arthur’s haunted house person. “I’m a huge chicken,” Harrow confesses. property. A relentless, devious company representative named Elizabeth What she is, it turns out, is a comedian—and one of Opal’s many endearBaine tries to bribe and blackmail Opal into spying on Arthur and phoing qualities is her often-snarky, sarcastic wit, as shown in both her narration and dialogue. Was her humor hard to write? tographing Starling House as she works. Harrow was inspired to create Elizabeth after writing The Once and Future Witches and encountering “No,” Harrow says with a laugh. “I find my main problem is to stop some reader reactions that were “very like, women are good and men are making jokes and try to rein it in a little bit.” bad and having very little sort of critical engagement with the history of —Alice Cary

feature | paranormal romances

Serious spells for lovestruck witches Three paranormal romances tackle complex emotions, pressing social problems and family drama. In Charm’s Way Lana Harper continues to enchant the hearts of readers with the fourth book in her Witches of Thistle Grove series, In Charm’s Way (Berkley, $17, 9780593637968). Delilah Harlow is still reeling from the oblivion charm cast on her at the end of book three (Back in a Spell). She’s lost memories and her sharp mind has been dulled, forcing her to turn to her paranormal community for help. But relying on others makes you vulnerable, which Delilah can’t abide, so she casts a dangerous blood spell to harness her power and bring forth its healing capabilities. What she didn’t account for was how the spell would make her a magnet for a hoard of dangerous monsters. Fortunately, there’s Catriona Quinn, a half-human and halffae monster hunter. She’s like Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a morally gray and beguiling core. Sassy and headstrong, confident and reckless, Catriona catches Delilah’s attention in the sexiest, most distracting way possible. Just distracting enough, in fact, to help Delilah get out of her head. Harper creates a remarkably intimate experience by keeping the reader rooted in Delilah’s perspective as she works through her mental trauma. Delilah is angry about the things that were taken from her, and rightfully so, but her experience has shifted her personality in such a way that she’s able to lean into the rage and use it to heal herself. The characters are well developed, the dialogue is snappy and the plot is fast-paced and engaging in the supremely satisfying and entertaining In Charm’s Way. —Dolly R. Sickles

Full Moon Over Freedom Recently divorced Gillian Armstead-Bancroft has returned to Freedom, Kansas, with two kids, no money, seriously dented self-respect—and a curse that’s robbed her of her magical powers. Nothing in life has turned out as this alwaysgood girl (and secret bruja) thought it would. And when a good girl is under a curse, the obvious fix is to try out being bad. Preferably with her childhood friend, Nicky Mendoza, who is now a successful artist and still the only man who has ever satisfied her in bed. Meanwhile, things are changing in the town of Freedom. The run-down East Side is getting a boost, and Gillian’s noisy, nosy family is leading the charge. There’s a role there for Gillian, if she’s willing to take it . . . and if she can let go of the idea that success looks like the life she left behind. Angelina M. Lopez’s Full Moon Over Freedom (Harlequin, $18.99, 9781335639936) , her sequel to After Hours on Milagro Street, delivers on all expectations. It’s both powerful and sweet to see Gillian and Nicky rekindle their romance. From the moment they reunite, Nicky is once again the only person Gillian lets herself be truly honest with. And when it comes to her sexuality—her needs, her desires—their compatibility is off the charts. If you’re a reader who enjoys the “healed by the

magic of great sex” trope, you will absolutely love this book. Mixing with all of the classic plot elements is actual magic, which in Lopez’s hands is tangible, present and beautifully imperfect. Refreshingly, it doesn’t solve all of Gillian and Nicky’s problems. It also results in contact with the spirit realm, moments that are alternately unsettling and enchanting—sometimes both at once. Gillian’s Mexican American identity, which Lopez shares, radiates throughout the book. Full Moon Over Freedom unpacks the Latinx history of Kansas, showing how the struggles of women in the past trickle down into the prejudices of today through an infuriating heartbreaker of a historical story based on a real court case. This is the work of a writer who knows and celebrates her community and her culture. It’s also a love story that embraces the unusual, celebrates the unsung and makes you believe the words of another famous Kansan: There’s no place like home. —Elizabeth Mazer

Witch of Wild Things Raquel Vasquez Gilliland’s Witch of Wild Things (Berkley, $17, 9780593548578) is a story of family legacies and complicated sisterhood, told with romantic and lush magical realism. Sage Flores feels anything but lucky to have inherited one of her family’s many “gifts,” which in Sage’s case is the ability to identify plants and commune with their spirits. The death of her younger sister, Sky, only solidified Sage’s decision to escape her hometown of Cranberry, Virginia. But eight years after Sky’s death, Sage finds herself back amongst her old childhood haunts and slowly starting to accept her uncanny talents. Accompanied by Sky’s ghost, Sage returns to her old job at the Cranberry Rose Company. One of her coworkers is a familiar face: Tennessee Reyes, the boy who left her heartbroken in high school. While Tennessee and Sage are rivals at first, their competitiveness is quelled as they nerd out on plants and bloom as friends (and then possibly more). Their romance is sweet and subtle, something Gilliland unfolds carefully while Sage deals with the larger obstacles in her life, namely her family. Sage is the heart of Witch of Wild Things, both delightfully funny and heartbreakingly flawed. She has magical family secrets to uncover and relationships to mend, most notably with her other sister, Teal, whose ability to summon thunderstorms and lightning have stirred up plenty of trouble. Even when the plot momentum ebbs, Gilliland keeps readers enthralled with her luxurious prose. Sage’s work with plants gives Gilliland plenty of opportunities to create gorgeous imagery for readers to lose themselves in. And the sexy Tennessee’s knowing smirks will make readers weak in the knees right along with Sage. Transportive and bursting with heart, Witch of Wild Things is a tender masterpiece of magical realism. —Amanda Diehl

Flower illustrations from In Charm’s Way © 2023 by Lana Harper. Cover art and design by Viki Lester. Reproduced by permission of Berkley. Mushroom and moth illustrations from Witch of Wild Things © 2023 by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland. Cover design by Sarah Oberrender. Cover illustration by Carrie May. Reproduced by permission of Berkley.

Mean—and magical—streets Two urban fantasies blend social commentary with sensational genre thrills. Fantasy has always been a playground for social commentary. From Tolkien’s anti-industrial allegories in Lord of the Rings to Samantha Shannon’s deconstruction of the archetypal damsel in The Priory of the Orange Tree, magical worlds with dragons and wizards are almost never as escapist as they seem. Urban fantasy is no exception, being as defined by its penchant for cultural critique as by its city settings. More than any other subgenre, urban fantasy is often unambiguously about real life. Take The Hexologists (Orbit, $18.99, 9780316443302) by Josiah Bancroft. It’s essentially a fantasy mystery novel, following magically talented detective Iz Wilby and her imposing yet soft-hearted husband (and de facto chef ), Warren, as they try to identify who has hexed the king of Bancroft’s barely fictionalized analogue of early 20th-century London. Bancroft’s leads are staunchly anti-royalist and anti-capitalist, positions which are proven to be entirely justified over and over throughout the book. Bancroft’s point could have been made more subtly, although, to be fair, subtlety does not seem to have been his intent: He opens the book with an overgrown tree golem attacking Iz and Warren’s house and spends a surprising amount of time justifying the couple’s high libido by asserting that sex helps Iz think. But The Hexologists is effective and entertaining regardless, not least because it also includes Felivox, a gourmand dragon who lives in a handbag. He is utterly delightful, and debilitatingly British dragons with discerning palates should be in more books.

Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey’s The Dead Take the A Train (Tor Nightfire, $28.99, 9781250867025), on the other hand, offsets its recognizable New York City setting with a relentless barrage of visceral body horror and deliriously twisted humor. So while their commentary—in their telling, Wall Street’s pursuit of money and power is literally devouring the world—is equally blatant, it feels more in line with the nature of the book. After all, we are introduced to the main protagonist, Julie, while she is amputating a bride-to-be’s arm in a nightclub with a penknife to extract a demon. After her plan to summon an angel to help a friend goes horribly awry, Julie tries to clean up her city-jeopardizing mess while also playing video games while high on possibly magical designer drugs, falling behind on rent and facing some creatively terrifying bogeymen. One antagonist is a seething mass of carnivorous worms, two others are twins who like to eat their sentient prey slowly, keeping it alive the whole time, and none of these is the one called The Mother Who Eats. This is most certainly not a book for the squeamish, the meek or the banker. (Remember: Wall Street is going to devour the world.) Although The Hexologists is a mostly well-mannered British murder mystery and The Dead Take the A Train is a depraved carnival of nightmares and eldritch narcotics, they are both solid representatives of contemporary urban fantasy, addressing real-world injustices while also being very, very funny. —Noah Fram

shelf life | cassandra clare

A bookseller’s recommendation helped inspire Cassandra Clare’s adult debut The YA fantasy icon reveals how she organizes her personal bookshelf and her favorite fictional library. Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunter Chronicles is one of the cornerstones of the modern YA fantasy boom. To mark the release of her first-ever book for adults, Sword Catcher (Del Rey, $30, 9780525619994), we asked Clare about her most cherished library memories and book-browsing habits. Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child. I grew up in Los Angeles, and even though I didn’t live in Beverly Hills, my mother took me to the Beverly Hills library because it was the biggest. It had a glass facade so the books always seemed to be bathed in a magical glow. And it had an amazing mosaic mural that took me years to realize was designed to appear as a shelf of books wrapping around the building!

It contains all the books that writers didn’t get a chance to write, but only dreamed up. I remember “The Man Who Was December” by G.K. Chesterton being one, and a Raymond Chandler that never made it to shelves. I love the idea because I often do dream of story ideas, but they never stay with me past the few moments after waking up. © SHARONA JACOBS

feature | urban fantasies

Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores you’d love to visit? What’s on it? I’d love to visit Livraria Lello, in Porto, Portugal. It has all this carved wood and a huge central staircase and a stained-glass skylight. Plus, the bookstore has vending machines around the city in case you crave a book outside of business hours!

While researching your books, has there ever been a bookseller who was especially helpful? One of the things I love about going on tour is that you can chat with booksellers about what they’re reading right now and get recommendations. Once a bookseller handed me a copy of Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, even though it’s not in a genre I write in at all. I was totally absorbed by it, and it ended up being an inspiration for Sword Catcher.

What’s the last thing you bought at your local bookstore? I bought a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

Do you have a favorite library from literature? I would pick the library from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series.

Bookstore pets: cats or dogs? Cats. I love dogs and cats but there’s something cozy about a bookstore cat.

How is your own personal library organized? By genre! Sometimes it gets complicated: Does dark fantasy go in horror or fantasy? But generally I have an idea of what genre space the book occupies in my head, so I’ll shelve it there.

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interview | diana helmuth

Bewitched Diana Helmuth brings both skepticism and curiosity to her exploration of witchcraft in this rigorous, deeply entertaining book. In her earliest days of practicing witchcraft, Helmuth toward this project in the first place.) Now living on the Washington coast, Helmuth Diana Helmuth gathered a number of recommended supplies—a special dagger called an acknowledges that at one point she counted among her friends and acquaintances more athame, many candles, a pentacle. She also witches than people of any other belief syscarried with her a number of expectations. For starters, she tem aside from “I didn’t want to punch down, would trace the atheism. She historical origins attributes this despite the fact that I knew I had to her northof modern witchcraft; this would ern California massive internal skepticism.” upbringing. ground her practice in a knowledge of its roots. She expected to “That’s where all the hippie buses broke down. find it structured like many organized religions: And that’s where we came out of the yurt and a set of rules and doctrines, a built-in commusaid, ‘We’re bringing goddess culture back.’ ” nity and moral framework—and the security of Helmuth has an easy wit—her first book, a knowing what happens when you die. beginner’s guide to backpacking, is cheekily But the practice had its own plans for Helmuth. titled How to Suffer Outside and is full of both “Witchcraft was quickly revealed to me to not be practical advice and hilarious commentary. In that kind of path,” she tells BookPage. a way, the same can be said of The Witching In The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Year. Her wry perspective keeps the narrative Fumbling Through Modern deeply entertaining. But it’s Witchcraft, Helmuth tells also an endeavor with ample the story of dedicating 12 heart, rigorous inquiry and months to learning everyan extensive bibliography. thing she could about what Comedic tendencies never one fellow witch calls “the eclipse Helmuth’s genuine crooked path.” Living with curiosity about, and respect for, her subject matter. her partner and two cats in an apartment in Oakland, “I didn’t want to punch California, Helmuth perdown,” she says, “despite the fact that I knew I had forms solo spellwork at a massive internal skepticardboard-box altar in her office nook (naturally, the cism.” When she forced cats are intrigued) and parherself to look closely at the ticipates in Wheel of the Year impulse to crack jokes, her rituals in the company of felpersonal journey really took low witches. She journeys to off: “Deeply interrogating this urgent need to make Stonehenge in search of a fun of something is, occaconnection with her ancestors, and spends a week at sionally, where the book a camp for witches in the deviated from a comedy The Witching Year woods. Her research takes into something far more Simon Element, $27.99 her deep into the tangled serious, and I think richer,” 9781668002988 she reflects. beginnings of Wicca, which emerged around the 1940s Helmuth ultimately Religion & Spirituality found that modern witchand was more or less an attempt to package witchcraft into something craft in America is largely self-directed and resembling that familiar box of midcentury not confined to any set of top-down, codified Western religion. (Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: methods. This could, she admits, feel challengA Guide for the Solitary Practitioner remains a ing at times. She found that the practice was widely respected text for aspiring witches.) “more about the discovery and healing and Throughout the year, Helmuth consults a nourishment of the sacred self. So effectively, number of witches who also happen to be it’s therapy. And that work is hard and never some of her closest and oldest friends. (Her done.” She adds, “I don’t actually think it’s parfriend Lauren, a key mentor in the book, nudged ticularly enjoyable work.”

Visit BookPage.com to read our review of The Witching Year.

The Witching Year contains candid chronicling of the challenging emotional endeavors her practice requires. “There are several parts in the book [when] I was like, ‘I want to get off the ride,’ and I couldn’t,” she says. Ultimately, the year included “really profound moments that absolutely changed my life in good ways and bad ways.” In the book she discusses the delight of feeling deeply interconnected with others: “Experiencing the sensation (while sober!) that we are all made from the same star stuff . . . is perhaps the greatest way this year changed me,” she writes. About communing with the goddess Isis, she reflects, “I had no idea this level of joy was this accessible to me on my own. In Witchcraft, people talk about shadow work, justice, self-help. . . . Rarely do I hear anyone talk about bliss.” And as a defender of wild spaces and a staunch environmentalist (which many, but not all, witches are), Helmuth gains perspective— but again, maybe not what she expected. To her surprise, the spirituality she’d always sought in the backcountry could be accessed closer to home. “I realized I didn’t have to hike 20 miles into the wilderness to have a deep connection with nature,” she says. “I can go down to the oleander under the freeway overpass and stare at it for 60 seconds and meditate on its perfection.” Now for the big question: After a year’s journey, does she call herself a witch? Not exactly, she concedes, partly because the term is so loaded. How one answers largely depends on who’s asking. She would like to see modern witchcraft cast as less rebellious and more friendly to the mainstream. The enormous number of books about magic and witchcraft in the marketplace, I point out, suggest that this might be happening. “I do ultimately think it’s a good thing,” she says, “because it’s about self-empowerment. And the more people who are self-empowered, the less miserable they’ll be. And isn’t that just a nicer planet to live on?” —Susannah Felts

feature | halloween

THE DARKNESS WITHIN A gloomy forest, two haunted houses and a sinking city are nothing compared to the terrors of human nature.

H After the Forest Greta Rosenthal has never felt like she fit into Lindenfeld, a little town on the edge of the Black Forest—not before she and Hans fell prey to the gingerbread witch, and not after their return. Reckless Hans continually mishandles their money, and Kell Woods’ After the Forest (Tor, $28.99, 9781250852489) quickly reveals how the Rosenthals have kept themselves afloat: Greta’s descent into witchcraft, aided by the gingerbread witch’s grimoire. At first, Greta confines herself to baking magically scrumptious gingerbread to sell at the market, but Greta soon evolves into a greenwitch, working with the forest itself to achieve her goals and save those she loves. As her powers grow, she learns about the terrible effects of more powerful, darker spells. Naturally, Greta swears off this dangerous magic at first, but the evil forces lurking in the woods outside Lindenfeld grow ever stronger, and she might not be able to keep her hands clean. Readers will root for Greta to finally achieve her happily ever after while also relishing Woods’ dark, folklore-infused story. After the Forest is full of enchanting references to various folk tales and truly feels like a children’s storybook come to life, albeit one with delightfully wicked and haunting twists. With its cookbooks that speak (and bite!) and enchanted gingerbread, After the Forest is a tantalizing treat. —Stephanie Cohen-Perez

The September House Empty nester Margaret Hartman is thrilled when she and her husband, Hal, buy a gorgeous old Victorian home. But the house soon begins testing them with annual September “shenanigans”: blood oozing down the walls, creepy spirits of 19th-century children and a demonic boogeyman that even an experienced priest can’t exorcise. When Hal disappears on the eve of the fourth September and his and Margaret’s daughter, Katherine, arrives to search for him, family secrets are brought to light. The house’s antics become routine for Margaret, and her wry, witty narration will also accustom readers to these supernatural events. But when author Carissa Orlando reveals why Margaret is so good at quelling ghosts, The September House (Berkley, $27, 9780593548615) takes an unexpected emotional turn. Her interactions with Katherine are particularly tense and anxiety-inducing as Orlando explores an estranged parent-child relationship impacted by intergenerational trauma. The September House pulls inspiration from classic settings, but Orlando’s characterization of the old Victorian is fresh and fascinating. The house serves as an analogy for the deterioration of family and mental health, with the collapse of a person’s mind being more terrifying than any specter lurking in the shadows. The September House will grab you by the ankles and drag you down into the pitch-black basement you’ve been warned to avoid. —Stephanie Cohen-Perez

A Haunting on the Hill Elizabeth Hand’s A Haunting on the Hill (Mulholland, $30, 9780316527323) is a brilliant reimagining of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 classic, The Haunting of Hill House. Struggling playwright-turned-teacher Holly Sherwin has landed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the form of a $10,000 grant. When a wrong turn leads her to the isolated Hill House, renting it out as a rehearsal space for her new play feels like fate. Against the better judgment of nearly everyone in Holly’s life, she moves her cast into the spacious home for several weeks of strenuous rehearsals and rewrites. From momentary delusions to black hares appearing out of nowhere, things start to go wrong as soon as they arrive. To survive, they need to leave—but they are beginning to forget why they’d want to in the first place. While fans of Jackson will no doubt revel in some of the obvious homages, Hand’s fresh text doesn’t require deep knowledge of Hill House lore to be intelligible or frightening. And its modern setting allows Hand to play with the paranoia and worries of a new age. A Haunting on the Hill explores age discrimination and the shadows of abuse as thoroughly as it does infidelity and professional jealousy, turning each into a tool that the house can use against Holly and her friends. Rationality soon begins to slip away, replaced by the glorious terror of one of literature’s most iconic haunted houses. —Laura Hubbard

H Last to Leave the Room Dr. Tamsin Rivers has been tasked with solving a major problem: The city of San Siroco is sinking, and no one understands why. Nowhere is sinking quite as quickly as Tamsin’s basement, and worse still, a mysterious door in the wall has spit out a perfect replica of Tamsin who has neither her memories nor her acerbic personality. She is pliable, innocent and biddable—the perfect test subject. As Tamsin experiments on her double, her memory and faculties begin to falter, endangering both her professional standing and her personal safety. Caitlin Starling’s Last to Leave the Room (St. Martin’s, $29, 9781250282613) is a study in claustrophobia and paranoia, combining the best of psychological horror and science fiction. Starling’s prose shifts with her main character, narrowing the scope of the novel as the walls begin to close in around Tamsin. It’s the kind of writing that makes you stop to question—just for a moment—how well you know your own mind and your own world. And that’s before Starling dives into the body horror possibilities that come with experimenting on your own doppelgänger. —Laura Hubbard Illustrations from After the Forest © 2023 by Kell Woods. Art by Andrew Davis. Reproduced by permission of Tor.

behind the book | c pam zhang

An opening to wonder C Pam Zhang’s debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, came out in the spring of 2020—a tremendously difficult time to be a first-time novelist. Yet her astounding voice and originality completely redefined the Western genre. Her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, is a true work of art, rooted deeply in pleasure, wonder and food. The two institutions in which I spent the most time as a child in Lexington, Kentucky, were the library and the church. The library was a small local branch at which, every Saturday, I’d check out my limit of 20 books. These I devoured alongside bags of misshapen apples on sale at the store. The church offered free childcare in the form of Bible School. Sessions began with the Old Testament and ended with the Pringles I wasn’t allowed at home. Both spaces fed the same fundamental need. I have always been a glutton for wonder. On the page, in the pew, I would sometimes experience a glorious expansion of my self beyond my body. I was equally moved to tears by the scene of a mouse warrior sacrificing himself in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series and a hymn about God so loving the little children that he gave up his only son. Both experiences ignited a physical charge: a tingling, a surge of heat and awe. I felt it in my body.

•••

low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city. I was 20 years old by the time I read these words. I lived in the heart of a gray city: Cambridge, England, where I studied at the famous university and dreamed of being a writer. Because my admission into this rarefied space had involved an aesthetic as well as intellectual education, I did not mention the other books that Waugh reminded me of; they were not serious literature. Certain texts were “guilty pleasures.” Certain consumptions were not spoken of.

•••

Another decade passed. It was 2020. Under the gray skies of Washington state, I lived in isolation during a pandemic that seemed to close off every possibility of wonder. In the face of national and global crises—protests, elections, the fate of family and friends—I became impatient with my body. It was an annoyance, if not an outright embarrassment. Every so often it would clamor for a lavish meal, or a drink with a friend, or a trip. I cut these desires out when they surfaced, reminding myself that I had my health and a roof over my head. I pared my life down to survival. I was also trying to survive the publication of my first novel. I had not prepared for the vast sense of loss that swept in when writing, once my private refuge, became public. The vulnerability of this event is usually balanced by the consolation of community, but in the isolation of 2020, I had no chance to meet readers face to face, or share rooms with booksellers and writers. I never saw my book in the physical world. I had only my loss. Writing seemed void of its original meaning. And then, in the spring of 2021, I ate a meal, and I wrote a book.

A few years later, I lost religion. I continued to reread the Old Testament long after giving up prayer. By then my family had moved to California. Under that terrifying expanse of Western sky, I anchored myself in the old story of the world as a place infused with meaning, wonder, flashes of justice and grace. The syntax of the King James translation is brutal and beautiful; I suspect that it moves beneath my prose, invisible yet substantial, bones beneath the skin. Having lost God, I kept reading. I was still young enough to do so indiscriminately, omnivorously. John Steinbeck’s California, with its sweeping timescales and pitiless cycles of good and evil, strummed a chord of near-Biblical majesty. The Animorphs series’ interstellar battles writ large the dilemma of being a moral creature on Earth. Of course I read C.S. Lewis’ fantasy series, the Chronicles of Narnia, after which I wandered into Lewis’ little-known Christian space novel, Out of H Land of Milk and Honey the Silent Planet. In a brilliant formal move, Lewis Riverhead, $28, 9780593538241 sidelines his scientists to secondary characters, an ••• excuse to skip the trivia of how lightspeed engines My second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, Literary Fiction operate. It is an awestruck Christian philologist—as concerns a chef who faces, in the starkest way, the quandary of seeking pleasure in a dying world. The novel asks, where do in, he is literally stunned and kidnapped—who walks the alien planet with you go when what you love loses meaning? How do you contend with the the wonder of an innocent in Eden. immensity of that grief? Is it possible to find a source of meaning again, Perhaps this smacks of sacrilege, but just as I saw little distinction between deep within yourself? the emotions at the core of religion and science fiction, so I failed to see To answer these questions, I had to write into the body. the boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, literary realism, magical My own body came alive again in 2021, on the evening of my first meal realism and pulp. Say a child steps through a wardrobe to find a vast, snowy forest; say outcasts wander for 40 years in the desert before discovering out with a friend. We gathered in the courtyard of a Filipino restaurant their land of milk and honey; say a teenager traces the orbit of two moons in Seattle. Stiff after long isolation, we moved through the necessaries: in an alien sky; say a refugee from Oklahoma beholds the fertile swells of health, work, hardship, loss. And then the food arrived. A pause; the air shifted. We dug our forks into a braised short rib with peanut butter and California: each is the story of the ordinary world as an aperture to wonder. shrimp paste, prepared with such ardor that it brought us, forcefully, to ••• A decade later, I was stopped by this phrase in Evelyn Waugh’s our mouths and hands at the table. For a few moments, there was nothing Brideshead Revisited: else to think about. No way to be but human. But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and My first novel ended with a girl, denied and sacrificed, who finally dares the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that to ask what she wants. Land of Milk and Honey begins with this question,

Visit BookPage.com to read our starred review of Land of Milk and Honey.

which I reencountered at that restaurant in Seattle. To eat that night was to look beyond survival, to believe that the world was capable of offering more. What I had dismissed as shameful and selfish in myself changed form at that shared table.

•••

I am increasingly interested in the body as an instrument of meaning. My love for church resided in the physical thrill of liturgy: the transcendence of a single body expanding to join a shared search for meaning. I now seek that connection in literature, in art, in music—and yes, in food. One project of this novel was to depict how the urges of an individual body may be no different than the feeling in a church pew. It took rigor and deliberation to render pleasure seriously, especially a woman’s pleasure. Too often female pleasure is dismissed as frivolous, selfish, small. As spectacle, or as a base instinct to master. But as Paul D says to Sethe at the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “You your best thing.” This novel is a love letter to food and pleasure as sacred, instrumental arts that our bodies are born capable of making. This art can be found anywhere, in any form. If my novel is realism, then it is realism in the vein of Brideshead Revisited or the strange stories of Nicole Krauss, works alert to the epiphany in the daily. If my novel is speculative or science fiction, then it is the kind that blurs the spaces between the equal miracles of science, religion and magic. I am tired of constructing false boundaries: between my desires and my needs, between genres, between the high and the low. The chef in my novel grew up placing French-inflected Western fine dining on an altar. She learns to consider the other forms in which glory may also appear: in street food, in a meal of frozen peas cooked by an overtaxed parent, in a bag of Doritos. There is nothing small about the story of one woman rediscovering the wellspring of her own pleasure. I have come to believe that there is nothing more universal. Consider the first fig I ate in the spring of 2021 in which I came back to life. My favorite fruit seller cut the fruit on his bare palm and offered me a taste. I was masked and wary, leaving the house only for what we called essentials; to accept the fig was to acknowledge a deeper form of nourishment. We spoke of the sweetness of figs, and asparagus, and the artichokes that would arrive next week, and the cherries promised next season, and all the seasons and meals and years ahead. Like many in the market, we peered through the narrow aperture of that year and chose to look toward abundance. —C Pam Zhang

reviews | fiction

H The Wren, The Wren By Anne Enright

Literary Fiction Birds are a lot like life: glorious to behold but gone far too quickly. But unlike the act of bird watching, the glorious aspects of life are counterbalanced by complications—paramount among them, the challenges of relationships. That’s the dynamic Anne Enright explores in her achingly beautiful new novel. The Wren, The Wren (Norton, $27.95, 9781324005681) is set in Ireland, and its key relationships are between a mother, her daughter and the daughter’s absent grandfather. Under other circumstances, Phil McDaragh might be a grandfather worth bragging about. He’s justly celebrated for his love poems, which Enright includes throughout the novel. But Nell never knew him because he walked out on his

H Family Meal

By Bryan Washington

Coming of Age For Bryan Washington, cooking, eating together or even refusing a home-cooked meal has far-reaching emotional repercussions. In his new novel, Family Meal (Riverhead, $28, 9780593421093), the relationships among friends are defined by the food they prepare and strengthened by the meals they share. Food provides the ultimate opportunity for community and witness against a backdrop of personal hardship and urban gentrification. Cam is back in his hometown of Houston after the traumatic death of his boyfriend, Kai, who worked as a translator and split his time between Los Angeles and Osaka, Japan. Unable to shake the violent circumstances of Kai’s death, Cam is haunted by Kai’s memory and his nights spiral into bouts of drug use and casual sex. He eventually ends up at the bakery where he once worked. The owner, Mae, and her late husband, Jin, took Cam in after the death of his parents, raising him alongside their son TJ. Though the boys were once close, they drifted apart as adults, and TJ struggles to navigate Cam’s limitless despair and self-destructive

family when his wife—Nell’s grandmother—developed breast cancer. Enright toggles between the perspectives of Nell and her mother, Carmel. At 22, Nell is just out of college and is “poking my snout and whiskers into the fresh adult air.” She gets a job writing content for an agency and begins a relationship with Felim, whose “party trick is to pick people up by the head,” a habit less distressing than Nell’s suspicion he’s still seeing a previous girlfriend. For Carmel, the specter of Phil’s departure lingers both in her nurturing side and in a cautiousness toward men. In one of the novel’s many marvelous character depictions, Carmel remembers Phil wearing tweed jackets with pockets “dragged out of shape by little books and cigarette packs” and how the “chewed

plastic of his glasses stuck out over one ear.” He was the type of man who would break a chair in frustration when he couldn’t find his watch. When Nell was born, Carmel “did not give [her] to any man…. Because this was her baby, and hers alone.” In lesser hands, The Wren, The Wren might have been unbearably downbeat. But Enright’s exquisite prose and sympathy toward her characters make it a rewarding experience. Late in the book, a character says, “You think you can walk away, but you really can’t walk away, because, guess what? There isn’t anywhere else to go.” That’s another distinction between humans and birds, as Enright elegantly points out: Both species have their challenges, but when times get tough, it’s easier for birds to rise above it all. —Michael Magras

behavior. (Washington provides a content note for readers for whom self-harm, addiction and disordered eating are sensitive issues.) Meanwhile, Mae is under pressure to sell the business, and her thoughts about expansion are dependent on TJ’s plans. Or are they? Although facing the people you’ve loved and left behind is often painful, as Washington demonstrates in Family Meal, it can reveal the unconditional love that remains. Shifting between points of view, Washington shows us characters at their most vulnerable, using food culture to explore conflict, desire, pleasure and passion. The meals his characters enjoy together through it all—from congee to collards to croissants—remind us of the many ways that love, like food, sustains us. —Lauren Bufferd

percolates through the matter-of-fact voice of its engaging narrator and main character. After the perceived failures that led to her daughter Eleanor’s downward spiral into lifelong drug dependence, 50-something schoolteacher Ruth seeks redemption through raising her granddaughter, Lily. The compact narrative—which nevertheless traverses 15 years— takes flight when the nomadic Eleanor agrees to meet Ruth on a gray Christmas day for a picnic, where Eleanor reveals she is going to have a child. Smash cut to Lily’s frenetic christening (the funniest scene in the book), with Ruth trying to rein in the chaos. She gives Eleanor and Lily’s father, Ben, who is also an addict, 4,000 pounds, but unsurprisingly, the new parents’ promises of baby purchases and educational savings accounts prove empty. After Ruth discovers a junkie’s corpse in Eleanor and Ben’s bedroom, she swiftly takes unofficial custody of Lily. A de facto mother again, Ruth throws herself into the task and bonds with Lily in ways she never managed with Eleanor. The quotidian story that unspools proves engrossing thanks to Ruth’s stream-ofconsciousness musing and the occasional surprising revelation. We come to know Ruth and the other women in her life intimately, and it is their very ordinariness that makes the novel resonate. Boyt is a well-established literary voice in Britain—she is the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund—yet Loved and Missed, her seventh novel, is the first book of hers other than her

Loved and Missed By Susie Boyt

Family Drama Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed (New York Review Books, $17.95, 9781681377810) is a disarmingly droll tragicomedy about imperfect motherhood and fractured families, generational trauma and the scars of addiction. Unexpected humor, subtle but honest,

reviews | fiction memoir, My Judy Garland Life, to be published in the U.S. With Loved and Missed, she proves herself a perceptive writer who invites readers in with a singular voice that both upends convention and cuts to the heart of the matter. —Robert Weibezahl

H Night Watch

By Jayne Anne Phillips

Historical Fiction Jayne Anne Phillips transitioned from highly praised short stories to novels in 1984, and several years have stretched between each new work. But that’s only part of what makes Night Watch (Knopf, $28, 9780451493330) such a meaningful literary event. Tracing an arc from catastrophic damage and loss to recovery through the Civil War and its aftermath, Phillips marries a timeless emotional quality and utterly contemporary sensibility to create a satisfying work in her first novel in a decade. Much of the story is told in the observant but occasionally naive voice of ConaLee, a 12-year-old girl born in the first year of the war in the mountainous territory of West Virginia. She’s the offspring of a couple who migrated north from a plantation in South Carolina’s Low Country in the company of a compassionate “woods doctor” named Dearbhla, whom the girl thinks of as her “granny neighbor.” When the novel opens in 1874, ConaLee and her mother are being deposited at the TransAllegheny Lunatic Asylum (a real institution) by a former Confederate soldier ConaLee has come to know as “Papa,” even though he has been physically and psychologically abusing her mother. More than a decade earlier, ConaLee’s real father had also shed his identity to enlist in the Union Army as a sharpshooter. After he was grievously wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, he spent months at a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, recovering from his injuries. He eventually healed physically, though with all memory of his former life erased. The novel devotes most of its attention to ConaLee’s mother’s return to sanity through the innovative methods implemented at the hospital by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride, while the fate of her husband remains a lingering mystery. How Phillips knits these two main threads together won’t be revealed here, because the novel features a healthy number of

complications that bring the story to its resolution and will delight fans of plot-driven fiction. Phillips is also a sensuous writer, and the novel features numerous captivating depictions of unspoiled nature. One of the most vivid scenes is a description of the sharpshooter’s last experience of combat that captures both the terror and exhilaration of war. Night Watch is escapist in the best sense of the word, allowing readers to immerse themselves in the experience of a distant era and identify deeply with the struggles of the people who lived through it. —Harvey Freedenberg

Undiscovered

By Gabriella Wiener Translated by Julia Sanches

Autofiction In Undiscovered (HarperVia, $24, 9780063256682) a Peruvian journalist and novelist living in Madrid confronts her past, present and future in a meditative work of autofiction. Gabriela Wiener begins with a visit to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris to see the Charles Wiener collection of artifacts, noting “that all these statuettes that look like me were wrenched from my country by a man whose last name I inherited.” Her father has just died, and as she grieves, she examines his life, exploring his relationships with her, her mother and his mistress. As she aptly notes, “My penchant for playing detective on family cases has only gotten worse with time.” Charles Wiener, the author’s great-greatgrandfather, was an Austrian-French explorer who traveled extensively in Peru and came close to rediscovering the ruins of Machu Picchu. He is said to have taken 4,000 pre-Columbian artifacts to Europe. Undiscovered insightfully probes his legacy, noting that he was more of a “media man” than a scientist. “Back then,” Wiener writes, “you just had to move some dirt around to call it archaeology.” She is particularly horrified to discover that Charles Wiener purchased, or as she corrects him, stole, an Indigenous child from his mother, taking the boy back to Europe with him. Wiener freely discusses many aspects of her own life, including her discomfort as a brownskinned girl around her white paternal grandparents. From time to time, she inserts humor, noting, for instance, that after her grandfather’s death, “my white grandmother became more affectionate toward us and started farting when she walked from one room to another.” She also muses about her relationships as a polyamorous

woman. She shares a child with her husband, while her wife and husband also share a child, and she finds herself being unfaithful to both her husband and wife. “I’m at a loss about what to do with my life,” she confesses, interweaving this uncertainty with the effects of her family’s long legacy of racism, desire and colonialism. Long strands from the past entangle her every move. While Undiscovered often feels more like an essay than a novel, Wiener delivers a no-holdsbarred, unflinching discussion. She reminds readers of the importance of confronting the white-savior myths that form the basis of so much of what we call “history.” —Alice Cary

Brooklyn Crime Novel By Jonathan Lethem

Literary Fiction Somewhere between its founding as Breukelen and the contemporary rise of area code 718 as a fashion statement, there existed a Brooklyn worthy of myth. Its eponymous bridge is one of New York City’s most recognized icons. The Dodgers came from there (and left). And its Bugs Bunny accent—well, fuggeddaboudit! Jonathan Lethem, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn, has returned to the scene for Brooklyn Crime Novel (Ecco, $30, 9780062938824). Don’t be deceived by its generic title. Going back nearly three decades to his debut noir-influenced novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, Lethem has never approached the beat looking for just the facts. The action begins in the 1970s among a loosely-knit community living on Dean Street in a neighborhood that is now known as Boerum Hill, with kids as the primary cast. For most of the novel, a single “crime” is re-enacted with the regularity of a cuckoo clock chime: a mini-mugging known as “the dance,” in which the losing participant is forced to pay a toll—or “lend” money— to the winner. This happens so frequently that parents routinely send their kids out with “mugging money” and advise them to stash their real bankroll in a shoe for safety. But other, larger crimes are going on as well. Sometimes the kids get caught up in them, and sometimes—as with the gentrification, or rather, demolition of the neighborhood by real estate speculators—they only affect the youngsters tangentially. Lethem unwinds his story through a series of small vignettes: imperfect Polaroids of an

reviews | fiction imperfect past that slowly coalesce into a photomosaic montage of memoir-meets-myth. You can smell the urban petrichor of a fire hydrant’s spray falling onto a blistering asphalt street; you can taste that first drop of cheesy grease dripping from a folded slice; you can feel the hot shame of a kid being bullied daily on his way to becoming a man. While Brooklyn Crime Novel may not cohere stylistically to the more hard-boiled Gotham underworld of an Ed McBain or Andrew Vachss novel, it’s by no means a chalk outline. —Thane Tierney

People Collide By Isle McElroy

Literary Fiction Isle McElroy’s second novel, People Collide (HarperVia, $28.99, 9780063283756), is a body-swapping, Kafkaesque story that explores gender, identity and how well we can know one another. On a fall afternoon, Eli arrives at his wife Elizabeth’s classroom at the end of the school day and can’t understand why Elizabeth’s boss is suddenly calling him Elizabeth. Slowly, Eli comes to understand that he is somehow inhabiting Elizabeth’s body, even as his memories and thoughts remain his own. And, just as mysterious, he discovers that Elizabeth has disappeared. As Eli copes with this strange new reality and struggles to credibly inhabit Elizabeth’s body, he searches for his lost wife. Misunderstandings abound; their handful of friends, along with Eli’s mother and Elizabeth’s parents, all think that Eli has abandoned Elizabeth, though it’s Elizabeth (in Eli’s body) who has left. People Collide asks questions about gender, desire, marriage and family dynamics as it offers mysteries for Eli to solve. Where has Elizabeth gone? Is she, in fact, in Eli’s body, as he is in hers? And if Eli-as-Elizabeth finds Elizabeth-asEli, what happens? It’s not a spoiler to say that Eli does find Elizabeth, and McElroy is inventive and sometimes funny in describing the couple’s encounters. Later sections of the novel move into Elizabeth’s point of view, and then into the perspective of Johanna, Elizabeth’s mother, who sees 28-year-old Elizabeth and Eli as not-quiteadults. These late sections are quite moving, as Eli and Elizabeth slowly come to a changed understanding of themselves, one another and their parents. People Collide is a distinctive and atmospheric novel. —Sarah McCraw Crow

H Death Valley By Melissa Broder

Speculative Fiction There’s a peculiar art to writing a novel that’s as inwardly focused as Death Valley (Scribner, $27, 9781668024843) the latest book from author and poet Melissa Broder (Milkfed, The Pisces). While the narrative thrust of the story is determined by its first-person narrator’s outward wanderings, it is what’s going on inside her heart and soul that delivers the real, satisfying emotional punch. To pull that punch off, Broder has to deliver prose that’s both memorable and relatable, as well as creating a narrator with an inner life that is fulfilling both thematically and narratively. That Death Valley manages this is enough to make it a thoroughly engrossing literary achievement—even before factoring in Broder’s humor, gift for linguistic flourishes and command of character. Broder’s narrator is an author who heads to a desert hotel to work on her next book, leaving multiple personal crises back home in Los Angeles. Her father is still clinging to life in a hospital bed months after suffering an accident, while her husband’s chronic illness keeps him largely housebound and seems to be strengthening. On a short hike through the desert, the narrator finds a giant cactus with a wound in its side, a wound that feels like a doorway worth stepping through. What happens after she steps into the cactus is, of course, an entirely new journey, but Broder keeps it just as relatable even as her narrator begins shaping conversations between inanimate objects and seeing visions of the past and future colliding in her mind. Through the voice of our nameless narrator, Broder immediately and thrillingly carves out a personality that’s equal parts emotional and wry; wise and impulsive. Even when she’s simply walking the halls of a Best Western, we feel like we understand this woman and grasp how her mind is being pulled in multiple directions at once. Rich with observations about the shape of stories and the various ways in which we center ourselves even in the narratives of other people, Death Valley is an exhilarating meditation on death, life, survival and how we rely on stories to get us through it all. It’s a triumph for Broder and an intensely intimate ride for readers. —Matthew Jackson

H The Caretaker By Ron Rash

Historical Fiction When Jacob Hampton returns home wounded from the Korean War, his parents couldn’t be happier. Before his conscription, they had disinherited him for marrying a poor, uneducated hotel maid who became pregnant soon after their elopement. Now that Jacob has come home, “They believed him ready at last to be their prodigal son,” writes Ron Rash in his stellar novel, The Caretaker (Doubleday, $28, 9780385544276). Jacob, however, quickly informs them, “I’m only here for my truck.” A PEN/Faulkner finalist and three-time recipient of the O. Henry Prize, Rash writes about the North Carolina mountains and their inhabitants with exceptional beauty and grace. In The Caretaker, he has created a Shakespearian plot so riveting that it begs to be read in one sitting. Rash sets up an explosive standoff between Jacob and his parents from the start, then quickly sets into motion a jaw-dropping turn of events. Rounding out the cast are Jacob’s wife, Naomi, who yearns for her husband’s return and is desperately trying to improve her third-grade reading skills as she writes to him. She is looked after by Jacob’s best friend, Blackburn Gant, who works as a caretaker on the cemetery grounds. He finds tending to the dead easier than dealing with the living, who are often repulsed by his limp and disfigured face, a remnant of polio. Rash’s prose is spare, yet piercingly sharp, whether writing about a gathering of men at the Hampton family country store or Jacob’s life-and-death battle with a North Korean soldier. Like Richard Russo, he’s a narrative maestro who creates entire communities, giving brief but meaningful backstories to characters big and small, including the town doctor, the girl whom Jacob’s parents want him to marry and the man in charge of receiving and delivering telegrams. Readers will likely find themselves galloping toward the end of this novel, but should be sure to stop to appreciate its quieter moments, such as when Naomi reflects on the oftenextraordinary beauty of an entirely ordinary day: “Maybe that was the saddest thing about life, that you couldn’t understand, not really, how good something was while living inside of it. How many such moments swept past, lost forever.” The Caretaker is an unforgettable novel of class, power, war, family, yearning and betrayal. Don’t miss it. —Alice Cary

reviews | nonfiction

H The Burning of the World By Scott W. Berg

History When the Great Fire burst forth on the evening of Sunday, October 8, 1871, Chicago had only been incorporated for 34 years. But it was already an economic powerhouse and its population had reached 300,000, more than half of them immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Germany. The city’s elite—people like merchandiser Marshall Field, “a thin, trim, unfailingly dapper man,” and timber baron and railroad executive William Butler Ogden—hailed from the eastern establishment and were leery of immigrants and fearful of common people holding political power. The Burning of the World: The Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul (Pantheon, $32, 9780804197847), Scott W. Berg’s fascinating account of the disastrous fire, is detailed and

H A Man of Two Faces By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Memoir Vietnamese refugee, American professor and acclaimed writer Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, The Sympathizer, in 2016. In both his fiction and nonfiction, he has represented the searing, often seething, always sensitive voice of the displaced, the decolonized, the erased and the marginalized: those whom he calls “The Other” in U.S. history and culture. In his memoir, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial (Grove, $28, 9780802160508), Nguyen blazes a nonlinear, literary way through the histories of Vietnam and the US, his parents’ arduous lives in each and his own struggles to find his voice as citizen, son and writer. Although the memoir neatly organizes Nguyen’s life’s trajectory, starting with his arrival at the age of four at a refugee camp in Pennsylvania, his memories are fragmented on the page. That is, until the artistry behind them becomes apparent, and then it is a sheer thrill to follow. Nguyen pushes his parents’ past traumas against the ever-bruising present. They must leave an adopted daughter behind in

often thrilling. In so many ways, the devastation could have been avoided but for a compounding of errors: a signal sending firefighters to the wrong location, firefighters exhausted and unprepared because of a large fire the day before and more. Berg describes the firefighting technologies of the day and the poor neighborhoods, shops and lumber yards that fueled the fire. Through brilliant miniature biographies of many involved—Field, newspaper editor and future mayor Joseph Medill, Army General Phil Sheridan, city alderman Charles C.P. Holden—he gives us a feel for the history and culture being consumed by the flames and the seeds of conflict that will flower after the flames are extinguished. Berg, it turns out, is just as interested in the political firestorm that followed. In his telling, the Chicago business elite seized the

Vietnam; they are shot on Christmas Eve while working in their grocery store. While Nguyen shares their fate as disrespected, underestimated “Other,” he is the only one who rails against it. For his Ba and Má fleeing their ruined homeland, America is a dream; for their son, America did the ruining during the Vietnam War, leaving his family forever torn apart. Always divided between his Vietnamese and American “faces,” Nguyen even narrates in a double voice, interjecting an introspective “you” into more straightforward threads of history, questioning everything as he lurches from childhood to his own parenthood, and on to his parents’ old age. “Be quiet,” he advises himself. “Be polite . . . But you have a character flaw. You are an ingrate.” It works as a kind of time-traveling history lesson that startles and fusses, but also endears. He “re members” and “dis remembers,” excavating and reassembling memories as if working on his family’s portrait, a pentimento of words. Yet there is no self-serving artifice here. Nguyen even includes a blistering list of The Sympathizer’s bad reviews, as well as advice from another writer that he seek therapy. His regrets run as deep as his anger and disgust. He cannot remember enough about his mother and the onset of her mental illness that would eventually destroy her. Her “war story” becomes his. He is compelled to write about her “because writing is the only way I know how to fight. And writing is the only way I know how to grieve.” —Priscilla Kipp

opportunity to wrest control of the city from a popularly elected alderman. In an election immediately after the fire, a “reform” group tried to institute measures that harmed workers. They sought to enforce a ban on alcohol sales on Sundays, the only day off for most laborers. They took control of the flood of donations pouring into the city and doled out assistance only to people who could prove their moral worth. They tried to force everyone to rebuild in brick instead of wood, a sensible-seeming measure, except that such homes were well beyond the means of many. In the following election, the elite-backed reformers were booted and the system of Chicago neighborhood politics was born. The Burning of the World is an absorbing story, and Berg, clearly a lover of rowdy Chicago, tells it well. —Alden Mudge

H The Cost of Free Land By Rebecca Clarren

History Over 20 years ago, journalist Rebecca Clarren made a life-changing faux pas. While interviewing an Oglala Lakota farmer on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Clarren mentioned that her family had once owned a ranch in South Dakota, in a place called Jew Flats. The farmer said nothing but smiled tightly, and Clarren realized that she had somehow offended him. It would take many years for her to understand fully why the presence of her family’s ranch on Jew Flats would be a source of profound skepticism, anger and sorrow to the Lakota nation. Clarren’s ancestors escaped persecution in czarist Russia to establish that South Dakota ranch in Jew Flats. They braved drought, loneliness and disease, and transformed the ranch into the wellspring of their good fortune. But there is a dark flip side to this Horatio Alger story: The land, far from free, was paid for in the blood and grief of the Lakota Sioux, who had initially lived there. In The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance (Viking, $32, 9780593655078) Clarren interweaves the story of her family with the timeline of the U.S. policy

reviews | nonfiction of destroying the American Indian nations. She documents in harrowing detail not only the many ways the government lied to, battled against and outright stole from the Indigenous peoples, but also how her family, and many others like them, directly benefited from these depredations. The injustices committed by the government against Native people are so vast and comprehensive that their reverberations are still felt—and Clarren makes a strong case that all non-Indigenous U.S. residents benefit directly or indirectly from them to this day. If telling this history were Clarren’s sole goal, it would be worthy and timely, but this book is far more ambitious. Drawing on Jewish traditions of reconciliation, Clarren seeks to find a path for meaningful reconciliation and reparation for the harm done to Native people. Her present-day family provides a remarkable model for compensation, repentance and transformation that can begin to heal the wounds from our past. —Deborah Mason

were created primarily to suppress Black people. As Shane notes, the usual narrative of the underground railroad tells of tiny groups fleeing on foot, aided by white sympathizers. Smallwood’s and Torrey’s efforts were bolder and more open, involving crowded cities, wagons, boats and actual rail cars, with helpers—and betrayers— as likely to be free Blacks as whites. It couldn’t last. Smallwood and Torrey had to part ways for safety, but both wrote memoirs. Torrey and his supporters never once mentioned Smallwood; Smallwood never once denigrated Torrey. Torrey was a brave, if reckless, man, but Shane’s hero is Smallwood, whose calculated daring, wit and foresight still inspire. —Anne Bartlett

heartbreaking read as Cross captures the terror and sadness the Polly Klaas case evoked 30 years ago. Polly’s mother, Eve Nichol, held out hope until her daughter was found, lighting a candle in the window each evening. “You can’t grow a new heart,” she said. “But when you have a big piece torn away, you can either fill it with anger and rage, or you can fill it with love. I just have to try and choose love.” —Amy Scribner

In Light of All Darkness

H Flee North

The Polly Klaas case captured America’s attention in the fall of 1993. It was uniquely horrifying: A lovely 12-year-old girl kidnapped at knifepoint from her own bedroom while her two friends watched helplessly. Polly was missing for two months before her body was recovered near an abandoned sawmill outside of Petaluma, California. The media couldn’t get enough: A child disappeared without a trace from the safety of her home. The story was on the cover of People and featured on “America’s Most Wanted.” Petaluma native Winona Ryder offered a reward for Polly’s return. Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, a bereft man desperate to find his only daughter, made supporting families of missing children his life’s work and appeared in scores of interviews. In this deeply compelling and carefully reported book, journalist Kim Cross examines why the Polly Klaas case struck such a chord and the lasting impact it has had on investigative techniques. Through dozens of interviews, Cross dives into the nascent use of DNA as a means of identifying and ruling out suspects, and how the Klaas case informed behavioral science used to profile unknown subjects. The case also changed how child witnesses were treated. The two friends—who were at Polly’s house that night for a sleepover—were subjected to repeated harsh interrogations and lie detector tests in the weeks after the kidnapping. This sparked a national conversation among law enforcement officials, leading to trained child interviewers and a new set of protocols to protect children who witness crimes. In Light of All Darkness (Grand Central, $32.50, 9781538725061) is a fascinating and

Nowadays, it’s common to see advertisements for all manner of sleep-related products, from sleep trackers to CPAP machines to sunrise alarm clocks. Similarly, it’s not unusual for people to enthusiastically discuss sleep hygiene, circadian rhythms or owl vs. lark tendencies. Self-awareness is a beautiful thing, but how did we get here? After all, as Discover magazine contributor Kenneth Miller reveals in his engrossing Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep (Hachette, $32.50, 9780306924958), “Just a century ago, only a handful of scientists studied sleep. . . . Most saw slumber as a nonevent,” something that “could be safely minimized or eliminated altogether.” But there were outliers, Miller explains, academics who knew sleep was not merely a pause but rather the precious foundation of our waking hours. In Mapping the Darkness, the author has crafted linked biographies of four groundbreaking scientists—Nathan Kleitman, Eugene Aserinksy, William Dement and Mary Carskadon—and the ways in which their discoveries resulted in our present-day understanding of sleep. In 1938, Kleitman and colleagues lived in a Kentucky cave for a month to examine sleep cycles. Over 20 years later, in the 1960s, Dement set up a cat-filled lab in a Quonset hut near Stanford University to focus on REM sleep. The fruits of these experiments and the research they subsequently inspired were helpful in analyzing root causes of the 1986 Challenger space shuttle tragedy (sleep deprivation was a contributing factor) and understanding teenagers’ need for more sleep than their younger counterparts. Among many other topics, Miller also chronicles research into the impact of shift work on sleep, treatments for sleep apnea and important sleep-related studies Carskadon is conducting today. But while knowledge is certainly power,

By Scott Shane

History As political tension over slavery grew in early 19th-century America, flashpoints were most likely to occur not in the Deep South or North, but in the borderlands, where the enslaved lived within striking distance of freedom. These borderlands were the stomping grounds of a free Black shoemaker named Thomas Smallwood, who ought to be as famous as the remarkable Harriet Tubman. Over just a couple of years in the 1840s, he helped hundreds of enslaved people escape from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. He wrote vivid, funny abolitionist polemics under a pseudonym derived from a Dickens character. And he was the first to write of the escape network as the “underground railroad”—initially as a joke at the expense of the slave-catchers. New York Times journalist Scott Shane brings Smallwood’s story to much-warranted wider attention in Flee North (Celadon, $30, 9781250843210), an exciting narrative of Smallwood’s partnership with Charles Torrey, a radical white abolitionist. For a short but fruitful time, the two stayed ahead of enemies like the major Baltimore trafficker Hope Slatter. Shane depicts an unsettled world where no Black person could live without crushing anxiety. The free could be kidnapped and enslaved; the enslaved could be sold south on a whim to hellish cotton-growing labor camps. Police departments

By Kim Cross

True Crime

Mapping the Darkness By Kenneth Miller

Science

reviews | nonfiction he cautions that we’re still experiencing “society’s ongoing, and ever-escalating, assault on sleep” due to digital devices, poor work habits and more. The impressive work of reportage that is Mapping the Darkness is an impassioned reminder to appreciate the researchers whose work has transformed our slumber—and do our best to give sleep the respect and attention it deserves. —Linda M. Castellitto

H How to Say Babylon By Safiya Sinclair

Memoir With unparalleled lyricism and a command of language only a poet could possess, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, $28.99, 9781982132330) re c o u nt s Sa f i ya Sinclair’s life as a Rastafarian child raised under the oppressive and patriarchal rule of her father. While providing a contextual background on Rastafari—a religious movement and cultural community many have heard of, but few outsiders understand—Jamaican-born Sinclair tells the story of her and her siblings’ upbringing of isolation, fear and poverty. Shining a spotlight on the persecution and unwanted attention her unorthodox upbringing garnered in Jamaica, in addition to the acts of racism running rampant in the Western world, Sinclair describes acts of ignorance and cruelty from a perspective so close, you can feel her wounds. How to Say Babylon contemplates matters of race and religion, of class and equality, of identity and womanhood, through an unforgettable voice that’s unflinchingly raw and powerful. The beacon of light throughout this often tragic narrative is Sinclair’s journey to her vocation as a writer. With rich descriptions that feel languid and decadent, each sentence should be consumed like a meal—filled with literary nutrition and poetic garnishes that’ll leave Sinclair’s fellow writers begging for the recipe. Inhabiting a space between poetry and prose, with the very best elements of both on display, How to Say Babylon is truly a poet’s memoir. A story of Black womanhood that grips the reader through its obvious feat of craft and its captivating storytelling, the style of Sinclair’s work is utterly unique, including phonetic dialogue that brings Jamaica’s Rastafarian world to life. How to Say Babylon also considers the power of literature and education, the strength and perseverance of familial bonds and the complex notion of identity for people of color worldwide.

Above all, the pages of How to Say Babylon should be savored like the final sip of an expensive wine—with deference, realizing that a story of this magnitude comes along all too infrequently. —Rachel Hoge

Wild Girls

By Tiya Miles

History Tiya Miles’ beautiful new book, Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation (Norton, $22, 9781324020875), opens with a provocative suggestion: Being outdoors—experiencing unfettered, wide, risky and exciting natural environs—can open one up in unique ways that defy gendered expectations. A professor of history at Harvard whose previous award-winning work has explored interconnections between African American and Native American histories, Miles first became interested in the way the outdoors could propel women and girls toward freedom and a fuller expression of self upon considering that Minty Ross, better known as Harriet Tubman, would have had “a pronounced ecological consciousness.” Her first chapter, “Star Gazers,” takes a close look at Tubman’s youth and the childhoods of two other enslaved girls, all of whom witnessed the same meteor shower. Miles considers the differing expectations for African American girls (strong field workers or docile house servants), Native American girls (“Indian princesses” who were seen as mythically connected to idealized landscapes, or young adolescents sent to boarding schools for forced assimilation) and white girls, most notably Louisa May Alcott, whose wide-ranging outdoor experiences made her able to create a gender-deviating character like Josephine March. Miles connects these historical women in what she calls “a newly conjoined cast of historical actors who navigated their social world differently because of their experiences in the outdoor world.” Alongside miniature portraits of more wellknown historical figures, Miles’ leaves space for lesser-known girls, such as the astonishingly accomplished Native girls’ basketball team at Fort Shaw. Miles also shares her own story of walking across the icy Ohio River and standing in a meadow when she was young, which felt “big, so big, all-encompassing, like my idea of an ocean.” If you, like Miles, were once a girl who found an expansive sense of wonder and possibility in wild spaces, this is a book to savor. —Kelly Blewett

Unreliable Narrator By Aparna Nancherla

Memoir The Buddha once said, “Be a lamp unto yourself.” This nugget of wisdom, which came to mind while reading comedian Aparna Nancherla’s collection of memoir-type essays, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome (Viking, $28.00, 9781984879806), may help to provide a reflective frame for readers as they peruse its pages. The American-born daughter of Indian immigrants, Nancherla has spent years toiling as a writer of comedy and a stand-up comic. But she has always felt fraudulent about being “a so-called comedian” and, at age 40, about having achieved a notable measure of success. Nancherla had tried to cope with her lifelong struggle with low self-worth through remedies such as medications, therapy, meditation and more, but she finally turned to writing to see if that would ease her impostor syndrome and the constant feeling that she is merely “a shadow” self (even though a therapist tells her “‘So what if you’re a fraud? Is that the worst thing?”). Nancherla presents honest, intimate, strikingly astute and well-researched essays about her mental state and overall psychological health, but be prepared for intermittent jolts of dark, sarcastic humor that line the author’s trail of self-exploration through her impostor syndrome, or, as she says, “an identity I’ve embraced without question my entire life.” These humorous insertions sometimes have the effect of distracting the reader from the main thrust of Nancherla’s refreshingly insightful commentaries, which put her mental health in broader context through discussions of the internet and social media; the struggles of people of color and immigrants, especially, to assimilate into and be accepted within American culture and society; and the difficulties, hazards and hard-won successes of a life in stand-up comedy. Overall, the subject of impostor syndrome, beyond a brief treatment in her first chapter (“Now That I’ve Got You Here”), ends up not being the main focus of Nancherla’s journey: It is her deep dive into her interior life that instead takes center stage. A realization in Nancherla’s epilogue alone makes this first-time memoir a worthy read. It’s an encouragement to those of us (and our numbers are legion) who are beset or traumatized by mental health woes to never give up trying to be “a lamp unto yourself.” —Alison Hood

reviews | young adult

H The Prince and the Coyote By David Bowles Illustrated by Amanda Mijangos

Historical Fiction The crown prince Acolmiztli is determined to see his kingdom of Acolhuacan flourish with art, innovation, architecture and poetry. But the war between Acolhuacan and Mexico grows increasingly fierce. When a brutal attack leaves his father dead and his mother and siblings missing, Acolmiztli escapes into the wilderness and takes on a new name: Nezahualcoyotl, which means “fasting coyote.” Faced with cruel enemies, natural dangers and haunting memories, Acolmiztli must choose to either embrace a new life or find a way to reclaim his kingdom. The Prince and the Coyote (Levine Querido, $19.99, 9781646141777) is an intense and moving epic based on the life of Nezahualcoyotl, an influential and artistic Mesoamerican leader.

A Study in Drowning By Ava Reid

Fantasy 18-year-old Effy Sayre has read the late Emrys Myrddin’s books “so many times that the logic of his world was layered over hers.” Emrys is the country of Llyr’s most beloved author, and his novel Angharad has long served as a balm for Effy’s troubled soul and a source of support on her darkest days. As Ava Reid’s darkly dramatic A Study in Drowning (HarperTeen, $19.99, 9780063211506) opens, readers are swiftly drawn into Effy’s miserable life in her first year at Llyr University. Because its literature college doesn’t admit women, she’s a reluctant architecture student adrift in a sea of snide, unfriendly men. Meanwhile, nightmarish visions of the Fairy King that have plagued her since childhood exacerbate her anxiety. Hope arrives when Myrddin’s family begins searching for someone to redesign their estate, Hiraeth Manor. This feels like fate to Effy—especially when she wins the competition to secure this daunting project and sets off for Myrddin’s cliff side hometown, the Bay of Nine Bells. Thanks to Reid’s knack for atmospheric, immersive writing—as seen in her adult fantasy novels, The Wolf and the Woodsman and Juniper

David Bowles weaves together history and fiction in a rich story of political intrigue, ferocious battles, beautiful landscapes and the enduring hope of humanity. The novel dares to be detailed and unflinching in its descriptions of violence and grief, while also luxuriating in depictions of natural beauty, man-made wonders and cherished relationships. Fast-paced prose is interspersed with expressive songs written by Acolmiztli that paint vivid pictures of his emotions as he grows from an idealistic child into an experienced, wise leader. Bowles gives Acolmiztli a sharp, honest voice that’s sure to draw readers in. Just as the Temple of Duality stands high above Acolmiztli’s hometown of Teztcoco as a

symbol of the coexistence of ideas, this nuanced novel challenges binary thinking. Acolmiztli’s tutor, Izcalloh, is a xochihuah, a queer gender in Nahua culture. Acolmiztli himself comes from two hostile kingdoms: His Acolhua father and Mexica mother risked everything to be together. As Acolmiztli undergoes different life experiences, his perspectives on leadership, faith, death, sexuality and lifestyle shift. The Prince and the Coyote asks readers to reevaluate their preconceived notions and ultimately put love and respect for all humankind first. The story of Nezahualcoyotl comes to life in this breathtaking retelling that feels both legendary and human. —Tami Orendain

& Thorn—humidity seems to rise from the page as Effy adapts to her strange new reality. Not only is Hiraeth Manor on the verge of crumbling into the sea, but another Llyr University student is on-site: the self-important Preston Heloury, who is ostensibly there for an archival task— but asks Effy to join his true mission to debunk Myrddin’s authorship of Angharad. Readers will delight in the scholars’ slow-burn attraction as they delve into Myrddin’s complicated legacy. Reid uses the characters’ clashing worldviews to prompt readers to consider the ways in which power structures affect what we learn and believe. A Study in Drowning is at once an absorbing gothic mystery and an intriguing social commentary set in a richly detailed world where history and magic collide. —Linda M. Castellitto

ensuing scars—both psychological and physical—while Layla dodged press and obsessive fans, known as V-heads. Then, Layla suddenly vanished. Now, five years after the film’s release, Sophia returns to Cashore House under the guise of starring in a documentary about Layla. But Sophia knows that Cashore has something to do with Layla’s absence. Katya de Becerra’s third young adult novel, When Ghosts Call Us Home (Page Street, $18.99, 9781645679639), is a gothic, spiraling ghost story that draws inspiration from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Unlike many others, de Becerra sidesteps typical retelling structures, allowing her book to be bolstered by the original rather than restrictively tied to it. As Sophia reenacts key scenes from Vermillion and is pulled deeper into the shrouded lore of Cashore, her memories begin to blur. Sophia’s first-person perspective provides intimacy while holding true to hallmarks of unreliable narration. Girl and ghost become more closely intertwined, and Sophia becomes less trustworthy—both to herself and to the reader. This is unfortunately where the book suffers: de Becerra’s prose is at times overworked and redundant, which undercuts moments of fear. Regardless, When Ghosts Call Us Home is a satisfying and imaginative haunted house story that uses its influences to great effect. Fans of books like Marisha Pessl’s Night Film and horror movies like The Ring will undoubtedly make themselves right at home in Cashore House. —Mariel Fechik

When Ghosts Call Us Home By Katya de Becerra

Horror As a child, Sophia Galich starred in her sister Layla’s viral horror film, Vermillion, about a demonic entity supposedly haunting Cashore House, the seaside mansion their parents were renovating. In the years afterward, Sophia grappled with the

interview | bob odenkirk & erin odenkirk

A treasure chest of family poems

You’d know the sound of Bob Odenkirk’s voice anywhere: its punchy, dexterous cadence has captivated audiences for decades, from his earlier days hosting the sketch comedy series “Mr. Show” to his legendary turn as smarmy yet sympathetic criminal lawyer Saul Goodman on “Breaking Bad” and its prequel, “Better Call Saul.” It turns out that same voice is also perfectly suited for reading children’s poems, which Odenkirk demonstrates on a video call by right from when they were little, launching into an effortless impreswhy don’t I write a poem with the sion of a nasally, feeble-voiced kids after we read five books.” Bob doctor character he once used to made sure his children saw him write down each poem in a book entertain his daughter, illustrator Erin Odenkirk, and her brother, that he called Old Time Rhymes. Nate Odenkirk. “Has the child had Erin would grow up to obtain a enough hot fudge?” he croaks. Bachelor of Fine Arts in Critical and Erin, joining the call from Visual Studies from Pratt Institute Brooklyn, says it was “the silliin New York, and Old Time Rhymes est thing you’ve ever heard when remained in her thoughts. Then along came COVID-19. “I had to you’re 6.” Dr. Bluestone, who thinks kids need to eat more sweets, is part come home from college during the of the memopandemic, as rable cast that a lot of people populates did,” Erin says. Zilot & Other “I was just sitI m p o r ta nt ting around Rhymes, an in my room illustrated . . . So my dad poetry coltook initiative lection that and pulled B o b, his [Old Time wife, Naomi Rhymes] out.” Odenkirk, For Erin, and their i l l u s t ra t i n g children Zilot meant s t a r t e d returning to around 20 the poems years ago with an adult perspecwhen, after a H Zilot & Other Important Rhymes tive: “I was few years of Little, Brown, $19.99, 9780316438506 reading sevsurprised to find just how eral picture Poetry unabashedly books every night, Bob considered how to fursilly and creative they were . . . You ther help his young children feel lose some of that as you get older, empowered as creators. “One of the and you start to believe you never things that I feel held me back in were that way. It was really sweet to my journey was just believing that go back and find that sort of childhood rawness.” writing or being a director or being an actor was allowed—that it was a Erin let go of a darker art style for possibility for me . . . So I thought, warmer colors in Zilot. Working on

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bob Odenkirk and his daughter, Erin Odenkirk, revisited poems they had written decades earlier.

children’s poems was also a sharp deviation for Bob, who was busy portraying the consequences of Jimmy McGill’s moral corrosion for the ruminative final season of “Better Call Saul”: “I need to be sort of singularly focused . . . I wasn’t so

able to work on ‘Saul’ and then just go home and write Zilot poems. I needed to have these breaks where I was able to refocus myself.” Fundamentally a writer, Bob sees similarities between Zilot’s poems and the comedy sketches that got him started in show business. “They’re short pieces; they have a comedy concept. They have a journey. If you do them right, there’s a bit of an arc to them.” Ultimately, Bob and Erin would like readers to know: “Please have a laugh. We wrote it for you to laugh at it and smile. We hope you will try things: write your own poems, invent your own words and draw your own drawings.” —Yi Jiang

Visit BookPage.com to read an extended version of this interview and our starred review of Zilot & Other Important Rhymes.

reviews | children’s

H Remember Us By Jacqueline Woodson

Middle Grade Remember Us (Nancy Paulsen, $18.99, 9780399545467) packs an understated but powerful punch. National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson’s lyrical coming-ofage novel is set in Brooklyn, New York, during the 1970s, when people called Bushwick “the Matchbox” because so many houses and buildings were burning down—some purposely set on fire by their own landlords in hopes of collecting insurance money. Although Remember Us is fiction, Woodson notes in an afterword that the novel is inspired by her own childhood: “We knew people who had lost their homes to fire, and my family worried about our own house going up in flames.” For 12-year-old narrator Sage, who dreams of becoming the first woman player in the NBA, seventh grade is “the year when, one by one, the buildings on Palmetto melted into a mass of

H A Cloud in a Jar

By Aaron Lewis Krol Illustrated by Carlos Vélez Aguilera

Picture Book Upon opening A Cloud in a Jar (Page Street, $18.99, 9781645679936), this reviewer let out an audible gasp at the deep blues and blacks of the midnight sky and crashing ocean that saturate the pages with edge-toedge colors. Across the endsheet, a mysterious, cluttered cityscape collides with itself. A Cloud in a Jar’s first stanza will hook readers as two intrepid kids and one less intrepid cat set off in a boat to bring rain (via a captured cloud) to the lovely seaside town of Firelight Bay, where they have everything but rain. The three adventurers make their way across the water to fulfill their mission aided by their wit, a coat full of useful items, and a little bit of the fantastic. A departure from rhymes traditionally aimed at children, Aaron Lewis Krol’s verse has an elevated, sophisticated feel that is further enhanced by eloquent alliteration, poetic similes and an intelligent vocabulary. This entertaining, not quite tongue-twisting read-aloud pulls you along like waves toward an unknown shore. Carlos Vélez Aguilera’s fantastic and energetic multimedia art is an endless feast for the eyes and an invitation to explore. The dark and

rock and ash and crumbled plaster.” It’s also the year that she befriends Freddy, who shares her love of basketball. Sage’s deep sense of nostalgia intertwines with a palpable fear of those fires, which act as a metaphor for Sage’s recognition that her body and her world are changing: The present is constantly turning into the “once was.” Sage and her mother live in the boyhood home of Sage’s late father, who belonged to the Vulcan Society (a fraternity of Black firemen) and died in a fire. Although Sage hardly remembers him, she cherishes using his basketball. “He, too, was a part of the once was,” she muses. “And soon I’d be part of the once was of Bushwick,

of my block, of the park and the hundreds of basketball games I’d played there.” Remember Us has the feel of a new classic, ageless in its universal themes while wonderfully rendering a specific time and place. The pure magic of this novel is that Woodson somehow makes readers feel as though they are experiencing these moments of growing up along with Sage. Woodson flawlessly intersperses explosive moments—and games of basketball—among quiet, reflective scenes while responding to Sage’s weighty fears with reassurance about the permanence of loving memories. —Alice Cary

imposing oceans and skies are just the right amount of scary. Intricate details such as lightning over the city, prints on a handkerchief and the aforementioned cloud in a jar will keep readers scanning the pages. A Cloud in the Jar has everything: clever narration, a straightforward message about bravery and determination, and brilliant artwork. This tale of innovative adventurers is engrossing and a true delight to read out loud. —Jill Lorenzini

images and the memories themselves feel almost dreamlike as they evoke joy and thrills, anxiety and melancholy. After the boy and mother take turns sharing memories, the boy somberly asks, “Do you remember . . . leaving our home behind?” “Of course I remember,” his mother replies. As the landscape changes from hills and hay bales and fields of wildflowers to cityscapes and traffic jams, Smith’s illustrations subtly reveal changes not only in the environment but also in the family itself. Whether you have experienced a move, a change in your family or even just a stroll down memory lane, this nostalgic tale will find its way into your heart as it reminds us that our memories will guide us through the changes of life. Sydney Smith beautifully captures all the fear and hope that comes with change in this heartfelt picture book about remembering and starting anew. —Callie Ann Starkey

Do You Remember? By Sydney Smith

Picture Book At first glance, Do You Remember? (Neal Porter, $18.99, 9780823442621) seems to simply be a story of a mother and son sharing fond memories. But look closer and each memory deeply reveals a piece of their life together: the excitement of berry-picking at a picnic, the woes of learning to ride a bike, the tension and darkness of a rainstorm. As in his previous Ezra Jack Keats Awardwinning picture book Small in the City and the acclaimed I Talk Like A River written by Jordan Scott, author and illustrator Sydney Smith uses ethereal watercolors to enhance his lyrical text and beautifully bring each memory to life. The

H Scroll By Hui Li

Picture Book Grandpa is teaching Lulu and her dog, Dumpling, the art of drawing ancient Chinese characters. But when

reviews | children’s Grandpa dozes off, Lulu draws the character for door—which becomes a real portal to a fantastic adventure. It’s a good thing Lulu paid close attention to Grandpa’s lessons, because she is going to need her new skills to save the day. Written and illustrated by Hui Li, Scroll (Christy Ottaviano, $18.99, 9780316340731) is a beautifully drawn, cleverly told tale of bravery and wit. Artistically, Scroll is one of the most unique books on shelves today. Li uses a combination of multiple media on watercolor paper to create a soft, welcoming backdrop. When Lulu and Dumpling go through the door into a magical village, Li’s art shifts from simply charming to mesmerizing. The village’s boats, houses, fish, nets and people are full of life, each one stunningly wrought from ancient Chinese characters. The narration is carried by simple and forthright dialogue as Lulu talks herself through each challenge, which helps the reader feel like part of the journey. Both the front and back matter give an intriguing peek into the rich history of Chinese language, but ultimately, Li’s story is accessible even without any prior knowledge.

Scroll is deceptively modest, starting with its cover, which depicts a writing lesson that blossoms into one of the most unique stories of the year—one that is as educational as it is entertaining. As Lulu discovers, wonders await those who take a chance and dive in. —Jill Lorenzini

I’m From

By Gary R. Gray Jr. Illustrated by Oge Mora

Picture Book A young unnamed Black boy wakes up on an ordinary school day, eager to enjoy his favorite breakfast: “pan-fried bologna, homemade pancakes, strawberry jam.” He hugs his dog, endures a raucous school bus ride and settles in at school. But his unremarkable day is disrupted by insensitive, likely routine remarks from his classmates, who try to box him into

prescriptive categories: “Can I touch your hair? . . . You don’t sound Black . . . Do you play basketball? . . . Where are you from?” In I’m From (Balzer + Bray, $19.99, 9780063089969), the protagonist is from all the things he loves: notebooks, caramel candy squares and late-night belly laughs. He feels most at home when he’s drawing pictures of himself and his dog as superheroes, and when he’s in the warm embrace of his family. They give the boy a sense of purpose and belonging, which allows him to fall asleep warm and secure under “handcrafted blankets, knitted with memories.” Illustrator Oge Mora depicts all this with bold, warm colors and patterns. Her artwork—created with a mix of paint, collage, markers, airbrush and other media—echoes author Gary R. Gray Jr.’s heartfelt words. Harsh colors and shapes mirror the emotional impact of the classmates’ sharp words, but the words of affirmation from the boy’s family are set amid a culminating, joyful spiral of swirling purples and magentas that carry him as high as his imagination can reach. This buoyant story of everyday love and frustrations will comfort readers who just want to be valued for who they are. —Norah Piehl

feature | meet the author

meet PHÙNG NGUYÊN QUANG & HUYNH KIM LIÊN

hùng Nguyên Quang and Huỳnh Kim Liên are married book creators who live and work in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Their first book released in the United States, My First Day, received five starred reviews, including one from BookPage calling it a “propulsive, cinematic story.” Quang and Liên are inspired by the folk culture of Vietnam and other parts of Asia, and they create their artwork using a mix of watercolor, acrylic and digital media. My Grandfather’s Song (Make Me a World, $18.99, 9780593488614) tells the story of Tí and his grandfather as they sail in a tiny boat to a new land of lush marshes and jungles reminiscent of south Vietnam, and build a home there.

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