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feb. 2012
america’s book review
a good american
Music and joy in a stirring immigrant story page 15
HOME FRONT Kristin Hannah on heroism, honor and hope page 19
A heroine’s journey from Scotland to Iceland in search of love and happiness
a m od er n ta k e o n th e classic
Jane Eyre
Now find us on Nook newsstand!
paperback picks penguin.com
Against All Enemies
The Duchess Diaries
A drug war rages between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels. The landscape is strewn with bodies, innocents and drug dealers alike. Into this deadly brew, Max Moore leads a group of specially selected agents whose daring actions reveal shocking answers and uncover an unholy plan—a strike against the very heart of America.
As headmistress of the Scarfield Academy for Young Ladies, Miss Charlotte Boscastle is tasked with keeping her charges free from notoriety. But when Charlotte’s diary goes missing, she can’t imagine having her most intimate secrets fall into the wrong hands.
9780425246061 • $9.99
9780451413123 • $7.99
Lucky Penny To support her orphaned niece, impoverished Brianna O’Keefe accepts work with a Colorado rancher. To guard herself from unwanted attention, she resorts to a harmless little lie: that she’s married to a Denver gold miner named David Paxton. But when her “husband” shows up, Brianna is stunned—not the least by her desire… 9780451236036 • $7.99
Night Vision The Red Citrus Trailer Park is inhabited mostly by illegal laborers. The park manager and his girlfriend want to sell the park for some easy money. Then a young girl witnesses the manager dumping a corpse into a lake, and he knows she has to be silenced—permanently. 9780425245750 • $9.99
The Nosferatu Scroll
River Marked
A Scandalous Countess
The Secret Soldier
Chris Bronson and Angela Lewis discover a desecrated tomb containing a female skeleton and a diary. The pages tell of a scroll that holds the key to answering an ancient secret. When Angela vanishes, Bronson is drawn into the hunt for a demented murderer and into a deadly conspiracy hundreds of years in the making.
Being a different breed of shapeshifter—a walker—Mercy Thompson can see ghosts. An evil is stirring in the depths of the Columbia River—and innocent people are dying. As other walkers make their presence known, she must reconnect with her heritage to exorcise the world of the legend known as the river devil…
Lady May is back. And so is the scandal that sent her tumbling from her position as the toast of London, when her husband, the Earl of Maybury, was killed in a duel. Even a year of mourning hasn’t quieted the rumors of her infidelity…
In Saudi Arabia, a series of terrorist attacks has put the Kingdom on edge. King Abdullah is losing his hold, and his own secret police cannot be trusted. With nowhere to turn, the king asks for ex-CIA agent John Wells’s help. Wells begins to unravel the conspiracy, and realizes that there is more than one country at stake.
9780451236197 • $9.99
9780441020003 • $7.99
9780451236043 • $7.99
9780515150346 • $9.99
The “delightful” (People) New York Times bestseller that’s earned raves— the story of three sisters who love each other, but just don’t happen to like each other very much… Three sisters have returned to their childhood home, reuniting the eccentric Andreas family. Here, books are a passion and TV is something other people watch. Their father—a professor of Shakespeare who speaks almost exclusively in verse—named them after the Bard’s heroines. It’s a lot to live up to. The sisters have a hard time communicating with their parents and their lovers, but especially with one another. What can the shy homebody eldest sister, the fast-living middle child, and the bohemian youngest sibling have in common? Only that none has found life to be what was expected; and now, faced with their parents’ frailty and their own personal disappointments, not even a book can solve what ails them... BERKLEY
9780425244142 • $15.00
A Penguin Group (USA) Company
NOW IN PAPERBACK
contents
february 2012 w w w. B o o k Pa g e . c o m
features
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10 spotlight: romance Three sizzling new series for chilly nights
cover story
margot livesey
Inspired by Jane Eyre, Margot Livesey creates a fully realized heroine for the postwar generation
15 alex george On becoming an American
Cover photo © iStockphoto.com/MGTS
19 true love stories The travails and triumphs of real-life love
19 kristin hannah Meet the author of Home Front
21 spotlight: short stories New releases from two masters of the form
28 black history for young readers Telling the stories of those who forged a new path to freedom and equality
29 jacqueline woodson Finding hope after great tragedy
31 maira kalman Meet the author-illustrator of Looking at Lincoln
departments 04 audio
reviews 20 Fiction
25 NonFiction
top pick:
30 Children’s
top pick:
The Underside of Joy by Seré Prince Halverson also reviewed: The Odds: A Love Story by Stewart O’Nan; Bond Girl by Erin Duffy; History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason; The Lost Saints of Tennessee by Amy Franklin-Willis; No One Is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel; The House I Loved by Tatiana de Rosnay; The Rebel Wife by Taylor M. Polites; The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey; Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea by Morgan Callan Rogers; A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson
top pick:
Gypsy Boy by Mikey Walsh also reviewed: Sister Queens by Julia Fox; Quiet by Susan Cain; Mr. and Mrs. Madison’s War by Hugh Howard; Immortal Bird by Doron Weber; The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O’Connor; Our Black Year by Maggie Anderson; Going Solo by Eric Klinenberg
Kindred Souls by Patricia MacLachlan also reviewed: When Blue Met Egg by Lindsay Ward; Mr. and Mrs. Bunny— Detectives Extraordinaire! by Polly Horvath; The Disenchantments by Nina LaCour; There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff
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04 author enablers 05 book clubs 06 book fortunes 06 cooking 07 whodunit 09 lifestyles 11 romance 12 well read
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columns BLACK MASK LIVES It was the butt-end of a dull day. Otto Penzler, the mastermind behind Mysterious Press, slouched into my office. He was dressed to the nines, armored in Armani, hoping to hide his penchant for pulp and need for noir. “Got a job for you,” he muttered, “big job. I’m resurrecting Black Mask, putting the best of it on audio for the first time.” BLACK MASK! The apotheosis (yeah, a tough P.I. knows some fancy words, too) of American crime fiction, the iconic mag that first published Hammett, Chandler and MacDonald. I was thrilled. I’d be there for Penzler as he made the cut, picked
out the classic hard-boiled sleuths and their crafty, curvy dames. It could get rough, but somebody had to do it. Now, Penzler has done it and we have four volumes of unabridged stories, read by top-notch performers. The latest, Black Mask Stories 4: The Parrot That Wouldn’t Talk (Highbridge, $29.95, 7 hours, ISBN 9781611744675), is out now. Black Mask Stories 5 will be out next month and there are six more in the Penzler pipeline.
GOING TO WAR
4
It took Karl Marlantes 30 years to write Matterhorn, his highly acclaimed Vietnam War novel, but he wrote What It Is Like to Go to War (Blackstone Audio, $34.95, 9 hours, ISBN 9781455114115) more quickly. Perhaps, after all those years of pondering and analyzing his experience in Vietnam, he was able to distill the essence of what he had gone through into a cogent portrayal of what a soldier feels and thinks and how, after a day or a decade, he processes combat. Marlantes both describes and prescribes. He offers a vivid account of his own feelings of “deep savage joy” and despair, and
audio
author enablers
by sukey howard
by kathi kamen goldmark & Sam Barry
shares his considered ideas on how to prepare young men to become warriors with a moral compass, to deal with chaos and violence, to come home with their psyches less ravaged. This should be required listening for everyone touched by war—and that’s all of us.
TOP PICK IN AUDIO The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach’s much-lauded debut novel, gamely read by Holter Graham, is as satisfying as a bases-loaded homer and executed with all the craft of a triple-play. It’s a great baseball novel, the kind that conjures up the excitement of the game so accurately that I found myself holding my breath, praying for a hit, a catch, a tag. Then I realized that that same involvement extended to all the non-baseball situations as well, that I really cared about all the characters, those who play ball and those who don’t. Harbach writes about friendship, growing up, dependence, independence, strength, vulnerability and love with as much insight and skill as he writes about fielding a ground ball. The book is set at a small college in Wisconsin, and centers, sort of, on the rise and fall and rise of Henry Skrimshander, a small, skinny kid from South Dakota who can play shortstop with errorless, feline grace, who lives for baseball and who discovers, as do his complex and appealing comrades, that missteps are part of life, that they have consequences and that you can play through them.
The art of fielding By Chad Harbach Hachette Audio $26.98, 16 hours ISBN 9781611132106
DEBUT FICTION
Practical advice on writing and publishing for aspiring authors
KEEP PLUGGING Dear Author Enablers, I’ve written two novels. After completing my first book, it took me nine months to find an agent and I thought my troubles were over. Right. My agent asked if I had a second book. I didn’t, but said I did and started writing that day. She didn’t sell the first one. She loved the second one, but didn’t sell that one, either. . . . I liked her, and she liked me. Nevertheless, I ended the relationship. I finally self-published the first book, Afterthought, [and] sent the second one out to a few publishers. Some response, no action. I am deep into a third novel. Any suggestions? Janet Clare Los Angeles, CA Fiction is hard to sell in the current market. We suggest that you not give up on working with an agent. You’ve only had one, and the result, while disappointing, is not unusual. Crackerjack agents in their prime can fail to sell a first novel. It’s a tough thing to do. Use your experience to find an agent who has an active track record of selling novels in your genre and try, try again.
Short is not a bad thing—it can even work to your advantage—as long as the book is designed well and priced appropriately. Humor is also a selling point, although humor about weight can be tricky. (Just ask Sam about the last time Kathi asked, “Do these pants make me look fat?”) You should continue to look for an agent, but if you have no luck, you might try selling this idea directly to publishers who specialize in either health and wellness or humor. If you go this route, you’ll need to create a formal nonfiction book proposal (if you haven’t done so already).
craft of writing spotlight
Dear Author Enablers, I am a full-time freelance writer and have just written a short, perhaps semi-novelty book called 110 Reasons Why It’s Not Your Fault If You’re Fat. It’s based on five years of research I’ve done as the lead writer for the website CalorieLab, which deals with diet, obesity, fitness and exercise. The information in my book is all legit, documented and written in a humorous tone. But it’s only 20,000 words long, and no agent so far has been interested. Does this simply sound like a goofball concept with no likely takers? Bob Wieder San Francisco, CA
From Roy Peter Clark, author of Writing Tools, The Glamour of Grammar and Help! For Writers: “The best tip I ever received on how to become a successful author came from the late Donald Murray, one of America’s great writing teachers. He said, so simply, ‘Remember, a page a day equals a book a year.’ Now there aren’t too many writers around who create a book a year. My rate recently has been a book every two or three years. But it’s not the outcome that is most important, it’s the method: one page per day. The page doesn’t have to be good or interesting or worthy of publication. What that page (250 words, one double-spaced piece of paper) does is to feed your habit as a writer. You want writing to became a habit, not a job, not a chore, not a responsibility; not something you do every month or so, but something you do every day. If you exercise a half hour a day, you will be a very fit person. If you write every day (and forgive yourself those occasions when you don’t), you will become a very fit writer. Now get to writing!”
There is always a market for books on weight issues and health, and we think your idea sounds saleable.
Email your questions about writing to authorenablers@gmail.com. Please include your name and hometown.
LONG STORY SHORT
book clubs by julie hale
New paperback releases for reading groups
SIBLINGS FOR HIRE Patrick DeWitt’s one-of-a-kind Western, The Sisters Brothers (Ecco, $14.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9780062041289), has the trappings of a classic but an attitude that’s decidedly contemporary. Charlie and Eli Sisters are brothers and guns for hire. When they’re enlisted by a wealthy settler to locate and eliminate a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, they leave Oregon for California, embarking on the adventure of a lifetime. In the foothills of the Sierras, they find Warm’s prospecting claim, but along the
way they encounter a variety of obstacles, including a group of crazed fur trappers, a witch and a bear. Their adventures are recounted by Eli, whose commentary infuses the novel with sensitivity and humanity. Shedding new light on old myths about frontier life, DeWitt’s book has plenty of action, and his sharply etched characters, though rooted in tradition, stand firmly on their own.
REMEMBER THIS S.J. Watson’s electrifying debut, Before I Go to Sleep (Harper, $14.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9780062060563), has all the makings of a classic thriller. At the center of the novel is Christine, an amnesiac who has lost her memory after a strange accident. Each day, her husband, Ben— whom she no longer recognizes— must supply Christine with the backstory of their life together. At the prompting of her doctor, Christine begins writing in a journal, an exercise that will hopefully spark her memory. When Christine discovers that she’s written the words “Don’t trust Ben” in her notebook, she feels
the ground beneath her feet shift yet again. Faced with fresh misgivings about the past as well as the present, Christine finds herself struggling to navigate a daily existence that’s marked by danger and doubt. Should she rely on Ben? And what, exactly, was the nature of her accident? Watson, who lives in London, writes with the assurance and polish of a seasoned author in his gripping first novel.
GREAT STORIES
NEW IN PAPERBACK #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR MEG CABOT “She is a master at entertaining and amusing readers.” — Booklist
TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown’s wonderfully appealing first novel, tells the story of a trio of sisters, each named by their eccentric scholar-father for a character from Shakespeare. Raised in Barnwell, Ohio, a quiet college town, Rosalind, Cordelia and Bianca Andreas spent their childhood engrossed in books and listening to their pater quote the Bard. Once out of the nest, though, the girls have very different experiences: Cordelia hooks up with a painter in New Mexico and gets pregnant, while Bianca has legal and financial troubles in New York. Meanwhile, Rosalind, the levelheaded oldest, remains faithfully in Barnwell, working as a math teacher. When the sisters learn that their mother has cancer, they return home for an unexpected reunion. Their time in Barnwell proves to be a period of awakening as they learn all over again the importance of family. Brown’s characters, like her prose style, are fresh and original.
AN UNFORGETTABLE TALE “Blending poignancy with humor, crafting characters as real and recognizable as your next-door neighbor, Mary Kay McComas weaves stories that brighten the heart.” — NO RA RO BE RTS
A CHARMING DEBUT “With fresh, fast-paced storytelling and a personable, self-deprecating protagonist, McKenzie whirls a perfectly indulgent tale.” — Publishers Weekly
The Weird Sisters By Eleanor Brown Berkley $15, 368 pages ISBN 9780425244142
EXCELLENT FOR BOOK CLUBS
FICTION
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columns
Our crystal ball predicts your next great read Reader name: Nancy Hometown: Champaign, Illinois Favorite genres: contemporary fiction, historical fiction, biographies and suspense Favorite authors: Audrey Niffenegger, Ann Patchett, Stieg Larsson Favorite books: Unbroken, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Water for Elephants, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Three Cups of Tea Based on Nancy’s list of favorite books, I suspect she likes biographies that read like novels—stories that transport the reader to another place, and fully capture a life. In that category, I’d recommend a wonderful biography that is now available in paperback: Cleopatra by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff. Cleopatra takes readers to exotic Alexandria, Egypt, and shines a light on one of the most intriguing women in history. For the story of another remarkable woman, read Robert K. Massie’s Catherine the Great, a beautifully written tale of one of history’s most maligned rulers. Finally, any fan of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Water for Elephants should get her hands on Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, a fantastical story of epic love. Reader name: Kath Hometown: Springport, Michigan Favorite genres: mystery, thrillers, horror Favorite authors: Linwood Barclay, Harlan Coben, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, John Saul
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Two novels that have nearly topped out BookPage editors’ personal freak-o-meter rankings in terms of sheer level of creepiness are Mo Hayder’s The Devil of Nanking,
Book FortuneS
cooking
by eliza borné
by sybil PRATT
a thriller set in Tokyo that takes readers on a journey to the Nanking Massacre, and Scott Smith’s The Ruins, about a vacation gone wrong in the Mayan jungle. In recent months, one of our favorite creepy thrillers is Sorry by Zoran Drvenkar, about four 20-something German friends who get involved with a brutal killer. We also recommend S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep (see the Book Clubs column on page 5 of this issue). Finally, you can’t go wrong with Jo Nesbø. His latest, The Leopard, is especially disturbing. Reader name: Bonnie Hometown: Roanoke, Virginia Favorite genres: mystery, suspense, Christian/inspirational, historical romance, fantasy, books that take place in Ireland Favorite authors: J.K. Rowling, David Rosenfelt, Casey Daniels, Charlene Baumbich, Melody Carlson, Dicey Deere Favorite books: Harry Potter series, Andy Carpenter series, Tales from Grace Chapel Inn series, The Historian, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Book Thief, Beach Music For a satisfying story set in Ireland, read In the Company of Others by Jan Karon, author of the beloved Mitford series. Besides the vivid Irish setting, you’ll be charmed by the relationship between Father Tim Kavanagh and his wife, Cynthia—and hooked by a mystery at the lodge where they’re staying on a trip. For an exciting suspense story set in Ireland, read Tana French’s In the Woods, a police procedural set in Dublin. Finally, grown-up Harry Potter fans will love Lev Grossman’s The Magicians (and its followup, The Magician King), a story BookPage described as “J.K. Rowling meets C.S. Lewis meets Donna Tartt.” For a chance at your own book fortune, email bookfortunes@bookpage.com with your name, hometown and your favorite genre(s), author(s) and book(s). Also, visit bookpage.com/newsletters to sign up for Book of the Day, our daily book recommendation e-newsletter.
martha light every night I’m a big fan of the “Everyday Food” cookbooks served up by the talented, tireless toilers in the kitchens of Martha Stewart Living. These are the stalwarts I turn to when my own quota of quotidian recipes seems uninspired. The latest is Everyday Food: Light (Clarkson Potter, $24.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780307718099), with 250 recipes all under 500 calories. This time around, there are tips on flavor boosters and techniques and tools for lighter cooking (like steaming and poaching). As before, the dishes are organized by season, so you can find the right, light, every-night dish throughout the year, and the header notes are extra-informative. Velvety
Sweet Potato and Chipotle Soup and Irish Lamb Stew are perfect winter comfort dishes. When it warms up, we’ll enjoy Spring-Vegetable Couscous with Chicken, then summery Gazpacho, and Scallop, Orange and Cucumber Kebabs, and when autumn falls, Roasted Chicken and Pears and Apple-Parsnip Mash will take center stage.
SLOW COOKING IN FRENCH The last time Michele Scicolone taught a slow cooker to speak a foreign language, it was Italian; now her multilingual kitchen assistant can parlez like a Parisian, and the results are magnifique. In The French Slow Cooker (HMH, $22, 240 pages, ISBN 9780547508047), she shows us how slow-cooker-made stews, soups and pot roasts can take on that Gallic je ne sais quoi, and how, miraculously, soufflés, so quintessentially French, puff perfectly in the gentle heat of a slow cooker, eliminating all that anxious timing. It’s hard to think of a classic that doesn’t benefit from this time- and energy-saving technique, from a Provençal Soupe
au Pistou, Duck Confit, Bouillabaisse and Potatoes Pipérade to Bistrot Crème Caramel and chocolaty Reine de Saba. To impress your guests, you can turn out an elegant Chicken Liver Mousse or Country Pâté without mess or stress. With Michele’s solid step-by-step instructions in hand and a slow cooker on the counter, you’ll make your grand-mère proud.
TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS I usually stay away from special diet cookbooks, but I’m breaking my self-imposed rule for Barbara Kafka’s The Intolerant Gourmet: Glorious Food Without Gluten & Lactose. My husband of many years, who would gladly live on ice cream and cookies, has gradually become lactose- and gluten-intolerant, as have many of our friends, and I’ve had to change the way I cook. Most of the lactoseand gluten-free cookbooks I looked at didn’t fill the bill. We love to entertain, so I needed guidance. Barbara to the rescue! Barbara’s cookbooks are fabulous; she understands excellence and how to pass that knowledge on. I was sure that with this particular intolerant gourmet as a guide, we’d be in good hands. And after following her recipes these past few months, I can solemnly swear that there really is “glorious food” without gluten and lactose and without ersatz ingredients. As you work your way from breakfast to dinner and dessert, you might find yourself singing, à la Edith Piaf, “Non, je ne regrette rien.”
The Intolerant Gourmet By Barbara Kafka Artisan $29.95, 272 pages ISBN 9781579653941
GLUTEN-FREE
Whodunit by Bruce Tierney
Atoning for sins OF the past You have to love a title like All I Did Was Shoot My Man (Riverhead, $26.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9781594488245), Walter Mosley’s latest work featuring pragmatic Big Apple P.I. Leonid McGill. Indeed, although Zella Grisham may have shot her man eight years before, she had nothing to do with the $58 million heist a week before the murder, despite the fact that some of the purloined loot turned up in her storage space. McGill knows exactly how the stolen funds found their way into Grisham’s possession, and it is a guilty secret that has eaten at him
ever since she went to jail for both crimes. Now Grisham has done her time, and she wants to reconnect with the young daughter she hasn’t seen since she went to prison. Problem is, the girl has been adopted, and the adoptive parents seem to have dropped off the face of the earth. Re-enter Leonid McGill, P.I., to expiate some of his prior sins— pro bono. As is always the case with Mosley novels, All I Did Was Shoot My Man bridges the broad river between genre fiction and elegant literature, combining the best elements of both: gritty first person narrative; complex familial relationships; and themes of greed, revenge and the things we do for love.
THE LIFE OF A LAWMAN Stetson-brimmed U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, the eponymous hero of Elmore Leonard’s Raylan (Morrow, $26.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780062119469), hails from Harlan County, Kentucky—which was coal-mining country back in the day. Now that the mines have shut down, many of the locals have turned to marijuana for their
source of income. A few have taken a more deviant path—the harvesting and sale of human organs—and nobody’s organs are safe, not even Raylan’s. The tale unfolds in true Leonard fashion. It’s not so much a story with a beginning, a denouement and a resolution, but rather a snapshot of a few days in the life of a lawman. Included therein are many storylines which might connect—or not; a plot resolution or two firmly planted in the middle of the narrative; and the droll commentary of both the author and his chief characters. (When challenged to a parking lot fight, Raylan responds: “You don’t see me right away, practice falling down until I get there.”) As usual, Leonard’s story is part Western, mystery and farce—a genre-transcending romp guaranteed to please new readers and long-time fans alike.
CHAOS IN CAIRO Although there are many suspense novels set in ancient Egypt, it is uncommon to find a mystery set in modern-day Cairo, especially one like Parker Bilal’s The Golden Scales (Bloomsbury, $25, 416 pages, ISBN 9781608197941), in which the detective protagonist is a displaced police inspector on the lam from war-torn Sudan. Hired by corrupt entrepreneur Saad Hanafi to find missing soccer star Adil Romario, P.I. Makana is plunged into a world of Russian gangsters, jihadists and the machinations of Cairo’s power elite. At the center of this desert whirlwind is a desperate English mom, back in the Egyptian capital after years of enforced exile, seeking any sort of information on the fate of her missing daughter, by now a young woman. When the Englishwoman is brutally murdered in her seedy hotel room, Makana is forced to confront his own ghosts in ways he could never have predicted. The first in a new series, The Golden Scales is one of those rare books in which
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the setting serves as a character itself: Cairo is portrayed as a living, breathing entity whose very existence shapes the lives of those residing within its confines.
TOP PICK IN MYSTERY What is a parent’s worst nightmare? The quick answer, I imagine, would be the loss of a child. Author William Landay takes the question one step further in his latest thriller, Defending Jacob. What if your child is accused of murder, and you think there is the slimmest possibility he might be guilty? Andy Barber, assistant D.A. for a suburban Massachusetts county, is a devoted family man. Raised in a broken home, he vowed early on to bring love and stability to his wife and son. For the most part, that plan has worked out pretty well. Except now, when a young neighbor lies dead in the nearby park, and Andy’s son Jacob looks good for the murder. The incontrovertible evidence: Jacob’s bloody fingerprint on the dead boy’s jacket. For perhaps the first time in his life, Andy finds himself “batting for the other team”—on the side of the defense rather than the prosecution. As his family crumbles under the pressure of the trial and its mounting evidence, Andy struggles to find a balance between objectivity and loyalty. All the while, there is this tiny nagging doubt . . . . Defending Jacob is one of the most disturbing books of the year, and soon to be one of the most talked-about.
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defending jacob By William Landay Delacorte $26, 432 pages ISBN 9780385344227 eBook available
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columns A DAY TO REMEMBER Bargainista Bride (Turner, $14.95, 168 pages, ISBN 9781596528338) by Aimee Manis is a compact, nononsense guide to creating a “simple and authentic wedding” that reflects the happy couple and their values rather than their net worth. There is no need to sacrifice style in order to trim costs, no matter how modest the budget. Brides-to-be are forewarned about succumbing to the temptations of add-ons and unanticipated upgrades, and each one merits a discriminating chapter: reception, entertainment, florals, dress, photography, invitations, honeymoon and more. “Bargainista Tips” are scattered throughout, peppering pages with gems such as: give the DJ a “don’t play” list along with the play list; getting married
from “November through March can save you 20 to 30 percent”; and online wedding sites can cut stationery costs to nil. Bargainista Bride empowers readers to create priceless moments and memories without going into debt.
CHECKING IT TWICE The Wedding Planner & Organizer (Workman, $28.95, 176 pages, ISBN 9780761165972) is just right for the bride-to-be who won’t feel comfortable without a three-ring binder in hand, complete with tabbed dividers, pockets and lists galore. You know who you are: Your fingers itch to fill out the wedding dress crib sheet, catering contacts, location pros and cons, guest list, the amazing budget spreadsheet and every other organizing aid. And the fact that all this meticulous information comes straight from Mindy Weiss, lifestyle guru and wedding planner to the stars, makes a legit foundation for this many-layered cake of a book.
lifestyles by joanna brichetto
(Speaking of cake, it gets its own checklist of questions, including bakery contract details.) Keeping everything—worksheets, receipts, business cards, catalog pages, photos, etc.—in one place can help simplify a complicated, expensive and stressful undertaking. For the bride who scrupulously sweats the details, The Wedding Planner & Organizer will make the process fun. And after the big day, the whole thing becomes an instant keepsake.
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TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES A Practical Wedding is the book offshoot from Meg Keene’s addictive “alternative” wedding blog, APracticalWedding.com. Expect a big-hearted, broad-minded, supersmart low-down on the indispensable practicalities of getting married. Keene helps readers define expectations (your own and others’, as well as those of popular culture at large) and craft an individualized plan to achieve the authentic ones. Here is where the fabulous dress, venue, cake and so on come in—but without loss of sanity or budget. Keene outlines options for how to prioritize, hack just about anything, shop smart and ask for help, and brings in pithy insights from experienced brides. Readers will learn how to doit-yourself and when to call in the pros, how to negotiate unexpected upheavals (money, illness, cold feet and worse), how to personalize a ceremony and how to surrender to what will certainly be “one wonderful, wildly imperfect day.”
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A Practical Wedding By Meg Keene Da Capo $16, 256 pages ISBN 9780738215150
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Novel Reads
HARPERCOLLINS HarperCollins.com • AvonRomance.com All Things Wicked by Karina Cooper
Juliet Carpenter thought of the coven as family, but when she falls for a man who betrays them all, she’s left alone and desperately searching for a reason why. Caleb Leigh has spent the past year in hiding, unable to escape his demons. With enemies circling and secrets threatening to consume them, Caleb has no choice but to fulfill a promise made long ago—protect her, save her. Even if it costs him his blood, his body…and what’s left of his mind. 9780062046932, $7.99
romance
Swoon-worthy new series
E
very reader knows the feeling: You turn the last page in a book, and sadness sets in. As Avon executive editor Erika Tsang says, “Readers don’t want to let go of characters they’ve come to love. We want to know what happens next.” Luckily, with many romance stories, you don’t have to say goodbye. “With series we get to return, time and again, to a place and a cast of characters that have become like family to us,”explains Amy Pierpont, editorial director of Forever, Grand Central’s romance imprint. Here, we’ve highlighted three new series from debut authors that will give you what Dianne Moggy, Harlequin’s vice president of series editorial and subrights, calls “happiness hits,” the kind of romance novels that “give us permission to escape from the day-to-day reality of our lives.”
Firelight Crunch Time
by Diane Mott Davidson Concerned for her friends, Goldy invites Yolanda Garcia and her irrepressible aunt Ferdinanda to stay with her. But her house is no longer safe. After a failed break-in and the discovery of a second body, the intrepid Goldy decides to swap her chef’s hat for a sleuthing cap. Now she’s got to move fast because it’s crunch time and a killer is getting dangerously close. 9780061348167, $7.99
Lair of the Lion
by Christine Feehan Impoverished aristocrat Isabella Vernaducci would defy death itself to rescue her imprisoned brother. She’d even brave the haunted, accursed lair of the lion—the menacing palace of legendary, lethal Don Nicolai DeMarco. Then Isabella met a man whose growl was velvet, purring heat, whose eyes held dark, all-consuming desire. And when the don commanded her to become his bride, she went willingly into his muscled arms, praying she’d save his tortured soul … not sacrifice her life. 9780062021359, $7.99
She Tempts the Duke
by Lorraine Heath
Lady Mary Wynne-Jones paid dearly for helping the imprisoned young Lords of Pembrook, and she remembers well the promise she made to Sebastian. While Mary is now betrothed to another, a friendship forged with dark secrets cannot be ignored. Unexpected passion soon burns dangerously between them, tempting Sebastian to abandon his quest for retribution and fight for a love that could once again set him free. 9780062022462, $7.99
Spycatcher
by Matthew Dunn Will Cochrane is the CIA’s and MI6’s most prized asset ... and their deadliest weapon. Since childhood, the only world he has ever known is a clandestine realm of elaborate lies and unholy alliances—where trust is rare, betrayal comes cheap, and a violent death is often the penalty for being outplayed by an opponent. Cochrane has never been outplayed … so far. 9780062037862, $9.99
All available as eBooks Visit LibraryLoveFest.com for more great reading
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spotlight
By Kristen Callihan, Forever, $5.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9781455508594
Take Beauty and the Beast, make the costumes skimpier and add some demons and a quest for eternal life, and you’ll have the first book in Kristen Callihan’s Darkest London series. Set in Victorian England, Firelight draws readers in with the many secrets of Miranda, a pistol of a woman with special abilities, and Lord Benjamin Archer, the masked man she must marry. Murder, a secret society and overwhelming desire keep Archer and Miranda on their toes—and keep readers turning pages. CHEMISTRY INDEX: Medium-high. The couple’s frequent quarreling (hot as it is) can sometimes get in the way of the good stuff. SIZZLE-O-METER: Read with a cold shower nearby! FAVORITE LINES: “Does watching me eat entertain you?” she murmured when she felt his eyes upon her. “Yes. You do so with such hedonistic abandon.” His gaze went hot. “It is rather stirring. Perhaps I should bid you to forego the silverware, if only to see how you use your hands.”
Vengeance Born
By Kylie Griffin, Berkley, $15, 336 pages, ISBN 9780425245361
In the first book of Kylie Griffin’s Novels of the Light Blade series, Annika, the half-human daughter of a demon king, helps Kalan, a Light Blade warrior, escape from her father’s dungeons. Annika was conceived as an act of revenge, and she’s been tormented beyond endurance. Kalan alone holds the key to her future. This unlikely couple will enthrall readers as they take a stand against hatred and bigotry—all in the name of love. CHEMISTRY INDEX: Hero and heroine are like moths to the flame. SIZZLE-O-METER: In spite of the constant danger that surrounds Annika and Kalan, sparks ignite—and a slow burn turns into an eternal fire. FAVORITE LINE: “You’re aroused.”
A Town Called Valentine
By Emma Cane, Avon, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062102270
In Valentine Valley, a Colorado town that’s famous for romance, Emily Murphy meets Nate Thalberg, a sweet and sexy rancher. Emily’s in town to fix up her family’s building and sell it, quick, so she can go back to college. Nate helps her with the renovations . . . and teaches Emily a thing or two about love. CHEMISTRY INDEX: Electric. Nate and Emily feel an immediate attraction, but then she backs off, thanks to her rocky romantic history. As they get to know each other better, the slow-and-steady build feels realistic and true. SIZZLE-O-METER: Hot and heavy. FAVORITE LINE: “But then his eyes locked on her, and suddenly she was back in the bar, his mouth on hers, his hands making her feel like a woman once again.” Visit BookPage.com to read about more new romance series and trends.
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romance b y c h r i s t i e r i d g way
A Renovation of home and heart One woman renovates a house, her life and her heart in Elizabeth Bevarly’s The House on Butterfly Way (Berkley, $15, 336 pages, ISBN 9780425245347). The delightfully amusing Eugenie is newly divorced and now the owner of a mansion that’s seen better days—a state of being that describes Eugenie, too. But a busy life keeps her from much self-examination: She’s balancing a job at a well-respected matchmaking service, work on the house and worry about her teenage son. Then new friendships—and possibilities for romance—have Eugenie looking at her past and her future with fresh eyes. Filled with wry humor and touching familial relationships, The House on Butterfly Way gives readers a heroine who is both vulnerable and honest.
AN UNLIKELY HUSBAND A hard man finds love in Sarah McCarty’s Shadow’s Stand (HQN, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780373777051). Wanted for murder, Shadow Ochoa is caught trying to reclaim his stolen horses after leaving the Hell’s Eight brotherhood. He’s about to be hanged when a beautiful woman saves his life in an unusual way: She marries him. Fei Yen is in need of a man, and the brawny and capable Shadow seems willing to act as her protector. What Fei didn’t expect was to find passion in this marriage of convenience. Shadow is similarly attracted, but he doesn’t consider their union permanent because of the price on his head. A story of both adventure and scorching romance, Shadow’s Stand shows the poignancy of two outsiders who realize that they truly do belong with each other.
LOVE ON THE RUN It’s been 15 years since “Mean” Joe
Green lost a brother-in-arms. Now, in Cindy Gerard’s Last Man Standing (Pocket Star, $7.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9781451606829), it looks as though he’s found some long-awaited answers—and he’s going off the grid to get revenge. But that means separating himself not only from his friends in the Black Ops, Inc. group, but also from soft and sweet Stephanie Tompkins, the little sister of that same fallen comrade. Joe steels himself to lie and leave her—claiming he can’t commit—and Stephanie watches him walk away with tears in her eyes. But Stephanie is an NSA employee who does spy work from a computer, and a month later she discovers that Joe’s in trouble in Sierra Leone. There’s only one person who might get to him in time—her. Readers will enjoy the suspense and the deepening relationship of this appealing pair. Thrilling and sexy!
roles, both must learn to compromise and appreciate their differences. This chronicle of love and faith is filled with unexpected twists.
TOP PICK IN ROMANCE Exotic adventure awaits readers of Anna Randol’s debut, A Secret in Her Kiss. Major Bennett Prestwood survived Waterloo, but instead of sailing for home he’s ordered to Constantinople to act as protector to a beautiful British spy. Mari Sinclair has spent almost all of her life outside of England, yet she has her own reasons for aiding the Empire with her cunning illustrations of the natural world that she uses to pass on vital information. Still, death has come too close. She’s on the brink of retirement when her stiff-spined minder arrives. Mari is both annoyed by and attracted to the handsome soldier—and each brush with danger brings the pair closer together. Can duty-bound Bennett understand the passions that drive
independent Mari? Will Mari’s loyalty to friends and adopted family only serve to get them killed? Mari and Bennett’s love blossoms, but with secrets and treachery all around them, it’s hard to say whether love—or the couple—can survive. An exciting tale!
A Secret in Her Kiss By Anna Randol Avon $7.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780062025807 eBook available
historical romance
MARRIAGE BY PROXY A woman must learn to trust that there is a plan for her destiny in Colleen Coble’s inspirational romance, Blue Moon Promise (Thomas Nelson, $15.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9781595549150). Lucy Marsh has lost her job, is losing her home and has no idea how she’ll take care of her young siblings. When her father’s old friend offers marriage to his son, it seems like Lucy’s only hope. So she weds Nate Stanton by proxy, then travels to the family ranch. Yet trouble still dogs Lucy. Not only is her husband consternated by his new status, there’s also the ranching life to become accustomed to, then something even more sinister: A dangerous someone from their old life has followed Lucy to Texas, and nobody knows what the stranger is after. As Lucy and Nate settle into their new
“Ann H. Gabhart weaves a story that is a page–turner from beginning to end. This is one you’ll highly recommend to friends.” —Judith Miller, author, Daughters of Amana series
D
uring a period of political unrest in 1855 Louisville, Adriane stands ready to do everything she must to keep her father’s newspaper on top, even if it means going toe-to-toe with a handsome rival editor.
www.AnnHGabhart.com
n
Available wherever books are sold.
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columns “No matter what I even attempt to say, I can’t possibly capture the absolute magic of this book. Like a spell, it haunts. Like love, it’s going to endure.” — C a ro l i n e l e av i t t, New York Times best-selling author of Pictures of You
Art of Hearing Heartbeats The
by
Jan-Philipp sendker
“A love story set in Burma … imbued with Eastern spirituality and fairy-tale romanticism …Fans of Nicholas Sparks and/or Elizabeth Gilbert should eat this up.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“An epic narrative that requires … a large box of tissues.” —Publishers Weekly
“Poignant and joyous … Sendker takes us from contemporary, upscale New York to impoverished Burma, weaving a complex tale that is part romance, part father-daughter story.”
— M a rg a r e t D i l loway, author of How to Be an American Housewife
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ot h e r p r e s s . C o M
well read by robert Weibezahl
celebrating Dickens at 200 Like many fans of Charles Dickens, my first encounters with his works were not in books. As a child, I’d listen every year to my family’s scratched and worn LP of A Christmas Carol, narrated by Laurence Olivier, and I remember seeing the film version of the musical Oliver! when it was newly released in theaters. Indeed, Dickens’ work is certainly among the most often adapted to stage and screen, and it is quite easy to feel as if one has read him, even if one has not. This month the world commemorates the bicentenary of Dickens’ 1812 birth, a suitable occasion for revisiting his writing—or encountering it for the first time. Why rediscover Dickens? Because he is not merely the verbose writer you were forced to read in high school English class (although he is undeniably verbose). He is a master storyteller, a sharp-witted social critic and a comic genius. Having recently read Oliver Twist for the first time, I was once again delighted and amazed by the scope of his talent for creating characters and situations that are as believable today as they must have been for his first readers. And did I mention that he is funny? That’s something that often gets lost in the otherwise excellent costume dramas Hollywood and the BBC have churned out. The specifics of Dickens’ childhood are well known and often bleed into his fiction. The family’s penury and time spent in debtor’s prison inform not only the autobiographical David Copperfield, but seep into other novels and stories as well, like Little Dorrit. Even when he became a wealthy writer and international celebrity, Dickens never forgot his precarious youth. The details of his life have been meticulously detailed in Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, now out of print, and in recent biographies by Claire Tomalin and Michael Slater. Novelist Jane Smiley has a concise biography in the Penguin Lives series. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s recent Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist covers his early career. As part of the Dickens celebration, his great-great-great-granddaughter,
Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, in association with the Charles Dickens Museum in London, has put together Charles Dickens: The Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012, a charming book full of photographs and documents. It even includes removable facsimile documents— manuscript pages, letters and even Dickens’ will—along with succinct chapters about the writer’s life and work. The best way to celebrate Charles Dickens at 200, of course, is through his ageless writing. One of my own favorites is Great Expectations, with its surprising twists of fate and its indelible depiction of Miss Havisham’s madness, but it may be impossible to choose any single Dickens book as his best, so all-embracing is his literary vision. Perhaps no one has said it better than the American critic Charles Eliot Norton, who, two years before Dickens’ death, wrote, “No one thinks first of Mr. Dickens as a writer. He is at once, through his books, a friend. He belongs among the intimates of every pleasant-tempered and large-hearted person . . . for, indeed, it is not in his purely literary character that he has done most for us, it is as a man of the largest humanity, who has simply used literature as the means by which to bring himself into relations with his fellow-man.” Visit BookPage.com for more on books by and about Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens: The Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012 By Lucinda Dickens Hawksley Insight Editions $39.99, 124 pages ISBN 9781608870523
Literature
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Farrar straus Giroux books for Young Readers
ImPRInTs OF The mAcmIllAn chIldRen’s PublIshInG GROuP
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interviews
alex george
Hitting the high notes
I
t’s often said that our country is a melting pot, and we all came from somewhere else. In his U.S. debut, Alex George, an Englishman practicing law in Missouri, portrays this quintessentially American experience.
With a soundtrack of jazz, opera and close-harmony singing, he follows a family of German origin through the small joys—and devastating blows—that make up a life. In 2003, George had already published several novels in the U.K. when he moved to Columbia, Missouri, with his wife, a native of the state. He was struggling to write another book when he realized that most people have never had the experience of moving to a new country. Around the same time, he heard a barbershop quartet perform at a funeral, and the pieces of his novel clicked into place. He began working on the story from 5 to 7 a.m. every morning before work and eventually sold the novel to a top U.S. publisher (Amy Einhorn Books, the Putnam imprint which published The Help). As George told me from his law office in Columbia, “Immigration and close-harmony singing—those are the pillars on which the book was built.” Or, as he recalls with a laugh, “Back when people would say, what are you writing about, I would say, well, it’s kind of a combination of The Godfather Part II and The Sound of Music. Some of the looks I got when I said that were absolutely priceless.” The result of this unusual mix is A Good American, a spirited story
A GOOD AMERICAN
By Alex George, Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $25.95 400 pages, ISBN 9780399157592 audio, eBook available
that begins with a song in Hanover, Germany, in 1904. After Frederick Meisenheimer serenades Jette Furst with an aria from La Bohème, the two fall in love. When Jette becomes pregnant, they decide to seek their fortune elsewhere, since Jette’s parents don’t approve of the relationship. Though they had originally planned to go to New York, they end up on a ship bound for New Orleans. As Jette says, “New York, New Orleans, what’s the difference? They’re both New. That’s good enough.” This spirited Once they arimmigrant rive in America, story begins Frederick and Jette settle in with a song the small ficand hums tional town of with everBeatrice, Mispresent music. souri, where Jette gives birth to a son, and Frederick takes a job at the town’s only tavern. Their decision to stay in Beatrice sets in motion the epic story of the Meisenheimer family, which spans the 20th century and includes big personalities, shocking plot twists and multiple love stories. Not to mention moonshine, illegal betting, competitive chess games and religious conversion. George’s own first trip to America was a journey he’ll never forget. He had come to New York for a friend’s wedding and thought the city was “one of those rare places that is just like it is in the movies.” On that trip he reconnected with the woman who would become his wife, and he commuted across the Atlantic for the next six months, until they married and moved to London. They relocated to Missouri a few years later. Much of the early plot of A Good American revolves around Jette and Frederick’s varied reactions to life in a new country: Jette desperately misses her family and Hanover, but Frederick unequivocally loves his new home, embracing the music of
famed cornetist Buddy Bolden and learning English as quickly as possible. George, who is in the process of becoming an American citizen, says that “as immigrant experiences go, mine was about as easy as it could be.” He knew the language and had studied law at Oxford, but he admits it was still a hard process. At the time of our conversation, George had passed his naturalization interview and was waiting for details on his oath-taking ceremony. He reminded me of a scene in the novel when Jette cries as she reads her oath to become a U.S. citizen. Reflecting on what it will be like to give up citizenship in his home country, George says, “It’s kind of amazing that I’m finding myself in exactly that position, just as the book is being published. I know how Jette feels; I am giving up a little bit of who I am.” Still, he says of America, “I adore this place.” The novel’s title comes from a conversation Frederick has with Joseph Wall, a doctor who is kind to the Meisenheimers as they navigate their way through Missouri. Wall’s advice to Frederick is to “go and be a good American.” Frederick lives out this promise by enlisting to serve in World War I, while Jette protests the war in the town square, an action George thinks is “just as important as what Frederick did.” What constitutes being a good American? “It’s all about freedom. Not just yours but your fellow citizens’,” George says. “The Constitution is an extraordinary document, and if we could all live according to the principles that are embedded in it, then that would be a hell of a life.” A Good American focuses on the seemingly inconsequential choices that direct the course of a life—or, as George eloquently puts it in the
© Carole Patterson
By Eliza Borné
novel, how “every life was a galaxy of permutations and possibilities from which a single thread would be picked out and followed, for better or for worse.” One great joy of the book is the ever-present hum of music in the background. George has been hooked on jazz since he read Philip Larkin’s poem “For Sidney Bechet”— about a jazz saxophonist—in an English class when he was 15. He also loves Puccini and had Frederick woo Jette with an aria because he’s such a “larger-than-life character”—he needed to be doing “the full sort of heart-pounding-on-your-chest-typething.” It is a pleasure to read about such a range of music, and George writes with clear enthusiasm. Now, as he balances work on a new novel with fatherhood, his law practice and book promotion, George’s life has changed in other ways: He and the wife who brought him to Missouri are getting divorced. Like his characters who keep returning to Beatrice, though, George says that moving away from Columbia is “unthinkable” thanks to his children (Hallam, 10, and Catherine, 6). He then evokes one of the Meisenheimers who leaves Missouri, thinking he’s gone forever, but comes back. Whether you’re in a home country or an adopted one, George says, “you get pulled back by family.” Likewise, readers will be pulled into A Good American—and perhaps be inspired to learn how and why their own family first came to U.S. soil.
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cover story
MARGOT LIVESEY Interview by Amy Scribner
Following in the footsteps of a legendary heroine
L
oosely based on Charlotte Brontë’s beloved classic Jane Eyre, the newest gem from acclaimed novelist Margot Livesey follows the trials of a determined young orphan as she searches to find her place in the world.
The Flight of Gemma Hardy is every bit as enchanting as Livesey’s previous novels, including the 2009 award winner The House on Fortune Street. Still, one has to wonder why any author—let alone one as critically and commercially successful in her own right as Livesey—would choose to re-imagine Brontë’s archetypal character in a 20th- century setting. “I’ve asked myself that question 417 times while I’ve been working
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
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By Margot Livesey, Harper, $25.99, 464 pages ISBN 9780062064226, eBook available
on this book,” Livesey replies with laughter during an interview from her home near Boston, where she teaches writing at Emerson College. Funny and frank, with a lilting Scottish accent, Livesey admits to some nervousness about how her new novel will be received. “I hope entering into the book or enjoying it does not depend on having read Jane Eyre or knowing Jane Eyre,” she says. “I hope the novel is sufficiently richly imagined that it’s its own thing. I didn’t want to write a novel that excluded any readers or made anyone feel they had to be brainy in a sort of annoying way.” Born in 1948, Gemma Hardy is orphaned as a toddler after her mother dies in a freak accident and her father drowns. She is taken in by her uncle, a kind and well-educated minister, and his family in Scotland. After her uncle dies, Gemma is left alone with her indifferent cousins and cruel aunt, who resents the time her husband dedicated to his orphaned niece. When Gemma suffers a panic attack while locked in a closet as punishment for fighting with her cousin, a local doctor takes
notice of her abusive situation. At the age of nine, Gemma is shipped off to a faltering boarding school, Claypoole, where “I hope the she’ll earn her novel is way by cooking sufficiently and cleaning. Plain but richly smart, she is imagined self-reliant and that it’s its confident she’ll own thing.” make her way in the world (much like a certain Brontë heroine). “Well, Gemma, we’ve reached the parting of the ways,” her aunt tells her as she drops her at the train station to travel alone to Claypoole. “You’re an ugly child—my poor sister-in-law was a plain Jane—but I hope you’ll study hard at Claypoole and be a credit to me.” “I’ll always try to be a credit to my uncle,” Gemma retorts, “but you’ve treated me like a leper. If I win every prize in the school it won’t be because of you.” Gemma struggles through her years as a “working girl” at Clay-
poole, dodging school bullies and trying to get a decent education in between mopping floors and serving meals to the paying students. When the struggling school finally closes, she takes a job as a nanny in the Orkneys, a cluster of islands in northern Scotland. It is there that Gemma’s life begins in earnest. She is drawn to the wealthy owner of the home in which she lives, but slips away to Iceland to search for her roots. Certainly the pristine writing evokes the moody, misty feel of Brontë, and the plotlines are undeniably similar. But Livesey needn’t worry about how her tale compares to Jane Eyre. In The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Livesey has created a character fully her own; her novel is more of an homage than a faithful retelling. “I really felt more like writing back to Charlotte Brontë,” Livesey says. Her inspiration for the book came, oddly enough, during an appearance at a book club, during which the group began talking about Jane Eyre. “Some of the best discussions and most illuminating moments I’ve had have been at book clubs,” she says. She decided to write a modern version of the book—or, at least, modern compared with the original Victorian setting. “If she came of age when the Pill was available and women’s rights were a topic of discussion, it would really change the novel and what I was trying to do,” she explains of her decision to set Gemma Hardy in the early 1960s. Livesey aimed to write a story about a girl determined to find a place in a world with few choices for a female of her status. Once she began writing, Livesey had no difficulty imagining a crumbling Scottish boarding school. As a girl, she herself was enrolled in one as a day student. Her father taught at the neighboring boys’ school and her mother was the school nurse. “I ended up in a class with girls three years older than me. It was just an enormous gulf,” the author recalls. “There were long, dark corridors, cloakrooms and stairwells. I was always hiding in some stairway trying to avoid some particularly
hefty girl.” The school eventually went bankrupt. “It was one time I felt my prayers were answered,” she says, laughing at the memory. After graduating from the Uni versity of York, Livesey moved to Canada in the 1970s to be nearer to a love interest, and took a series of odd jobs. “I discovered this amazing thing called creative writing and even more amazing was that I was qualified to teach it,” she says. “That changed my life in a more radical way than romance. It tied me to North America more than, say, waitressing or working at a dry cleaners.” The places at which she’s since taught reads like a high school counselor’s dream list: Boston Uni versity, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Tufts University and Williams College. Yet she’s still found time to write a handful of compelling novels that have earned her a loyal following and the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. “I write novels that have what I so admired growing up: a strong plot and vivid characters and an explo ration of moral questions, although that sounds incredibly pompous and dreary,” Livesey says. “Maybe there’s a way to better say it that is fun.” She plans to celebrate finishing Gemma Hardy by traveling to the Brontë family home in England, which, ironically, she never visited while studying at the University of York. “I’m ashamed to say as an under grad I was too absorbed in the emergency of self,” she says wryly. “I didn’t have time for a literary pilgrimage!” The Flight of Gemma Hardy is the beautifully melancholic and wholly transporting story of one courageous girl searching for her place in a changing world. And now that it’s finished, Livesey may even re-read the novel that inspired it. “I never read Jane Eyre once I started my book,” she admits. “I thought, if I do, I’ll just throw down my pen.”
An epic, sweeping tale of a dynasty rotten to the core, driven by ambition, lust–and hatred.
From debut author
N E L L E DAV Y
“Our farm was like the world when people still thought it was flat. And when you left it, it was as if you had simply sailed too far and fallen off the surface into the void.”
Available now! “This dark tale of a golden farm family is a wonderfully Gothic read.” –Jenna Blum, bestselling author of Those Who Save Us and The Stormchasers
Learn more at www.NelleDavy.com ®
and
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are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee.
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HE’S THEIR JUDGE, JURY, & EXECUTIONER… BUT FIRST COMES THE FEAR.
{ Rising romantic suspense star Mary Burton’s new bone chilling thriller “will have readers sleeping with the lights on.”
©Woodward Studios
{
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)
On Sale 1.31.12 Also available ZEBRA
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An imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp. VISIT KENSINGTONBOOKS.COM
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TRUE LOVE STORIES B y L i n d a M . C a s t e ll i t t o
meet KRISTIN HANNAH
the title of your new Q: What’s book?
CHARLES BUSH
features
PARTNERS IN LOVE AND LIFE
L
ooking for a Valentine’s Day gift that’s not candy or flowers? Three new books offer fresh insight on modern love—along with a healthy dose of humor.
BETTER? YOU BET After nearly 10 years of marriage to her husband Dan, Elizabeth Weil still felt “proud, nearly giddy” about being his wife. She also worried: “Because just as I believed that marriages formed slowly over time, I also believed they broke that way.” Armed with a goal-oriented mindset, Weil decided she and Dan would embark on a year-long marriage improvement project and proac-
tively address things that weren’t such a big deal at the moment— e.g., their laissez-faire approach to money management, differing marital role models—but might become problems later. From religion (should they raise their daughters Jewish?) to food (he brings home and cooks entire animals, she’s not thrilled) to partnership (they swim in a punishing race from Alcatraz to San Francisco), No Cheating, No Dying (Scribner, $25, 192 pages, ISBN 9781439168226) explores the ways in which two people can form and strengthen bonds—or accept some things just the way they are. This is an eminently enjoyable tale of a committed, kooky couple and an excellent resource for doing a relationship tune-up of your own.
100 SIMPLE RULES Clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner is perhaps best known for her bestseller The Dance of Anger, but she’s also written books on motherhood, fear, sex and more. In Marriage Rules (Gotham, $22.50,
288 pages, ISBN 9781592406913), she offers rules for long-term relationships. There are 100, but not to worry: They’re straightforward, brief and organized by subject matter, so readers can turn right to sections like “How To Connect with a Distant Partner” and “Forget About Normal Sex.” Lerner’s not trying to be heavyhanded; she suggests readers regard rules “as pretty good ideas to consider. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of our own common sense.” Her list of 100 should do the trick, and anecdotes about all manner of couples, including herself and her husband, demonstrate how the rules can be helpful, when gracefully applied.
would you describe the Q: How book?
is this book especially important to you? Q: Why
Q: W hat do you hope readers will take from the story of Michael and Jolene?
change places with one person for a day, who Q: Iwould f you could it be and why?
Q: W hat’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not writing?
THE HILARITY OF LOVE If it’s by The Onion, it’s gotta be irreverent and funny with a good hit of raunchy, and Love, Sex and Other Natural Disasters (Quirk, $12.95, 144 pages, ISBN 9781594745492) doesn’t disappoint. This compendium of “relationship reporting” has hilarious entries galore, from news briefs like “New Girlfriend Bears Disturbing Resemblance to Old Girlfriend” to a report about “Voyeur Concerned About Lack of Sex in Neighbors’ Marriage.” There are dating tips, too, such as: “Do not bathe for several days prior to a date to get your pheromones good and strong,” and “Please, for the love of God, just stop doing that weird chewing thing with your mouth.” With its trademark combination of silly and spot-on, The Onion brain trust has created another laugh-out-loud volume of articles, photos and infographics that will perk up Valentine’s Day for sure.
achievement are you proudest of? Q: What
Q: W ords to live by?
HOME FRONT
Since taking a detour from a planned career as a lawyer more than 20 years ago, author Kristin Hannah has become a best-selling chronicler of modern relationships. She turns her attention to a troubled marriage in her 20th novel, Home Front (St. Martin’s, $27.99, 400 pages, ISBN 9780312577209). Hannah and her family live on an island near Seattle, Washington.
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reviews
FICTION Bond Girl
The Underside of Joy
By Erin Duffy Morrow $24.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780062065896 eBook available
facing life after loss
debut FICTION
Review by Carla Jean Whitley
It isn’t surprising that Ella Beene’s husband, Joe Capozzi, dies within the first 10 pages of The Underside of Joy. After all, the jacket copy reveals that this story is about the personal struggles and family challenges Ella faces after her husband’s death. But the juxtaposition of Seré Prince Halverson’s descriptions of pure, unadulterated joy, and the reader’s knowledge that Ella’s joy has an expiration date, is breathtaking. In the opening pages, Ella says, “For three years, I did backflips in the deep end of happiness. The joy was palpable and often loud. Other times it softened—Zach’s milky breath on my neck, or Annie’s hair entwined in my fingers as I braided it, or Joe’s humming some old Crowded House song in the shower while I brushed my teeth.” Debut novelist Halverson paints a picture of Ella’s everyday life, married By Seré Prince Halverson, Dutton, $25.99 to Joe and raising her stepchildren, Annie and Zach, in a coastal Northern 320 pages, ISBN 9780525952596 California town. Ella was still fresh out of her first marriage when she met eBook available Joe. The couple fell for each other hard and fast, and were married within a year. He, too, was divorced; Joe’s first wife, Paige, had left him and the kids months earlier, with hardly a word since. Ella is the only mother they have ever known. Until, of course, Paige shows up at Joe’s funeral and begins the fight to regain custody of her children. The first third of The Underside of Joy is rich with detail, recounting Ella’s move from joy to mourning to struggles with Paige and the faltering family business Joe left behind. Though the plot at first moves slowly, Halverson’s prose is captivating. In fact, it’s once the plot quickens that the book hits occasional weak points, where plot takes precedence over previously enchanting descriptions. But as she mines the family secrets her characters hold close and how those affect their relationships with one another, Halverson proves she’s a wordsmith and a storyteller to keep an eye on.
THE ODDS: A LOVE STORY By Stewart O’Nan Viking $25.95, 192 pages ISBN 9780670023165 eBook available
LITERARY FICTION
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Stewart O’Nan (Emily, Alone) has packed a huge amount of emotion into this slim novel. In less than 200 pages, he manages to examine the whole history of a marriage—complete with excess baggage, lingering resentments, equal amounts of frustration and fondness. The Odds takes place over a single weekend— Valentine’s Day weekend—when Art and Marion head to Niagara Falls for what is ostensibly a second honeymoon. The truth is that this trip is the couple’s last resort. What
their friends and grown children don’t know is that Art and Marion are on the verge, simultaneously, of bankruptcy and divorce. Their plan is to risk all the cash they have left in one big blowout gambling weekend, before they finally admit defeat and attempt to start from scratch. In concise chapters that begin with a relevant statistic (“Odds of a U.S. citizen filing for bankruptcy: 1 in 17”) and alternate between Marion’s and Art’s points of view, we discover exactly how this entirely non-extravagant couple arrived in their unhappy situation. Timely without being even slightly dry, the novel looks at today’s brutal economy through a lens that’s entirely focused on the personal and emotional consequences. O’Nan is adept at describing the way certain personality characteristics (competitiveness, shyness, optimism) combined with certain circumstances (unemployment, a house in need of repair) can end up
pitting two people against each other despite their mutual affection. The arguments and resentments that Art and Marion have seem so realistic because they’re baffling for both parties; neither spouse particularly wants to fight. Both are often confused as to how and why an argument started. And they each cling to old guilt and old grudges they know they should abandon but can’t quite let go, even when they genuinely wish they could. The story isn’t as grim as that may sound—O’Nan laces his harsh truths with plenty of humor, and even his sort of brittle, difficult characters are endearing. He also never abandons the possibility that things will work out. The Odds is a painful but well-executed portrait of ordinary human weakness and its aftermath. —Becky Ohlsen
Visit BookPage.com to read a Q&A with O’Nan about The Odds.
Never mind that you should not judge a book by its cover: I must confess to panicking when I glimpsed the shiny black Louboutin stiletto embellishing Erin Duffy’s debut novel Bond Girl. Call me a snob, but I have no interest in reading anything remotely resembling an homage to Sex and the City. Thus I was delighted to discover that Duffy’s maiden literary voyage has steered clear of the silly and sordid clichés of so-called “chick lit,” and instead delivers a delectable tale of a plucky female bond trader whose Wall Street escapades just happen to coincide with the economic Armageddon of 2008. When it comes to writing fiction about “the Street,” Duffy—who spent 10 years in the world of fixed income sales—certainly knows her stuff, and is a heck of a storyteller, too. While Bond Girl is not autobiographical, its heroine, Alex Garrett, clearly has much in common with the author. Smart, sassy and smitten with dreams of breaking the gender barriers imposed by the Manhattan men’s club of investment bankers, Alex is hired fresh out of college at the elite firm Cromwell Pierce. Of course, Alex’s illusions about working on “the Street” are shattered on day one at the firm, after she is handed a child-size folding chair with “Girlie” scribbled on the back and subjected to a fraternity-house work environment. Surprisingly, Chick—Alex’s profanity-spewing, hard-driving boss— is one of the most sympathetic characters in Bond Girl, which is littered with a cast of offensive characters whose peccadilloes include wagering over a co-worker’s disgusting act of eating everything in the vending machine; talking trash about the firm’s resident silicone-enhanced
FICTION tart, aka “Baby Gap”; and raising money for charity by auctioning off lunch with the poor guy who mans the building’s coffee cart. Readers will find themselves rooting for Alex from page one—and hoping that the very talented Duffy might have a sequel in the works. —Karen Ann Cullotta
History of a Pleasure Seeker By Richard Mason Knopf $25.95, 288 pages ISBN 9780307599476 eBook available
LITERARY FICTION
charge, Egbert, an obsessive-compulsive musical genius chained to the rigid fugues of Bach. The novel isn’t perfect—one significant character’s turnaround feels far too complete and abrupt— but it is fast-moving and never dull. Perhaps most enjoyable is its subtle social combat: Reading between the lines is the norm for these characters, and the arrows Piet shoots leave his prey delightedly breathless while he gets what he wants. Aware of his power, he is nevertheless unaware of the extent of his impact. In the end, the novel’s confidence is as strong as its hero’s. One feels lucky to have brushed against it for a while. — Sheri Bodoh
The Lost Saints of Tennessee Richard Mason’s History of a Pleasure Seeker seduces from page one. A lighthearted follow-up to 2009’s Natural Elements and set during the Belle Époque, this lushly told story of a beautiful young man’s attempts to get ahead teases the imagination from its first baiting sentence. Piet Barol, dark-haired, blue-eyed, lovely-lipped, leaves his meager world of outhouses, cold baths and boredom for a chance at luxury in Amsterdam as live-in tutor to a hotel magnate’s son. Not above using his many charms to get ahead, Piet has a flirtatious interview with the lady of the house and quickly secures his position. From there, he gently jolts the lives of family and servant alike, launching an affair with his new employer’s wife, sharing hot baths with a handsome footman and shaking up the self-assured superiority of the magnate’s nervy daughters. What follows is a celebration of sensuality remarkable for both its employment of every one of the senses and its relative lack of actual sex. Mason achieves great mileage from the simplest detail. Piet is opportunistic and his interests are prurient, but his wrongdoing is imbued with innocence. The message behind the playfulness is sweet and stirring: Pleasure is a balm for the soul. Piet’s sensibilities, shaped by his late singer mother, affect even his 10-year-old
By Amy Franklin-Willis Atlantic Monthly $25, 320 pages ISBN 9780802120052 eBook available
Southern FICTION
Recently divorced, middle-aged and generally down on his luck, Ezekiel Cooper doesn’t know where he’s going when he packs up his loyal dog, Tucker, and leaves his hometown of Clayton, Tennessee. Zeke just knows he’s running—running from memories of his broken marriage, from his twin brother’s tragic death and from the many secrets that have shattered his family. Through the alternating, pitch-perfect voices of Zeke and his complicated mother Lillian, Alabama writer Amy Franklin-Willis tells the story of the Cooper family from the 1940s to the 1980s in The Lost Saints of Tennessee. Lillian is a difficult woman—a mother who loves her five children, but can’t help but feel that they have derailed her dreams. Zeke is her golden child, the one she’s sure will get out of their small town and make something of himself. But things don’t exactly turn out as planned, and his time at the University of Virginia is cut short. Then his brother’s mysterious death changes every-
spotlight
short stories By Harvey Freedenberg
I
t’s an embarrassment of riches to have new collections by short story masters Nathan Englander and Dan Chaon released on the same day (Feb. 7). After publishing novels in 2007 and 2009, respectively, they’ve returned to a form that showcases their talents at fashioning sturdily constructed, memorable tales. Englander caused a stir in 1999 with his first collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, which offered unorthodox glimpses into the world of Orthodox Judaism. He stays close to his roots here, echoing the art of Jewish short fiction masters from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Philip Roth in tales that are both contemporary and timeless. Most of the Jewish characters that populate the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf, $24.95, 224 pages, ISBN 9780307958709) are survivors (literally so, for the several who endured the Holocaust). Nowhere is that more dramatically demonstrated than in the novelistic “Sister Hills,” set in the northern portion of the territory captured by Israel in 1967. The story spans decades, and focuses on Rena and Yehudit, settlers who occupy two desolate settlements on “empty mountains that God had long ago given Israel but that Israel had long ago forgotten.” With its mythic overtones, it’s a stunning narrative achievement. Englander is intrigued by the difficulty of moral choices, as displayed in stories like “Camp Sundown,” when a group of Holocaust survivors at an elderhostel camp decide to take revenge on a man they believe was a Nazi guard at a concentration camp. And the title story, evoking a classic Raymond Carver tale, follows two couples— one, assimilated South Floridians; the other, friends who have abandoned America for an ultra-Orthodox life in Israel—as they debate which of them would shelter the other in a new Holocaust. As serious as some of Englander’s themes may be, he displays an equally potent gift for comedy, most notably in “How We Avenged the Blums,” recounting the fumbling efforts of a group of Long
Island Jewish boys and their dubious Russian martial arts teacher to retaliate against an iconic bully, “the Anti-Semite.” Several of the stories in Dan Chaon’s Stay Awake (Ballantine, $25, 272 pages, ISBN
9780345530370) have the same enigmatic aura as his 2009 novel, Await Your Reply, an intricate exploration of identity in the cyberage. From the opener, “The Bees,” in which a recovering alcoholic is haunted by his decision to abandon his wife and young son, a chill descends on Chaon’s world. The mostly male protagonists are stunted, both economically and emotionally. The employed ones work as supermarket clerks or UPS drivers, and the most accomplished, a former college professor in the story “Long Delayed, Always Expected,” has been brain damaged in an automobile accident. Death is another thread that unites Chaon’s stories. Two moving examples are the title story, in which a child is born with a “parasitic” twin head with an underdeveloped body attached to hers, and “Thinking of You in Your Time of Sorrow,” where a teenager and his “former future wife” struggle after their newborn’s death. Though their subject matter could not differ more dramatically, in their moral seriousness and literary craftsmanship Nathan Englander and Dan Chaon deliver some of the best of what contemporary short fiction has to offer.
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reviews The Life and Art of Alfred Hutty Edited by Sara C. Arnold & Stephen G. Hoffius $49.95, cloth • 9781611170412 $24.95, paper • 9781611170429 A celebration of paintings and prints by one of the principal artists of the Charleston Renaissance.
Blood & Bone By Jack Shuler $29.95, cloth • 9781611170481 A fresh perspective on the Orangeburg Massacre and its legacy.
—Abby Plesser
No One Is Here Except All of Us
University of South Carolina Press
By Ramona Ausubel Riverhead $26.95, 336 pages ISBN 9781594487941 eBook available
Stephanie Laurens’
LITERARY FICTION
TITLES FROM
fans cannot get enough of the Cynsters–New York Times bestselling author’s wickedly seductive family.
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thing. Eventually, Zeke finds himself back in Virginia, with his mother’s cousins Georgia and Osborne, trying to reclaim his life, his sanity and his family. In her powerful debut, FranklinWillis expertly crafts a Southern novel that stands with genre classics like The Prince of Tides and Bastard out of Carolina. The Lost Saints of Tennessee is a measured, slow-burning book, with complex, compelling characters and secrets that reveal themselves slowly. A beautiful novel from a talented new author, The Lost Saints of Tennessee proves that in great literature, as in life, we must always expect the unexpected.
StephanieLaurens.com AvonRomance.com
Tales about the Second World War are so popular in modern fiction that the risk of running across a stale story keeps rising. It takes a very fresh perspective, a very particular voice, to tell a new tale of that era of broken lives and crumbling nations. Ramona Ausubel is one of those voices, and with her debut novel she’s managed to weave a WWII story that is utterly revolutionary. Rather than tackle the war with the drama and epic proportion of a battle chronicle, or the heartbreak of a Holocaust drama, Ausubel draws inspiration from her own family history, setting No One Is Here Except All of Us in a remote Jewish village in Romania. The world is insulated, comfortable, even magical in its simplicity. Then one day a bombshell literally drops into the midst of it, and the villagers realize the world outside is growing ever more tumultuous. At the suggestion of a mysterious stranger and a young villager named Lena, the villagers decide to literally pray away the world outside. They al-
FICTION low the one road that connects them to the rest of the world to grow over with vines and brambles, remaking themselves as a pocket universe. Lena vividly narrates as the villagers re-examine their society, reassign their lives and attempt to make the world truly new. But slowly, the outside world begins to encroach, and in one startling moment, Lena finds herself confronted with the world’s violence, and must make a choice that will change everyone’s future. Though the concept alone is enough of a hook, the true magic of the novel is in Ausubel’s prose. She weaves complex, thrilling imagery with the deft hand of a master. With its combination of fairy-tale flair and heartbreaking realism, No One Is Here Except All of Us has earned a place among this year’s most compelling and unique debut novels. —Matthew Jackson
to bring her food, water and coal to keep warm. Also sustaining her are memories, as revealed in the letters she writes to her dead husband. Fans of de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key will not find the same kind of compelling, page-turning urgency in The House I Loved. Its pace is slow—meandering even, like the walks Rose used to take along the Seine on warm summer evenings. However, the details de Rosnay provides allow readers not only to see Rose in her fine silk bonnets, but to feel her emotions. — Cynthia Wolfe Boynton
The Rebel Wife By Taylor M. Polites Simon & Schuster $25, 304 pages ISBN 9781451629514 eBook available
HISTORICAL FICTION
The House I Loved By Tatiana de Rosnay St. Martin’s $25.99, 240 pages ISBN 9780312593308 Audio, eBook available
historical FICTION
A slim narrative with much of the story told through letters written by and to widow and lifelong Parisian Rose Bazelet, Tatiana de Rosnay’s The House I Loved is a tale as dark and haunting as the Edgar Allan Poe stories full of ghastly secrets that Rose so admires. Readers learn early on that Rose has a ghastly secret of her own—and it’s not just that she’s hiding in the cellar of her beloved, three-story home on the rue Childebert while Emperor Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and Baron Georges-Eugene Haussman tear Paris down rue by rue in order to rebuild a modern city. Replacing interweaving streets and medieval buildings with straight boulevards and modern facades appalls Rose. Even though her home is in the path of destruction, she refuses to leave, relying on a ragpicker
The aftermath of the Civil War— specifically, the Reconstruction era in Alabama—comes to vivid life in Taylor M. Polites’ debut novel, which dispels some of the myths associated with that period of our history. The Rebel Wife opens in 1876 with the gruesome death of Eli Branson, the local mill owner, from what his doctor calls blood fever. Eli had been shunned in the small town of Albion for being a Yankee sympathizer—and indeed, the town’s Negroes turn out for his funeral in far greater numbers than the whites. Eli’s young widow Augusta, or Gus, wasn’t privy to his political activities, or even his finances, though she assumed she and Henry, their son, had been well provided for at his death. Gus quickly learns how mistaken she has been—not only underestimating the negative feelings of the town’s whites toward Eli, and now her, but also their wealth, which, according to her cousin Judge, the executor of Eli’s will, has dwindled to practically nothing. Polites has peopled his wellresearched account with an intriguing cast of characters, each of whom contributes to Gus’ awakening to the
FICTION postwar realities she now must face alone. There is Judge, whose greed surpasses their blood ties; Mike, Gus’ conniving brother who expects a share of the mill profits; Rachel, who has cared for Gus since childhood; and Simon, a loyal freed slave who knows the details of Eli’s finances, including a secret stash sought also by Judge and Mike. Gus is perceptively portrayed as she gradually moves from feeling “irrelevant and disregarded” to taking charge of her altered life, and grows in her awareness of what the slaves have been through. She is ashamed of having accepted their treatment “as the way things are”—a far cry from the usual image of the Southern belle in fiction and film. Polites’ debut is a historically accurate and compelling depiction of the postwar South, in all its divisiveness and discord. —Deborah Donovan
The Snow Child By Eowyn Ivey Reagan Arthur $24.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780316175678 eBook available
fairy tale. Unwinding alongside the mystery of Faina is the very palpable reality of Alaska. Ivey’s depictions of the state she was born in are literally breathtaking. You feel the snow and cold in your lungs, as if you’ve inhaled the place’s icy air, or spent time crunching through pure white blinding snow that comes up to the knees. Very rarely has the beauty and unyieldingness of nature been described so sensuously. The reader also cares about Ivey’s characters. Mabel and Jack deserve a measure of happiness, and it would take a hard heart not to adore their salt-of-the-earth neighbors. But wrapped around everything is the enigma of Faina. Who or what is she, really? The answer is just one of the elements that make The Snow Child such a splendid, magical book. —Arlene McKanic
Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea By Morgan Callan Rogers Viking $26.95, 320 pages ISBN 9780670023400 Audio, eBook available
Debut FICTION
Debut FICTION
Shack. Though local and state law enforcement is called in to work the case, it remains unsolved year after year. When her father begins to drink heavily, Florine moves in with her paternal grandmother, who provides stability she badly needs. As the years pass, Florine enters high school, runs with her same group of friends and is even tempted into a brief drugfueled affair with the son of one of the wealthy families who summer on the Maine coast. At the same time, she emulates her grandmother’s quiet life—baking bread and knitting sweaters to be sold in the general store, going to church and waiting at the edge of The Point for the fishing boats to return every evening. But without her mother and estranged from her father and his new girlfriend, she often feels that the heart is literally missing from her life. Rogers grew up in Maine and knows intimately the strengths and drawbacks of living in a small community, where your neighbors know all your business and where what nurtures you can also stifle your growth. The novel is filled with a kind of fresh honesty, as well as dry wit— seen most of all in the character of Florine. She is impetuous and sassy, but truthful to a fault. It is almost impossible not to care about her. —Lauren Bufferd
“Is she real?” is the question the reader asks about the strange, wild little girl at the center of Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child. Faina shows up in the dead of winter at the home of Mabel and Jack, a married couple who are trying, without too much success, to make a go of it as homesteaders in postWorld War I Alaska. Faina lives all by herself in the woods. Her skin is ice pale, her hair so blonde that it’s white. She seems to thrive in cold and snow and can’t tolerate heat; Mabel actually fears she’ll melt if she gets too close to a fire. She appears after Mabel and Jack build a snow child in their yard one whimsical night, and Mabel thinks she’s both a manifestation of her and Jack’s deep longing for a child and a sprite out of a Russian
It is the summer of 1963, and 12-year-old Florine Gilham lives with her parents on The Point, a small fishing village in Maine. She has spent July swimming on the rocky beaches and playing in the piney forests with the same group of friends she’s known all her life. When a prank goes awry, the children are forbidden to play together for the rest of the summer, but that just means that Florine can spend more time with her mother, Carlie. That is, until Carlie disappears. The strength of Morgan Callan Rogers’ Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea lies not in the mystery of Carlie’s disappearance, but in the way her absence shapes and determines Florine’s passage into adulthood and impacts the larger community. Carlie disappears on an annual “girls weekend” taken with her friend Patty, a fellow waitress at the Lobster
A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty By Joshilyn Jackson Grand Central $24.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780446582353 Audio, eBook available
stricken nearly silent by a stroke—to regain her language and expose the truth; and sends 15-year-old Mosey and her best friend out to unearth the mystery of her past. New York Times best-selling author Joshilyn Jackson’s A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty shows the strength of these Mississippi women—and the ties that bind them. Alternately told in their three voices, the story is Southern in vernacular but modernized in a way that other Southern stories often are not. Like Jackson’s previous four novels, it presents the real South in a tale that is less interested in the stereotypical poverty, hackneyed regional idioms (think “knee-high to a grasshopper”) and unbearable humidity than in the lives of three fiercely brave women, who just happen to be Southern. The Slocumb women’s choices aren’t always the right ones, but they know that even bad decisions are theirs to make. After all, sometimes the path to contentment is a winding one, and the journey chronicled in A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty includes a dangerous road trip, a forest sex lair, swimming pool physical therapy, poison, handfuls of pregnancy tests, drugs, text messages and attempted communication through photographs. But through it all, the Slocumbs have each other’s love and support. Jackson’s engrossing fifth novel is a mystery, comedy and drama wrapped up in one. —Katie Lewis
Southern FICTION
Ginny knows that trouble is bound to find the Slocumb household this year. After all, she’s turning 45, and every 15 years brings a pregnancy or other heartache to the family. This year is no different: A child’s bones, dress and toy are found buried beneath their backyard willow tree. The scandalous discovery sends Ginny into the arms of a married former love; drives 30-year-old Liza—already
Ruth by Marlene S. Lewis Troubador • $16.95 ISBN 9781848766235 Abandoned, alone and pregnant, Ruth must find a way to survive in 1960s Australia and Papua New Guinea.
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On February 14th, fall in love with
© Matthias Scheer
THE WOLF GIFT
ANNE RICE
all over again
An erotic, daring new departure from the inspired creator of THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES, LIVES WITCHES, and the angels of OF THE MAYFAIR WITCHES SERAPHIM—an author THE SONGS OF THE SERAPHIM who “will live on through the ages of literature” (San Francisco Chronicle). A whole new world imagined, and an unforgettable story as old and compelling as history.
“ANNE RICE IS BACK WITH THE BAD GUYS”—LIBRARY JOURNAL Scan to read an excerpt
e sweepstakes:
ENTER the Anne Ric Ten (10) Grand Prize Winners will receive a signed edition of Ten
THE WOLF GIFT
No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 18 years of age and older. To enter, follow the instructions at www.Knopfdoubleday.com/WolfGift. All entries must be received by February 29, 2012 (11 pm EST). Winners selected by a random drawing. Void where prohibited by law. Go to www.Knopfdoubleday.com/WolfGift for the Official Rules.
Visit www.AnneRice.com
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Published by Knopf
reviews
NONFICTION
A GYPSY BOY BECOMES A MAN
Gypsy Boy
—Catherine Hollis
Review by Pete Croatto
“Somehow, this time, I would make it work.” That’s the quiet plea of 12-year-old Mikey Walsh, desperate to fit in with his Romany Gypsy family. Such is the power of Walsh’s fantastic memoir, Gypsy Boy, that your heart breaks for his empty hope. Being an outsider is bad enough, but Walsh (a pseudonym) reveals the special hell that is being a pariah in a band of outsiders—and the courage required to start anew. Walsh’s destiny is sealed as soon as he is born. Like his father, Frank, the boy is meant to become a bare-knuckle boxer, continuing a grand family tradition of clueless pugilists. But it never happens; Mikey never responds to Frank’s abusive boxing lessons, which begin at age four and segue into a bloody blur of nonstop torture. Then Mikey, vulnerable and ignored by his family, becomes the target of his Uncle Joseph’s deviant sexual urges, and By Mikey Walsh, Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s can do nothing to stop the much larger man. $24.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9780312622084 In the testosterone-driven Gypsy world, Mikey is an outlier and he’s eBook available gay—which is literally life-threatening. If his father ever thought Mikey’s homosexuality was real, “rather than just the worst insult he could think of, he would go ballistic and would, almost certainly, kill me.” Walsh must flee, though he has no idea how; formal education and marrying for love remain mystifying, disdainful concepts in this dangerous environment governed by backward traditions. Yet it’s the only world he knows, and flowers do bloom there: his salty mom, adventures with his sister, the occasional promising glimpse of friendship. It’s a testament to Walsh’s skill that he portrays his hopelessness so eloquently, without wallowing in sordid self-pity. His understated, lyrical sentences carry the book. You remember the little touches as well as the giant horrors: a magical, midnight car ride to London that serves as Walsh’s youthful salvation, the small gift from a friendly teacher that represents a nearly incomprehensible generosity. “We were all old before our time,” Walsh writes. “That’s the way we lived.” The last portion of Walsh’s riveting book shows him breaking away from the Gypsy culture. It exacted a heavy price. But as an arts teacher living in London who recently married his partner, Walsh has finally made it work.
Sister Queens By Julia Fox Ballantine $30, 480 pages ISBN 9780345516046 eBook available
biography
Historian Julia Fox’s absorbing new dual biography of Katherine of Aragon and her sister Juana, Queen of Castile, gives fans of Showtime’s “The Tudors” an engrossing, starcrossed family history of Henry VIII’s first wife. Epic in scale, Fox’s Sister Queens shows how Katherine and Juana were groomed by their parents, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, for royal marriages and political intrigue.
Using ample primary sources, such as letters Katherine wrote to her father from England, Fox goes behind the scenes to reveal the sisters’ heartbreak and stoicism as they lived out the royal fates allotted to them. Katherine was originally sent from Spain to marry Prince Arthur, Henry’s older brother, but when Arthur died suddenly after a few weeks of marriage, Katherine’s position in the English court—and Spain’s alliance with England—was thrown into question. Seven years of holding firm to her marginalized position finally won her betrothal to Henry VIII—but how much of a victory was it? Juana’s life story is even more dramatic. Married to Duke Philip of Burgundy—“Philip the Handsome”—Juana became a duchess, with the promise of one day becoming the Holy Roman Empress. An
balanced scholarly assessment of such legends as Juana’s attachment to Philip’s corpse. Sister Queens balances history and drama in telling a fascinating story about larger-thanlife characters in a dramatic political climate.
initially passionate attachment to her husband lapsed into bitterness and estrangement due in part to his many affairs, but also due to her violent response to them (she physically attacked one of his mistresses). Known to history as “Juana the Mad,” she may have suffered from mental illness exacerbated by the political machinations of her husband, her father and, later, her son. After Philip’s untimely death, when she refused to be parted from his coffin, the legend of her madness was firmly established. By confining her to convents, both Ferdinand and her son Charles were able to usurp Juana’s political power after her ascension to the Spanish throne following her mother’s death. Fox examines the myths surrounding Juana and Katherine in light of the historical record, and her biography of the sisters provides a
Quiet By Susan Cain Crown $26, 352 pages ISBN 9780307352149 Audio, eBook available
CULTURE
Maybe you lack the instinct for self-promotion. Maybe you can’t muster your employer’s rah-rah-rahsis-boom-bah attitude. Maybe you’d rather stay home and read a novel instead of going out to the party of the year. So? Something’s the matter with you, and you should feel ashamed, right? Wrong, says Susan Cain, author of Quiet, a vigorous, brainy and highly engaging defense of introversion. A self-proclaimed introvert herself, Cain examines in the first part of her book how our one-time “Culture of Character,” which gave roughly balanced respect to the positive characteristics of both introverts and extroverts, shifted to our contemporary “Culture of Personality,” a culture of marketing and self-marketing that almost exclusively (and to our peril) favors the risk-takers, the quick-decision-makers: in short, the extroverts. Drawing on cultural histories and fascinating recent research in psychology and brain-function science, Cain challenges such misconceptions as “the myth of charismatic leadership,” the utility of group brainstorming and the idea that introversion is the result of bad parenting instead of an innate personality characteristic. “Probably the most common—and damaging— misunderstanding about personality types is that introverts are antisocial and extroverts are pro-social,” she
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reviews writes. “But as we’ve seen, neither formulation is correct; introverts and extroverts are differently social.” In the final section of her book, she offers sensible advice on strategies that introverts can use to succeed in a society that operates within a value system she calls the “Extrovert Ideal”—without betraying their essential selves. Cain enlivens her discussion with road trips and case studies. She skeptically enrolls in a seminar given by Tony Robbins, who is probably the extrovert ideal incarnate. She visits students and professors at Harvard Business School and Asian-American students in Silicon Valley. She cites the experiences of Rosa Parks and Mohandas Gandhi. She interviews husbands and wives, parents and children. Cain says her “primary concern is the age-old dichotomy between the ‘man of action’ and the ‘man of contemplation,’ and how we could improve the world if only there was a greater balance of power between the two types.” Hers is surely an argument worth talking about. —Alden MudgE
Mr. And Mrs. Madison’s War By Hugh Howard Bloomsbury $30, 384 pages ISBN 9781608190713
HISTORY
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In August of 1814, Maryland was invaded by foreign troops. After months of naval clashes in the Chesapeake and raids on shore, the British landed a serious force at Benedict, on the Patuxent River. And who was tracking their every move from a short distance and sending dispatches back to President James Madison? The U.S. secretary of state. Yes, James Monroe, known as “Colonel” Monroe for his Revolutionary War service, was personally skulking behind bushes, risking capture or death, as he scouted the enemy. Imagine, if you will, Hillary
NONFICTION Clinton running agents in Kandahar. Of course, you can’t, and that’s the point: The U.S. was a sparsely populated, fragile country in 1814, with a tiny, amateurish government and an ill-trained army. Monroe was probably the best man for the job. As we begin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, author Hugh Howard brings that very different world alive in Mr. and Mrs. Madison’s War, an engrossing narrative history of a conflict that few today know much about. Howard ranges widely, as the war did, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans to the Mid-Atlantic Coast. His descriptions of the human carnage during the naval battles are particularly dramatic and moving. At the book’s heart is the personal experience of Madison and his gregarious wife Dolley, culminating in her legendary insistence on saving an iconic portrait of George Washington before she fled the White House ahead of the arrival of British troops in Washington. They burned the mansion and the Capitol, but subsequent American victories turned the tide. Still, even the most positive assessment of the war, which was begun by Madison to end British impressment of American sailors and, he hoped (too optimistically), to expand U.S. territory into Canada, must conclude that it was hardly an American triumph. We lost as many battles as we won, and the ultimate peace treaty didn’t even mention the impressment issue, or much else. (The British stopped impressing Americans because they won the war against Napoleon and didn’t need the men anymore.) And yet, this murky war was the source of what Howard calls the “rich, patriotic mythology” that helped solidify U.S. independence and fortify the country for the booming decades to come. It was a struggle of memorable personalities and phrases: “Don’t give up the ship.” “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” “Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave.” Howard reminds us of the gumption and bravery behind those words. —Anne Bartlett
Immortal Bird By Doron Weber Simon & Schuster $25, 368 pages ISBN 9781451618068 eBook available
MEMOIR
A pivotal moment in Immortal Bird occurs when the protagonist, adolescent Damon Weber, is playing a pick-up game of soccer with his family. After a lengthy scrimmage, his father, author Doron Weber, is ready to call it a day. His son becomes angry. There is a heated exchange, as the young Damon, filled with adrenaline, competiveness and rage, refuses to quit. “Why are we stopping?” Damon asks. “Let’s keep playing. I wanna play!” His father argues, but then gives up, overlooking Damon’s tantrum because the teenager has been through so many medical calamities since his birth, and faces more in the future. “I decide to refrain from further reprimand, because I wish to preserve that spirit,” Weber writes. “Even if it’s misplaced here, this fieriness will serve him well in future contests.” Weber’s Immortal Bird is a love letter to his son, an account of Damon’s determination to fight a series of medical setbacks while fighting for his life. Damon was born without one of two ventricles that pump blood to and from the heart and lungs. He is missing the ventricle that pumps blood to the lungs to replenish oxygen and discharge carbon dioxide. By age four, Damon had already had two heart operations, the second a “modified Fontan,” which essentially replicates the work of the second ventricle. The surgery allows Damon to lead a relatively normal childhood, although he is smaller than most of his classmates. But he is smart, energetic and proves to be a gifted actor, performing Shakespeare and earning a small part on the HBO Western “Deadwood.” Damon’s medical maladies are comparatively minor until he is
diagnosed with PLE, an affliction related to his Fontan procedure that prevents him from keeping protein in his body. This results in an arduous journey in which Damon experiences many physical and emotional highs and lows, and ultimately, a heart transplant with traumatic side effects. Immortal Bird is a heart-wrenching family memoir that describes the deep love between parent and child, while also celebrating the nobility and spirit of a boy who embraces life with a fiery passion. —J o h n T. S l a n i a
The Lady in Gold By Anne-Marie O’Connor Knopf $30, 368 pages ISBN 9780307265647 eBook available
HISTORY
Vienna circa 1900 was a virtual paradise for artists, intellectuals and those who enjoyed their company. It was during this cultural golden age that the painter Gustav Klimt, having pulled himself up from poverty and into fame as a “workaholic artist and serial philanderer,” created his best-known works. Among them was a portrait, three years in the making, of Adele Bloch-Bauer, born in Vienna but of Jewish descent. She was The Lady in Gold. Anne-Marie O’Connor’s book traces the history of the famous painting as well as those whose lives it intersected. The title alone tells part of the story: When the Nazis stole the painting during the war, leaving Bloch-Bauer’s name attached to it would have meant acknowledging that the painting’s subject was Jewish; far simpler then to reduce her to “the lady in gold.” Thus “Adele’s identity disappeared with a simple stroke of the pen.” Sixty years after its theft, the painting became the subject of lengthy litigation between Bloch-Bauer’s surviving family members and the Austrian government,
NONFICTION a case that improbably ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court. The painting was ultimately returned to the heirs and sold at auction for a record sum. It’s currently on display in a New York gallery, but O’Connor’s focus is more on the journey than its end point. The biographical sketches of Klimt, Bloch-Bauer and their families and community are richly drawn. While any book following the plight of Jews in Vienna at the time of the Holocaust will of course be full of sorrows, there are bright spots and humor as well. Having the paintings returned brings nobody back to life, but they do testify to a time when the Jewish elite were not just accepted but celebrated in Vienna. Klimt, derided by critics for “objectifying” women, found them to be his greatest champions for acknowledging and portraying female sexuality. It’s widely known that he carried on affairs with his models, and the historical assumption is that Adele Bloch-Bauer was no exception, but there is no proof to be found. One of Klimt’s grandsons was asked about it and, acknowledging there’s no way to tell, nevertheless added, “I’m certain he tried.” Part history and part mystery, The Lady in Gold is a striking tale. —Heather Seggel
Our Black Year By Maggie Anderson PublicAffairs $25.99, 320 pages ISBN 9781610390248
economics
Only two cents of every dollar African Americans spend in America go to black-owned businesses. Disturbed by this leakage of money from black communities, Maggie and John Anderson pledged to spend a year buying only from black-owned businesses for themselves and their two young daughters. They called it “The Empowerment
Experiment,” and hoped to start a movement that would harness black buying power and infuse money into local communities. More local purchasing leads to better services and more jobs, and can even help alleviate “food deserts,” areas where residents have few fresh, healthy, affordable choices. It seemed like a simple idea. And yet, even in Chicago, with its many black neighborhoods, the Andersons struggled to find groceries, clothes, gas, restaurants and household goods. Black-owned businesses simply didn’t exist in most places. Our Black Year is a blistering, honest journal of the Andersons’ efforts to buy black, and those efforts can only be described as Herculean. Maggie Anderson spent hours driving to far-flung, dumpy minimarts to pick up $6 boxes of sugary cereal and subpar produce. “I felt like it was my duty to keep shopping this way,” she wrote. “If a point was going to be made, maybe it was good that I didn’t have a wonderful option . . . because most Black Americans don’t.” The Andersons got widespread media coverage for The Empowerment Experiment—and a different, uglier kind of attention, too. Comments on their website ranged from supportive to downright sinister. Some suggested the family move to Africa. Others called them racist, and suggested they wouldn’t give their children medical care unless it was from a black doctor. Maggie, a business consultant, and John, an attorney, were confounded by the vitriol. “We viewed our project as a moderate, well-reasoned form of self-help economics, something that people across the political spectrum could support. After all, experts of every stripe agree that the problems in America’s impoverished neighborhoods—black, Hispanic, Hmong or rural white—are fundamentally economic. So why were we being tagged as racists?” Our Black Year is a brisk call to action, offering clear-eyed perspective on how African Americans got to where they are today and what they can do to support black busi-
ness owners. In Maggie Anderson’s eyes, it’s a moral imperative. “My worst fear is that black people will always be the pitiable, ridiculed underclass,” she writes. “We built nations and empires, invented industries and revolutionary products, and conquered slavery, rape and genocide. We put a black man in the White House. And we’re still stuck at the bottom.” —Amy ScribneR
Going Solo By Eric Klinenberg Penguin Press $27.95, 288 pages ISBN 9781594203220 Audio, eBook available
CULTURE
Both proportionately and absolutely, more people in industrialized countries are living alone today than ever before, Eric Klinenberg asserts. This has been made possible, he says, by four primary factors: the massive entrance of women into the workplace; urbanization, which allows “singletons” to form interestoriented social relationships to replace or supplement traditional family links; the spread and improvement in mass communications that both entertain and enable people to keep in touch with each other; and longer life spans. Klinenberg is a professor of sociology at New York University and editor of the Public Culture journal. In probing this subject, he leavens his copious array of statistics with dozens of anecdotes about individuals who live alone either by choice or by circumstance. In many cases, having a place of one’s own to retreat to is an unalloyed benefit, a step in the direction of self-determination and personal freedom; in others, it is a lonely and often perilous existence, the grim solitude before the grave. Klinenberg doesn’t take sides. Having established the contours and likely continuation of this demographic trend, his focus is on
its social and political implications. What does it mean for municipal planning? For single women and men who eventually may want to marry and/or have children? For old people who have lost their mates and/or the ability to care for themselves? For the environment? As with most situations in which there are competing interests, there is no one solution that satisfies all. America, though a vigorous participant in this trend, is not at the forefront of it. According to Klinenberg’s figures, more than half of American adults are single and one out of every seven of these live alone—a total of around 35 million. The proportion is greater in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where from 40 to 45 percent of adults live alone. Some of the most imaginative planning appears to be taking place in Sweden, where dwelling complexes and mixed communities have been designed to accommodate and socially enrich singletons of every age, from college students to seniors. Given this phenomenon, what are we to do about it, if anything? Klinenberg concludes Going Solo with this proposition: “What if, instead of indulging the social reformer’s fantasy that we would all just be better off together, we accepted the fact that living alone is a fundamental feature of modern societies and we simply did more to shield those who go solo from the main hazards of the condition?” This book is a catalog of possibilities. —Edward Morris
Killing the Secret by Donna Welch Jones Deadly Niche Press • $14.95 ISBN 9780937660980 Somebody is killing the women who played on a high school basketball team 20 years ago!
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children’s books
black history By Julie Hale
AFRICAN-AMERICAN Tales of triumph
B
lack History Month is a special period of celebration and commemoration—a time for looking back at the individuals and events that made progress possible. In honor of this special time, BookPage has rounded up a group of new picture books that chronicle some of the highlights of the African-American legacy.
MAKING SPIRITS SOAR In Touch the Sky: Alice Coachman, Olympic High Jumper (Whitman, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780807580356), Ann Malaspina revisits a thrilling chapter in American sports—the story of the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal. Born in Albany, Georgia, to impoverished parents, Alice Coachman seems destined to defy gravity. Leaping over tree roots and shooting baskets with towering boys, practicing the high jump with a crossbar made of branches and rags, Alice, as depicted in Eric Velasquez’s dynamic paintings, seems always to be airborne. Her father disapproves of her tomboyish behavior, but when she’s invited to join the Tuskegee Institute’s famous Golden Tigerettes track team, Alice develops skills that take her to the 1948 London Olympics. There she soars farther than she ever imagined, setting a new Olympic high jump record. Malaspina em-
ploys a spirited prose style to tell the story of Alice’s extraordinary career.
A LEADER GETS HIS START Proving that knowledge really is power, Lesa Cline-Ransome’s Words Set Me Free: The Story of Young Frederick Douglass (Simon & Schuster, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9781416959038) recounts the rise of one of America’s greatest orators. Frederick Douglass spends his early childhood on a Maryland plantation where slaves caught reading are severely punished. When he’s transferred to the home of the Auld family in Baltimore, Frederick gets his first taste of formal education. Kind-hearted Missus Auld gives him lessons in the alphabet, and Frederick is soon obsessed, practicing in secret with a brick and chalk. At the age of 12, he buys his first newspaper and encounters words like “abolition” and “liberty.” Against all odds, Frederick educates himself and—later on, at great risk—his fellow slaves. By unlocking the secrets of language, he arms himself for the future. Featuring beautifully nuanced pictures by the author’s husband, James E. Ransome, this moving book comes with a clear message: Education is the key to success.
OVATION FOR A LEGEND
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With Jazz Age Josephine (Atheneum, $16.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9781416961239), Jonah Winter offers an irresistible homage to a groundbreaking performer. Born dirt poor in St. Louis, Missouri, young Josephine Baker spends part of her childhood in the city slums, where she’s taunted by other kids. Using theatrics as a survival tactic—clowning and dancing to hide her hurt—she makes a
little money and eventually joins a traveling show as a dancer, but the blues follow. At one point, she’s so broke, a bench in Central Park serves as her bed. At the age of 19, Josephine takes off for Paris, where she finds her artistic footing and gets a taste of what liberation is like. Embracing her race and blossoming as a performer, she hits the heights of fame but never forgets her St. Louis roots. Winter’s blues-inflected writing style is perfectly complemented by Marjorie Priceman’s bright, impressionistic visuals. Brimming with infectious energy, Winter’s book is a showstopper from start to finish.
HOME RUN HERO Showing how team spirit in sports helped break down racial barriers, Chris Crowe’s Just as Good: How Larry Doby Changed America’s Game (Candlewick, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780763650261) is a wonderful depiction of the brotherhood of baseball. It’s the fall of 1948, and the city of Cleveland is humming with anticipation for game four of the World Series—a contest between the city’s own Indians and the Boston Braves. An AfricanAmerican boy named Homer narrates the events of the big day, as he and his parents gather around the radio to listen to the game. Homer’s hero, Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League, will be stepping up to the plate. When Doby hits a home run in the third inning, he makes history, becoming the first African-American ballplayer to do so in the World Series. Mike Benny depicts Homer’s wide-eyed excitement through luminous illustrations, while Crowe seamlessly weaves facts and stats from the actual game into the storyline.
VERSES OF FREEDOM Ntozake Shange is a beloved African-American playwright, poet
and novelist. With Freedom’s a-Callin’ Me (Amistad, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780061337413), she delivers a timeless collection of verse inspired by the Underground Railroad—dramatic and impassioned poems about slaves dreaming of escape, the white folks who help them and the trackers who trail them. Shange writes with wonderful authenticity and an ear for syntax, conjuring up a group of unforgettable narrators who experience hope, danger and loss on the road to a better life. The book’s title poem eloquently describes one man’s plan to flee, to “mix myself way low in the cotton . . . wind myself like a snake / till ah can swim ’cross the stream.” The poems are filled with arresting imagery—slave hunters leading ferocious hounds, overseers wielding their whips—which Rod Brown brings to life in his sensitively rendered paintings. Throughout the book, Shange offers different perspectives and stories to create a multifaceted look at the secret system that changed so many lives. This is a wonderful introduction to an important chapter in African-American history—and to the narrative possibilities of poetry.
A REMARKABLE DAY Written and illustrated by acclaimed author Shane W. E vans, We March (Roaring Brook, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9781596435391) is a stirring account of a history-making event as seen through the eyes of one African-American family. On August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 people came together for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, an episode forever inscribed on the American memory thanks to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Evans’ tale brings the momentous day down to a personal level, as the family prepares to march, painting signs, praying and joining the procession to the Lincoln Memorial. Evans’ brief, poetic lines have a simple majesty that reflects the significance of the occasion. His vibrantly illustrated story gives readers a sense of what it might have been like to join the crowd taking crucial steps on the road to freedom.
interviews
Jacqueline Woodson
A hopeful path from addiction
F
or Jacqueline Woodson, hope is an essential component of a good story. Whether she’s reading or writing, “happiness doesn’t have to come at the end, but there has to be hope somewhere, to keep me engaged and wanting to move forward.”
Since her first book was published in 1989, the much-lauded author of 30 books and counting has created many characters who are dealing with difficult problems. “They have to figure out what they’re going to do with the hand they’ve been dealt,” Woodson says from her home in Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner and their two children. “For the most part, kids are so resilient, and they do figure out a way to move through it.” Her latest book for teens, Beneath a Meth Moon, opens on a bleak day in the life of 15-year-old Laurel. She’s a pretty blonde who, not long after moving to a town called Galilee, makes the cheerleading team, meets a new friend (Kaylee) and boyfriend (T-Boom) and becomes a meth addict. Laurel and Kaylee’s budding friendship will feel familiar and sweet to anyone who’s felt that frisson of delight at the start of something good. And under Woodson’s hand, when Laurel and T-Boom lock eyes on the basketball court, their attraction is palpable: “Just me and T-Boom, seeing each other—not for the first time, really, but yes, for the first time. . . . He’s home to me, and I don’t even know him.” Behind the 7-Eleven just hours later, when T-Boom offers Laurel meth and she unhesitatingly breathes it in, her acquiescence is horrifying and sad but, thanks to Woodson’s skill, not entirely surprising. Readers have already learned that Laurel is hobbled by grief and searching for a way to blunt her feelings of pain and sadness. Woodson doesn’t reveal Laurel, or her other characters, in a linear manner; she moves back and forth through time, from presentday conversations to snippets of thought and memory. Until she was 11, Laurel and her family lived in
Pass Christian, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico with its pretty water and warm sand. But those memories get crowded out by what came in 2005: Grandma M’lady decided not to evacuate during Hurricane Katrina and Mama stayed with her, while the rest of the family went to Jackson to wait for them. Like so many others, M’lady and Mama did not survive the hurricane. Woodson compassionately renders the “There are so shock of those left behind, many great and, by extenreasons to sion, the efforts be here, to made by anyone be whole, to experiencing such sadness to be fully in adjust to their the world new burden. no matter Laurel’s father what our life moves her and situation is.” her younger brother, Jesse Jr., to Galilee in hopes of putting the past behind them, but, Woodson says, “This promised land, this dry land, is not what they expected.” The author’s own grandmother died a few years ago, and her mother died suddenly just before she started to write Beneath a Meth Moon. “You have to figure out what happens to you,” she says. “How does the world change for you, what do you do with that change? And here’s Laurel having lost two important figures very quickly, and being lost in a way that makes absolute sense.” While Laurel’s meth use doesn’t make sense to Woodson in a literal way (like this writer, she read Go Ask Alice in her youth and the book had the desired, frightening effect concerning the dangers of teenage drug use), she says that writing Beneath a Meth Moon was a way to explore things she’d wondered about—like the children who survive a massive,
tragic event, or people who decide to take a drug they know to be dangerous and destructive. She says of the young Katrina survivors, “What happened to those kids, emotionally, psychologically and physically, given this kind of loss? You just don’t hear about them, unless they survived and went on to play for the Dallas Cowboys . . . otherwise, people are apt to just disappear. I don’t want that to happen.” And, she asks, “Why would anyone even put meth to their nose? Seeing the damage that drug can do, why would you make the choice to do it? Who would do it, why would they do it, what would be their reason for living?” Through the character of Laurel, Woodson says, “Hopefully what readers get is that there are so many great reasons to be here, to be whole, to be fully in the world no matter what our life situation is.” That sense of promise—that hope—is present not only in Laurel’s story, but in those of her family and friends, too. There’s Kaylee, who sticks around even when she doesn’t understand or agree with Laurel’s decisions. “To some extent, Laurel is Kaylee’s hope,” Woodson says. “What Laurel brings to her is the bigger world. She’s done something else, lived another life, and they’re going to escape together.” And there’s Moses, a young man who paints murals of children who died of drug overdose. He’s kind to Laurel, but also matter-of-fact in noting that she may well be one of his subjects someday. The author says she can relate to the push-and-pull of being a teenager trying to imagine the future: “I think kids have to make choices all the time about who they are becoming. It’s part of identity politics: ‘Am I who you’re naming me to be?’ Those moments of not being who you want to be, of wanting to get past it
© marty umans
BY LINDA M. CASTELLITTO
and be something else. And having gone through that myself as an adolescent, not wanting other people to decide my fate—like becoming a writer, when the message was, you don’t come out of this community to be a writer, you become a bluecollar worker.” Certainly, Woodson has moved far past that proscription. Her books have garnered many honors—including several National Book Award nominations, three Newbery Honor awards, ALA Best Book for Young Adults nods and more. With the timely, unflinching and empathetic Beneath a Meth Moon, she adds another powerful story to her critically acclaimed body of work.
Beneath a meth moon
By Jacqueline Woodson, Nancy Paulsen Books $16.99, 192 pages, ISBN 9780399252501 Audio, eBook available, ages 12 and up
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children’s books Kindred Souls
reviews
a gentle soul goes home R e v ie w b y R o b i n S m i t h
Family history is alive and well in the newest offering from Patricia MacLachlan. In Kindred Souls, she brings us the story of young Jake, who lives on the family farm with his parents, siblings and 88-year-old grandfather, Billy. The prairie setting feels like another character in the book, one that lives in the hearts of the whole family, especially Billy, who has one fervent hope: to see the sod house of his childhood rebuilt. Readers see Billy and Jake’s life together through the little boy’s observations—the “predictable” walk they take together after the chores are done, the visit to the cows and horses and Billy’s near-whispered refrain at the end of their walk: “I miss that sod house.” One day, a special dog arrives out of the blue and takes a shine to Billy, even visiting him when he ends up in the hospital. While Billy is recuBy Patricia MacLachlan, Katherine Tegen Books perating, Jake and his family decide to build the sod house that Billy has $14.99, 124 pages, ISBN 9780060522971 hoped for. The happy activity of cutting the sod and picking out furniture Ages 7 and up lulls the reader, like Jake, into believing that Billy will live forever. Adult readers will see it all coming but will still be saddened when Lucy, the angel dog, barks her sad bark to bring the family to the quiet sod house. And, though we are older and understand these things, we will join Jake in his confusion: He thought they built the house so Billy would stay, but it turns out they built the house so that he could leave. Books for young children that speak openly about death and the cycle of life are rare, and rarer still are those that tell us the time to grieve and prepare is while our loved ones are still here. I promise Kindred Souls will make you cry, but these will be tears of recognition, reminding us to take care of our loved ones before they are gone.
When Blue Met Egg By Lindsay Ward Dial $16.99, 32 pages ISBN 9780803737181 Ages 3 and up
PICTURE BOOK
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When Blue Met Egg is a delightful story about a spunky bluebird named Blue who lives in Central Park. When a snowball flies through the air and lands in Blue’s nest, Blue adopts the newcomer, mistaking it for an egg, and taking it everywhere for several wintry months. Newcomer Lindsay Ward combines this charming story with funky illustrations created from cut-paper collages and sketches, taking readers on a bird’s-eye tour of New York City. Blue and Egg travel to Columbus Circle, the subway, an art museum, the opera, the top of a skyscraper and to a telescope pointed
at the Statue of Liberty. A wonderful fold-out section features Blue and Egg perched atop the Brooklyn Bridge. Look closely at these illustrations and you’ll see bits of newspaper in Blue’s nest, skyscrapers fashioned from test answer forms, crossword puzzles and graph paper in the Central Park snow, maps in the East River. The beauty of Ward’s style is that these fragments are a seamless part of each illustration: present, but not overpowering the art. Blue’s nest appears so cozy that you can practically feel its softness, while the snow appears to fall from the sky in a panoramic skyscraper scene. Ward moves the story along with gentle humor, as Blue unsuccessfully tries to share a hot dog with Egg, or reads The Golden Egg to her friend. Finally, Blue tries to feed Egg soup as Egg begins to melt, but (as with the hot dog) it doesn’t go well. When Blue Met Egg is about hope, friendship and undying optimism. When Egg melts, Blue
panics, but ultimately finds happiness: She discovers a pink flower in Egg’s melted snowball puddle, and exclaims, “Egg, you’ve bloomed!” Blue always sees a glass as half full, which is a sweet, lasting message for young readers. —ALICE CARY
Mr. and Mrs. Bunny— Detectives Extraordinaire! By Polly Horvath Illustrated by Sophie Blackall Random House $16.99, 256 pages ISBN 9780375867552 Ages 8 to 12
middle grade
National Book Award winner Polly Horvath puts a fresh twist on a typical theme—a young orphan placed with an older caregiver—in her delightful new middle grade mystery, Mr. and Mrs. Bunny—Detectives Extraordinaire! Young Madeline
might as well be an orphan. The only responsible resident on Hornby Island, off the coast of British Columbia, she changes the light bulbs while her hippie parents make sanddollar jewelry. When her parents not only refuse to attend her fifth-grade graduation, which Prince Charles will officiate during his Canadian tour, but also refuse to buy her new white shoes to conform to graduation standards, Madeline decides to earn her own money. After returning from a shift at the Happy Goat Café, Madeline discovers that her parents have been kidnapped by a band of foxes, who are looking for help in decoding secret family recipes before opening a bunny-processing factory. Just when all seems hopeless, Madeline meets Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, a pair of middle-aged rabbits whose passion du jour is detective work. Just as horse whisperers communicate with horses, the human girl can somehow understand these fedorasporting bunnies. Mr. and Mrs. Bunny set out to find her parents in time for graduation. Their sleuthing leads Madeline in and out of trouble, but for the first time she feels taken care of. Aided by a smart car, Craigslist and neverending breadsticks from the Olde Spaghetti Factory (because what town doesn’t have a chain Italian restaurant?), the bunnies do their work, all the while offering spot-on observations about human behavior. Horvath’s humor is a rare feat: a blend of over-the-top and smart that will keep both children and adults laughing to the bittersweet end. —ANGELA LEEPER
The Disenchantments By Nina LaCour Dutton $16.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780525422198 eBook available Ages 14 and up
TEEN
Colby is about to embark on a year he’s been dreaming of forever:
reviews Once he graduates, he’s both driver and roadie for his best friend Bev’s band as they tour the Pacific Northwest, after which he and Bev will take off and spend a year exploring Europe. So it’s a major surprise when, before the rubber has even hit the road, Bev tells Colby she’s bailing on him as soon as the tour is done. That squall of feedback you heard wasn’t just Colby’s life screeching to a halt; meet The Disenchantments. There are many reasons this book should be on your radar. Author Nina LaCour (Hold Still ) has created a road trip so realistic you’ll end up with leg cramps from sitting in the van so long. Each stop along the way has its own side trips, cruddy motel rooms and wonderfully odd local characters. Also tattoos, impromptu dance parties, nude hot tubbing and epic graffiti. The excitement of live shows comes through, along with the boredom of hours on the road and time spent simply waiting. While they travel, Colby presses Bev for an explanation. She does ultimately reveal an event from her past that shaped her decision to plan the trip, and also to abandon it . . . but did she really understand what she was seeing? With his plans in chaos, will Colby be able to regroup and reconsider his future without Bev in it? And when she told him, “You have to find something to love,” did she mean “besides me”? While navigating these hard questions, Colby, Bev and their fellow travelers have lots of conversations about art and music; they’re a pleasure to eavesdrop on, and it’s inspiring to observe the way they each take details from their environment and turn them into a work of art, a sculpture, drawing or song, that captures a better moment than the one that really was. It’s not giving anything away to say the story resolves on an inspiring note, too— when life gives you so much raw material, sometimes it’s possible to make inspired, and brave, decisions. The Disenchantments’ music may make your ears bleed, but their story is beautiful and full of heart. Don’t miss it. —Heather Seggel
meet MAIRA KALMAN
There Is No Dog By Meg Rosoff Putnam $17.99, 256 pages ISBN 9780399257643 eBook available Ages 12 and up
TEEN
Sometimes being God has its benefits. The whole “creating and naming everything on earth” gig was kind of a blast, and so is engineering the occasional cosmic miracle. And, of course, being able to seduce any woman on the planet is not a bad perk. Just ask Bob. Since being appointed God, he’s had his share of beautiful girls—and he’s also created his share of natural disasters, when (like any teenage boy in the throes of lust and heartbreak) he reacts badly if things don’t quite turn out according to plan. Bob may have met his match in the form of Lucy, a voluptuous young zoo employee who’s eager to settle down, although maybe not with the Creator of the Universe. Bob’s petulance during his courtship of Lucy wreaks some serious havoc worldwide (is it global warming or a pouting God?). Meanwhile, Bob’s provocative mother has gambled away the only creature who loves Bob more than he loves himself, and Bob’s sidekick, Mr. B., is plugging away at the less glamorous godly work of answering prayers and making sure the world doesn’t fall apart entirely. The idea of gods behaving badly is at least as old as Greek and Roman myth; envisioning a hormoneaddled modern-day Judeo-Christian God, however, is a provocative premise, and one that Meg Rosoff is more than capable of handling. In the past, she’s been known for dark, evocative, apocalyptic work, like the Printz Award-winning How I Live Now; in this, her first foray into satire, she also reveals herself to be irreverent, insightful and very, very funny. —Norah Piehl
Looking at lincoln Author and artist Maira Kalman offers a unique perspective on our 16th president in her new picture book, Looking at Lincoln (Nancy Paulsen/Penguin, $17.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780399240393). Kalman, a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Times, lives in Manhattan but completed this Q&A while on a visiting fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.
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WORDNOOK
By the editors of Merriam-Webster
A WEASEL’S WORK Dear Editor, What is a weasel word? I heard this used with reference to a certain politician recently. It doesn’t sound like a term that would be meant as a compliment. A. L. Boca Raton, Florida Weasel word is defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition as “a word used in order to evade or retreat from a direct or forthright statement or position.” The term originates from the belief in a reputed peculiar habit of weasels. Some people believe that weasels can suck the insides out of an egg while leaving the egg superficially intact. The egg looks fine, but it is actually empty and useless. We don’t know if weasels can really do that, but the belief that they could caused people to use the term weasel word to mean a word (or words) used to give the impression that everything is fine when, really, the speaker is trying to avoid answering
a question, telling the truth or taking the blame for something.
English through trade with Arabic nations.
PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
THE REAL DEAL
Dear Editor, I was consulting my Old Farmer’s Almanac the other day, and it struck me what an odd word almanac is. It has a rather exotic sound to it. Can you tell me anything about where it comes from? D. K. Williamstown, Massachusetts
Dear Editor, Can you explain the origin of the real McCoy? W. M. Louisville, Kentucky
Almanac came into English in the 14th century, and scholars believe it traces back to al-manakh, Arabic for “the almanac.” It’s not surprising that almanac should come from Arabic—the medieval Arabic world was a hotbed of learning, scientific discovery and trade. The types of English words that find their roots in Arabic are evidence of that. Algebra, algorithm and alchemy are a few examples of scientific words; admiral and arsenal come from the governmental and military world; and soda and spinach came into
So many explanations for this phrase have been proposed that even the variations have variations! Probably the most popular is a story connecting the real McCoy to a turnof-the-20th-century welterweight boxing champion named Norman Selby, who used as his professional name “Kid McCoy.” One variation has it that so many fighters took his name as their own out of admiration that he had to bill himself as “Kid ‘The Real’ McCoy.” Another story claims that McCoy was challenged by a drunk who refused to believe he was the champ. One punch proved that he was, and the drunk exclaimed, “You are the real McCoy!” If the poor fellow was drinking
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Excerpted from Mensa 10-Minute Crossword Puzzles by Fred Piscop, on sale now from Workman Publishing.
ACROSS 1 Java holder 4 1993 football movie 8 Hammerheads and makos 14 Pavarotti standard 16 Straight 17 Fenway or Wrigley 18 Missing links 19 Western treaty gp. 20 PRNDL pick
whiskey, he might have imbibed the real McCoy, for another story links the expression with a distillery in Glasgow, Scotland, owned by A. and M. MacKay. (The real MacKay is the British version of the phrase.) The brothers MacKay exported their whiskey to the United States and Canada, where it became known as the real MacKay or the real McCoy to distinguish it from inferior whiskeys. Both theories are plausible, but it turns out that Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson used the real MacKay in a letter written in 1883, long before Kid McCoy. We therefore subscribe to the theory that connects the phrase ultimately with the clan MacKay of Scotland. The position of chief of the clan has been, over the years, a matter of much dispute, and thus the real MacKay, which was altered to the real McCoy, refers to the real chief of the clan.
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49 Where to find driftwood 50 Hackneyed 51 Chicago airport 52 Jouster’s weapon 53 Lionel Hampton’s instrument 54 Rest room sign 58 Staff symbol 60 Road crew’s supply 61 U-turn from WSW 63 PO box item 64 Sparks or Buntline 65 Mdse.
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