BookPage April 2012

discover your next great book www.bookpage.com

april 2012

america’s book review

a Dark

Legacy In a haunting new novel with a love story at its heart, Ron Rash explores the links between landscape and destiny

Easter reflections on faith

Our Top Picks Absolution pg 19 Fiction The Language of Flowers pg 7 book clubs

SMALL MIRACLES

The False Prince pg 30 children’s Wild pg 26 NONfiction

A little girl makes Born to Darkness pg 10 ROMANCE big things happen American Dervish pg 6 audio in The Land of Decoration Easy Money pg 5 whodunit

& The latest advice for

making your garden grow!

paperback picks penguin.com

Just Down the Road

Betrayal

Chasing Fire

The Princess and the Peer

Since Tinch Turner lost his wife, he’s spent his nights boozing and brawling. When one of his escapades lands him in the ER, he sees the beautiful new doctor in town and for the first time in years, he feels a spark.

Meanwhile, Reagan Truman finds comfort in the makeshift family she’s made—proving to everyone that life does go on.

During one hot summer, Noah Di Luca and Penelope Alonso came together in the sweetness of first love…until his past reared its ugly head. As peril builds around them, Penelope has one choice: to survive, she must once again trust the man who betrayed her.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author delves into the world of elite firefighters who thrive on danger and adrenaline—men and women who wouldn’t know how to live life if it weren’t on the edge.

When a royal summons from her brother arrives, Emma knows it’s time to embrace her duties as the princess of a small European kingdom, and marry the man her brother has chosen for her…a stranger she has never met. Instead she does what any self-respecting princess would do—she runs away.

9780425246924 • $7.99

9780451413208 • $7.99

9780515150636 • $7.99

9780451236340 • $7.99

Son of Stone

Sixkill

Quicksilver

The Thirteenth Sacrifice

After an eventful trip to Bel-Air and a reunion with his sophisticated former love, Arrington Calder, Stone Barrington is back in New York, and he’s looking to stay closer to home and cash in on his partnership at Woodman & Weld. But Arrington has other plans for Stone... including introducing him to the child he fathered many years ago.

In the course of a murder investigation, Spenser encounters the main suspect’s bodyguard, Zebulon Sixkill. The two forge an unlikely alliance, with Spenser serving as mentor for Sixkill. As the case grows darker and secrets about both Jumbo and the dead girl come to light, it’s Spenser—with Sixkill at his side— who must put things right.

Virginia Dean wakes at midnight beside a dead body, with a bloody knife in her hand and no memory of the evening’s events. Dark energy, emanating from the mirrors lining the room, overpowers her senses. With no apparent way in or out, she is rescued by a man she has met only once before, but won’t soon forget.

When young women start dying, Samantha Ryan is the perfect person to investigate, for only she knows what the archaic symbol carved into their flesh means. Reluctantly, Samantha goes undercover—into a town obsessed with black magic, into her terrifying past, and into the dark, newly awakened heart of evil.

9780451236357 • $9.99

9780425246900 • $9.99

9780515150568 • $7.99

9780451236364 • $7.99

From the national bestselling author of Mistress of Rome comes a tale of love, power, and intrigue spanning the wilds of the Empire to the seven hills of Rome.

Brash and headstrong, Vix is a celebrated ex-gladiator returned to Rome to make his fortune.

The sinuous, elusive Sabina is a senator’s daughter who craves adventure. Sometimes lovers, sometimes enemies, Vix and Sabina are united by their devotion to Trajan. But others are already maneuvering in the shadows. Trajan’s ambitious empress has her own plans for Sabina. And the aristocratic Hadrian—the Empress’s ruthless protégé and Vix’s mortal enemy—has ambitions he confesses to no one, ambitions rooted in a secret prophecy.

When Trajan falls, the hardened soldier, the enigmatic empress, the adventurous girl, and the scheming politician will all be caught in a deadly whirlwind of desire and death that may seal their fates, and that of the entire Roman Empire...

9780425242025 • $15.00

BERKLEY

A Penguin Group (USA) Company

contents

april 2012 w w w. B o o k Pa g e . c o m

features

14

12 a.j. jacobs Meet the author of Drop Dead Healthy

A tale of faith, doubt and miracles, told through the eyes of a child

Five new books to put your feet back on the right path

18 poetry

ron rash

With The Cove, his latest novel to feature the lush mountain landscape of western North Carolina, Rash presents a compelling defense of “regional writers”

16 grace mccleen 17 easter

cover story

Cover image © iStockphoto.com/LightScribe

reviews 19 Fiction

top pick:

In praise of the perfectly turned phrase

28 rhymes for young readers A celebration of playful poetry

29 robin lafevers

Absolution by Patrick Flanery The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan; The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler; A Partial History of Lost Causes by Jennifer duBois; A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash; The Good Father by Noah Hawley; The Red Book by Deborah Copaken Kogan; The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead; Hand Me Down by Melanie Thorne; White Horse by Alex Adams; Calico Joe by John Grisham; A Surrey State of Affairs by Ceri Radford also reviewed:

26 NonFiction top pick:

Killer nuns, a real-life teen queen: a new historical fantasy breaks the mold

31 douglas florian Meet the author-illustrator of Poem Runs

Wild by Cheryl Strayed The Woman Who Wasn’t There by Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr.; The Maid and the Queen by Nancy Goldstone; The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall; Damn Yankees edited by Rob Fleder; The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson also reviewed:

30 Children’s top pick:

The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen Tracks by Diane Lee Wilson; Ruby Redfort Look Into My Eyes by Lauren Child; Losers in Space by John Barnes; The List by Siobhan Vivian also reviewed:

columns 04 cooking 05 whodunit

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18

19

26

06

16

31

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06 audio 07 book clubs 08 lifestyles 08 author enablers 10 romance 12 well read

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3

“These are the 100 recipes everyone needs!”

—Ina GarTen, author of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks

“ One of the best cookbook authors of her generation, Katie Workman is the perfect person to help moms everywhere get delicious meals to the table.”

—BoBBy Flay, chef, Mesa Grill; author of Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain Cookbook

“ At first, Katie Workman’s terrific book made me wish I’d had it when my own kids were little. Then I thought: ‘No, wait. I wish Katie were MY mom.’”

—Sandra BoynTon, author, artist, and mother of four

columns Why make your own kitchen staples? Check in with Alana Chernila and page through The Homemade Pantry (Clarkson Potter, $24.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9780307887269) and you’ll get the answers, the recipes and a seat in Alana’s wonderfully messy kitchen. There, you’ll learn how to fill your own pantry with handmade treats from creamy ricotta to ketchup, sauerkraut to salsa, crispy graham crackers and potato chips to spice-mellowed chai. Kicking the packaged-food habit (wholly or partially) will save money and avoid unwanted chemicals and the waste of unnecessary packaging.

COOKING WITH COLORS

J

book that every mom needs—filled with delicious, no-fuss, easily adaptable

recipes, plus tips, attitude, and wisdom for surviving and staying happy in the kitchen.

workman.com • themom100.com

4

by sybil PRATT

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

But, best of all, the food you make at home will taste better. Just compare a homemade corn tortilla, flattened in an inexpensive wooden press, or a cinnamon-and-sugar-filled homemade pop-tart, to the cardboard variety from the supermarket and you’ll know why it’s worth doing.

Alana’s instructions are thorough and she’s added problem-solving, “tense moment” tips and handy storage advice.

ust in time for Mother’s day, the

cooking

Ripe: A Fresh, Colorful Approach to Fruits and Vegetables (Running Press, $25, 312 pages, ISBN 9780762440245) by Cheryl Sternman Rule, with fabulous color photos

by Paulette Phlipot, is organized in a uniquely inviting and liberating way—by color. Cheryl figures that most of us know that we should be eating more fruits and veggies, and most of us understand why. So, her intent is not to preach about a peach, but to use Mother Nature’s vivid paint box to spark your imagination. The photos alone will make you reach for that dark red head of radicchio, green-leafed bok choy or orange-hued papaya. Add recipes with inventive ingredient

combos, such as Persimmon Apple Radicchio Stacks, Warm Fava Shallot Couscous, Ginger Cashew Cauliflower, Rhubarb Cherry Mint Crisps and Blackberry-Lime Cornmeal Shortcakes, and you’ll wake up your culinary senses and shake up the way you feel about fruits and vegetables.

You’re on your way to easy, breezy, technicolor triumphs.

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS Jeffrey Saad has a passion for vibrant international flavors, and he’s circled the globe in hot pursuit of the spices that define the special pizzazz in the world’s most intensely flavored cuisines. Saad, a rising star on the Food Network, has gathered the best of the recipes he’s created—personal takes on the regional dishes he’s savored—in his debut cookbook, Jeffrey Saad’s Global Kitchen. After deconstructing the “flavor families,” the unique constellations of ingredients that give the cuisines of Mexico, Asia, India, the Middle East, a trio of European hotspots and our amazing American melting pot their distinct identities, he gets to the real fun—infusing the bold flavors of one tradition into another and coming up with a fabulous juxtaposition that sends your palate flying off on its own magic carpet: Moroccan harissa jazzes up the mayo on an all-American BLT; Indian garam masala makes Chicken Pot Pie sing a new song; Chinese five-spice powder empowers French Toast; and green chile gives Cod Tapas a New World zing. Stay home while your taste buds roam.

Jeffrey Saad’s Global Kitchen

By Jeffrey Saad Ballantine $22, 256 pages ISBN 9780345528360

INTERNATIONAL

Whodunit

by Bruce Tierney

investigations in Hollywood When a new Joseph Wambaugh book arrives, I know that I will be mightily entertained: I will laugh out loud, suffer with the characters through the poignant moments and be very sad to have turned the final page. This is certainly the case with Wambaugh’s latest Hollywood Division novel, Harbor Nocturne (Mysterious Press, $27, 336 pages, ISBN 9780802126108). Back once again are the usual zanies: “Hollywood” Nate Weiss, the SAG-card-carrying wannabe actor, fretting as always that he is fast approaching his

use-by date; Flotsam and Jetsam, the amiable party-down surfer cop duo; and the looming presence of “The Oracle,” a fallen officer whose photo graces the lobby of Hollywood Station—no cop passes the picture without touching it for good luck before going on duty. This time out, Wambaugh’s motley crew will investigate a massage parlor that may be a cover for a human trafficking operation; a strange Russian fellow with a fetish for amputees— particularly folks who have voluntarily had healthy limbs removed; and the strange doings of a Serbian crime lord and his huge and lethal Korean associate. Another do-notmiss novel from a living legend of contemporary crime fiction.

STICKY FINGERS IN TOKYO This month, three novels deviate from the norm and unfold from the perspective of the crooks. The first one is best-selling Japanese author Fuminori Nakamura’s English-language debut, The Thief (Soho, $23, 304 pages, ISBN 9781616950217).

Originally published in 2009 as Suri, The Thief is the first-person narrative of an ill-starred Tokyo pickpocket about to be drawn into

the biggest scam of his career. He is none too happy about this turn of events, but there is little to be done about it; ruthless crime boss Kizaki is watching his every move. Complicating matters is his budding friendship with a young shoplifter and the boy’s ne’er-do-well mom, each of whom has a hidden agenda that could compromise our (anti) hero’s tenuous grip of the situation.

Then, when what should have been a straightforward burglary turns into a highly publicized political assassination, all bets are off. Our light-fingered protagonist finds himself in the position of knowing too much— way too much. Nakamura’s writing invites comparison to the best of the Japanese suspense novelists: Natsuo Kirino, Miyuki Miyabe, Keigo Higashino. A must for fans of Tokyo noir.

OUTSMARTING THE RECESSION In different circumstances, Pender and his friends might have had more normal lives (the ritual commute into the city; the family comfortably ensconced in the split-level; the two weeks’ vacation), but the downturn in the economy has left the recent grads underemployed, and they have been forced to improvise. The group has engineered a clever kidnapping scam: low ransom, high volume. They’ll take 50K here, 100K there, and soon there should be enough dough socked away to fund their early retirement. But that wouldn’t be a great story, and Owen Laukkanen’s debut novel, The Professionals (Putnam, $25.95, 384 pages, ISBN 9780399157899), is nothing if not a great story. Things go pear-shaped when the group kidnaps the husband of a noted Mafia queen; needless to say, she is not pleased, and she sets her minions after the young crew. Author Laukkanen deftly cuts back and forth among the kidnappers, the thugs and the authorities hot on their trails, engendering

reader empathy for members of each group—no easy feat!

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY You’ve been waiting for this book.

You’ve worked your way through all the Henning Mankells and the Jo Nesbøs. You’ve read enough Scandinavian thrillers to teach Swedish Suspense 101. But you haven’t read anything like Jens Lapidus’ Easy Money, which is the antithesis of a police procedural. Rather, it is a crime procedural, written from the points of view of three career criminals on a collision course with one another: Jorge, the Chilean immigrant drug dealer who performed a vault over a prison wall with no plan of what to do afterward; JW, the preppie coke supplier to frat boy cronies, desperate for the cash to keep up appearances; and Mrado, the conflicted strong-arm goon for the Serbian mafioso who holds sway over the Stockholm underworld.

Every flavor of evil is close at hand: sex slavery, drugs, extortion, killing for hire—and these are just the tip of the iceberg. No sin is left uncommitted; no offensive word goes unsaid; no punches are pulled. For my money, Easy Money is hands-down the best gangster thriller in years.

Easy Money

By Jens Lapidus Pantheon $26.95, 480 pages ISBN 9780307377487 eBook available

mystery

A chilling paranormal tale from New York Times bestselling author

Sometimes dead men do tell tales…

“Graham...stands at the top of the romantic suspense category.”

—Publishers Weekly on Phantom Evil [starred review]

Available now!

5

columns Spring Listening A JANE AUSTEN WHODUNIT f ro m M ac M i l l a n au d i o

The #1 New York Times BesTseller Home FRoNT by Kristin HannaH

“Everyone knows that war is hell, but the deeper truth is that coming home can be worse...heart-wrenching.”

—People

ANoTHeR piece oF my HeART

by Jane Green

Jane Green’s most powerful novel yet: a story that explores the complications of a woman marrying into a ready-made family, and the true meaning of motherhood.

LeTTeR FRom A STRANgeR by barbara taylor bradford

“The storyteller of substance.”

—The Times (London) “Queen of the genre.”

—Sunday Times (London)

THe Dog WHo DANceD by susan Wilson

From the New York Times bestselling author of One Good Dog comes a novel about a woman’s cross-country journey to find her lost dog, and discover herself.

come Home by lisa scottoline

“ The pace is relentless, the twists are jaw-dropping.... Scottoline is a powerhouse.” —David Baldacci

Available on CD and for Digital Download

6

www.macmillanaudio.com

There’s been a steady stream of Jane Austen sequels, movie adaptations and TV miniseries—even zombies have lumbered in—and they keep coming. Some are terrific, others terrifically awful. But now Austenistas can rejoice: P.D. James, the much-lauded mistress of the eloquently executed mystery, has slipped into Austen’s aura with such perfection that you’ll be sure she’s either a faultless time traveler or champion channeler. Death Comes to Pemberley (Random House Audio, $40, 10 hours, ISBN 9780449011157) is an excellent pe-

audio by sukey howard

always hidden her inner demons, making herself choose “happiness.”

But when she returns from her deployment to Iraq, wounded in body and soul, plagued with guilt and PTSD, she’s no longer able to be all that she can be. What might have been a contemporary take on “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” becomes an intense, intimate look at what happened to this American family and to the love that bound Jolene and her husband and protected their precious children.

Keep the Kleenex close, and breathe through the lumps in your throat.

TOP PICK IN AUDIO

riod mystery, replete with all manner of mayhem, and a most welcome way to revisit Elizabeth and Darcy, now happily married and delighting in their two children, as well as many other characters from Pride and Prejudice. James, steeped in Austenian prose, conjures them up and Rosalyn Landor, with her honeyed, elegant English accent, gives them voice. Ms. Austen would surely have approved of the literary felicity produced by this exemplary combo.

IN HARM’S WAY Kristin Hannah’s Home Front (Macmillan Audio, $39.99, 15 hours, ISBN 9781427212658), read with fine emotional nuance by MaggiMeg Reed, is the kind of novel that grabs your heart as it draws you in. Nested in this love story and portrait of a family are some very big issues: duty, honor, what we owe our country, what our country owes us and what we owe our loved ones. Hannah looks at the choices we make and the drastic changes they can bring as she examines the impact of war on those who serve and those who wait at home. Jolene, a super-competent mother, wife and Black Hawk helicopter pilot, had

American Dervish is Ayad Akhtar’s extraordinary debut novel and his extraordinary debut as an audio narrator. Hayat Shah, the only son of well-to-do, non-observant Pakistani parents living in Milwaukee in the 1980s, is on the brink of adolescence when his mother’s best friend moves in with them. Mina, beautiful and brilliant, a fervent but liberal Muslim, awakens Hayat’s intellectual interest in the Koran and religious certainty, without realizing that she’s the object of his first, fierce feelings of pubescent lust— and without Hayat understanding the consequences of childish spite (think Atonement). As Hayat’s coming-of-age struggles get snarled in Mina’s romance with his father’s best friend, a Jewish doctor, they all get caught up in a stew of bigotry and belief, the complex contradictions of assimilation and ethnic identity, heritage and heartbreak.

American Dervish

By Ayad Akhtar Hachette Audio $29.98, 9.5 hours ISBN 9781611136173

debut FICTION

book clubs by julie hale

New paperback releases for reading groups

SHARED DESTINY A collection of interconnected narratives, Julie Otsuka’s richly imagined novel, The Buddha in the Attic (Anchor, $13.95, 144 pages, ISBN 9780307744425), focuses on a group of Japanese women who come to California after World War I as “picture brides” to marry men they’ve never met. Otsuka employs a first-person plural voice to tell their story, a device that emphasizes the characters’ shared fate. Facing up to the difficulties of being wives and the confusion of unfamiliar customs

(wearing shoes while indoors, for example), they discover that their new lives contain unexpected challenges.

But when World War II hits, unleashing widespread suspicion of Japanese Americans, Otsuka’s heroines find themselves in the midst of a nightmare. A finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, this remarkable novel is a skillful portrayal of the immigrant experience that reinforces Otsuka’s reputation as a writer to watch.

LEGACIES OF 9/11 The Submission (Picador, $15, 352 pages, ISBN 9781250007575), Amy Waldman’s accomplished debut, examines the ways in which America was changed by the tragedy of 9/11. The novel’s polarizing event is an anonymous design contest for a memorial at Ground Zero. When the competition is won by Muslim architect Mohammad Khan, the controversial choice causes an uproar. Waldman, a former New Delhi bureau chief for The New York Times, creates a fascinating cast of players to tell an unforgettable story. Rich widow Claire Burwell, a judge in

the contest, initially backs Khan but later has misgivings. Hottempered Sean Gallagher, who lost a brother on 9/11, is against the memorial, while contest chairman Paul Rubin is worried about the political side of the crisis. Waldman’s depictions are convincing, and she writes with emotion and heart—but without lapsing into sentimentality.

This is a shrewd and timely novel that’s sure to hit home with readers.

GREAT STORIES

NEW IN PAPERBACK FROM THE AUTHOR OF CONVERSATIONS WITH THE FAT GIRL “The dialogue is sparkling, the characters engaging and this is by all means a great read.”

— Daily Mail (London)

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s touching debut tells the story of 18-year-old Victoria Jones, an orphan living on the streets of San Francisco. Brought up in foster care, Victoria finds it hard to trust people and shies away from relationships. She finds solace in an unexpected source: flowers. Diffenbaugh deftly weaves in scenes of Victoria’s childhood, when she lived with a woman named Elizabeth who taught her all about plants. That knowledge proves invaluable when Victoria lands a job at a florist, where she demonstrates a gift for creating bouquets. Her arrangements seem to have special properties, triggering change for the better in the lives of those who receive them. When change affects her own life—in the form of a kind young man from her past—Victoria finds herself re-evaluating her solitary existence. Diffenbaugh’s sensitively written tale shows what life is like for the lonely while affirming that connection and growth are always possible.

A SPELLBINDING TALE “An eerie blend of The Stepford Wives, The Witches of Eastwick, and Desperate Housewives… bewitching characters and a creepy story that will stick with the reader long afterward.”

— Library Journal

A NEW BLESSINGS NOVEL FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR BEVERLY JENKINS “Another fantastic reunion with the folks of Henry Adams, Kansas… Jenkins’ latest is funny and poignant.”

— Romantic Times

The Language of Flowers

By Vanessa Diffenbaugh Ballantine $15, 352 pages ISBN 9780345525550

EXCELLENT FOR BOOK CLUBS

debut FICTION

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

@WilliamMorrowPB

7

columns

lifestyles

author enablers

by joanna brichetto

by kathi kamen goldmark & Sam Barry

INCH BY INCH, ROW BY ROW Tomatoes, whether or not we think of them as vegetables, are far and away America’s favorite fruit, and the one most likely to be in a home garden. But disease, pests, soil “issues,” too much or not enough water and flagrant user error often nip our homegrown harvest in the bud. You Bet Your Garden Guide to Growing Great Tomatoes (Fox Chapel, $14.95, 96 pages, ISBN 9781565237100) can help. Author Mike McGrath is the host of the public radio show “You Bet Your Garden” and now your own personal backyard expert. No matter the skill level or size of garden (or container),

anyone can grow healthy, delicious and gorgeous tomatoes. McGrath details how to pick the right variety, start from seed, plant, stake, cage, deal with pests and disease, practice “basic keeping-alive skills” and harvest the bounty. Wit and wisdom combine with big color photos, wacky cartoons and insider tips to help you grow serious gardening skill in no time.

GROWING UP

8

Vertical Vegetables & Fruit (Storey, $16.95, 176 pages, ISBN 9781603429986) by Rhonda Massingham Hart spotlights a chronically under-utilized direction in every garden: up. Whether we have a whole backyard, a terrace or just a teeny deck, growing vertically maximizes space and harvest, and minimizes time and effort. Techniques range from traditional teepees and trellises to funky ways to hang, stack, shelve and tower plants.

Learn to grow greens in garbage cans, herbs in cinder blocks, tomatoes in five-gallon hanging buckets or beans in a tote bag. Popular annual vines like beans, peas, tomatoes, cucumbers and squash get a

chapter each, with details about recommended varieties, site requirements, planting guidelines, training tips, lore and advice. Ditto for popular perennial fruits like grapes and berries, plus a chapter on how to espalier fruit trees. A nice bonus: Going vertical makes it nearly effortless to go (and stay) organic.

TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES Handmade Garden Projects by Lorene Edwards Forkner promises to show you “how to transform your little patch of the big outdoors into a refreshing, unique garden paradise.”

This is DIY done with creative vision and “made-from-scratch ingenuity.” It’s thrifty, too: Forkner admits to having “more ideas than money” and knows how to repurpose her way around a hardware store or a basement full of junk. The result?

Whatever paradise means to you: comfort, style, privacy, a space to entertain guests and/or play with the kids. She starts from the ground up, with gravel, pavers, mosaic, turf and bamboo paths. Then come “supporting acts”: trellises and structures made from galvanized wire, scrap metal and a lovely dead tree, followed by fountains, firepits and furniture crafted from unexpected material. Containers for plants run the gamut: a child’s wagon, a length of gutter, even an ingenious faux-granite feeding trough. Every project includes plenty of plant suggestions with an eye (and a green thumb) toward low maintenance and high personality.

Handmade Garden Projects

By Lorene Edwards Forkner Timber $19.95, 224 pages ISBN 97816046918563

GARDENING

Practical advice on writing & publishing for aspiring authors

MAKE IT TWO Dear Author Enablers, If I think I’ve found an agent I’m interested in, what should I do if the agent does not represent some of the genres I write in? For instance, I have some comedy scripts and some children’s manuscripts, but the agent does not represent children’s books.

Can a writer have two agents?

Laura Crowder Ohio, Illinois The quick answer is yes: It’s fine to have two agents, as long as they know about each other and everyone is clear about who’s doing what.

This can be a little tricky, and you’ll need to use all your people skills.

Proceed carefully and make sure you get clear agreements about your working arrangement with everyone involved, in writing.

Agents definitely do have specialties. A large agency might have the personnel to meet all your needs.

On the other hand, if you have one great agent who believes in you, that can be more valuable than experience in a particular genre.

VOTE OF THANKS Dear Author Enablers, What is the etiquette regarding giving thanks in an acknowledgment page to those who are generous enough to give you a blurb for your book? I’ve noticed such folks generally don’t get included. Is it because it makes it seem as though the endorsement is not honest or valid? I’m in the final stage of preparing my book for self-publication. I was able to obtain some terrific words of praise from some very busy people whom I had to pursue over several months. I want to include them in an official acknowledgment, but don’t want to seem amateurish if it normally “is not done.” Please advise.

Leslie Miklosy Fayetteville, North Carolina Authors generally should not thank the people who endorse their book in the acknowledgments. It

gives the appearance of a quid pro quo—a brown paper bag stuffed with cash or their favorite bottle of expensive booze should suffice.

Seriously, although most people know that endorsements are the result of some sort of personal connection (either yours or your editor’s), we all agree to the polite appearance that endorsements come about because a well-known author came upon a copy of your manuscript and fell in love.

It is better to send a formal thank you note to everyone who endorsed your book, along with an autographed copy. Congratulations for being so observant and doing your homework on this point of publishing etiquette.

CRAFT OF WRITING SPOTLIGHT In part two of our conversation with Les Standiford, author of Last Train to Paradise and director of the creative writing program at Florida International University, he answers three important questions about his approach to writing: How do you establish a sense of place?

For a novelist, there is no more important or enjoyable aspect of writing. I love being in certain places in actual life, and love trying to bring others there in turn, via the five senses.

How do you write convincing dialogue?

Study screenplays. Less is more.

How do you create a compelling plot?

Five questions: Who is my main character? What tangible things does she want? What obstacles are in the way? Why does the quest turn out the way it does? Why will anyone care about any of the foregoing?

Email your questions about writing to authorenablers@gmail.com. Please include your name and hometown.

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Novel Reads

HARPERCOLLINS HarperCollins.com • AvonRomance.com The Bone Yard

by Jefferson Bass

Called away from Tennessee’s renowned Body Farm, Dr. Bill Brockton discovers the dark side of the Sunshine state when he’s called in to investigate human remains found on the grounds of a Florida boys’ reform school.

9780061807046, $7.99

Call Me Irresistible

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips Ted Beaudine, one of Phillips’s most charming characters is now all grown up and in a heap of romantic trouble all his own— in a perfectly marvelous contemporary romance that fans of Jennifer Weiner, Kristen Hannah, and Barbara Delinsky will simply adore.

columns A Royal Marriage A Regency-era princess on the brink of an arranged marriage briefly escapes her royal fetters in The Princess and the Peer (Signet, $7.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780451236340) by Tracy Anne Warren. As her betrothal nears, Princess Emmaline travels alone to London, intending to surprise a former teacher. When Emma is robbed by thieves, she turns to a handsome nobleman who offers aid, and she moves into his home, pretending to be a governess. Nick, an earl, brings

9780061351532, $7.99

by Lori Wilde

Set in Jubilee, Texas—a small town full of horses, cowboys, and romance. Fall passionately in love with cowboy Joe Daniels, the sexy ranch-hand, as he and a beautiful failed wedding planner try to make a go at a falling down ranch and find that their hearts are leading them straight to the altar.

Scorpion Betrayal

by Andrew Kaplan

A breakneck-paced international espionage thriller. A relentlessly exciting page-turner featuring an ex-CIA agent code-named Scorpion—on a breathtaking chase across the capitals of Europe in pursuit of a frighteningly elusive terrorist known as “the Palestinian.”

9780062064585, $9.99

Wanted: Undead or Alive

by Kerrelyn Sparks

New York Times bestseller Kerrelyn Sparks takes the passionate action way out west, as a vamp and a werewolf go undercover at a Wyoming dude ranch...with sizzling results!

9780061958069, $7.99

A Week to Be Wicked

by Tessa Dare

A restless British lord is desperate to escape the quaint and too quiet small seaside resort he’s trapped in…and he gets much more than he expected when he eagerly agrees to escort a beautiful, brilliant, socially awkward lady scientist to Scotland.

9780062049872, $7.99

All available as eBooks Visit LibraryLoveFest.com for more great reading

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b y c h r i s t i e r i d g way

Until, that is, she discovers a need for backup help when a handful of adorable but incorrigible kids comes into her life. Billy likes the folks of Bramble—and he especially likes Shirlene—but that doesn’t mean he can retreat from his secret plan for revenge on the town. His plan might mean hurting Shirlene, but a promise to family comes first . . . or does it?

Nosy townsfolk, Texas twangs and an electric romantic attraction will leave readers smiling.

TOP PICK IN ROMANCE

The Cowboy Takes a Bride

9780062047755, $7.99

romance

his aunt along as chaperone and promises Emma a week of London fun. This sounds perfect to a young lady on the verge of marrying a king she’s never met, and the pair do find fun . . . and more. Once they fall for each other and Nick assumes they’ll marry, Emma realizes that she has to face the reality of her royal life, and she regretfully leaves her new lover.

But the princess underestimates the peer. Nick is not willing to let Emma go, and the two must find a way to be together. A charming story!

COUNTRY LOVIN’ One pet pig, four cute kids and a family curse provide obstacles in Katie Lane’s contemporary Western romp, Catch Me a Cowboy (Forever, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9781455508150). After losing her husband and making lousy financial decisions, Shirlene Dalton is living in a trailer, miles from her repossessed mansion in Bramble, Texas.

There’s also trouble next door in the person of Billy Wilkes, who claims to be in town for a little hunting and fishing. He’s a sexy, simple country boy—or at least he seems to be a simple country boy—and Shirlene figures she can ignore him.

Suzanne Brockmann envisions a complex and compelling near future in Born to Darkness, the first book in a paranormal romantic suspense series. The Obermeyer Institute, a privately funded research organization, trains talented people to tap into the brain’s hidden powers.

Aptly named “Greater Thans,” these super-humans sometimes aid beleaguered law enforcement. Their current focus: stopping a criminal organization that kidnaps and terrorizes young girls, then distributes an illegal and expensive drug created from their blood. Dr. Michelle Mackenzie and her team will do anything to rescue the children—even at the risk of their own lives. Mac risks her heart, as well, when she partners with a new recruit to the Institute, the dangerously attractive former Navy SEAL Shane Laughlin. Both sexy and suspenseful, this sizzling story will draw readers into a world of frightening evil and heroic action.

Born to darkness

By Suzanne Brockmann Ballantine $26, 528 pages ISBN 9780345521279 eBook available

Paranormal Romance

A red-hot new tale of danger, desire and love from New York Times bestselling author

“Lori Foster delivers the goods.”

—Publishers Weekly Don’t miss these other smoldering tales of men who walk the edge of honor:

11

meet A.J. JACOBS Michael Cogliantry

columns

DROP DEAD HEALTHY

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An editor-at-large for Esquire magazine and best-selling author (The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment ), A.J. Jacobs chronicles a new phase in his quest for personal improvement in DROP DEAD HEALTHY (Simon & Schuster, $26, 416 pages, ISBN 9781416599074).

He lives in New York with his family.

well read by robert Weibezahl

tragic life, literary legend The story of John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces is a publishing legend. A writer of unfilled promise, Toole committed suicide in 1969. More than a decade later, his indomitable mother man­ aged to get a book that had been deemed unpublishable, published— and it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. This tragic episode is often carted out as a cautionary tale about the vagaries and subjectiv­ ity of the book trade, but as Cory MacLauchlin reveals in Butterfly in the Typewriter, the real story is far more complicated and far more interesting.

Toole’s posthumous legacy was artfully constructed and carefully guarded by his mother, Thelma, who despite her propensity for preser­ vation, destroyed the most vital of documents—her son’s suicide note.

So MacLauchlin relies mainly on literary detective work to reconstruct the life of this troubled writer. Toole was born in 1937 in New Orleans, the eccentric city that would serve as his fictional terrain. A highly intelligent child, he skipped two grades and graduated from high school at 16.

Toole went to Tulane on a full schol­ arship, jettisoning his original plans of becoming an engineer to study English. He moved to New York for graduate school at Columbia, then returned to Louisiana to teach.

Not content with his notable academic accomplishments, Toole burned to write fiction. As Mac­ Lauchlin convincingly shows, Toole was a keen observer, and as far back as childhood was noticing the idio­ syncrasies of the Big Easy locals who would populate his work. At 16 he wrote a promising novel, The Neon Bible, which lay forgotten until res­ urrected in the wake of his belated success. But it was A Confederacy of Dunces, written in his early 20s, that would become both his obsession and his undoing. It has been well documented how he sent the manu­ script to Robert Gottlieb, a nurtur­ ing editor at Simon & Schuster, who carried on a thoughtful two-year correspondence with Toole about the book, then ultimately rejected it.

Toole took that rejection hard, and it is an openended ques­ tion whether it triggered his suicide. In retrospect, one wonders why he fixated on Gottlieb and did not try to place the book elsewhere. The answer may lie in Toole’s spiral into mad­ ness—paranoia and depression that MacLauchlin probes with compas­ sion and respect. Toole was, perhaps, betrayed by his own brilliance.

The final chapters of Butterfly in the Typewriter are Thelma’s, as she takes up the cause of getting her late son’s book published. A colorful character in her own right, the sep­ tuagenarian alienated many friends and relatives in the process, and publicly derided Gottlieb who, to his credit, stayed out of the fray. Her fierce control over her son’s legacy may have given us this classic, but it also means there will always be unanswered questions about Toole’s life and death.

Despite his own admiration for Toole’s work, MacLauchlin never los­ es sight of the fact that many readers hate A Confederacy of Dunces, an im­ perfect book that is perhaps an apt reflection of its creator’s imperfect life. This highly readable biography occasionally makes some question­ able, or at least not provable, leaps (MacLauchlin seems particularly vehement in rejecting suggestions that Toole struggled with latent homosexuality), yet overall it does an impressive job filling in the gaps and helping readers better understand this complex writer.

Butterfly in the Typewriter

By Cory MacLauchlin Da Capo $26, 288 pages ISBN 9780306820403

literature

From New York Times bestseller

CHARLES MARTIN author of Where the River Ends

u

“Part mystery, part love story… a moving and worthy read.”

—Bret Lott, author of Dead Low Tide

“In the tradition of Nicholas Sparks & Robert James Waller.”

—Publishers Weekly on Where the River Ends

She’s on the run from an abusive ex.

He’s a retired Texas ranger who will defend the innocent… no matter what the cost.

Available in hardcover, from Hachette Audio, and as an e-book Street is a division www.centerstreet.com CharlesMartinbooks.com Center of Hachette Book Group Photo: Jon Livingston

Sky Photo: Getty Images

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cover story

ron rash Mark Haskett

INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE

SHAPED BY THE LAND, torn apart BY INTOLERANCE

R

on Rash believes that “almost all of the great books are regional books.”

What, he asks, “could be more regional than James Joyce’s Ulysses,” which unfolds during a 24-hour ramble through Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904?

So Rash bristles—in a modest, gentlemanly sort of way—when people use the word regional to pigeonhole, diminish or dismiss fiction like his, which roots itself in a particular place—Appalachia, and especially western North Carolina, where his family has lived since the 1700s.

“It’s an important issue to me because I think there’s a difference between regional and local color,” Rash says during a call to his office at Western Carolina University (WCU) in Cullowhee, North Caro-

THE COVE

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By Ron Rash, Ecco, $25.99, 272 pages ISBN 9780061804199, eBook available

lina. “Local color is writing that is only about difference—what makes this particular place exotic. Regional writing is writing that shows what is distinct about a place—its language, culture and all of that—yet at the same time says something universal. Eudora Welty says it better than I can. She says that one place understood helps us understand all other places better. That’s been a credo for me. I think that if you go deep enough into one place, you hit the universal.”

A point in his argument’s favor?

Ron Rash’s novels, especially his recent bestseller Serena, are popular in France. He’s been invited to read his fiction in places as far away as Australia and New Zealand. His books sell well in China. And his short stories and novels have been nominated for national, not just regional, awards.

Still, there is his sense of loyalty to his place of origin. On a 10-city book tour in France, for example, Rash, a charming storyteller with a strong regional accent, remembers that “they had me go to a local high school, I think partly [so students] could hear an American speaker.

The first thing I told them was not to

imitate me; they certainly would not be understood in New York City if they sounded like me!”

A regional setting and universal themes are definitely hallmarks of Rash’s atmo“Landscape is spheric new novel, The destiny. The Cove. Set in environment the fictional western North you grow up in has to have Carolina town some kind of of Mars Hill at the end of the effect on how First World War, you perceive The Cove uses a little-known the world.” historical incident as a stepping-off point for a haunting narrative about intolerance and redemptive but illicit love.

“Obviously I love to read about the region’s history,” says Rash, who is the first person to hold the endowed Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies Chair at WCU. “But a few years ago I was doing some research and I was amazed to find that [there had been] a German internment camp near where I live in western North Carolina during [World War I]. And this camp was not for POWs. It was

for German civilians who happened to be marooned in the United States when the United States entered the war. That was fascinating to me. And it became even more fascinating to me when I started reading about the Vaterland, which was the biggest ship in the world at that time and was much more elegant than the Titanic, and these guys who ended up in Hot Springs [North Carolina] had been on the Vaterland.”

Then Rash read an account of the internment camp that mentioned in passing the fact that one and only one German prisoner had ever escaped. “Wow! I thought, boy, what I can do with that. To me there was just this incredible story here that even a lot of people in the region did not know about. At the same time, because of some things that were happening in the United States, contemporary issues, I thought there were interesting connections.”

But Rash, who customarily writes between 12 and 14 drafts before completing a novel—usually while sitting in front of his fireplace with his two dogs at his feet—could not get his story of a German escapee to fly. Not, that is, until he realized that the real emotional center of his book was Laurel Shelton, a young woman who has lived all her life in a sheltered cove near Mars Hill and who longs to escape from a life blighted by the superstitious beliefs and confining scorn of most of her neighbors. Her dilemma threatens to split her apart from her brother Hank, who has returned to the family’s hardscrabble farm in the deep shadows of the Appalachian mountains after being wounded in the war.

“To me,” Rash says, explaining his intense interest in describing the ghostly place in which his characters rise and fall, “landscape is always a character. And I would say the cove itself, the landscape, is in some ways as dominant a character as any other character. . . . It’s hard for me to completely articulate but to me it’s like landscape is destiny. The environment you grow up in has to have some kind of effect on how you perceive the world. I would argue that The Great Gatsby could only

CAROLINA DE ROBERTIS have been written by a Midwesterner because the kind of expansiveness Gatsby could imagine fits a Midwestern sensibility; looking out on this endless expanse gives you a sense of endless possibility. The same might be true of someone who was born at the ocean. But if you live in mountains—I’ve seen this in my own family—two things can happen. One is that you feel protected by the mountains, almost like it’s a womb that protects you from the outside world. But the other thing that can happen is that the lack of light does something physically to people who live in a cove. There’s always a sense of your smallness, your puniness and insignificance compared to these mountains that have been here millions of years and loom over you. The result can be the kind of fatalism I saw even in my own family. I think The Cove is my strongest attempt to show that.”

Though based on historical research and set almost 100 years ago, The Cove is artfully layered with Rash’s concerns about the present. One of his most persistent concerns is how easily we turn other people into enemies and go to war against them. In a remarkable way, The Cove dramatizes a hope that loving, reasonable sensibilities will prevail—and a fear of the tragic consequences if they do not.

“I don’t want to be a propagandist, but I hope the reader senses that this is in the story. Certainly there are questions of what it really means to be patriotic, what it means to go to war. You kind of lay it out there and let the reader make the connections or not.”

Then Rash returns the conversation to his interest in discovering the continuities of past, present and future. While researching his previous novel, he reports with delight, he discovered that the house he owns about three miles from the WCU campus had been in his family roughly 230 years ago. And the future? Well, he says with some pride, like his wife and himself, his 24-year-old daughter and 22-yearold son have chosen to become teachers. “At least we didn’t run them off from the profession.”

A N U N F O R G E T TA B L E N E W N OV E L F R O M T H E AU T H O R O F T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L B E S T S E L L E R

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A story of one woman’s explosive search for the truth about Argentina’s “disappeared” and the dark secrets of her own family history.

“A beautiful tale.”

— B O O K L I S T, starred

“ Propulsive and emotionally gripping.”

—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred

“ Elegantly written…

The book is as much a romance as tragedy.”

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

S�an�to�re�d K�o�f

CarolinaDeRobertis.com • Also available as an eBook

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interview

GRACE MCCLEEN

by Jillian Quint

The power of ordinary miracles

G

od. Faith. Creation. The ability to receive love. These may seem like concerns better suited to a philosopher than a 10-year-old girl. Yet in The Land of Decoration, readers are introduced to such heady concepts through the eyes of a child—and the result is both affecting and profound.

Judith McPherson, the sheltered, wildly imaginative narrator of Grace McCleen’s stunning debut, is perhaps more inclined to tackle these kinds of things than most children.

A member of a fundamentalist Christian sect, Judith spends the majority of her time studying the Bible, preaching the Word with her widowed father and enduring the affections of her church’s stranger members. Her only pleasure comes from creating a miniature homage to the Old Testament in her bedroom.

This tiny world—The Land of Decoration, as she calls it—is constructed from found objects and bits of discarded junk. Yet its creation and preservation is everything to Judith, who comes to believe she has the ability to commune with God and perform “real world” miracles by manipulating her little kingdom.

“I didn’t want to rule out the possibility [that these miracles were really happening],” McCleen says during a call to her home in London. “It was difficult making the miracles seem plausible to her, but also plausible simply as natural events.”

These miracles—which begin with a snowstorm Judith believes she conjured—escalate as she becomes the target of a schoolyard bully. Though the bully’s actions

The Land of Decoration

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By Grace McCleen, Holt, $25, 320 pages ISBN 9780805094947, eBook available

against the McPherson family grow increasingly violent and destructive, the dynamic is more complicated than a simple antagonizer/victim dichotomy.

“I think that when you get older you do realize that everyone is a product of their upbringing, their social and economic conditioning.

I don’t think anyone is evil or bad,” McCleen says.

A Welsh-born writer and musician, McCleen is in a unique position to assess such ambiguities, not to mention the effect of a person’s upbringing. Like Judith, McCleen grew up in a fundamentalist religion, which she left about 10 years ago. And also like Judith, she once thought she had a personal relationship with God. Though she says her own story is less extreme than that of her narrator, she admits that when writing the novel, she drew on emotions from her own childhood: “emotions like fear, grief, anger and helplessness.”

Still, one of the remarkable successes of The Land of Decoration is how universal it feels. McCleen didn’t want the story to be set in a particular country or time period, and she worked hard not to condemn or condone her characters’ faith. “Every culture can relate to God and childhood,” she says. “I hoped the effect would be almost mystical, like a children’s story.”

Indeed, when reading the novel, it’s hard not to think of children’s literature, with its big ideas and morals couched in small, contained plotlines. It’s this simultaneous complexity and simplicity that has earned The Land of Decoration comparisons to adult/young adult crossover novels like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Room. But while McCleen owes much to the canon of juvenile fiction (she cites Beatrix Potter as an influence), her greatest trove of source material comes from the Bible itself.

The opening of The Land of Decoration is a creation story in its own right: “In the beginning, there was an empty room, a little bit of space, a little bit of light, a little bit of time.” From there, McCleen goes on to explain the origins of Judith’s miniature world— the sun she crafted from a metal cage, the homes she made from dry grass and tree stumps.

By choosing to let a child tell the story, McCleen did her narrative a great service. Judith’s religiosity might seem heavy-handed coming from an older narrator, and “One of the her innocence is hardest believable, while things for never feeling saccharine or humans to do is to open contrived.

Over the themselves course of the to another novel, both person.”

Judith and her father have their faith tested. But while he finds it increasingly difficult to honor a God who would allow such suffering, she becomes more resolute in her calling—and thanks to McCleen’s deft hand and steady plotting, such devotion rings true. Judith emerges as an honest and likable—if ultimately unreliable—guide.

Still, while readers come to see discrepancies between real-world events and Judith’s imagination, McCleen leaves the issue of miracles open-ended. Spirituality and reality need not be at odds, she feels, and in short, metaphysical passages, she gestures toward the scientific existence of things that seem impossible.

“When I was in my religion— which I was until I was 22—I believed that miracles had ceased in Jesus’ day,” McCleen says. “But then I

left my religion and became very interested in spirituality. And there are people these days who believe that miracles still happen. I’m not sure. . . . I could see how something could appear to be a miracle, but also make scientific sense. Now I’m open to many things which I wasn’t when I believed in a single God.” The greatest miracles, she believes, are ones that may not seem particularly miraculous—every­day miracles, like “a father and daughter finally showing love.” And as Judith and her father struggle to understand each other and combat hardship—both corporal and spiritual—the difficulty and importance of being loved become increasingly apparent. “One of the hardest things for humans to do is to open themselves to another person,” McCleen says. “It can be terrifying and it can be the most powerful thing you’ll ever experience. It’s frightening to be so exposed.”

The Land of Decoration is a book that jumps, head first, into such raw terror and redemptive love. On the outside, it may seem like a small story about small things. But at its core, it’s about the biggest issues a person can encounter—how to confront the unknown, how to negotiate faith and how to be a decent and loving human being.

The fact that Grace McCleen is able to address these matters with such subtlety and delicacy is no small miracle itself.

features

Easter

by Howard Shirley

inspirational portraits of faith and renewal

A

s Easter approaches, churches and believers around the world place a special emphasis on the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah—events that are the cornerstones of modern Christianity. As reading selections for the season, we’ve chosen five new books that offer messages of faith, resilience and hope and expand on the promise of Easter.

FILLING A VOID Pete Wilson’s Empty Promises: The Truth About You, Your Desires, and the Lies You’re Believing (Thomas Nelson, $15.99, 236 pages, ISBN 9780849946516) examines the many things we chase in the quest for fulfillment. Some are obvious— wealth, success, appearance—but others are surprising, including religious practices like trying to pray more or do good works. Wilson’s point is that even though we try many solutions for the emptiness we feel, if God isn’t at the heart of our journey, we will find only empty promises. As in his previous book, Plan B, the Nashville pastor writes in a conversational style that’s easily accessible, while still offering moments of great challenge, like a tap on the soul to say, “This is you, pal.”

If you’ve been chasing after “the next thing” that will finally make your life worthwhile, I highly recommend Empty Promises—you might discover you’ve bought into a few dead ends yourself.

SPIRITUAL POWER Also calling us to re-evaluate our lives and our religion is Jim Cymbala’s Spirit Rising: Tapping into the Power of the Holy Spirit (Zondervan, $19.99, 208 pages, ISBN 9780310241256). The pastor of Brooklyn Tabernacle, Cymbala believes that the true power of faith is found not in prayer and worship songs, but comes only from the gift of the Holy Spirit. Cymbala acknowledges that many Christians today hear the term “the Holy Spirit” and picture emotional church services dominated by bizarre behavior. As a result, they become cautious and withdrawn from what the Spirit really is—the presence of God as a guide and comfort. Using examples from the teachings of Christ and the writings of Paul, Peter and more,

Cymbala reveals how fundamental the Holy Spirit is to Christian faith.

He also shares effective accounts from friends and members of his own church who have experienced the Holy Spirit’s power to transform lives. Spirit Rising is a thoughtprovoking call to Christians to set aside “to-do list” religion and seek the power of God as a real and active presence in every moment.

A PRESIDENT’S DEVOTIONAL During his time in office, President Jimmy Carter displayed a candor about his Christian faith that until then was remarkably rare in a modern president. Others had kept their faith largely private, but Carter spoke readily about both his faith and his personal failings as he strove to live by it. Through the Year With Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President (Zondervan, $24.99, 388 pages, ISBN 9780310330486) is a reflection of that life of faith, offered as a guide for other believers. Drawn from Sunday school lessons Carter taught throughout his life (a ministry he followed even while president), each daily devotion offers the insight of a man trying to connect with God and understand his place in the world, not as a leader or politician, but as a child of God and a follower of Christ.

The passages are brief—a Bible verse, Carter’s personal thoughts on the passage and a closing prayer— but the thoughts are often rich and surprising. Neither politics nor history nor memoir is the point here; this excellent devotional is all about looking at life and faith and learning how to live them together.

LOST AT SEA The Fourth Fisherman (Waterbrook, $19.99, 240 pages, ISBN 9780307956279), by Joe Kissack, is a story about men lost at sea—one

lost in the sea of worldly success and excess, and the others lost in the actual vast waters of the Pacific Ocean. The story begins in 2005 as three day-laborers gather to act as hands for a small fishing boat captain in the remote Mexican village of San Blas. Their fishing trip goes awry when an unexpected storm and their captain’s misjudgment set them adrift in the powerful currents of the Pacific. As the fishermen struggle to survive exhaustion, dehydration and lack of food, Kissack contrasts their story with his life as a driven television executive headed for his own personal storm. The stark hardships the fishermen face and Kissack’s life crumbling under the weight of his material success serve as effective counterpoints.

The fishermen, who have never had anything, find a faith that sustains them against unbelievable odds, while Kissack, who has everything, must almost lose it all in order to come to the realization that what he really needs is Christ. In the end, Kissack suggests, all of us are lost at sea, and the only thing we can do is place our faith in the One who can bring us safely home.

sensation, sparking a frenzy that saw accusations raised against John, his wife Patsy and even JonBenét’s nine-year-old brother. For Ramsey, it felt as if he had entered the life of Job, going from successful business owner and happy family man to a shattered father hounded by paparazzi and cynical policemen.

The Other Side of Suffering (FaithWords, $24.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780892963850) is Ramsey’s story of his struggle, compounded by the death of Patsy from cancer and the loss of all he thought he was.

One might expect such a story to be bitter, with railings against a heartless media and incompetent investigators, not to mention JonBenét’s killer (whose identity remains unknown). The Other Side of Suffering, however, is instead a beautiful and soul-wrenching account of a man’s struggle to find God’s grace in the midst of tragedy and injustice. Ramsey’s growing faith through mounting grief and disappointments is moving, stirring the heart with both the pain he has felt and the love he has experienced.

Amid crushing sorrow, Ramsey finds uplifting peace; through sadness and loss, he learns the real promise of God’s joy. As he puts it himself, he has survived to reach “the other side of suffering” and discover hope again. And in the end, isn’t that the very heart of Easter?

FROM GRIEF TO HOPE The worst fate most parents can imagine is to live through the loss of a child—especially a child lost to murder. This is the tragedy that has weighed on John Ramsey for more than 15 years.

The murder of his daughter JonBenét was a media

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features

POETRY by julie hale

Verse-atility: Celebrating the power of poetry

N

ational Poetry Month is a time for applauding poetry’s unique appeal—its capacity to surprise and move us, to show us the world in new ways. The new collections below are stellar examples of the genre’s timeless attraction.

Poetry of transformation Much like the moon, the human heart waxes and wanes—a fact that provides the foundation for Jonathan Galassi’s beautifully wistful Left-Handed (Knopf, $26, 128 pages, ISBN 9780307957085). Following the phases of that fickle organ with a sensitive eye, Galassi’s perceptive poems document the ways in which our desires change with time.

“I don’t / know how my dream / became a contraption / for unhappiness,” he writes in “The Scarf,” one of many pieces that show a mind struggling to make sense of an attachment gone awry.

Galassi frequently employs rhyme in the service of mood, using it to

exude playfulness, melancholy or awkwardness, as in “Tinsel Tinsel”: “All the fool for love can do is stare. / His neck is permanently out of whack; / he doesn’t care.” Overall, the collection tracks a movement from confusion to clarity, to a place of fresh possibilities, where relationships actually work. The president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and author of two previous collections of verse, Galassi is honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets. His latest book is everything a poetry collection should be: companionable, wise and expertly crafted.

A poetic departure In Almost Invisible (Knopf, $26, 64 pages, ISBN 9780307957313)

“Old-fashioned American treats with a healthy dose of Southern flair. . . . A well-rounded baking book suitable for home cooks of all levels.”

—LIBRARY JOURNAL

Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Strand forgoes verse for prose, offering a transportive group of poems, each in the form of a short paragraph.

Despite their orderly exteriors, the pieces are often surreal, with a touch of the fairy tale about them. Some are full-fledged narratives, and some are musings; others are sharply etched portraits of characters without bearings in the world, who have no sense of connection. In “Like a Leaf Carried Off by the Wind,” a man works at a place “where he is not known and where his job is a mystery even to himself,” while the narrator of “Bury Your Face in Your Hands” struggles with the vagueness of daily existence: “There is no way to clear the haze in which we live . . . The silent snow of thought melts before it has a chance to stick.”

Strand achieves his very own tone—an ominous quality offset by dark humor—and he sustains it from start to finish. These poems soar thanks to his great wit and his remarkable understanding of humanity—its capacity for miscommunication, its tendency to cultivate discontent. “What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past?” he writes in “No Words Can Describe It.” Like all great poets, he articulates the big questions beautifully.

A soul in transit Across the Land and the ­Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001 (Ran-

run the hottest bakery in Savannah, Georgia. The Days’ debut cookbook is filled with more than 100 of their customers’ favorite recipes— from breakfast pastries and puddings to cake and pies and even quick breads— Available wherever books are sold. and all the charm of this A division of Workman Publishing Inc. www.artisanbooks.com friendly Southern bakeshop.

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dom House, $25, 192 pages, ISBN 9781400068906) is a watershed volume that makes the collected poetry of German writer W.G. Sebald available in English for the first time.

The author of numerous celebrated novels, including Austerlitz, Sebald died in 2001. Rich with historical allusion, international in scope, these visionary poems—translated from the German by Iain Galbraith—tell of departures and returns, of hotel interludes en route. They’re snapshots of a life marked by transience.

Many of the poems reflect a sifting of daily experience as they touch upon everything from art, religion and mythology to past conversations and memories. In the midst of this sifting, spare yet crystalline images serve as points of clarity, like these beautifully refined verbal visuals from a poem called “Panacea”: “A club moss / and a cube of ice / tinted with a jot / of Berlin blue.”

Sebald, whose father served in the Nazi army, was no stranger to the weight of history, and in many of these poems, the past is a force to be reckoned with. “Memo” reads as a telling note to self: “Build fire and read / the future in smoke . . . / Be sure / not to look back / Attempt / the art of metamorphosis.” Sebald’s later poems are delicate balancing acts between memory, the moment at hand and whatever awaits. His mind, it seems, is usually in at least two places at once. “Day Return” contains references to (among other things) Samuel Pepys’ diary, graffiti scrawled on an urban wall and the city of Jerusalem. The products of an expansive intellect and an inquisitive mind, the pieces in this collection are nothing less than transcendent.

reviews ABSOLUTION

FICTION

under african skies review by Lauren Bufferd

It is difficult to write about Patrick Flanery’s riveting debut Absolution without giving away too much of the plot. The novel centers on the character of Clare Wald, a distinguished South African writer. When her official biographer, Sam Leroux, comes to Cape Town for a series of interviews, it turns out they share a powerful connection: Sam knew Clare’s daughter Laura, whose radical politics led to her disappearance or maybe death more than a decade ago. Though Sam reveals their connection early on, it is unclear what Clare remembers or even how much she is willing to divulge.

Both Sam and Clare struggle with their ambivalence about their complicated homeland. Clare is haunted by guilt over what she perceives as the sins of her past, holding herself responsible for both the death of her older sister and Laura’s disappearance. Sam, who as a child lost his own parents

By Patrick Flanery, Riverhead, $26.95, 400 pages in a Cape Town bombing, struggles to remember the exact chain of events ISBN 9781594488177, eBook available that led to his meeting Laura and then leaving South Africa for university and a career in America. Returning to work on Clare’s biography and holed up in an elegant, but ominously gated Johannesburg compound, Sam wonders if he could ever make this country his home again.

Absolution is a beautifully crafted novel. Much like the complex country it describes, the narrative itself is fragmented. Both Clare and Sam tell their stories, but Absolution also includes portions of the “fictionalized memoir” that is Clare’s next project, in which she confesses her involvement in her sister’s death and imagines what ultimately happened to Laura. These chapters are interspersed with Sam’s childhood memories of the weeks after his parents died and his interactions with both Laura and Clare. Taken together, the four accounts represent the impossibility of arriving at any singular historic truth.

Though Flanery is American, he has thoroughly immersed himself in South Africa—its politics, geography and literature. His novel has some obvious similarities to works by South African authors, notably Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. Yet Absolution is no pastiche. Flanery’s writing is graceful and rich in imagery. The novel moves like a thriller: The reader will be eager to discover how much Sam and Clare recall. At the same time, it explores complicated issues such as the impact of violence and the long-term effects of apartheid with an ethical gravity.

Absolution is a must read for anyone interested in South Africa, or in literary fiction of the finest kind.

The Lifeboat

By Charlotte Rogan Reagan Arthur $24.99, 288 pages ISBN 9780316185905 Audio, eBook available

debut fiction

Don’t start The Lifeboat right before bedtime. Charlotte Rogan’s gripping debut won’t let you turn out the light until the last page is turned, and will have you mulling over the questions of survival, sacrifice and responsibility it raises long after that.

Grace Winter has been “married for 10 weeks and a widow for over six” and is on trial for her life when

The Lifeboat opens. It seems there are some questions about her actions during the two weeks she spent in a small lifeboat on the Atlantic with 38 other survivors of the sinking of the Empress Alexander. To get the events straight in her own mind, Grace begins an account of the wreck and its aftermath, blending in the story of her courtship with and brief marriage to the wealthy Henry Winter.

It gradually becomes clear that this isn’t the first time Grace’s mettle has been tested: Perhaps the steely drive necessary to climb the ranks of Edwardian society is the ultimate survival skill.

Originally, the stunned passengers on Lifeboat 14 continue in the rigidly defined roles of class and gender that they held on the ship. The one seaman on board, Mr. Hardie, takes

charge, rationing out the meager stores of food; the men take the oars, the women sit quietly and console one another. But as the days pass, keeping order becomes more of a challenge. Two female passengers ally against Mr. Hardie, questioning his decisions and sowing discontent among the hungry survivors.

Pragmatic Grace sees the divisions forming and is determined to be on the winning side. But at what cost?

Survival stories often showcase the beauty of human nature, our ability to rise above circumstances to care for our fellow man. The Lifeboat is not that novel. What Rogan finds under our veneer of civility is pure animal nature, red in tooth and claw—in a way, the sinking of the luxurious Empress Alexandra echoes mankind’s fall from grace. “We were

stripped of all decency. I couldn’t see that there was anything good or noble left once food and shelter were taken away,” writes Grace. Her dispassionate narration of harrowing events somehow makes their impact even more powerful.

Though the narrative frame means that Grace’s survival is assured, the suspense of The Lifeboat never lets up, and it is a testament to Rogan’s talent that a novel that so insightfully confronts existential questions is also a complete and utter page-turner.

This compelling, smart and resonant work is certain to stand as one of the year’s best debuts.

—T r i s h a P i n g

The Beginner’s Goodbye

By Anne Tyler Knopf $24.95, 208 pages ISBN 9780307958228 Audio, eBook available

Literary fiction

Aaron and Dorothy may have seemed an odd couple to family, neighbors and co-workers. Aaron, crippled in his right arm and leg by a childhood illness and plagued by sporadic stuttering, runs the family vanity publishing business, whose biggest success to date is a series of “Beginner’s” books—The Beginner’s Wine Guide, The Beginner’s Monthly Budget or, most recently, The Beginner’s Book of Birdwatching. Something on the order of the Dummies books, Aaron feels, but “more dignified.” Dorothy was a doctor: “work-obsessed,” according to Aaron’s sister, Nandina; she left early for the office, stayed late and “barely knew how to boil an egg.” And yet, as Aaron recalls after Dorothy’s sudden death at the hands of a fallen oak tree, they were “happily, unremarkably married.”

After her death, Aaron feels as if he’s been “erased,” or “ripped in two” . . . until he begins getting visits from Dorothy. At first he’s afraid to speak, worried she will leave if he does. But gradually he engages her in conversation—asking if she’s happy, if she

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reviews misses being alive—even revisiting some of their ancient and petty arguments. But he also realizes they really loved each other, even if each of them was somehow unable to demonstrate that love when they had the chance.

Anne Tyler’s novels (this is her 19th) have often been peopled with eccentric male characters. In 1974’s Celestial Navigation, it was Jeremy, a loner who crafted intricate paper collages for a living; Macon in The Accidental Tourist (1985) was a travel writer who hated traveling; and Liam, in 2010’s Noah’s Compass, was a would-be philosopher who taught fifth grade at a second-rate private elementary school.

Aaron joins this celebrated group, portrayed with Tyler’s signature quirky humor and her gift for drawing her characters into awkward situations all too uncomfortably familiar to every reader. Peripheral characters enrich the mix, including the

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FICTION ever-pragmatic Nandina, and their secretary, Peggy, a “pink-and-gold person with . . . a fondness for thriftstore outfits involving too many bits of lace,” both of whom alternately try to nurture Aaron and chide him for his inability to move on. This glimpse into personal loss limned with an unexpectedly bright future will be welcomed by Tyler’s many admirers.

—Deborah Donovan

A Partial History of Lost Causes

By Jennifer duBois Dial $26, 384 pages ISBN 9781400069774 Audio, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

What compels us to cling to hope in hopeless circumstances? That’s the intriguing question first-time novelist Jennifer duBois explores in a story that evocatively connects two characters whose biographies give little hint of the way their destinies ultimately merge.

The novel takes its title from the name of a hand-produced dissident journal teenager Aleksander Bezetov distributes furtively in the city still known as Leningrad, where he arrives in 1979 as an aspiring chess prodigy. After one of his comrades is killed by Communist operatives, he makes his peace with the regime and begins a meteoric rise to the pinnacle of the chess world, with all the perquisites and soul-destroying compromises that choice entails.

A quarter-century later Irina Ellison, a young woman with a Ph.D. in comparative literature, abandons her life in Boston and flees to Russia.

She’s been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, the same affliction that slowly and painfully killed her father, with whom she had watched many of Aleksander’s matches. Before she begins to feel its effects, Irina seeks out Aleksander to answer a question about facing loss gracefully that her father once asked him in an unanswered letter.

Irina and Aleksander finally

encounter each other in 2006, in the midst of Aleksander’s quixotic electoral campaign to unseat Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Irina’s grim persistence eventually leads her to Aleksander’s door, where the two are drawn together by their shared sense of desperation.

In a novel that conjures the Russian literary tradition, duBois weaves an intricate web of relationships among characters forced to confront difficult existential choices. Irina, with her “inability to invest in lost causes,” struggles with the private suffering brought on by the knowledge that her life will be truncated by disease, while Aleksander fights against what seems an equally inevitable public destiny.

Though at times she overreaches for an arresting metaphor, duBois does an admirable job of portraying the death rattle of Communism and the birth of a nominally democratic but persistently corrupt society.

She vividly captures the spirit of St. Petersburg and Moscow, not least the cloud of paranoia that hovers over both the old and new Russian worlds.

A Partial History of Lost Causes is a deeply thoughtful novel, a pensive, multilayered look at a culture in transition and the lives of the two complex, memorable characters at its core.

—Harvey Freedenberg

A Land More Kind Than Home

By Wiley Cash Morrow $24.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780062088147 Audio, eBook available

SOUTHERN FICTION

Jess Hall will never forget what he saw while peering into the church that day. Sheriff Clem Barfield is determined to find out exactly what happened inside those walls. And when all is said and done, town midwife Adelaide Lyle finally feels like the church is again a place of sanctuary.

Strange goings-on at River Road Church of Christ in Signs Following

have been taking place ever since mysterious Pastor Carson Chambliss arrived in rural Marshall, North Carolina. It was one thing when parishioners covered the church windows in newspaper, then began speaking in tongues and handling serpents. But Addie had had enough when a copperhead struck a 79-year-old church member. After the snake was put away, the service went on and church members dumped the body in the woman’s front yard to avoid drawing attention to the congregation.

Addie declared the church no place for children and began leading the congregation’s youngest members in Sunday school lessons beside the river, where they were safe.

Or so it seems, until the day a church man comes for one of her charges. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Christopher “Stump” Hall is brought in for healing. The child has been mute since birth, and his mother is a loyal church member. But when the healing goes terribly wrong, the entire town is thrown into a tailspin.

In his debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home, Wiley Cash ably blends the intertwining stories of Jess, Addie and Clem to gradually reveal what happened to Stump in the church that Sunday. In the process, Cash proves capable of handling dialect and multiple narrators while creating distinctive voices and fully developed characters.

Jess has always been fiercely protective of Stump, and Cash offers insight into a child made more adult by being responsible for his older brother. Addie has served as midwife for most of the town, and as a result can trace each character’s path to the present. Though Clem, as sheriff, plays the role of good guy, his struggles with right, wrong and anger make him a believable character.

Cash, himself from western North Carolina, never stoops to typecasting his characters, instead exploring how their pasts have led them to the present. The result is a compelling, fastpaced story that draws the reader into the lives of Marshall’s residents.

—Carla Jean Whitley

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reviews The Good Father

By Noah Hawley Doubleday $25.95, 320 pages ISBN 9780385535533 Audio, eBook available

literary FICTION

Screenwriter Noah Hawley’s latest novel, it must be said, does not join the list of novels and movies about “demon seed” children who cause unspeakable mayhem. Though The Good Father is narrated by a parent, the miscreant here is a grown man when he commits a senseless act of violence. Still, the tale of Daniel Allen, aka Carter Allen Cash, is no less harrowing for that.

Daniel’s father, renowned rheumatologist Dr. Paul Allen, simply refuses

FICTION to believe that Daniel has murdered an aspiring and inspiring presidential candidate—a cross between Barack Obama and John Edwards. For the longest time, Paul, logical as he is, dismisses the mountain of evidence against his son; the reader can’t blame him but will grow more and more exasperated by his blindness.

The question that haunts this suspenseful novel is why Daniel did what he did. Was it because he worked for the candidate at one point and saw him looking lecherously at some girl’s cleavage? Was it an explosion of pent-up rage over his parents’ divorce? Paul keeps wondering whether he was indeed a good father to Daniel. If he was, how could this have happened? And if not, is he being a good father to his young twins now?

In the background of Hawley’s heartbreaking book, the reader senses the anxiety of a class of

people who believed that their lives were predictable and comfortable, only to find those lives suddenly and inexplicably upended. While others endure unemployment, underwater mortgages or catastrophic illness, Paul Allen has a political assassin for a son. You can run, The Good Father tells us, but you can’t hide.

—A r l e n e M cK a n i c

The Red Book

By Deborah Copaken Kogan Voice $24.99, 346 pages ISBN 9781401340827 eBook available

POPULAR FICTION

Best-selling memoirist Deborah Copaken Kogan (Shutterbabe)

returns with her second novel, The Red Book, a lively story following several former Harvard roommates at their 20th reunion. Every five years, the infamous “red book” compiles classmates’ personally written recaps of tragedies, divorces, job successes, children and deaths in a bound red volume delivered to each alumni member. Its revealing entries begin each chapter, allowing readers to peer into the private lives of these former Harvard contemporaries.

Readers are introduced to headstrong Clover, a former Lehman banker who recently lost her job in the collapse of the company and is desperately trying to conceive with her husband. There’s flighty wildchild Addison—a former lesbian artist—whose tumultuous relationship with her trust-fund husband is hanging by a thread. Jane is a Korean war orphan who has recently lost not only her mother but also her

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FICTION first husband. And finally there’s Mia, a former star of Harvard’s stage who has now committed to being a full-time mother while married to a famous Hollywood director.

Fans of Mary McCarthy’s The Group will be drawn to these women (and the men who come in and out of their lives) as they struggle with their identities in their respective professional and personal fields. Here, the past affects the present, whether that means an arrest for unpaid parking tickets, furtively copulating with old flings, rediscovering your vocation or hiding financial collapse to keep up appearances. But if the characters in The Red Book learn anything, it’s that their secrets will bury them faster than they think.

—Megan Fishmann

The Coldest Night

By Robert Olmstead Algonquin $23.95, 304 pages ISBN 9781616200435

historical FICTION

Robert Olmstead, author of the national bestseller Coal Black Horse, delivers another work of prose with language so painstaking and exact it reads more like poetry. The Coldest Night is a treasure as lean and stripped as the desolate, frozen peaks of Korea where much of the novel takes place.

In rural West Virginia, teenager Henry Childs leads a quiet, contemplative life until a violently catastrophic love affair leaves him broken in body and spirit. Unwilling to return home, Henry lies about his age and joins the Marines. It is 1950 and Korea is on fire, and almost immediately Henry finds himself in the middle of the push north to China that will result in the infamous battle of the Chosin Reservoir.

Henry’s task is one warriors have faced since the days of Odysseus: to stay alive, come home and forget not only the terror of battle, but the beauty of it, its insidious seduction.

This is the third novel featuring the warrior Childs family. Robey Childs’ search for his soldier father among the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War was the subject of Coal Black Horse, and in Far Bright Star, Napoleon and Xenophon Childs hunted for Pancho Villa’s raiders in the scorched Mexican desert on the eve of World War I. If those two acclaimed, awardwinning novels are journeys, then The Coldest Night is the destination. Henry’s metamorphosis from child to a man old beyond his years provides truths as cauterizing as a red-hot poker touched to the spot of an amputated limb. Like those of Cormac McCarthy, another writer unafraid of wading through the gore of America’s baser nature, Olmstead’s characters are laconic and their dialogue is spare. Unlike McCarthy, his descriptions of nature are lush and bountiful, lending a measure of beauty to even the most forbidding of landscapes.

All three of Olmstead’s books featuring the Childs family have been written while America was at war, and all three pointedly ask why, if war is so unspeakably awful, it has been as constant as birth in the history of humankind. Olmstead weds the nature of armed aggression to the nature of man without apology, even with compassion, seeking only understanding, which, during our second decade of continuous war, is no insignificant goal.

New York Times Bestselling Author

A

poignant new story about finding love and freeing oneself from the

past.

—Ian Schwartz

Hand Me Down

By Melanie Thorne Dutton $25.95, 320 pages ISBN 9780525952688 eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

Difficult to read, but impossible to put down—this is perhaps the best way to describe Melanie Thorne’s debut, Hand Me Down.

Like Janet Finch’s 1999 bestseller White Oleander, this is a raw and all

Coming home is bi�ersweet; in one beautiful summer on Blackberry Island, Michelle Sanderson may just discover love and rekindle the friendship of a lifetime.

Pick up your copy On Sale March 27 Visit www.SusanMallery.com to learn more

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Miss Julia is back!

The newest nonstop adventure from the New York Times bestselling series

Can Miss Julia spring J. D. Pickens from a sheriff’s clutches and investigate a strange cult— plus keep up appearances as a proper Southern lady?

“DelighTful . . . Those who like smiles with their crimes will be satisfied.”

—Publishers Weekly

Now in paperback from Penguin Books:

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reviews too realistic story about a California teen forced to move from house to house—and often from bad situation to worse—after her well-intentioned but self-centered mother makes a life-changing choice.

In Hand Me Down, 14-year-old Liz is forced to leave home after her mother marries a convicted sex offender. Like White Oleander’s Astrid, Liz is a likable, sensitive and courageous narrator, forced into maturity too soon. However, this is no copycat debut. Hand Me Down is based on many of Thorne’s own life experiences, including the fact that her mother did, indeed, marry a sex offender, which led to Thorne and her younger sister moving apart.

Like Thorne, Liz has a little sister, Jaime, and Liz has grown up trying to protect her—first from their violent, alcoholic father and then from their mother’s new husband who, on more than one occasion, has let Liz know he’s interested in getting to know his stepdaughters more intimately. Even after Liz and Jaime are separated— living not just in different homes, but in different states—Liz continues to try to protect Jaime. It’s a situation that leads to heartache for both Liz and the reader, who by this time is so thoroughly drawn in by Thorne’s honest prose and dialogue that it becomes difficult to put the book aside.

Thorne said she wrote Hand Me Down to help herself heal; to show that “parents, even good ones, screw up”; and to encourage others struggling with family pain and forgiveness to share their stories. No doubt, Hand Me Down will inspire conversations. The situations and people Liz encounters are all believable.

Even the more surreal characters (like Christian conservative Aunt Deborah) and events (Liz and Jaime trying to talk their drunk father out of buying a beer from a gas station on their way to Christmas Eve dinner) are those that readers vividly see and experience right along with Liz, thanks to Thorne’s sharp storytelling.

Hand Me Down is Thorne’s first novel. Despite a somewhat predictable (but much wished-for) ending, it hopefully will not be her last.

—Cynthia Wolfe Boynton

FICTION White Horse

By Alex Adams Emily Bestler Books $19.99, 320 pages ISBN 9781451642995 eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

only in her memories, Zoe still has the ability to choose freely and never loses hope—as long as those things remain, so does her humanity. The first installment in a bold new trilogy, White Horse is the perfect start to a series that promises to both terrify and thrill.

—Stephenie Harrison

Calico Joe In Greek mythology, Zeus locked all the evils of the world within a single jar and made a woman named Pandora its guardian. Should Pandora ever open the jar, all the corruption contained within would spill across the face of the earth and forever plague humanity. In White Horse, a woman named Zoe faces a similar dilemma when a mysterious sealed jar appears in her apartment. This alien canister terrifies and intrigues her, so much so that she seeks out a therapist in an attempt to master her obsession. Unfortunately for Zoe, the malevolence imprisoned within her jar is so virulent and deadly that it will not be contained. When it escapes, the terror it unleashes knows no bounds and will not stop until humankind, like the ancient gods, is nothing more than a relic of the past.

White Horse may be Alex Adams’ first published novel, but it is written with such skill and confidence that it sits easily in the pantheon of postapocalyptic thrillers alongside the likes of Justin Cronin and Stephen King. Like those of her predecessors, the world Adams paints is grim and harrowing and not for the faint of heart: To survive requires equal measures of grit and luck, and readers who hope to accompany Zoe on her journey for salvation will need an iron will to make it through these pages. Thankfully, the company is good: Zoe is a charming heroine whom readers will root for each step of the way as she fights for not just her own survival, but that of her unborn child.

Like the best dystopian literature, White Horse is not solely about desolation but also prompts serious thoughts on the difference between living and surviving. Even when the world she once knew appears to exist

By John Grisham Doubleday $24.95, 208 pages ISBN 9780385536073 Audio, eBook available

POPULAR FICTION

John Grisham’s latest novel, Calico Joe, is something of a departure from the Arkansas-born author’s many bestsellers. Here, Grisham returns to a topic—baseball—that he explored previously in 2001’s A Painted House, the first of his novels not categorized as a legal thriller.

The story toggles effectively between past and present, as protagonist Paul Tracey recalls the magical summer of 1973, when a rookie named Joe Castle joined the Chicago Cubs and proceeded to set the National League on fire with an astounding and unprecedented display of hitting. Castle’s heroics propel the Cubs on a path to the playoffs, and like most every other baseball fan everywhere, young Paul is smitten with the multitalented young star.

But Paul is the son of Warren Tracey, a veteran pitcher for the rival New York Mets and a surly, unhappy womanizer prone to physical violence at home. Warren faces Joe Castle that same summer in an important ball game at Shea Stadium.

Paul, sitting in the stands, watches as his father throws a fast ball at Castle’s head, causing irreparable injury and ending the rookie’s brief but legendary career.

Fast forward to 2003, when Paul hatches a scheme to reconnect with his father—who left the family years before and is now dying of cancer— and force him to travel to Arkansas

FICTION to make amends with Castle, who has spent the past 30 years physically impaired and working as a baseball groundskeeper.

Grisham deftly blends fact and fiction in his baseball accounts from the past, populating his story with real ballplayers from the era and neatly establishing a childlike fascination with statistics and heroic athletic feats as seen through Paul’s eyes as a youngster. Even the novel’s main event—the beaning of Castle— recalls actual historical events of 1920, when New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays beaned Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman. (Chapman passed away the next day in the only incident in the history of the game when a batter died from being hit with a pitched ball.)

Yet beneath all the baseball lore and Grisham’s obvious affection for the game, Calico Joe offers a sad but real tale about fathers and sons and the difficulties family members can

experience when attempting to reestablish severed bonds. As with all Grisham novels, it is a smart, smooth read—and it’s guaranteed to entice thoughtful fans of the summer game.

—Martin Brady

A Surrey State of Affairs

By Ceri Radford Viking $25.95, 273 pages ISBN 9780670023424 eBook available

debut FICTION

To be a good busybody, you need people skills and the best of intentions. (Bad busybodies are something else again.) The middle-aged British heroine of A Surrey State of Affairs, Constance Harding, is perfect for the role, strewing both

N o w

Was the birth of the nation based on a lie?

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i N

intended and unintended results of her meddling all around her circle of family, friends and virtual universe with innocent ignorance and a blithe disregard for reality. Not to mention a bewildered disbelief at the occasional unexpected results of her activity.

Trying to live up to the outmoded values of her upper-middle-class upbringing, Constance ricochets from ignoring the obvious evidence of her own husband’s adultery to missing entirely the crush another woman’s spurned husband has on her. (That would be a man from her beloved Tuesday evening bell-ringing club.)

She also totally misreads her son’s sexual leanings, resulting in misguided attempts to find him a wife, even as she despairs at her daughter’s truly appalling computer-assisted illiteracy.

But that’s only the first half of this giggle-out-loud, go-with-the-flow novel of old-fashioned human im-

pulses filtered through the first-person narration of Constance’s blog. It’s whimsical and droll, a good enough premise to provide the setting for the whole novel, but Ceri Radford (called the “new Helen Fielding”) has other plans for her debut. Reader be warned, the story abruptly abandons its old-fashioned character-probe for a startling new tack: Constance suddenly tires of her Wodehousian existence and sets off to bring her outmoded education up to date.

She impulsively follows her husband Jeffrey (“a man of few words and many possible meanings”) to Buenos Aires and Patagonia, being careful, of course, to pack a compass, sturdy boots and Bach’s Rescue Remedy. Readers will be charmed

by Constance’s all-out approach to life and swept away by this comical, sparkling adventure.

— M a u d e M cD a n i e l

p a p e r b a c k “Terrible secrets…breathless action…

Nobody—and I mean nobody— does this stuff better than Rollins.”

—Lee Child

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—Brad Meltzer NEW IN HARDCOVER

A Sigma Force Novel On Sale June 26, 2012

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reviews

nonFICTION The Maid and the Queen

EPIPHANY AMONG THE BLISTERS

Wild

history

Review by Catherine Hollis

A profound and moving pilgrimage through the wilderness of grief, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild is one of the best American memoirs to emerge in years. After the shock of her mother’s unexpected death, 25-yearold Strayed is profoundly lost in the world, her family shattered. In the tradition of Thoreau and Kerouac, she finds herself again by hitting the road, or in this case, through-hiking 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail through California and Oregon.

Painfully funny and honest, Strayed documents the sheer stupidity of her early days on the trail, when her pack weighs upwards of 70 pounds and she fills her camp-stove with the wrong kind of gas. But mile by mile, and toenail by lost toenail, she grows stronger and smarter and lighter as she experiences how the extreme physical suffering of long-distance

By Cheryl Strayed, Knopf, $25.95, 336 pages hiking eases the intense emotional suffering that brought her to it. She ISBN 9780307592736, audio, eBook available realizes that her instinct to walk the PCT was “a primal grab for a cure,” an attempt to create a new self and life from the ruins of the old. This reinvention extends to her new name, “Strayed,” which she chooses because “I had strayed and I was a stray . . . from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.”

As “Dear Sugar” advice columnist for The Rumpus, Cheryl Strayed is beloved for her compassionate wisdom.

With Wild, we now witness the crucible that forged that hard-won knowledge. On the PCT, the loneliness of grief evolves into a visionary state of solitude: “Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before.” Even so, “trail angels” begin to reveal themselves to her, people who offer water, food or companionship—stations along the lonely way.

Wild is never simply a survival memoir, although it offers up many a thrilling incident—bears, rattlesnakes, dehydration, blisters, weather—to compel the reader’s attention. It is also a guidebook for living in the world, introducing a vibrant new American voice with a deceptively simple message: Go outside and take a hike.

The Woman Who Wasn’t There

By Robin Gaby Fisher and Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr. Touchstone $26, 304 pages ISBN 9781451652086 eBook available

NONFICTION

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Tania Head was in the south tower of the World Trade Center when a hijacked jet sliced through it, leaving her severely injured and barely able to escape before the tower came crashing down. In those same perilous moments, her fiancé died in the blaze of the north tower.

Or so her story went.

The subtitle of The Woman Who Wasn’t There is “The True Story of an Incredible Deception,” but “incredible” doesn’t begin to capture

the depth of Head’s lies in the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Head, whose seeming strength and resilience made her a cause célèbre and cochair of the powerful World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, was not in the tower on that awful day. She was not even in the country.

How Head managed to hoodwink so many for so long is the focus of this fascinating book. She started her deception shortly after September 11, when she joined an online survivors’ forum. Her mind-boggling story of loss and hope comforted others suffering from guilt and post-traumatic stress. No one thought to question the veracity of her account, which included an encounter with a badly burned man in the 78th-floor sky lobby who begged her to return his wedding ring to his wife. Her story began to unravel only after a New York Times reporter

By Nancy Goldstone Viking $26.95, 320 pages ISBN 9780670023332 Audio, eBook available

profiling her for an anniversary story tried to verify her claims.

Head’s motives are perhaps unknowable, but the reader is left yearning for more answers than the authors are able to give. Certainly Head had her share of traumatic experiences: As a teen, she was in a serious car accident that nearly severed her arm. Her parents had an ugly divorce, and her father and brother were involved in a highprofile embezzlement scandal. But what causes someone to exploit such a tragic event? Head never applied for victim compensation, and her work with the Network was voluntary. In the end, all she gained was a small measure of fame and intimate friendships with survivors.

Ultimately, The Woman Who Wasn’t There forces us to examine our need for connection and purpose by any means necessary.

—Amy Scribner

In 1429 the embattled French dauphin, Charles, faced an internal civil war and an external threat from English invasion. He was fast losing hope that he would ever survive to take his father’s place on the throne.

All seemed lost until an obscure teenage mystic arrived on a mission from God: to raise the siege of Orleans and crown Charles the true king of France.

Joan of Arc’s triumphant and tragic story has fascinated people for 600 years. However, most scholars have studied these events from Joan’s perspective. Now Nancy Goldstone has uncovered new elements of Joan’s story by gazing through a different lens: the life of Yolande of Aragon, Queen of Sicily.

Yolande, mother-in-law of the dauphin, was ambitious, strong, intelligent and one of the busiest diplomats of her day. A devoted wife to Louis II, king of Sicily, she was not just an ornament but wielded power as his equal. She also raised Charles along with her own children, married a daughter to him and acted as his closest advisor and confidant for years. When his rule was threatened, she worked tirelessly to protect him (and her own interests); and she may have been the one who delivered Joan to his court just when he needed her most.

Goldstone has written a lively, fast-paced and fascinating account of Joan’s story, weaving together the labyrinthine intrigues of medieval politics, the real story behind a medieval fairy tale and the astonishing events that led a young peasant girl from the command of an army to a fiery death at the hands of the English. As in her previous books, Goldstone also sheds light on a little-known but admirable woman,

nonFICTION Yolande of Aragon. The Maid and the Queen reminds us that, as Goldstone has remarked, “History makes a lot more sense when you put the women back in.”

—Marianne Peters

The Storytelling Animal

By Jonathan Gottschall HMH $24, 272 pages ISBN 9780547391403 eBook available

CULTURE

Cartoonist Jen Sorensen once drew a strip titled “How to get Americans to care about genocide,” which included “Darfur: The Movie, starring Russell Crowe as an aid worker.” She may be onto something: Jonathan Gottschall argues, among other things, that fiction triggers empathy more effectively than nonfiction, giving Crowe a leg up on Anderson Cooper. Surprisingly, that’s not always a bad thing.

Gottschall roots his theory in early childhood, where kids are constantly making up stories that weave through their playtimes. Virtually all of them hinge on problems, offering a ready-made “plot” for princesses or firemen to jump into. These stories give them a place to practice social and problem-solving skills in a low-risk environment. Adults do this in daydreams, and some researchers believe our sleeping dreams serve much the same function (we just tend to forget those parts because they look so much like daily life, unlike when we’re late to class . . . and arrive in our underwear).

Adult fiction may feature more sophisticated plots, but the stories we’re drawn to are still almost entirely problem-focused. Even the scripted worlds of so-called reality television are designed to promote screaming matches, tearful reconciliations and hot-tub hookups. Would you really tune in to a show where nobody drank, swore or ate anyone else’s peanut butter? Obstacles are key to story as we understand it.

Gottschall looks at anthropological and neurobiological evidence that stories are part of human survival and evolution. The great religious texts offer people stories that unite them in communities and promote a common moral good.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin shifted popular sentiment about slavery and roused passions at home and abroad as the nation went to war. Of course, the same degree of attachment can lead to tragic consequences as well; many of history’s atrocities originated from religious beliefs taken to extremes. Story is a double-edged sword, but one we play with daily.

The Storytelling Animal is informative, but also a lot of fun, as when Gottschall vividly describes the “Neverlands” his daughters create in their playtime. Anyone who has wondered why stories affect us the way they do will find a new appreciation of our collective desire to be spellbound in this fascinating book.

—Heather Seggel

Damn Yankees Edited by Rob Fleder Ecco $27.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780062059628 eBook available

ing Yankee. More satisfying for my money are pieces by biographers and profilers focusing on individual players. Jane Leavy supplements her recent Mickey Mantle biography by tracking down one of the Mick’s nemeses on the mound. Michael Paterniti turns in a moving profile of Catfish Hunter in the final days of his struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. And the best essay in the book belongs to Pete Dexter, who in his inimitable, hilarious style explains the greater lessons to be drawn from Chuck Knoblauch’s forgetting how to throw from second to first base.

Of course, this book would not be complete if it did not offer ruminations on Yankee hatred. Why do we deplore them so? Frank Deford has a few opinions in a blast that is sure to please Yankee bashers everywhere.

A more complicated question: Is it ever okay to like the Yankees?

Indeed, there are a very few people in this world who can root for the Yankees while retaining their credibility as true lovers of baseball. Roy Blount Jr. makes a noble effort to place himself among them.

The Yankees are and will remain an institution. Love ’em or loathe ’em, this collection is a fine assessment of what that institution means.

—J o h n C . W i l l i a m s

sports

The Social Conquest of Earth

For 99 years now, Americans have celebrated, tolerated, blessed and cursed a baseball team called the New York Yankees. Damn Yankees brings together 24 essayists to explore the club’s history, its players and the reasons why—as the book’s subtitle tells us—the Yankees are the world’s most loved and hated team.

Overall, this is a well-conceived exercise. Editor Rob Fleder has collected some top-notch writing talent, and his authors take a wide range of approaches to their subject. Personal reminiscence is perennial in this sort of book—the most successful foray here is J.R. Moehringer’s tale of meeting a man in the Yankee Stadium nosebleeds who purported to be the oldest liv-

By Edward O. Wilson Liveright/Norton $27.95, 352 pages ISBN 9780871404138 eBook available

book offers a kind of summing-up of his magnificent career.

In The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson asks three simple questions: “Where do we come from?”; “What are we?”; and “Where are we going?”

Answering these questions, however, is not so simple, and he brings together disciplines ranging from molecular genetics to archaeology to social psychology in his quest to address these persistent queries.

Drawing upon detailed mathematical models and meticulous biological research, including his own work with the social insects—ants, wasps, termites—Wilson concludes that multilevel group selection, rather than inclusive fitness and kin selection, offers a fuller and more accurate explanation of the origins and development of human social behavior. He demonstrates persuasively how the conflict between individual selection (the competition for survival among members of the same group) and group selection (which shapes instincts that tend to make individuals altruistic toward one another) has led to our very human struggle between good and evil. The worst in our nature coexists with the best; to scrub it out, even if such were possible, would make us less than human.

While not everyone will agree with Wilson’s provocative and challenging conclusions, everyone who engages with his ideas will discover sparkling gems of wisdom uncovered by the man who is our Darwin and our Thoreau.

—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

SCIENCE

With his probing curiosity, his dazzling research, his elegant prose and his deep commitment to bio­ diversity, Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist (The Ants) and novelist (The Anthill) Edward O. Wilson has spent his life searching for the evolutionary paths by which humans developed and passed along the social behaviors that best promote the survival of our species. His eloquent, magisterial and compelling new

Apostles of Equality by D. Laurence Rogers Michigan State University Press • $39.95 ISBN 9781611860153 New look at abolitionist roots of Republicans and surprising untold Appomattox incident delaying the war’s end.

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children’s books POETRY SPRINGS UP EVERYWHERE

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very year I look forward to the spring crop of children’s poetry books, which always brings a bouquet of creativity. This year is no exception.

UNEXPECTED FINDS The Arrow Finds Its Mark: A Book of Found Poems (Roaring Brook, $16.99, 48 pages, ISBN 9781596436657, ages 8 to 12), illustrated by Antoine Guilloppé, is a fascinating collection sure to captivate young and old alike. Just leave this book out in plain sight and watch what happens!

What is a “found” poem, you might ask? It’s a piece of already existing text that is then “made” into a poem, as explained by editor Georgia Heard, who collected these examples. Such text might be a line from Twitter, a note found on a floor, a photo caption, a sign or graffiti.

For instance, here’s a poem called “Pep Talk” that consists of phrases from a box of OxiClean detergent: Keep cool.

See a brighter solution.

Mountain freshness.

Boost your power!

This little book makes for fun perusing. There’s a poem created by crossword puzzle clues, another from a dictionary entry and another from the book titles on a young girl’s shelf. This is a collection guaranteed

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to inspire family fun or give students a new way to look at poetry.

SEND THE KIDS OUTSIDE! Run, jump, blow bubbles or stomp in a puddle: That’s the refreshing theme of A Stick is an Excellent Thing: Poems Celebrating Outdoor Play (Clarion, $16.99, 40 pages, ISBN 9780547124933, ages 4 to 8). Prolific poet Marilyn Singer doesn’t disappoint in this celebration of classic children’s fun, which is likely to remind adults of their own experiences hosing friends with sprinklers, rolling down hills and playing hopscotch or hide and seek.

Singer captures the endearing exuberance of childhood with poems like “Really Fast”: Skateboard races, pigeon chases, running bases.

Backyard dashes, racecar crashes, puddle splashes.

Everything’s a blast when you do it really fast!

LeUyem Pham’s illustrations are the perfect accompaniment to these lively poems. Her colorful pages are

RHYMES FOR YOUNG READERS b y A l i c e Ca r y

full of smiling kids who laugh, leap and lunge. But be forewarned: This book isn’t a great choice for bedtime, because the poems will make readers want to head right out the door.

Outdoorsy kids are likely to adore a new poetry collection with the engrossing title Nasty Bugs (Dial, $17.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780803737167, ages 6 to 8). Children’s poetry connoisseur Lee Bennett Hopkins has collected another winning swarm of poems, with names sure to entice kids, such as “Stink Bug,” “Ode to a Dead Mosquito” and “Barbed and Dangerous.”

Will Terry’s illustrations are truly glorious, with a spread on the stink bug swirling in a fiery background of orange, red and yellow as a huge green bug leers at the reader, with fumes rising. Terry brings readers eye to eye with a litany of malevolent creatures, such as fire ants, boll weevils, lice and bedbugs.

Many mothers will (not!) appreciate the first verse of Amy Ludwig Vanderwater’s poem, “Lice”: Ridiculous Pediculus O tiny vampire louse You crawl from head to head to head from house to house to house.

Not only are these poems fun, they also contain facts that will keep kids entertained, educated and grossed out, all at the same time. In addition, an explanatory section at the end contains a short but intriguing entry for each bug mentioned.

For more outdoor poems, dip into the exceptionally clever A Meal of the Stars: Poems Up and Down (HMH, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780547390079, ages 4 to 8). Dana Jensen has written a series of “vertical” poems, with each line containing just one word. Some of these poems read from top to bottom, while others read from bottom to top. Kids will love this form and no doubt want to try to write their own.

Jensen writes about such upward and downward topics as giraffe necks, popping balloons, rockets blasting into space and kites soaring

in the wind. Tricia Tusa’s illustrations add the perfect touch of humor, personality and motion.

DOUBLE TAKE When my identical twin girls were born 13 years ago, I dearly wish I’d had Take Two! A Celebration of Twins (Candlewick, $17.99, 72 pages, ISBN 9780763637026, ages 4 and up).

This is a treasure chest of poems for parents, siblings and twins, sprinkled here and there with interesting facts.

(Imagine, for instance, this hardto-believe item: “In the 1700s, Mrs. Feodor Vassilyev of Shuya, Russia, had sixteen sets of twins. She also gave birth to four sets of quadruplets and seven sets of triplets!”)

Written by the dynamic children’s literature duo of J. Patrick Lewis (a twin himself) and Jane Yolen, these fun poems address many aspects of twinhood, including the novelty, fun and frustrations. Best of all, the poems are both heartfelt and humorous. Consider these lines from “What’s It Like to Be a Twin?”: ’Cause a twin’s a double rainbow Or the fork that goes with the knife.

He may wear around the edges, But he’s guaranteed for life.

This is a beautifully designed book as well, with layouts pleasing to the eye and doubly adorable illustrations by Sophie Blackall. Even though my twins become teenagers this month, I’m keeping this book on our shelves for years to come.

BOOK SENSE BookSpeak!: Poems about Books (HMH, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780547223001, ages 4 to 8) is a lively, lovely literary collection.

Laura Purdie Salas writes verses about things like coming to the end of a book, falling asleep while reading and an avid reader begging for a sequel. One particularly clever poem asks readers to pay attention to the indexes of books and says: “So I’m telling you, kid: / ignore the rest of the book. / All you really need is me.”

Josee Bisaillon’s illustrations are varied and wonderful, adding an extra dimension of fun and whimsy.

robin lafevers interview by Heather Seggel

a thrilling fantasy with roots in real life

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rave Mercy, the first volume in an exciting new trilogy for teens, is set in a 15th-century French convent where the nuns are trained killers for the god of death. There’s wealth beyond imagining, stark and stunning violence and a romance in the midst of it all. Make no mistake: This book is vividly imagined. So it’s surprising to hear how easily it might never have come to exist.

“I had always wanted to be a writer,” author Robin LaFevers says from her home in southern California. “Since I was a little kid that [desire] had always been there, but the well-meaning adults in my life tried to redirect me” away from work that had a high risk of rejection and no guarantee of financial security.

LaFevers didn’t argue: “I listened to them.” But no clear career path emerged, so she held a handful of jobs, including work at a bank, a brokerage house and a stint as a truck driver for an energy company.

As she describes it, “I really just drifted” for a number of years.

Her eventual success took root after the birth of her two sons. “I was a stay-at-home mom,” she says. “Books were our salvation. We would just read for hours.” LaFevers reconnected with her childhood love of books, especially the way books we love as kids continue to resonate as we grow up. Figuring it was safe to risk rejection, and seeking a diversion from 24/7 mom duties (“I really needed to save my sanity”), she decided to go for broke and begin what she calls an “eight-year apprenticeship,” leading to the publication of her first book, The Falconmaster, in 2003. Several

Grave mercy

By Robin LaFevers, Harcourt, $16.99, 560 pages ISBN 9780547628349, eBook available, ages 14 & up

books in, she landed a contract that enabled her to quit a part-time job and jump into writing full time.

With one early exception, all of LaFevers’ work is historical fantasy, which mingles real facts and people with fictional and supernatural details. Her interest in the genre is grounded in how often these seemingly divergent areas overlap. “So many of the things we think of as fantasy elements, like wizards and alchemy, people actually believed as science at one point,” she says. “It makes me aware of how much we shape our reality. In 500 years, what are they going to be laughing about that we believed was real? That’s much more interesting to me than the events and places and dates of history—it’s how people moved in a world” built around beliefs much different than those of our present day.

In Grave Mercy, the worlds of history and fantasy come together when Ismae, newly escaped from a life of abuse and arranged marriage to a cretin, is taken in by the convent of St. Mortain. While you won’t find assassin nuns in any history book, Ismae’s job takes her to Brittany and Duchess Anne, who really did rule the region at the ripe old age of 12.

That the characters in this story are teens is entirely faithful to the roles they occupied in society, “doing really big, important, cool things” as military and political leaders.

LaFevers recalls that those adult responsibilities aroused one editor’s suspicions. “My editor kept saying, ‘Really?! She just seems too old to be 12!’ ” while reading about the unusually sophisticated Anne. “I said, we can change [the character] but all people have to do is Google her to find out she really was 12, and she really was speaking and writing Greek and Latin at five and a half.

She was raised to be a duchess from

the moment she was born.”

The author, who lives with her husband and a cat she describes as “demonic,” hopes readers will look up the historical characters in the book, but warns that Anne’s real-life story contains some spoilers as far as her future goes in the His Fair Assassin trilogy.

It’s not just the people but the setting for Grave Mercy that lends itself to historical fantasy.

LaFevers has posted a photo on her website showing a medieval chapel in the Brittany region of France.

“One of the starting points for me” in researching the books “was seeing this church built right next to these two pagan standing “I’m so tired stones,” she of the bad boy, says. In Grave semi-stalker Mercy those love interest pagan ways and lust at first include not sight. I wanted just “herbwitch” as to show that a job dereal love opens scription, the world up but souls rendered visto you.” ible above the bodies of the dying and a pantheon of saints at the ready to intercede on behalf of virtually any cause. This, too, is true to Brittany as it was in the Middle Ages. “That duchy really clung to their old folk beliefs longer and harder” than many neighboring areas. Even today Brittany observes some holidays tied to pagan beliefs.

For the character Ismae, a world rich with spirits is the backdrop for a journey of personal discovery. Grave Mercy is ultimately “intended to be a story of coming into one’s own mental faculties and learning to think for yourself, make your own decisions, your own choices. It’s about seeing the world with your own eyes, not

your parents’ or your convent’s eyes.”

That journey does include a romance between Ismae and Gavriel Duval, a Breton nobleman, but don’t expect this courtship to be business as usual. LaFevers says, “I’m so tired of the bad boy, semi-stalker love interest and lust at first sight [in young adult fiction]. I wanted to show that real love opens the world up to you.

You don’t have to give up part of yourself, or be less than who you are, or need to be saved. Two strong people can meet and find common ground.”

The romance develops into a sexual relationship, which is ultimately why the novel is designated for readers 14 and older. However, there’s violence in the tale as well, particularly in the book’s first scenes, that some readers may find alarming. To keep the opening from being mired in gloom, Ismae is seen smiling even as she’s locked into a root cellar by her monstrous new husband, just to show that her spirit hasn’t been broken.

With Ismae, and characters who will take center stage in future volumes, some of the fascination is in what sees them through their difficult backgrounds. “Part of it’s about coping mechanisms,” LaFevers says.

“We know people have these really dark [life] circumstances,” but the grim details may not be as useful as the ways people learn to navigate through them. “That’s what I’m trying to focus on.”

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children’s books The False Prince

reviews

PLOTTING to steal the throne Review by Kevin Delecki

Sage has led a rough life. He arrived at an orphanage five years ago with nothing, the son of a failed musician. His only chance for survival comes from his ability and willingness to steal everything he needs to live. All that changes, though, when Conner, a nobleman, arrives at the orphanage and purchases Sage. After attempting to escape, Sage is hauled on to a wagon with three other orphan boys to a camp outside of town. It is there that Sage and the other boys learn that one of them will be chosen to pose as a prince.

Jennifer A. Nielsen, author of Elliot and the Goblin War, weaves a dark and twisted plot in The False Prince, the first book in the Ascendance Trilogy. The King, Queen and Prince of Carthya are dead, though that fact has not yet become common knowledge. Conner is convinced that if he can

By Jennifer A. Nielsen, Scholastic, $16.99 “find” the missing prince of Carthya, all the noblemen will band together 352 pages, ISBN 9780545284134 and war will be averted (of course, Conner plans to grab a little of this Audio, eBook available, ages 8 to 14 power for himself). Since the missing prince cannot be located, Conner hatches a plot to find boys who resemble the prince. He then plans to train them, select the best candidate and convince the noblemen that this boy is the missing prince—and now the King of Carthya. However, like most things in life, the plan doesn’t go exactly as intended.

The False Prince is a fast-paced, exciting adventure. There is action, as the boys train with Conner’s assistants, sneak out of their rooms and jockey for position in the most important contest of their lives. There is political intrigue, as Conner considers how to convince the noblemen that he has found the missing prince, and convince the boys to reward him for what he has done. There is even friendship, between Sage and the other boys, as well as with some unexpected characters. Nielsen has written a terrific story that carries readers along to the very (surprising) end and will leave them clamoring for the next book in her trilogy.

Tracks

By Diane Lee Wilson Margaret K. McElderry $16.99, 288 pages ISBN 9781442420137 eBook available Ages 10 to 14

MIDDLE GRADE

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Late in 1866, a 13-year-old Irish lad named Malachy Gormley heads West to work for the Pacific Railroad and support his widowed mother and siblings back East. He’s big for his age and looking for adventure.

Malachy doesn’t mind hard work, nor is he afraid to stand up for himself with the other men who, like him, must brave extreme temperatures, avalanches and dangerous working conditions to achieve this incredible enterprise—the completion of the transcontinental railroad.

Malachy befriends a feisty bulldog he names Brina and a dedicated horse, Blind Thomas. But he is less sure what to think about the Chinese workers who have also been recruited for this hazardous work, especially one young man, Chun Krowk Keung, whom he calls “Ducks.”

Diane Lee Wilson’s meticulous research and elegant prose make the story of Malachy and the challenges he faces a compelling read. She doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects, including the insults that the Chinese men endure, the tensions between the workers and Malachy’s struggles to find his moral compass.

An avid horse lover, Wilson has written about horses in such previous novels as Black Storm Comin’ and Firehorse. Here, she bases the endearing character of Blind Thomas on a horse who “may or may not have existed” named Blind Tom, who was called a hero at the

Golden Spike ceremony in Promontory, Utah, that joined the tracks on May 10, 1869. In Tracks, Wilson has created a stirring coming-ofage story for young readers and a thoughtful account of a fascinating time in history.

—DEBORAH HOPKINSON

gets caught up in a great mystery.

Like Petra and Calder in Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer and Reynie in Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society, Ruby is a precocious kid who thrives on difficult problems and tricky situations.

The story moves along fluidly, although some elements are a bit cartoonish: Ruby’s unbelievably stupid parents; the spy agency that only seems able to crack codes with Ruby’s help; and the fact that billions of dollars in gold are coming to the small town of Twinford, USA. Despite these elements—or perhaps because of them—the story is a fun romp through Ruby’s interesting life.

Child does an excellent job of subtly alerting us that the story takes place in the 1970s and that Ruby is an American. (Child is British.) The author also includes some interesting puzzles and a difficult code to decipher. (This reviewer, who prides herself on her own decoding abilities, had to resort to the Internet for help.) And there’s plenty of page-turning action as Ruby gets closer to solving the mystery.

Though Ruby Redfort Look Into My Eyes will appeal to all ages, middle-grade girls will especially identify with Ruby’s disconnect from her parents, her efforts to be independent and her struggle to be heard by the adults in her life. This lighthearted caper also carries a valuable lesson as Ruby learns that trusting her instincts can help her crack the toughest cases.

— J enni f er B r u er K i t c he l

Ruby Redfort Look Into My Eyes

By Lauren Child Candlewick $16.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780763651206 eBook available Ages 10 to 13

MIDDLE GRADE

Losers in Space

By John Barnes Viking $18.99, 384 pages ISBN 9780670061563 eBook available Ages 14 and up

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Get ready, puzzle lovers! There’s a new book on the scene that will satisfy the sleuth in all of us. Author Lauren Child (Clarice Bean, Charlie & Lola) introduces Ruby Redfort, a young code-cracking genius who

In the year 2129, the United Nations’ Permanent Peace and Prosperity governs the world and

96% of the global population allows robots to do their work and lives on the social minimum, a government allowance comparable to two million dollars a year today. With the rise of boredom, entertainment is what really rules the planet. Only celebrities with the most media play are deemed eligible for professional celebrity status and employment beyond the social minimum. Celebrities’ children, however, must prove their own celebrity status, mostly by “styling” attitude and emotions, and as a result, special schools exist to prepare them for celebrity potential exams.

In this brilliant adventure, Printz Honor-winning author John Barnes balances real science with humorous jibes against today’s obsession with social media, including swapping out the “infodumps” of hard science fiction for periodic “Notes for the Interested,” which can be skipped (but why miss the fun?).

He also knows how to tell a thrilling story. Susan Tervaille and eight of her fellow classmates at one of the elite prep schools have little chance of raising their recognition scores until Derlock, whose lawyer father has become famous for getting violent offenders freed due to media interest, comes up with a scheme to make them even more famous than their parents.

The plan—to hide out on a spacecraft that facilitates transportation between Earth and Mars—is interrupted by an accidental explosion that leaves only the nine teens and an illegally “geneered” horton (yes, from Dr. Seuss’ elephant-like creation) alive. They can’t communicate with the outside universe, and they have a limited window to approach Mars or spend two years in orbit. When classmates suddenly find themselves in other life-threatening situations, Susan begins to wonder if the “accident” was part of Derlock’s plan. Fighting for survival while disconnected from the media, the teens begin to realize the importance of feelings over styling, teamwork over status and education over entertainment. Hang on, readers, for one wild ride.

It’s a longstanding tradition at Mount Washington High School— on the last Monday in September “The List” is posted all over school.

It names the prettiest girl, and the ugliest girl, from each grade. Who writes The List? No one seems to know. It’s apparently an honor secretly passed down from one student to another, and it’s gone on for as long as anyone can remember. To add a touch of legitimacy, each copy of The List is emblazoned with a line drawing of Mount Washington High, from an embossing stamp stolen decades ago from the principal’s desk.

When beautiful Candace is named “ugliest” in the sophomore class, with an annotation that “beauty isn’t just skin-deep,” she is devastated and wonders what could have gone wrong. When lovely Bridget is named “prettiest” in the junior class, along with a note about “what a difference a summer can make,” she resolves to continue her zealous diet and maintain the thin physique she managed to starve herself into over the summer. The stories go on, in alternating chapters that reveal the humiliations and triumphs of each of the eight girls on The List.

Siobhan Vivian’s latest novel for young adults tackles the beauty myth head on. Readers will find themselves relating to each character’s struggles—and The List does bring challenges to all who appear on it, “pretty” and “ugly” alike.

Labels can be damaging, even when they may appear to be positive.

Half cautionary tale and half whodunit, The List will keep readers turning pages in the hopes of finding out who is behind The List, and what will become of the girls it singles out.

—Angela Leeper

— E m i l y B o o t h Ma s t e r s

meet DOUGLAS FLORIAN the title of your Q: What’s

new book?

Lee taplinger

reviews The List

By Siobhan Vivian Push/Scholastic $17.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780545169172 Ages 13 and up

would you describe Q: How

the book?

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has been the biggest influence on your work?

Q: Who

Q: What was your favorite subject in school? Why?

was your childhood hero?

Q: Who

Q: W hat books did you enjoy as a child?

one thing would you like to learn to do?

Q: What

Q: W hat message would you like to send to children?

POEM RUNS Artist and poet Douglas Florian has created many acclaimed poetry collections for children. A former Little League shortstop, he celebrates the glories of the game in POEM RUNS: BASEBALL POEMS AND PAINTINGS (HMH, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780547688381). Florian lives with his family in New York.

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WORDNOOK

By the editors of Merriam-Webster

A BREED APART Dear Editor, I recently purchased a Dandie Dinmont terrier puppy. The breeder told me the name Dandie Dinmont comes from literature, but she couldn’t remember the exact source.

Do you know?

B. P. Roswell, New Mexico The Dandie Dinmont, which has been touted as “the only breed to be named for a fictional character,” got its name from a character in Sir Walter Scott’s 1814 novel Guy Mannering. In the novel, Dinmont is a farmer who owns six such dogs.

Dandie Dinmonts were originally bred in the Northumberland region of England. Before Scott’s novel, they were known simply as “terriers” or “pepper and mustard terriers,” with “pepper” and “mustard” referring to the two possible colors of the breed (gray and tan).

The Dandie Dinmont character is often said to be based on an actual tenant farmer and dog breeder named James Davidson. Scott

himself insisted that Dinmont was a composite of various northland farmers he knew, but did admit that certain aspects of the character were patterned after Davidson. In any case, after the publication of Scott’s novel, the popularity of the breed increased and folks began calling Davidson Dandie Dinmont. By the end of the 19th century, the name Dandie Dinmont was also being applied to the dogs themselves.

HEAVENS ABOVE Dear Editor, Can you explain the origin of the expression seventh heaven? What does it mean, and where does it come from?

S. E. Amarillo, Texas The expression seventh heaven is defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition as “a state of extreme joy.” The concept of the seven heavens has its origins in the medieval Jewish cabala, and it figures prominently in Islamic mysticism as well. Although there

are several different representations of the seven heavens, most depict the heavens as being concentric celestial spheres enveloping the Earth. The final level—that is, the seventh heaven—is the most exalted of all: the abode of God himself and the final destination of souls on their ascent toward perfect purity.

It is from this mystical concept of perfect bliss that we get our secular (and somewhat more banal) notion of seventh heaven as being a state of heightened delight.

A TARNISHED WORD Dear Editor, I’m curious about the expression What in tarnation?! Did it originate in the days of the Wild West?

J. S. Staten Island, New York All languages and cultures seem to have words or practices that are taboo and hence not mentioned in polite society, leading to the creation of euphemisms that can be used more freely. Often a euphemism retains the initial sound of the

IT ’ S H IP T O B E S Q U A R E W I TH C ROS S W OR DS F R OM

your zle puz of zen this puzzle was originally made to try to land an internship with 40-across . . . to no avail.

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Send correspondence regarding Word Nook to: Language Research Service P.O. Box 281 Springfield, MA 01102

TR Y ON E!

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1 Word on a cell phone button 5 Group of 70-Acrosses 9 Rapper Nicki 14 Love, in Livorno 16 Start of a biography? (not yet born) 17 In 18 She played Bridget in Bridget Jones’s Diary 19 Line on a baseball 20 Like some situations 21 Onetime host of 61-Across 24 61-Across correspondent Samantha 25 “The Notorious ” (2009 61-Across segment) 26 Obama, once: Abbr.

taboo word, as with gosh, a substitute for the irreverent use of God. At other times, the sounds of the original word are altered slightly and the word or expression is shortened; for instance, drat is probably an alteration of the oath God rot.

Tarnation evolved through a combination of these practices.

Its earliest ancestor was the word damnation, which was euphemistically altered to darnation. Around 1790, the same time that tarnation emerged, the word tarnal, an alteration of eternal, was being used as a euphemism for damned. Ultimately, tarnation developed as an alteration of darnation, influenced by tarnal.

Tarnation may conjure up visions of the Old West, but in fact it can be found in the dialects of many different areas. James Joyce, the great Irish writer, even has a character exclaim, “Wall, tarnation strike me!” in his 1922 novel Ulysses.

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PuzzLE By CALEB MADISON

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1 Common style in 61-Across 2 Like some professors 3 Geometric figure with a square number of sides 4 Half of sechs 5 1995 Scorsese film 6 Author Jean 7 Tries 8 Song in Annie 9 61-Across correspondent Olivia 10 Skater Midori 11 Tyros 12 Sharon and others 13 61-Across correspondent Jason 15 Head lines?

22 Durant on the court 23 Wade’s opponent, in court 28 Like all the sides of 3-Down vis-à-vis the perimeter 30 Beseech

32 Power part de Triomphe 34 36 “The Stupid ” (52-Down segment on 61-Across) 38 Rendezvous 41 Lineup makeup 42 “Don’t tell ” 43 61-Across correspondent John 46 Japanese emperor beginning in 1989 47 Kind of can 48 Towards the wind 49 Medium for 70-Across, perhaps 50 Cheering syllable 52 61-Across correspondent John 54 61-Across correspondent Wyatt 56 Comedian Izzard Breckinridge 58 Vidal’s 61 Old source of Soviet news 62 Pierce player, once 63 Anatomical pouches 65 Suffix with Brooklyn

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