BookPage April 2015

DISCOVER YOUR NEXT GREAT BOOK

BORN WITH TEETH

Actress Kate Mulgrew on the arc of a spirited life

AT THE WATER’S EDGE Sea monsters and socialites in Sara Gruen’s latest

THE STRANGER

Anonymous secrets that can shatter a life

APRIL 2015

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MUST-READ

BOOK REVIEWS

A REUNION OF GHOSTS

Judith Claire Mitchell Her captivating chronicle of three sisters who carry the weight of a dark family legacy

PaperbackPicks Tom Clancy Support and Defend In Tom Clancy Support and Defend, covert agent Dominic Caruso faces the deadliest challenge of his career.

Cut and Thrust Stone Barrington enters the cutthroat fray of politics in the exceptional new thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Stuart Woods.

Feature

of the

Month

“Tautly written, wickedly sexy, and just plain fun.”

—#1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner

Field of Prey

Otherwise Engaged

The extraordinary new Lucas Davenport thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.

The New York Times bestseller!

“Quick…has outdone herself with the 19th-century protagonist of Otherwise Engaged.”

—The Seattle Times

Suspicion

A Deadly Web

The electrifying new thriller from Joseph Finder, New York Times bestselling author of Vanished and Buried Secrets.

The new Bishop Files novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The First Prophet and the Special Crimes Unit novels.

The American Mission One of NPR’s Best Books of 2014!

Global headlines come to life and international politics collide in this electrifying debut thriller from Matthew Palmer.

Too Dangerous for a Lady The new novel in the Rogue series from the New York Times bestselling author—and five-time RITA Award winner.

NEW IN HARDCOVER Two brothers bound by more than blood discover a conspiracy that will change their destiny in the astonishing all-new novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, the “frighteningly addictive” (Publishers Weekly) series by #1 New York Times bestselling author J. R. Ward.

“J.R. Ward’s unique band of brothers is to die for.”

—New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann.

contents

APRIL 2015 B O O K PA G E . C O M

features

12

14 KATE MULGREW

Judith Claire Mitchell explores the unbreakable bond and dark fate shared by three sisters in A Reunion of Ghosts.

A spirited memoir from the celebrated actress

16 BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN Meet the cartoonist and author of I Was a Child

Cover illustration from A Reunion of Ghosts courtesy of HarperCollins

17 ANNA FREEMAN The forgotten lives of female prizefighters

18 POETRY Three new collections uncover the beauty in the everyday

reviews 21 FICTION

20 CHRISTIAN LIVING Inspirational titles for Easter

28 ELIZABETH WEIN Two teens take to the skies

25 NONFICTION

LIFESTYLES WELL READ LIBRARY READS ROMANCE COOKING BOOK CLUBS WHODUNIT AUDIO

top pick:

also reviewed:

The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle I Refuse by Per Petterson A Slant of Light by Jeffrey Lent Viper Wine by Hermione Eyre Pretty Ugly by Kirker Butler The Turner House

by Angela Flournoy Emma by Alexander McCall Smith

Natural Born Heroes

by Christopher McDougall

Between You & Me by Mary Norris Hissing Cousins by Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer A Fine Romance by Candice Bergen The Wilderness of Ruin

by Roseanne Montillo

columns 04 04 05 06 06 09 10 11

At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum The Children’s Crusade by Ann Packer Where They Found Her

by Kimberly McCreight The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan Oh! You Pretty Things

by Shanna Mahin Academy Street by Mary Costello

Get ready for opening day

Meet the author-illustrator of Everybody Sleeps (But Not Fred)

top pick:

also reviewed:

19 BASEBALL

31 JOSH SCHNEIDER

cover story

New Historical and Contemporary Romances from Avon Books!

Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith Water to the Angels by Lee Standiford The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits Swansong 1945 by Walter Kempowski What Comes Next and How to Like It

by Abigail Thomas

29 TEEN

30 CHILDREN’S

top pick:

top pick:

also reviewed:

also reviewed:

The Truth Commission

by Susan Juby

The Tightrope Walkers

by David Almond Under a Painted Sky by Stacey Lee Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

by Becky Albertalli

The Penderwicks in Spring

by Jeanne Birdsall

Inside This Book by Barney Saltzberg Orion and the Dark by Emma Yarlett Moon Bear by Gill Lewis If You Find This by Matthew Baker Dear Hank Williams

by Kimberly Willis Holt

A M E R I C A’ S B O O K R E V I E W PUBLISHER Michael A. Zibart

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Cat Acree

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Allison Hammond

Elizabeth Grace Herbert

CONTRIBUTOR

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CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

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MARKETING Mary Claire Zibart

CONTROLLER Sharon Kozy

EDITORIAL POLICY BookPage is a selection guide for new books. Our editors evaluate and select for review the best books published in a variety of categories.

Only books we highly recommend are featured. BookPage is editorially independent and never accepts payment for editorial coverage.

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3

columns

LIFESTYLES

WELL READ

BY JOANNA BRICHETTO

BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

House to homestead

Learning to love poetry

At a time when the grow-yourown food movement is booming, it can be frustrating for those who are eager to flex their green thumbs but lack the outdoor space to cultivate a sprawling home garden. With DK’s Grow All You Can Eat in 3 Square Feet ($22.95, 256 pages, ISBN 9781465429803), you can learn how to make the most of just three square feet (or less!) of growing space. This cheerful

Each April, National Poetry Month promotes the enduring art form in the classroom and beyond, celebrating the integral role that poetry has played in our literary tradition. Yet, this once-a-year focus on poetry also reminds us of how few readers still make poetry a regular part of their reading diet.

We encounter poetry every day, of course, in its most populist forms—song lyrics, advertising— but the meager sales of poetry collections would indicate that few of us are curling up by the fire with a volume of verse. If asked, many readers might cite their lack of interest as growing out of intimidation—they just don’t “get” poetry, its language is hard to crack, its subject matter arcane.

Jane Hirshfield is working to change that perception. “We write and read poems because we need them,” says the award-winning poet and current Chancellor of the Academy of American ­Poets.

In Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, $24.95, 320 pages, ISBN 9780385351058), Hirshfield offers a collection of essays that immerse eager readers into poetry, illuminating the art with knowledge and insight. In a similar vein to Francine Prose’s best-selling Reading Like a Writer, Ten Windows teaches us how to become closer readers, to gain a deeper understanding of poems and contemplate their necessary place in our lives. To accomplish this task, Hirschfield guides us through an array of poems, some widely known, some less so. She is tackling big questions here—How does art work?

How does it grow out of the human experience?—but her method of inquiry is small and intimate, taking us deep into the details.

Hirshfield’s congenial approach includes some of the nuts and

and encouraging guide takes you through the steps of assessing your plot’s light and soil conditions, choosing your best-bet crops and keeping your harvests plentiful throughout the entire growing season. With plenty of fun DIY projects like balcony saddlebags, ladder shelves and window boxes, plus helpful advice about the varieties of crops to grow (sun-loving, shade-tolerant, quick-growing, etc.) and how to best protect them against pests and disease, you’ll have a kitchen stocked with your own lovingly grown produce in no time—no matter how small your space.

FURNISH YOUR REBELLION Inventive self-reliance is also a key theme in the next book, which calls for some imaginative upcycling. With gleeful mischief, craftsman and carpenter Will Holman’s Guerilla Furniture D ­ esign: How to Build Lean, Modern Furniture with Salvaged Materials (Storey, $19.95, 192 pages, ISBN 9781612123035) wages war against the big-box stores by utilizing paper, wood, plastic and metal to create 35 practical pieces for every room—including handmade lamps, tables and chairs, coat racks and credenzas. Holman begins his intensive workshop (complete with detailed and easyto-follow instructions) with a man-

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ifesto—a thoughtful, philosophical foundation for his subversive modus operandi. In this IKEA era, in which popular interior design trends are focused on furniture manufactured on a mass scale, Holman gives us the means to take back our appreciation of craftsmanship. With just a few simple tools, some inexpensive materials and a little rebellious spirit, Holman encourages us to get crafty for the greater good.

TOP PICK IN LIFESTYLES Brit Morin has made a name for herself as “Silicon Valley’s Martha Stewart.” As the founder and CEO of Brit + Co., she has created an online support system for 21st-century women of all ages and encourages us to take pride in our identity as homemakers. With a promise of more than 1,000 creative solutions and projects for the home, Homemakers: A Domestic Handbook for the Digital Generation (Morrow, $22.99, 448 pages, ISBN 9780062332509) makes it possible to take pleasure in homely tasks so that we might cultivate a sense of domestic tranquility for ourselves. In a time when the majority of women are juggling fulltime responsibilities both in the workplace and in the home, the concept of DIY never seemed like fun before Morin got her tough, yet beautifully manicured hands on it. Whether you’re looking for advice on poaching an egg, folding a napkin, determining your living room’s feng shui or concealing under-eye circles, Morin is the home-economics guru we’ve been waiting for. Best of all, she knows that we now live our lives on the “split levels” of real and virtual space. Homemakers shows us how to inhabit both regions with simplicity, freedom and grace.

bolts we associate with poetry: language, imagery, form. But a deeper appreciation of poetry, she suggests, can be found in the poet’s impetus.

She looks at how our uncertainty as humans has inspired great poems, how many poems grow out of the hidden and how poems can offer what she calls “a constellation of surprises,” unfolding with new meaning with each revisit. As she considers a broad spectrum of poems, ancient and modern, Hirshfield shares her keen observations through her own poet-eyes. While her writing occasionally encroaches on the academic, which is perhaps unavoidable when trying to plumb the mysteries of a serious art form, for the most part it speaks to the general reader.

Though it comes relatively late in the book, Hirshfield’s chapter on what is American about modern American poetry is particularly straightforward and informative, and might be a good Poems can place for the offer “a less-initiatconstellation ed to start. of surprises,” Her concise unfolding with appraisal of how Amernew meaning ican-grown each time we poetry “conrevisit them. tains multitudes and not a few contradictions” kindled fond memories for this former English major of encountering some of the marvelous practitioners of our native verse decades ago in a favorite college seminar. An earlier chapter on haiku also serves as a good jumping-off point.

“No matter how many poems exist, there is, it seems, always room for another,” Hirshfield writes at the end of Ten Windows.

“In this way, poems are like life itself: an ever increasing inhabitance of the possible, a realm in which something else is still able to happen.”

Selected from nominations made by library staff across the country, here are the 10 books that librarians can’t wait to share with readers in April.

#1

AT THE WATER’S EDGE by Sara Gruen Spiegel & Grau, $28, ISBN 9780385523233

In the new book from the author of Water for Elephants, a frivolous young woman gets a new outlook on life during a journey to the Scottish highlands. BookPage review on page 21.

THE ROYAL WE by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Grand Central, $26, ISBN 9781455557103 The hilarious minds behind the fashion blog Go Fug Yourself put a fictional twist on the modern-day romance of William and Kate. BookPage review on page 22.

A DESPERATE FORTUNE by Susanna Kearsley

Sourcebooks Landmark, $16.99, ISBN 9781492602026 in Kearsley’s atmospheric new novel, an amateur codebreaker uncovers a story of betrayal and rebellion while decrypting a 17th-century journal.

THE DREAM LOVER by Elizabeth Berg

Random House, $28, ISBN 9780812993158 Best-selling author Berg (Open House ) takes the eventful life of George Sand as the premise for her first historical novel, set along the storied streets of 19th-century Paris.

STILL THE ONE by Jill Shalvis

Berkley, $7.99, ISBN 9780425270189 The latest in Shalvis’ Animal Magnetism series finds a sexy physical therapist reluctantly falling for a strong-willed travel writer.

New York Times bestselling author

LINDA GOODNIGHT welcomes you to Honey Ridge, Tennessee, and a house that’s rich with secrets and brimming with sweet possibilities.

INSIDE THE O’BRIENS by Lisa Genova

Gallery, $26, ISBN 9781476717777 A family struggles to cope with a diagnosis of Huntington’s disease—which has no treatment and no cure—in this tender new novel from the author of Still Alice.

HOUSE OF ECHOES by Brendan Duffy

Ballantine, $26, ISBN 9780804178112 In this chilling horror debut, the Tierneys move to Upstate New York with their two children in search of a better life— but instead, they find a nightmare.

THE PRECIOUS ONE by Marisa de los Santos

Morrow, $25.99, ISBN 9780061670893 Taisy Cleary reluctantly agrees to play ghostwriter for her estranged father—and finds herself forging a connection with her prickly teenage sister.

“Linda Goodnight is a genuine treasure.

The Memory House is a beautiful, rich, unforgettable story filled with tenderness and heart.”

—New York Times bestselling author RaeAnne Thayne

THE BONE TREE by Greg Iles

Morrow, $27.99, ISBN 9780062311115 In the follow-up to Iles’ bestseller Natchez Burning, Penn Cage and his fiancée, reporter Caitlin Masters, find themselves drawn deeper into a fearsome terrorist sect.

WHERE THEY FOUND HER by Kimberly McCreight

Harper, $26.99, ISBN 9780062225467 When a newborn baby is found dead in an idyllic small town, reporter Molly Sanderson is determined to uncover the truth.

BookPage review on page 22.

www.HQNBooks.com www.LindaGoodnight.com

LibraryReads is a recommendation program that highlights librarians’ favorite books published this month. For more information, visit libraryreads.org.

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columns

ROMANCE

COOKING

B Y C H R I S T I E R I D G WAY

BY SYBIL PRATT

Fighting for true love

Mediterranean magic

A mixed martial arts fighter loses the battle for his heart in Holding Strong (HQN, $7.99, 480 pages, ISBN 9780373779611), the latest in Lori Foster’s Ultimate series.

Denver Lewis thinks daycare worker Cherry Peyton is sexy, beautiful and a definite flirt. The fact that her flirtations with other

Nancy Harmon Jenkins’ Virgin Territory: Exploring the World of Olive Oil (HMH, $29.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9781118203224) is a twoin-one triumph. I doubt there’s anyone in the cookbook-buying community who doesn’t know that olive oil is a healthy, delicious golden elixir and that extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) is even better in

men bothers him so much has made him steer clear of her. With an important fight in the offing, he doesn’t need the distraction of a known tease. However, his resistance only lasts for so long, and when he and Cherry finally kiss, he knows he must have her.

Cherry fell for Denver early and is ecstatic that they’re together—until ugliness from her past arrives.

She hopes to handle the situation on her own, but she quickly learns the importance of trust.

Will Cherry and Denver manage to defeat her ghosts and find their happy-ever-after? This story is a winner, proving that nobody writes a studly hero better than Foster.

DANGEROUS DELIGHT In Molly Harper’s The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire (Pocket, $7.99, 368 pages, ISBN 9781476706016), 20-year-old human programmer Gigi Scanlon works for the World Council for the Equal Treatment of the Undead.

The hours aren’t ideal, but the perks are great, and Gigi is accustomed to dealing with vampires since her sister, brother-in-law and friends are blood-drinkers themselves. However, complicating her job is the distraction of Nik Dragomirov, the mysterious vamp who gave her one searing kiss and then disappeared. Now he’s back and running hot and cold when it comes to Gigi. She’s attracted

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to Nik big time, but there’s the pesky fact that he can easily turn from sweet seducer to dangerous assailant.

When they learn that a witch has cursed Nik, it’s a race to break the spell before it forces Nik to put a very permanent end to their growing love. Entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny, this paranormal romance is a great addition to the Half-Moon Hollow series.

TOP PICK IN ROMANCE Eloisa James continues her best-selling Desperate Duchesses series with Four Nights with the Duke (Avon, $7.99, 384 pages, ISBN 9780062223913), a jewel of a love story. Mia Carrington is desperate to find a husband in order to secure the guardianship of her orphaned nephew, so she turns to Vander Brody, the Duke of Pindar, her adolescent crush and the one man she can blackmail into a quick marriage. Being cornered by Mia enrages Vander, but to save his family name he agrees to her stipulations—up to a point. Assuming that her old obsession with him is fueling the situation, he’ll exact revenge by allowing her only four nights a year in his bed. When the truth comes out—that Mia only wants a convenient marriage that can quickly be annulled—he’s only more annoyed. The maddening yet lovely woman moves in with her ward, and Vander easily bonds with the child, leading him to believe that the marriage might work after all. However, the machinations of an unscrupulous relative threaten all they have begun to build together. Sexy, sweet and with secondary characters who will wiggle their way into readers’ hearts, this historical romance is amusing, smiles-all-around entertainment.

every way. But not too many of us know what EVOO really is, what determines quality, why it matters and how to select the best. Jenkins, a renowned olive oil authority and avid advocate of the Mediterranean diet, remedies that with the savvy seminar she offers here.

The 100-plus recipes that follow are, unsurprisingly, all marvelous, EVOO-anointed and mostly Mediterranean. No course is left behind, from starters and small dishes, like tapenades and real Falafel with garlicky tahini, to soups, salads, seafood, serious meat and poultry mains, sauces, pastas, pizzas, rice and desserts—even Mousse au Chocolate and Brownies.

UNHURRIED DINING What can the bass player for the indie rock band Grizzly Bear and a photographer teach you about making fabulous dinners?

A lot. Chris Taylor is the musician, and a dedicated home cook. Ithai Schori is a photographer who’s worked as a pro in some high-end restaurants. When they met, the two discovered a shared passion for “making good food happen” and for feeding their friends in an unhurried, laid-back style.

They experimented, riffed on each other’s ideas and came up with Twenty Dinners (Clarkson Potter, $37.50, 272 pages, ISBN 9780385345286), featuring their favorite techniques and inspiring ideas, plus luscious photographs,

for simple evening meals or more elaborate events.

Consider their menus, but mix and match these sensational, seasonally arranged dishes in any way you want. I fell for the Seared Kale Salad with toasted pine nuts from Dinner 1, and served it before the slow-cooked Roasted Lamb Shoulder from Dinner 8, with Spiced Carrots and Harissa Yogurt from Dinner 14, followed by a rich, intense Lemon Verbena Tart from Dinner 3. A total wow!

TOP PICK IN COOKBOOKS Sometimes I wonder if the world really needs another Italian cookbook. Then, a book like Nonna’s House (Atria, $30, 288 pages, ISBN 9781476774114) arrives, and I know that the answer is a resounding sì! Missing his grandmother, mother and sister and the glorious food they made, Jody Scaravella had the brilliant idea to open a unique restaurant where all the cooking was done by real Italian grandmothers—the nonnas who learned to cook from their nonnas and who hold their families together with authentic regional food made from legacy recipes. It all happens at Enoteca Maria on Staten Island. If you can’t hop on the ferry to get there, you can open this book and make the nonnas’ cucina casalinga (home cooking) part of your own culinary legacy. Spiced with warm reminiscences and almost-edible photos, the book includes lovingly detailed recipes from all over Italy—Farro Soup from the Abruzzi, mint-infused Stuffed Eggplant from Sicily, Calabrian Baked Pasta Casserole, Risotto with Radicchio from the Veneto, Neapolitan Potato Pie. Mangia bene—this is tradition at its tastiest.

columns

BOOK CLUBS

BY JULIE HALE

Memories of a POW Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Vintage, $15.95, 416 pages, ISBN 9780804171472) is a gripping, complex novel about war, love and loss. Tasmanian physician Dorrigo Evans is 77, an age that’s ripe for reflection, and his recollections provide the underpinning for an expansive narrative. Dorrigo’s

affair with Amy Mulvaney, his uncle’s wife, and his experience as a prisoner in the hands of the Japanese during World War II are the formative experiences of his life. As a POW, he worked on the Thailand-Burma Railway in the Burmese jungle, performing backbreaking labor that takes its toll on him and his fellow prisoners, a varied cast of men that Flanagan brings to memorable life. The narrative moves fluidly through time, shifting backward to Dorrigo’s childhood and moving forward again into wartime. Dorrigo’s postwar years are filled with memories of Amy and of the comrades who toiled beside him in the jungle.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize, this impressive novel has earned Flanagan much-deserved acclaim.

He writes with deep compassion about heartbreak, the horrors of war and the difficulties of escaping the past.

FIELD WORK Euphoria (Grove, $16, 288 pages, ISBN 9780802123701) by Lily King is a fascinating blend of fact and fiction based on the life of Margaret Mead. British anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been doing research in New Guinea for years.

Mulling over the death of his brothers and feeling discouraged by his work, Andrew is gripped by loneliness and despair. His outlook

changes when he crosses paths with fellow anthropologists Nell Stone and her capricious husband, Fen. Nell is ardent about her work, and her presence inspires Andrew.

His discovery of a new tribe kindles passions among the trio, as Andrew becomes fixated on his new discovery— and on Nell. Named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Euphoria is an adventure-filled novel written with authority and lyrical grace—a book that transports the reader through sheer narrative drive even as it offers an insightful look at a formative era in anthropological research. This is an unforgettable book that enriches Mead’s biography.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, Donna Tartt’s The ­Goldfinch (Back Bay, $20, 784 pages, ISBN 9780316055444) is at once an epic coming-of-age novel and a sophisticated art-world thriller.

The narrator, Theo Decker, is 13 when the novel opens and struggling with the loss of his mother.

After her death in an explosion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a valuable Dutch painting ends up in Theo’s hands—a rare work that changes the course of his life. Growing up, Theo lives with the family of a school chum on Park Avenue, then moves in with his father in Las Vegas, where he befriends Boris, a Ukrainian. He eventually makes his way back to New York to work at an antiques store, where he finds himself in the middle of an international mystery, related to the painting, of course.

Danger, under-the-table art deals and an appealing protagonist make this novel—Tartt’s third—a true page-turner.

A Month of

Great Book Club Choices Little Beach Street Bakery

by Jenny Colgan

In the bestselling tradition of Jojo Moyes and Jennifer Weiner, New York Times bestselling author Jenny Colgan’s moving, funny, and unforgettable novel tells the story of a heartbroken young woman who turns a new page in her life . . . by becoming a baker.

The Home Place

by Carrie La Seur

“It is always a treat when a talented writer chooses to write about her home, particularly when she does so with authority, clarity and imagination...With pitch-perfect prose, La Seur reminds us that home, though often a difficult word to define, is the place that pulls us no matter how hard we try to push against it.”

—Bookpage

The Hurricane Sisters

by Dorothea Benton Frank “Dotty Frank’s books have the fizz of a gin and tonic, the hilarity of a night out at a comedy club and the warmth of a South Carolina sun.”

—Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author

All I Love and Know

by Judith Frank

“In this wonderfully rich, absorbing novel, Frank sheds light on gender and identity, the anguished politics of the Middle East, the limits of love and one family’s struggle to stay intact.”

—People

@Morrow_PB

@bookclubgirl

William Morrow Paperbacks

Book Club Girl

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columns

WHODUNIT

BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Secrets come back to bite you The crime of blackmail must be about as old as mankind, when the first child caught his sibling doing something naughty and cagily offered the offender an out—for a price. Countless tales have been spun about blackmail, but rarely with such an original twist as in Harlan Coben’s The Stranger (Dutton, $27.95, 400 pages, ISBN 9780525953500).

For the person known only as “the Stranger,” money is secondary to the justice he (or she) is able to mete out to wrongdoers who erroneously believe the Internet offers them a measure of anonymity.

Case in point: With the help of an Internet novelty company, Corinne Price faked a pregnancy and a

shadowy and distinctly ominous presence of the Stranger.

subsequent miscarriage to salvage a marriage she felt was coming apart. Pregnancy test: paper strips that show “positive” every time.

Sonogram: someone else’s, doctored with Corinne’s information.

Abdomen: an ever-increasing jelly belly that would magically disappear with the “miscarriage.” Now

the deception has come back to bite her in a big way, at the most inopportune time imaginable. This is but one of several deceptions, each separately and painstakingly constructed, connected only by the

Read the next electrifying novel in the Cafferty & Quinn series from New York Times bestselling author

BRAVO, BRUNETTI Longtime readers of Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti novels are in for a treat. Her new book, Falling in Love (Atlantic Monthly, $26, 256 pages, ISBN 9780802123534), harkens back to the first novel in the series, Death at La Fenice, in which Brunetti cleared the name of opera singer and murder suspect Flavia Petrelli. The diva is in need of Brunetti’s help once again, this time as victim rather than as suspect. It seems an obsessed fan has entered Petrelli’s life, bombarding her with bouquets of exquisite yellow roses. At first the attention and the adulation was flattering, but that was before the roses began to pile up in her dressing room and in her locked apartment. And before a young singer publicly complimented by Petrelli was brutally thrown down a staircase. Brunetti must intervene (with the able assistance of ever-so-resourceful and devious Signorina Elettra) in an attempt to forestall any further violence. Fans of exceptionally character-driven mysteries will find lots to like here.

CUBAN CRISIS

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

—Publishers Weekly Visit www.eHeatherGraham.com to learn more.

Available now! www.MIRABooks.com

Of all the would-be successors to John D. MacDonald’s legendary Travis McGee, Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford stands out as the clear frontrunner. Cuba Straits (Putnam, $26.95, 336 pages, ISBN 9780399158148), the latest in a long line of tropical adventures, finds the canny Florida marine biologist and his hippie sidekick, Tomlinson, tangled up in a situation with tendrils reaching back to the heady days of the Cuban revolution. Meanwhile, in modern times, as the U.S. and Cuba edge ever closer to détente, Juan Garcia’s business of smuggling first-rate Cuban baseball players to American teams may be in jeopardy. But the danger of that endeavor pales in comparison to the sensitive nature of some letters he has recently acquired for resale.

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Ostensibly love letters indicating that Fidel and Raúl Castro were once in love with the same woman, these pages may expose something altogether darker— something worth killing over almost 60 years later. And then Garcia disappears, basically without a trace. If the hitherto forbidden landscape of Cuba speaks to you, if you miss Travis McGee like a long-lost brother, if you value a writer whose easy familiarity with his milieu is evident on every page, look no further.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY Norwegian author Jo Nesbø, who has notably chronicled the life and times of Oslo cop Harry Hole, has jumped the tracks with his latest standalone novel, Blood on Snow (Knopf, $23.95, 224 pages, ISBN 9780385354196), taking his readers along for the first-person narrative of Olav, a slightly slow-witted contract killer, or “fixer.” Olav has tried other crime jobs over the years, driving getaway cars, robbing banks and so on, but the only thing he seems talented at is “fixing” people. Now he faces a conundrum: Olav’s boss wants his wife fixed. If Olav carries out this fix, he will hold dangerous knowledge about his boss. And if he doesn’t, when some other fixer does the job, Olav will still know that the boss is responsible. It’s truly a damned-if-you do, damned-ifyou-don’t situation. So Olav must navigate uncharted territory to do the bidding of his boss, but in such a way as to ensure against any deadly repercussions. At the heart of the story is the fact that Olav is basically a sweet-natured individual, not the hardened sociopath one might expect of someone in his line of work. In the end, this may prove to be his salvation—or his undoing. This is a fascinating character study, a clever and engaging mystery and a terrific example of a chameleon-like writer successfully stretching his already broad limits.

AUDIO

BY SUKEY HOWARD

A Mormon mystery Kurt Wallheim, the bishop of a Mormon ward in Draper, Utah, hears the secrets of his congregation and offers counsel. The bishop’s wife does her best to help him with his heavy load. But Linda Wallheim, the star of Mette Ivie Harrison’s first adult novel, The Bishop’s Wife (Blackstone Audio, $34.95, 11 hours, ISBN 9781483039558), is not an ordi-

nary stay-at-home Mormon mom.

Though she has five boys, she also has an active Miss Marple-sleuth gene and a questioning, independent mind. When a neighbor, Jared Helms, comes to their door carrying his 5-year-old daughter and claiming that his wife has walked out on them, Linda suspects abuse or far worse. Driven to sort out what really happened in the Helms’ house, she uncovers another possible murder in seemingly quiet Draper. As she unravels these multilevel whodunits, Linda takes us through some of the intriguing complexities of Mormonism and her own fascinating doubts. I hope a sequel, with Kirsten Potter narrating again, is in the works.

ONE OF THE FAMILY Brigid Quinn, the white-haired, 60-ish, still-combat-ready exFBI agent, not only survived her appearance in Becky Masterman’s debut (Rage Against the Dying) but gathered a big fan base and established herself as an appealing apprehender of diabolical murderers. Now she’s back in Fear the D ­ arkness (Macmillan Audio, $39.99, 12.5 hours, ISBN 9781427239563), with another convincing performance by Suzanne Toren. Brigid’s blissful new life with her sage, ex-Jesuit husband is upended when her niece, Gemma-Kate, moves in with them to go to college. Weird things start to

happen— fit, healthy Brigid suddenly has a slew of disturbing medical problems, her beloved pug eats a poisonous toad and her church’s congregation is sickened during coffee hour. Is Gemma-Kate, a budding toxicologist, also a budding psychopath?

Her niece’s symptoms are worsening, but Brigid’s determined inner investigator won’t quit. And when she begins to explore the suspicious suicide of a local teen, the subplots twist into intriguing knots and the threat level rises as we head toward a doozy of a denouement. More please, Ms. Masterman.

Spring Listening!

“Scottoline writes riveting thrillers that keep me up all night, with plots that twist and turn.” —Harlan Coben

Read by George Newbern

Introduction read by Bill O’Reilly Read by Tom Wopat

TOP PICK IN AUDIO Much has been written about the men who did our fighting and killing during Operation Iraqi Freedom, but no one has done it with the unsparing clarity that marks Phil Klay’s National Book Award-winning collection of short stories, Redeployment (Penguin Audio, $40, 10 hours, ISBN 9781611764536). Read here

by Craig Klein, Klay’s prose gains a gritty immediacy, making all the more powerful the fear these Marines endured, their adrenaline highs, the wild swings of their moral compasses, the struggle to stay human in the face of inhumanity and the troubled transition from the fog of war to their uneasy ambivalence about being back home.

Klay served as a public affairs officer in Anbar province during the surge and has turned what he saw into the kind of experience-based fiction that will undoubtedly become a wartime classic. His take on what it really means to be put in “harm’s way” by politicians, the military brass and a public that has determinedly kept its distance is brilliant and provocative.

“The path to happiness is rarely a straight line, but there are so many opportunities for wisdom along the way.”

—Oprah Winfrey Read by a Full Cast

Read by Scott Simon

“Christine Breen creates an emotional story that tenderly explores the depth of a mother’s love.”

—Diane Chamberlain Read by ORlagh Cassidy

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11

cover story

JUDITH CLAIRE MITCHELL INTERVIEW BY CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

The links between family and fate

T

he heroines of Judith Claire Mitchell’s engrossing new novel—sisters Vee, Delph and Lady Alter—don’t bear a lot of similarity to their creator. The three were raised with a family legacy of suicide: Their great-grandmother Iris became the first to kill herself after her husband’s chemical inventions were used as World War I weapons.

All told, six members of the generations before Vee, Delph and Lady died by their own hand, with four of them committing suicide in their 40s. Now in that decade themselves, the Alters view their fate as inevitable. In A Reunion of Ghosts, the sisters recount their family history as they seek to understand its relationship to their own stories.

Although this is Mitchell’s second novel with ties to World War I, her interest is incidental. Her grandparents all came to America from Europe, some before the war and others after.

“But it wasn’t a big family thing.

Historically, I find World War I so fascinating because I feel it’s when the 20th century became the 20th century. It’s when the Victorian era died completely,” explains Mitchell, who is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin. “The horrors of that war—it introduced chemical warfare, it introduced a level of violence that, as bad as war had been, it had not been expe-

A REUNION OF GHOSTS

By Judith Claire Mitchell

Harper, $26.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780062355881, audio, eBook available

FICTION

12

rienced quite this way. The peace treaty afterward was so poorly wrought that I firmly believe the wars we’re fighting right this minute are a product of this peace.”

A Reunion of Ghosts originated after Mitchell saw a bit of a PBS program featuring Clara Haber, on whom the character Iris is based.

Clara did, in fact, kill herself after work by her husband, Fritz Haber, became the basis for chemical warfare during World War I. “That seemed so dramatic to me. That stayed with me,” Mitchell says. “I tried to work them in as characters in the novel I thought I was working on.”

But gradually, the Haber-​ inspired storyline took over. “The more I found out about them, the more I found out about their descendants, the more I became fascinated with this entire family.

Finally, I came up with the idea of completely inventing the fourth generation and telling the story from their point of view,” Mitchell says.

Ultimately, the novel became a suicide note from the three sisters, who set their expiration date as December 31, 1999. “It’s also about the 20th century and all the terrible things that go wrong,” Mitchell says with a laugh, “and I kind of dump it on this poor family.” So it seemed fitting, she explains, “to end it with the end of the century.”

Once Mitchell decided to write the novel as a suicide note, it began to flow. Throughout the novel, the sisters refer to themselves as “we,” as though one’s life story is a reflection of all three. It’s an unusual stylistic choice, but one that draws the reader ever closer to the narrators.

“That voice and that format just helped me,” she says. “I wasn’t

really influenced by other writers or other books, I really felt like I was kind of alone in a bunker with this family, some of whom were real and some of whom I was inventing, and just had to figure it out on my own.”

The resulting tale recounts the tight-knit relationship of the three sisters and the family’s history of suicides, two of which take place in the Upper West “I totally Side apartment referred to this in New York as the book City that has been handed that would down through never sell.” the generations. (The Alter girls’ grandfather and mother both killed themselves in the master bedroom, which the girls refer to as the “Dead and Dying Room.”)

But even with all its darkness, A Reunion of Ghosts is a surprisingly funny novel with three dry but witty women at its heart.

“I totally referred to this as the book that would never sell,” Mitchell admits. “Here, it’s a 400-page suicide note, do you want to read it? Yeah, no,” she says with a laugh.

“But I couldn’t stop working on it.”

“People say to me, it’s a little dark, and I’m like, well life is a little dark, but we still manage to love and laugh our way through it.”

Although her subject matter isn’t light, Mitchell, who prefers to go

by Judy, is as quick to laugh as she is to share literary insight. An hour of conversation with her suggests enthusiasm for her craft and warmth that must spill over into the classroom.

And the classroom is, in fact, an

important part of Mitchell’s story.

As a child and again in higher education, she encountered teachers who were skeptical that Mitchell could have a career as a writer.

One encouraged her to prepare for life as a secretary instead—a more acceptable profession for girls. Mitchell also encountered professors who believed the world would knock students down, and so the professors took the first swings to help students prepare.

“My philosophy is, the world is going to knock you down, so I’m going to help you get up,” Mitchell says. “It’s looking at the same situation but having a completely different way of responding to it. I think artists and writers are big balls of insecurity. The experience of being introverted and yet wanting the whole world to read what you’re writing, it’s very strange. I hit my stride in my 40s, so to tell someone in their 20s that they don’t have it, well, you just don’t know. They may have some growing and living to do.”

But it was also a teacher whose advice gave Mitchell the nerve to pursue such sprawling stories.

Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer James Alan McPherson was among her professors at the acclaimed Iowa Writers Workshop.

“One day, out of the blue, we were in workshop and he looked around and said, ‘Some of you are

#1 New York Times bestselling author going to publish books. If you do, I just want to suggest you write about things that are important.’ ” Without that advice, Mitchell says, she would have written about people much more like herself.

“When he said that, it was like giving me permission to write outside my world.”

And of course, the learning process never truly ends. Mitchell continues to seek improvement herself as she balances her roles as writer and teacher.

“I balance it badly. When I’m teaching, I tend to put most of my energy into that, into the teaching and into the huge amount of service that professors have to do to maintain a program,” she says.

“I do tend to put my energy into the actual living people who need something from me. The manuscript tends to get back-burnered.

Because I’m a novelist, I also feel I need to sink into that world, and it’s hard for me to bounce in and out of it.”

Mitchell says this accounts for the 10-year gap between her first novel, The Last Day of the War, and A Reunion of Ghosts. During that span, Mitchell directed Wisconsin’s MFA program twice and directed its post-graduate program in between. She focuses on her own writing during the summers, and has taken residencies to allow chunks of time for focusing on the book. “I try to write when I can squeeze it in,” she says.

With a third novel under way, Mitchell attempts to set aside non-teaching days as writing days.

But her students take precedence; if a student can only meet on that day, Mitchell accommodates them.

“I’m hoping my third book doesn’t take me 10 years, because I will be very old then!” she says.

Students will often say they dream of the life she’s living, but Mitchell cautions them to be careful what they wish for. “Sometimes I think if I were a barista, I would have [written] more books. I tell them that, too,” she says, explaining that writing “is not the way you make your living, it’s what you do because you have to. It’s not that fun sometimes, even . . . but you have a story you’re impelled to tell.”

brings you a powerful story of three sisters as they step beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter and discover the importance of being a woman first.

“For great storytelling and beautifully drawn characters, enter the world of Robyn Carr.”

—Susan Elizabeth Phillips, New York Times bestselling author

Available for the first time in trade paperback!

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2015-02-25 4:36 PM

interview

KATE MULGREW

A stubborn path, from Iowa to stardom

C

lad in Starfleet regulation red and black, Kate Mulgrew helmed the USS Voyager for seven seasons as Captain Kathryn Janeway in “Star Trek: Voyager.” In the hit series “Orange Is the New Black” she co-stars as take-no-guff Galina “Red” Reznikov, who shrewdly navigates the echelons of a minimum security federal women’s prison.

Now, Mulgrew proves equally commanding as a storyteller—with a new memoir that is equal parts triumph and heartbreak.

The tellingly titled Born with Teeth is no cookie-cutter career chronicle. Yes, Mulgrew mentions the more notable film, TV and stage projects of her 40-year career. And there is occasional name-dropping. (A boozy Richard Burton, with whom she is co-starring in an Arthurian romance, tells her to “Get. Out.” Get out of what, she wonders? He replies, “This business will kill you. . . .”) But the book’s emphasis is on family and friendships, along with the actress’ own indomitable spirit, which is a hallmark of the characters she’s known for portraying.

“If there is an arc to my life it is that wherever there is light, there is shadow,” Mulgrew says.

Speaking by phone from her Manhattan apartment, just days after recording the audio version of Born with Teeth, she describes what it was like to read her own words: “It was an existential, revelatory, bizarre, but strangely

BORN WITH TEETH

By Kate Mulgrew

Little, Brown, $28, 320 pages ISBN 9780316334310, audio, eBook available

MEMOIR

14

exhausting and moving experience.

I encouraged the director and the engineer to keep rolling through it. Because if there were tears or a huskiness in my voice or an unexplained pause, the audience would certainly understand, and I think it endows it with an authenticity.”

The going was particularly difficult when it came to the passages about her beloved younger sister, Tessie, who died of a brain tumor.

And then there were the sections about an early-in-her-career unplanned pregnancy and the decision to give the baby up for adoption.

“My own life—and I realize I’m at risk of sounding arrogant, but I assure you this is not intended that way—has surpassed, in richness, size and depth, anything that I have lived as an actress,” Mulgrew says. “The people that I’ve loved, the losses that I’ve experienced. . . .

My upbringing alone was extraordinary.”

The eldest daughter of a loud, boisterous, unconventional Irish-Catholic family, Mulgrew grew up in a rambling house in Dubuque, Iowa, where she was mother hen to her six siblings (a seventh died in infancy), and the best friend and confidante to her mother, Joan, whose own dashed artistic dreams propelled her to urge Kate toward success.

A pivotal moment came when the young Mulgrew became transfixed by both writing and the theater. “You can either be a mediocre poet or a great actress,” said her mother.

Looking back at that exchange, Mulgrew, on the cusp of turning 60, says, “I was to complete her incomplete journey. At the time I couldn’t have understood that she needed

to live through me, vicariously.”

It was after making her way to New York University, and into the acting program taught by the legendary Stella Adler, that Mulgrew encountered another defining figure. “Stella unleashed in me the things that allowed me to become who I did become. My mother had the map. She understood the road.

But Stella knew the way.”

Mulgrew was just 19 when she was cast in a new daytime soap, “Ryan’s Hope,” and as Emily “My own Webb in the life . . . has Broadway revival of the surpassed, in Thornton richness, size Wilder perenand depth, nial, Our Town. anything that “I spent my I have lived as days in the studio, my nights an actress.” on the stage.

I knew that I would never be this happy again in my life. Or feel so exhausted.

Or joyful.” Adds Mulgrew, “I was elated. I was alive. I was unfettered and I was free.” Then came the unplanned pregnancy.

The soap opera star lived a soap opera of her own. A pregnancy was written into “Ryan’s Hope,” and Mulgrew made arrangements with a Catholic adoption agency.

After giving birth, she wasn’t allowed to hold her baby daughter—though a hospital nurse allowed her one quick peek at Baby Girl Mulgrew before closing the Venetian blinds that shielded the newborns from onlookers. Three days later Mulgrew was back at

AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS

B Y PAT H . B R O E S K E

work—where the script called for her character to cradle a stunt baby.

Mulgrew subsequently moved from daytime to primetime TV as the title character in “Mrs. Columbo,” and starred in sweeping miniseries like “The Manions of America,” which introduced viewers to a handsome Irishman named Pierce Brosnan. There were movies, too, and lots of stage work. And romances and marriage and motherhood (two sons). And divorce. Through it all, Mulgrew agonized about the daughter she had given up. When queries to the adoption agency were ignored, she hired an investigator.

When, in 1998, Mulgrew was at last put in touch with her daughter, Danielle, and asked for an in-person meeting, the young woman said, “I’ll have to ask my parents first.” Today, birth mother and daughter are close. (“She’s coming in this weekend,” Mulgrew notes.)

Danielle was given an advance galley of Mulgrew’s book—as were a handful of close friends, siblings and Mulgrew’s soulmate—husband Tim Hagan. (The memoir chronicles Mulgrew’s romance with Hagan, an Ohio politician.)

Mulgrew wrote Born with Teeth over a year-long period without the usual co-author (or ghostwriter).

“Writing is different than acting, but it’s the same longing. It’s tapping into the same primitive place.”

meet BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN

the title of your new book?

Q: What’s

In a war pitting brother against brother, two sisters choose their own battle — one seeking vengeance, the other finding love.

Q: Describe the book in one sentence.

OuO

Joseph and Thomas are fresh recruits for the Confederate Army, daring to join the wild fray that has become the seemingly endless Civil War, sharing everything with their fellow soldiers—except the secret that would mean their undoing: they are sisters.

BeforeThey the war, Joseph and Thomas were are sisters.

Josephine and Libby. But that bloodiest battle, They are tosoldiers.

Antietam, leaves Libby find her husband, Arden, dead. She vows vengeance, dons Arden’s One is going mad. clothes, and sneaks off to enlist with the Stonewall Brigade, swearing to kill one And one is falling inYankee love.for every year of his too-short life. Desperate to protect her grief-crazed sister, Josephine insists on her. Surrounded by flyingtour-debullets, “Anjoining unsparing, bloody, emotional deprivation, andlove illness, sisters are found force.

A tale of and the hate, vengeance andby devotion, and the darkest secretstoward imaginable. other dangers: Libby is hurtling madHighly recommended for all. ” ness, haunted and urged on by her husband’s ghost; Josephine is falling in love with a fellow —Historical Novel Review soldier. She lives in fear both of revealing their “Delivers another time and place. disguise andusofinto losing her first love before she We can smell the gunpowder and taste the can make her heart known to him. metallic tinge of fear along with their Here, best-selling novelist Kathy Hepinstall remarkable heroines.” joins with her sister Becky to show us the hopes Newman, author of Mary of—Janis love andCooke war, the impossible-to-sever bonds of sisterhood, and how what matters most can both hurt us. Pick ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆us ◆ and An heal Okra

f you could relive one moment or event from your childhood, Q: Iwhat would it be?

were your three favorite TV shows as a kid?

Q: What

you could send a message now to your younger self, Q: If what would it be?

OuO

OuO Available wherever books and ebooks are sold 0315

www.hmhbooks.com/sistersofshiloh

16

Q: What’s your greatest fear?

Q: Your proudest accomplishment?

Q: Words to live by?

I WAS A CHILD The artist best known as BEK—whose strange and hilarious cartoons appear in The New Yorker —looks back on his New Jersey childhood in I Was a Child (Blue Rider, $25.95, 208 pages, ISBN 9780399169519), a memoir that’s deeply honest and surprisingly touching.

“I was a child,” he writes, “but I wasn’t very good at it. I’m not sure why.” Kaplan now lives in Los Angeles and has worked as a producer and screenwriter on programs including “Girls” and “Six Feet Under.”

features

BEHIND THE BOOK

BY ANNA FREEMAN

Fists up for a chance at a better life

A

When I was researching British history (for a book idea that ended up being shelved), I came across actual newspaper extracts of the day, in which women challenged one another to fight: I, Ann Field, of Stoke Newington, ass driver, well-known for my abilities in my own defence . . . having been affronted by Mrs Stokes, styled the European Championess, do fairly invite her to a trial of her best skill in Boxing, for 10 pounds.

And then the reply: I, Elizabeth Stokes, of the City of London, have not fought this way since I fought the famous Boxing Woman of Billingsgate 29 minutes and gained a complete victory . . . but as the famous ass-woman of Stowe Newington dares me to fight her for the 10 pounds, I . . . doubt not that the blows I shall present her with will be more difficult to digest than any she ever gave her asses.

These are the real words of real

THE FAIR FIGHT

By Anna Freeman

Riverhead, $27.95, 480 pages ISBN 9781594633294, eBook available

HISTORICAL FICTION

women who punched and spat and sagged to their knees on the sawdust whilst a watching crowd cheered the sight of their spilled blood.

They were doing this whilst other ladies were trapped in drawing rooms, endlessly embroidering cushion covers.

What particularly gripped me was the thought of the lives these women must have led to bring them to the boxing ring. These were fights in which you could be very seriously injured, even die. But then, of course, Elizabeth Stokes fought Ann Field for a purse of 10 pounds, at a time when a maid might earn six pounds a year. It was a ladder out of poverty, and if you fell, well, wasn’t it worth the risk?

It proved very difficult to find out much about the real, everyday lives of female prizefighters.

History is mostly recorded by, and about, people from the upper classes. There are facts and figures about mortality rates, and a fair bit about the everyday diet of people living in poverty. There are court records of arrests, which showed that many of these women came from a background of prostitution.

But whereas there are a fair few surviving diaries of aristocratic women, most of the working-class women who took their chances in the ring weren’t even literate. I was left to imagine how it must feel to choose between making your living by your fists or lying on your back.

I like to think that if I were in that position, I’d make the same choice that my character Ruth does and step up into the ring.

Another protagonist of The Fair Fight, Charlotte, sprang from those

© MORGANE BIGAULT

t the turn of the 19th century, England was a pretty brutal place. There was no street lighting and no police force. If you were born in 1800, there was a 50 percent chance that you would die before your fifth birthday. Popular sports of the day were often bloody: bear- or badger-baiting, cockfighting and, of course, bare-knuckle boxing.

First love.

Second chance?

New from New York Times bestselling author

This Heart of Mine aristocratic diaries. They read like letters from a comfortable prison; many of the noblewomen keeping them felt trapped and miserable.

When I discovered that some ladies accompanied their husbands to watch the boxing matches, I thought, my god, what must it have been like to step out of your drawing room, bound by the shackles of convention, and watch another woman break them so completely?

In fact, there was one “lady of quality,” Lady Barrymore, who was nicknamed “The Boxing Baroness.” She enjoyed watching boxing matches, and would dress up in boxing costumes and gave displays of sparring for the amusement of her husband.

The Fair Fight is a work of imagination, but it is grounded in real history. It’s an adventure story, but it’s also a look at gender, class and what it means to strive for personal freedom. All of the characters in The Fair Fight are struggling to transcend the circumstances into which they were born, in different ways. It’s only partly about boxing; there is more than one way to fight.

Poet Anna Freeman makes her fiction debut with The Fair Fight.

A visceral take on the world of female prizefighters in 1800s Bristol, England, the novel has already been optioned for TV by the BBC. Freeman lectures in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Visit BookPage.com to read a review of The Fair Fight.

“A rare treat.

Brenda Novak draws you in from the first page.”

—Barbara Freethy, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Read it today!

www.MIRABooks.com www.BrendaNovak.com

17 15_027_BookPage_ThisHeart.indd 1

2015-02-25 4:39 PM

features

POETRY

BY JULIE HALE

Hidden poetic moments

P

roviding a moment of repose in our accelerated era, poetry is an enduring art. Just in time to celebrate National Poetry Month, we’re exploring three new collections that address the joys and challenges of contemporary existence with compassion, wit and linguistic ingenuity.

In The Beauty (Knopf, $26, 128 pages, ISBN 9780385351072), her eighth book of poetry, Jane Hirshfield continues to do what she does best: sift and refine reality—the experience of the self in its surroundings—into poems that contain startling moments of recognition for the reader. Throughout this unforgettable collection, Hirshfield excavates the everyday and finds romance in the routine of being human.

In poems that are tidy and efficient, with brief lines that are

notable for their lack of extravagance, Hirshfield celebrates the status quo—“the steady effort of the world to stay the world”—and imbues the homely, plain or pedestrian with wonderful significance.

The mundane, everyday items that fall in her way present fresh opportunities for poetic moments.

In “A Common Cold,” she makes a common ailment seem cosmopolitan: “A common cold, we say— / common, though it has encircled the globe / seven times now handed traveler to traveler . . . common,

New in paperback from JOJO MOYES, New York Times bestselling author of �e Before �ou

“Hilarious . . .

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18

though it is infinite and surely immortal . . . ” Now, at the age of 60, Hirshfield also reflects upon her own meandering timeline in a series of equally rewarding and astounding “My” poems. Poetry is embedded in the world, and—fortunately for the reader—her ability to recognize it seems inexhaustible.

man psyche and portrayals of the creaturely discomforts that come with being alive in the world make this a sympathetic and penetrating collection.

AN AGE OF UNCERTAINTY

A visionary book, beautiful and bleak, that speaks to the ills of the current era, The Last Two Seconds (Graywolf, $16, 88 pages, ISBN LATE-LIFE MUSINGS 9781555977047) is the seventh colA new batch of poems from Pulection from acclaimed poet and litzer Prize winner and former Poet 2007 National Book Critics Circle Laureate Charles Simic is always a Award winner Mary Jo Bang. In this cause for celebration. The Lunatense, unsettling and apocalyptic tic (Ecco, $22.99, 96 pages, ISBN collection, Bang focuses on the 9780062364746) marks a welcome nature of time as it relates to conreturn from a writer who’s singutemporary experience—on what it’s like to live in a world that’s both larly attuned to the absurdity that attends the human condition. The speeding up and winding down. narrator is frequently a tragicomic Bang is an expert at depicting the machinations of the modern mind, figure who grapples with a sense and in this collection, she portrays of identity and the unrelenting passage of time. Many of the that interior space as a place of terror and isolation. A character in an poems find him caught in the grip extended three-part poem called of history, as the past invades the present, and the intervening years “Let’s Say Yes” is trapped inside constrict into a single utterance or her own thoughts, “the edge of her mind turning meaning for hours / remembered vision: “The name of a girl I once loved / Flew off the tip at a time. Hours and days. A sound of my tongue / In the street today, like a sickle. / Her head a bunch / Like a pet fly / Kept in a matchof heather.” Many of the poems box by a madman,” Simic writes in address the difficulties of process“The Escapee.” “Oh, Memory” fixes ing the here and now, of sorting out upon a central, haunting image reality. The overall atmosphere is drawn forth from the speaker’s unsettling: One narrator hears “the boyhood: “a small child’s black suit cricket voice of suffering.” A loaf / Last seen with its pants / Danof bread is like “a dead armadillo.” gling from a high beam / In your Disturbing imagery abounds as, grandmother’s attic.” again and again, Bang turns the Short and incisive, biting in their mirror toward the reader. Having brevity, the poems are full of black arrived at the precipice, where humor and diluted joy. Simic writes humankind has achieved and yet with a winning humility: “I’m the destroyed so much in this world, uncrowned king of the insomniacs we struggle to navigate the most / Who still fights his ghosts with a critical of moments. This is a colsword, / A student of ceilings and lection that demonstrates Bang’s closed doors,” he says in “About rare gift as a writer: her uncommon Myself.” Simic’s mining of the hucapacity to shake and awaken us.

BASEBALL

BY JOHN C. WILLIAMS

The brains behind America’s pastime

B

aseball is 90 percent mental and the other half physical, Yogi Berra once said. That precise calculation is debatable, but, however you cut it, the game has always been the thinking person’s sport. So it’s appropriate that each of these books on the national pastime highlights some aspect of baseball’s brain.

Perhaps “brain” is not the first word one associates with the subject of Bill Pennington’s new bio, Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius. (HMH, $30, 544 pages, ISBN 9780544022096). “Brawn” is more like it. The longtime manager got into so many brawls—on and off the field—that it’s hard to keep track. Over 500-plus pages and 49 chapters, Pennington provides a comprehensive document that amply illustrates the thesis stated in his introduction: that Martin represented an American dream of freedom.

Freedom of the damn-the-torpedoes sort, at least. It’s the version of freedom in which you tell the boss to take the job and shove it, which Martin effectively did again and again, most famously leading to five firings

by George Steinbrenner’s Yankees.

But Pennington also makes a good case that Martin indeed had a managerial brain of the first order.

His tactics were often unorthodox and hardly in line with what has become conventional wisdom among statistics-minded managers. He relied heavily on playing head games with the opposing team. Whatever was in the sauce, though, it usually worked, as he often wrung production out of underperforming players and won the 1977 World Series with the Yankees.

Martin’s life was a rollicking one, and as with the life, so with the book. Pennington’s take is great fun, and the author’s drive to talk to everyone who may have known Martin—from the most arrogant star to the humblest bartender—is impressive. But perhaps Pennington should have left some of his material in the dugout. This reader, for one, did not need to know that

Martin was a bad shot at the toilet.

Still, the hits are greater than the misses. It’s sure to become the definitive biography of one of the game’s most fascinating characters.

We meet Martin’s polar opposite in Baseball Maverick: How Sandy Alderson Revolutionized Baseball and Revived the Mets (Atlantic Monthly, $26, 320 pages, ISBN 9780802119988). Steve Kettmann, who previously ghostwrote Jose Canseco’s steroids tell-all, Juiced, opens with a strong vignette of

general manager Alderson’s wheeling and dealing to trade Mets star Carlos Beltrán for phenom pitcher Zack Wheeler in 2011. Kettmann then details Alderson’s time as a Marine in Vietnam, his stint at Harvard Law School and his seemingly accidental rise to the Oakland A’s front office in the early 1980s.

Oakland won the World Series in 1989 under Alderson’s guidance, and Kettmann shows how Alderson tutored Billy Beane, who would later become the A’s general manager, of Moneyball fame.

At this point, the book begins to lose some steam, becoming less an Alderson biography and more a day-to-day chronicle of the 2013 and 2014 Mets seasons. The book’s subtitle contains a bit of false advertising, as the Mets have not produced a winning season under Alderson (though the 2015 team shows promise). Nevertheless, for the reader—particularly the

diehard Mets fan— interested in insider accounts of the front office, this book is worth seeking out.

Alderson’s key contribution was to pay closer attention to statistical analysis. A Bible of this data-driven style is The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Its Statistics (University of Chicago Press, $22.50, 440 pages, ISBN 9780226242484) by John Thorn and Pete Palmer, originally published in 1984 and now available in a third edition. The book is a defiant challenge to conventional wisdom that dominated professional baseball for most of the 20th century—that batting average is an accurate metric of batting performance, for example, or that RBIs can tell us who the greatest hitters are.

The authors propose a series of new measures, some of which—such as on-base percentage plus slugging—have become standard. Others had suggested similar ideas before, mostly in technical papers, but the beauty of this book is its pure literary merit. It contains plenty of daunting graphs and equations, but it almost always gives those graphs and equations a heart with its prose.

This book has one significant weakness, which is that its main text has not been updated since its original publication. It illustrates statistical principles with early 1980s players sure to be unfamiliar to many of today’s readers. The authors have compiled an updated list of the best players of all time—Barry Bonds is greater than Babe Ruth!—but they provide no additional reflections on that list.

Still, as an introduction to statistical analysis of the game, it’s hard to go wrong with Thorn and Palmer.

April 24-27, 2011 349 tornadoes ripped through 21 states 324 people died Heroes emerged Here are their stories

“Gripping…Cross’s detail-oriented reporting anchors a novelist’s flair for drama.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

See Kim Cross on tour Visit WhatStandsInAStormBook.com for details.

Pick up or download your copy today. @AtriaBooks /AtriaBooks Atria-Books.com

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features

CHRISTIAN LIVING

BY HOWARD SHIRLEY

The Easter season’s promise of renewal

E

aster is a time for self-discovery and reflection on relationships, faith and the soul. Five new books offer fresh perspectives to help readers find God, themselves and each other, and renew their hearts for another year.

Rediscovering the meaning of the gospel is the soul of N.T. Wright’s Simply Good News: Why the Gospel Is News and What Makes It Good (HarperOne, $24.99, 208 pages, ISBN 9780062334343).

Wright has a gift for cutting through religious dross to the essence of faith, and this book is no exception. Challenging conventional views of what is meant by “gospel,” Wright calls for an understanding of the Good News as just that: good and news. Like an ancient herald declaring “There is a new king—everything has changed,” so too is the gospel, and that change is as immediate and world-shaking today as it was on that first Easter morning.

Wright’s book is a call to stop defining Jesus by what fits our culture, but as the world-changing king He is, with believers as active participants in His kingdom, building it now, brick by brick. Fascinating and uplifting, Simply Good News is the must-read book of the year for every Christian. It will surprise you, it will challenge you, and it will make you see the world and your faith with fresh eyes—good news, indeed.

WORLDS APART Discovering God’s kingdom is the theme of Chad Gibbs’ Jesus Without Borders: What Planes, Trains, and Rickshaws Taught Me About Jesus (Zondervan, $15.99, 240 pages, ISBN 9780310325543).

A native of Alabama—“the buckle of the Bible Belt”—Gibbs grew up surrounded by the culture of the Christian South. While on a European vacation, he observed churches very different from those at home, prompting him to think about how Christianity itself must differ around the world. For more than two years, Gibbs hopped around the globe on a quest to see these differences for himself, calling on contacts everywhere from

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Africa to Australia. In all, Gibbs visited 12 countries, worshiping with Christians of all cultures and hearing their experiences of faith— often in lands where that faith was in the minority. The result is more than just a travelogue of sites and curiosities; it’s an insightful examination of the assumptions made

by American Christians and a look at how much we can learn from other views of the faith. Gibbs has a gift for humor—Jesus Without Borders is a very funny book—but also a greater gift for exploring profound questions about how culture alters faith, and how what we think it means to be Christian is at least partially the result of the society in which we live. Enjoyable and eye-opening, Jesus Without Borders will take you on a journey you did not expect and change you for the better along the way.

Unexpected discoveries also lie at the heart of Called: My Journey to C.S. Lewis’s House and Back Again (Leafwood/ACU Press, $14.99, 288 pages, ISBN 9780891123842), by Ryan J. Pemberton. A successful young marketing writer, Pemberton had his life spun completely off track when he was jolted by a profound certainty that God wanted him to leave his comfortable, well-paying job in Oregon and travel around the world to study theology at Oxford. Facing obstacles of financing and finding living space for himself and his wife, and of course the rigors of the

most prestigious academic setting in the world, Pemberton found himself in an unexpected place, where he could only rely on faith to carry him through. Called is his account of those challenges, and of the surprises God had in store for him throughout—including the opportunity to live in C.S. Lewis’ Oxford home. Told in vignettes both simple and sublime, Called is a record of faith and revelation, and a reminder that life with Jesus will shake up all our expectations—but that upheaval will be worthwhile.

LOOKING INWARD Sometimes discovery must come not only for ourselves, but also for others in our lives. Donald Miller, the best-selling author of Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, confronts this reality in his latest memoir, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy (Thomas Nelson, $19.99, 256 pages, ISBN 9780785213185). In his typically straightforward, revealing manner, Miller shares his difficulties with finding and keeping an intimate relationship, culminating in a year-long quest to change himself from an actor playing at love into a human being able to trust another with his heart. As with all his books, Miller’s faith lies at the center, guiding him through this journey of self-discovery. As Miller prayerfully lays bare his own habits

of manipulation and deception, he exposes these same tendencies in the rest of us, pointing the reader and himself toward the openness and honesty that God intends for us to share with those we love.

Discovering the self is also at the heart of Jessica N. Turner’s The Fringe Hours: Making Time for You (Revell, $14.99, 272 pages, ISBN 9780800723484). “Fringe hours” is Turner’s phrase for moments of unused time that pass unnoticed on the edges of a busy day, moments that can be redeemed to restore the spirit and pursue passions. Since Turner’s work is aimed at the busy American woman, I recruited the perspective of one I know well—my wife, Betsy. Reading the book with me, she offered her thoughts: “The Fringe Hours gives a lot of suggestions for ways to find and do what you love when you are limited by time, finances, job and family constraints. As a woman who measures herself against peers, this book helps me get excited about my passions (what makes me tick) and pursue what I need (rest and quiet time) without feeling guilty about what I’m not doing or being. Turner’s transparency about her life, as well as the survey comments from other women in the book, are refreshingly candid and compassionate.

Her book extends grace, hope and inspiration to the reader. After reading this, I actually feel excited about my own fringe hours.” The book features short segments and brief questions, making it easy to glean inspiration and insight, even if the reader only has a few “fringe moments” to spend. If you’re feeling a bit lost in the whirlwind of daily pressures, The Fringe Hours can help you find yourself again.

reviews

FICTION bounces from one bad decision to the next, racing toward the inevitable conclusion. This completely engaging debut lingers long after the book is put down.

—DEBORAH DONOVAN

AT THE WATER’S EDGE

Monsters beneath the surface REVIEW BY MELISSA BROWN

A search for an elusive sea monster at the height of World War II sounds like the plot of a genre-mashup movie. But in At the Water’s Edge, the latest novel from Water for Elephants author Sara Gruen, what starts out as a lark on the part of rich, entitled friends turns into a quest that is at times frightening, liberating and even comical.

Bored and wealthy Ellis schemes to find and photograph the Loch Ness Monster in an attempt to one-up his dismissive father, who was ultimately discredited in his own infamous attempt. He and his best friend, Hank, drag Ellis’ wife, Maddie, along—and her journey to uncover truths about herself, her marriage and the kind of life she wants to lead provides the novel’s heart.

Glad simply to be alive after encountering German U-boats during their Atlantic crossing, Maddie isn’t willing to participate in the boys’ foolish scheme—and she soon starts to wonder whether the true monBy Sara Gruen ster might be closer to home. Ellis and Hank certainly possess money Spiegel & Grau, $28, 368 pages ISBN 9780385523233, audio, eBook available and the breeding that often goes along with it, but as their search proves futile, Ellis displays increasing disdain for Maddie and the HISTORICAL FICTION people of the Scottish village where they’ve sheltered. As Ellis’ desperation mounts, Maddie fears for the safety of herself and her newfound friends, including the brooding, handsome proprietor of the village inn.

Gruen skillfully weaves in historical reference points, making Maddie’s story seem larger than that individual focus. The author conveys the lure of the Scottish Highlands, and its storied lore and mystery help create her novel’s riveting, ethereal atmosphere. Maddie’s growing self-awareness is presented in stark— and welcome—contrast to her husband’s spiral into conceit and self-deception.

At the Water’s Edge captivates with its drama, intrigue and glimpses of both the dark and light of humanity. As Jane Austen once wrote, “with due exceptions, woman feels for woman very promptly and compassionately.” For all her faults, Maddie’s tragic history and her courage in the face of her present predicament will win readers to her side.

HAUSFRAU

By Jill Alexander Essbaum

Random House $26, 336 pages ISBN 9780812997538 Audio, eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

“Anna was a good wife, mostly.”

So opens Jill Alexander Essbaum’s remarkable debut novel, the mesmerizing story of Anna Benz, an American expatriate who has lived in Zurich for nine years with her husband, Bruno—a Swiss banker— and their three children.

Hausfrau begins as Anna is final-

ly trying to break out of her cocoon of passivity—of the feeling that “she rode a bus that someone else drove.” She enrolls in a language class, and at the same time begins weekly visits with Doktor Messerli, a Jungian therapist, whom she and Bruno hope will be able to get Anna to engage more with her surroundings.

Though Anna loves her children—Victor, 8; Charles, 6; and the baby, Polly Jean—she interacts with them on a very superficial level.

“Everyone’s safe. Everyone’s fed,” she tells herself. She has no friends among the neighbors or her fellow parents. In other words, she’s lonely and bored, which is dangerous according to Doktor Messerli, for “bored women act on impulse.”

Anna’s impulses lead her—like her namesake, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—to multiple affairs, liaisons which make her feel momentarily alive. A Scottish expat in her language class and a friend of her brother-in-law provide potent, though ultimately trivial, dalliances. But she becomes obsessed with Stephen, an American professor on sabbatical, and it slowly becomes clear that their affair has had a lasting effect.

In chapters alternating between these affairs and Anna’s probing sessions with Doktor Messerli, the reader becomes sympathetic to her plight and gains a real sense of her “frantic scrambling to keep from being alone.” Essbaum brilliantly keeps up the tension as Anna

THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE

By Ann Packer

Scribner $26.99, 448 pages ISBN 9781476710457 Audio, eBook available

LITERARY FICTION

Pity the quiet novel about family life. In an era when novelists are taught to write killer openings and the line between literary and genre fiction is increasingly blurred, it seems as if there’s no room for a contemplative novel that finds drama in quiet moments. Fortunately, such books are still being published, and one of the better examples is The Children’s Crusade, the new novel by Ann Packer (The Dive from Clausen’s Pier).

The story begins in the 1950s, when Michigan native Bill Blair completes a residency in pediatrics and buys 3.1 acres of undeveloped land in what will eventually be known as Silicon Valley. He marries Penny Greenway, who, at first, takes great pride in her role as a housewife. But well before their four children are adults, Penny has converted the shed on the property into an art studio and withdrawn from the rest of the family. When 38-year-old James, the youngest child, returns to California in 2006 from his current home in Eugene, Oregon, he tells his older siblings— Robert, a physician; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; and Ryan, a teacher— all of whom still live on or near the homestead, that he needs money and wants to sell the house. The novel alternates between past and present and among each sibling’s perspective to create a compelling portrait of complicated family relationships.

Packer’s strength is her ability to see meaning in small gestures, to recognize that “Are you okay?”

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reviews is, in many marriages, a loaded question. Her descriptions are beautiful; she imagines the sky as being the color of a glass of water into which one has dipped a calligraphy pen. Some scenes go on too long, but the book is always perceptive about love and relationships and treats its nuanced characters with sympathy. When Robert’s boy Sammy is born, Bill gives his son advice: “Enjoy him.”

The Children’s Crusade is about, among other topics, whether we enjoy our children, even when they grow up into adults whose company we might not otherwise accept.

That’s the kind of insight you get in a quiet novel.

—MICHAEL MAGRAS

WHERE THEY FOUND HER

By Kimberly McCreight

Harper $26.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780062225467 Audio, eBook available

SUSPENSE

The body of a newborn girl has been found in an idyllic New Jersey town. It’s not the best assignment for a newspaper reporter who so recently delivered a stillborn child, but Molly Sanderson wants to prove to her editor that she can cover hard news. So—despite her husband Justin’s trepidation that covering this story might cause Molly to lapse back into serious depression—she dives in, determined to find out how the child ended up abandoned beneath a bridge.

Was it a homicide? Could it have been a panic-stricken student at the town’s prestigious Ridgedale University? Is there a connection to another death under the bridge two decades before? What about the mysterious mother and daughter who recently returned to a rundown apartment on the edge of town?

As Molly tracks down leads and interviews anyone who might have a connection to the mystery, she becomes immersed in the intrigue and politics of a tight-knit commu-

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FICTION nity. But then things take a more menacing turn, with college officials watching her every move and seemingly unconnected people coming together. When a mysterious package appears in their home, Justin fears for her safety—and her sanity. And Molly has no way to know just how close to home the story will hit.

Author Kimberly McCreight is well known for her 2013 best-selling debut, Reconstructing Amelia.

With Where They Found Her, she has delivered another eerie, harrowing read. Through flashbacks and multiple narrators—some more reliable than others—McCreight weaves a deeply satisfying spellbinder that unfolds deliciously to the very last chapter.

—AMY SCRIBNER

Visit BookPage.com for a Q&A with Kimberly McCreight.

Prince Nicholas, heir to the British throne, an unlikely friendship develops and the sparks soon fly.

It’s a tricky business basing a novel on a pairing whose romantic ups and downs are already so well known, but Cocks and Morgan have managed to do so with charm and wit. Bex and Nick’s relationship does sometimes too closely mirror that of their real-world counterparts; however there are enough creative twists thrown in to keep things fresh. In particular, the pragmatism is unexpected—The Royal We pulls back the veil on the fantasy of what it really means for a regular person to be part of the royal family, and it doesn’t skim over the sacrifice required to reach a happy ending. Readers should prepare to lose their hearts to The Royal We, a loving satire that is scandalously funny and wonderfully romantic.

—STEPHENIE HARRISON

THE ROYAL WE

By Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan Grand Central $26, 464 pages ISBN 9781455557103 eBook available

OH! YOU PRETTY THINGS

—KATIE STEWART

ACADEMY STREET

By Mary Costello

FSG $22, 160 pages ISBN 9780374100520 eBook available DEBUT FICTION

By Shanna Mahin Dutton $26.95, 368 pages ISBN 9780525955047 eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

POPULAR FICTION

When she married Prince William back in 2011, Kate Middleton didn’t just capture the heart of a future king—she also ensnared the imaginations of women worldwide.

Will and Kate’s royal romance has been meticulously documented by the press and even been the subject of a Lifetime movie. Now it serves as the inspiration for the first adult novel by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the duo behind the snarky celebrity-fashion blog, Go Fug Yourself, and authors of two young adult novels (Messy and Spoiled).

In The Royal We, Cocks and Morgan blend fact and fiction to put their own spin on the “unlikely princess” motif: Rebecca Porter isn’t just a brash, carefree commoner, she’s an American to boot!

But when a semester abroad at Oxford lands her down the hall from

to always be either picking herself apart or letting other people do so.

Although fiercely loyal and protective of her friendships and her bosses, Jess struggles to stand up for herself in ways both little and life-altering.

Oh! You Pretty Things is not only an accurate portrayal of life in Hollywood but also an accurate portrayal of life’s ups and downs.

Though the setting is familiar, the plot developments are unique and surprising. Don’t expect a perfect Hollywood ending. Mahin’s intelligent and approachable story will grip you from beginning to end.

The story of a young woman trying to make it in Hollywood is familiar to most. However, Shanna Mahin turns this common tale into a simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming story. Oh! You Pretty Things gives readers a glimpse of the destruction that celebrity (and the obsession with it) can cause in day-to-day life.

Encompassing humor, wit, irony and sheer sass, this story shows that even in glitzy Hollywood, life can be filled with hardships.

We follow Jess Dunne on her journey from barista to B-list celebrity assistant to A-list celebrity assistant. She is a woman who actively chooses a complicated way of life. Whether it’s a complex mother-daughter relationship or an exhausting semi-friendship with her celebrity boss, Jess seems

There is a strong tradition of Irish writers—William Trevor, Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín come immediately to mind—who can turn the everyday details of an ordinary life into art. Add to these ranks Mary Costello, whose deceptively slender first novel, Academy Street, takes in the full measure of one woman’s quietly tragic life in fewer than 200 pages.

The novel begins and ends with a death at Easterfield, the Lohans’ big old house and farm in the west of Ireland. At age 3, young Tess does not fully understand the circumstances or the implications of her mother’s death, but she feels the loss deeply. A meditative and lonely child, she grows up alongside her older sisters and two brothers, her life unfolding in familiar patterns: She goes away for a time to boarding school, she moves to Dublin to study nursing, an older sister joins the Irish diaspora in New York, and Tess follows a few years later.

Tess’ life in Manhattan continues largely in solitude, marked by a brief, hollow love affair and the demands of single motherhood at a

FICTION time when there was little support for such a choice. As the years pass, the unimaginable will bring Tess to her knees emotionally, even as she continues to endure all with that distinctive variety of Irish fatalism.

Plot is largely secondary for Costello, who is more concerned with providing a portrait of the inner life, a thing she accomplishes with admirable deftness. Indeed, the external chronological touchstones—the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination, Patty Hearst, 9/11—sometimes seem like tacked on, unwelcome distractions, although the latter will play an essential role in Tess’ story. It is a cliché to call a novel haunting, but thanks to Costello’s graceful prose and emotional honesty, Academy Street—which won the Irish Book Award for novel of the year over such heavy-hitters as Tóibín and David Mitchell—certainly stays with you.

—ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

THE HARDER THEY COME

By T.C. Boyle

Ecco $27.99, 400 pages ISBN 9780062349378 Audio, eBook available LITERARY FICTION

something to burn down—and burn they do. Adam is also the son of ex-Marine Sten, the epitome of claustrophobic rage and frustration, who kills a thug with his bare hands while on vacation in Costa Rica.

As these three stubborn minds draw together like fire and kindling, violence becomes more than an inherited trait within one family, but a syndrome of a nation built on revolution and stoicism, distorted by fear and hysteria. It may be a stroke of genius that the characters themselves are maddening in their own right, leaving readers with a pounding pulse not only from suspense but from infuriation.

The best-selling, unbelievably prolific Boyle has described The Harder They Fall as a counterpoint to his historical novel, San Miguel (2012), which unfolded through the perspectives of three women who sought refuge and sanctuary on an island off the coast of California.

It was a departure for Boyle, and now the pendulum swings back to high-adrenaline zaniness and pertinacious, destructive misfits.

Individualism remains central, but unlike San Miguel, it’s far from contemplative. It is a juggernaut, twisted to borderline psychotic.

—CAT ACREE

I REFUSE The men of the American Wild West called it the “shining times,” when the law held no sway over any place beyond the Mississippi.

This was the last true American independence, and though it died out a long time ago, the new novel from T.C. Boyle takes this tradition of renegades and turns it into something violent.

Twenty-five-year-old Adam worships one of these survivalist mountain men, even renaming himself after him: Colter. He’s manic, raging and growing his own stash of opium poppies, and he easily falls in with 40-something Sara, a hardcore member of an extremist anti-government movement. Together they are citizen soldiers, making war (not love) and defiantly, desperately in search of

By Per Petterson Graywolf $25, 224 pages ISBN 9781555976996 eBook available

LITERARY FICTION

among contemporary novelists.

The action of I Refuse encompasses a broad swath of time, a technique Petterson characteristically has employed to explore how long-ago events resonate in the present. Early on a September morning in 2006, Tommy Berggren encounters his friend Jim, whom he hasn’t seen for more than 35 years, fishing off an Oslo bridge.

From that chance meeting the novel flashes back four decades to the town of Mørk, where Tommy and his three sisters live with their abusive father, abandoned by his wife. While Tommy overcomes his troubled childhood to become a successful, if emotionally remote, businessman, Jim, a self-professed socialist, struggles with panic attacks that reduce him to depending on disability payments.

Petterson relies on a variety of narrative voices, both first and third person, to tell this story. He’s especially effective depicting the quotidian moments of boyhood, and in illuminating the relationship between teenagers Tommy and Jim, two boys “so close to each other that there might be some current between them, an electric arc that made one feel what the other felt.”

Few writers can surpass Petterson’s skill in employing a narrative technique that’s distinctive for its confidence, and his readers will relish the opportunity to fill in gaps from what’s only hinted at on the page. Couple that with the psychological acuity of his storytelling and it’s clear why his novels, for all their surface bleakness, are so deeply satisfying.

—HARVEY FREEDENBERG

A SLANT OF LIGHT Admirers of Norwegian Per Petterson’s melancholy, atmospheric novels like Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia will welcome this story of two boyhood friends from a small town outside Oslo and the unexpected paths their lives trace after those early days. Featuring the same deep attention to character and introspective style of his earlier works, I Refuse confirms Petterson’s status as a standout

By Jeffrey Lent

Bloomsbury $27, 368 pages ISBN 9781620404966 eBook available HISTORICAL FICTION

Set in upstate New York just after the Civil War, Jeffrey Lent’s

latest book is a bit puzzling. To be blunt, it ends just when things are getting really interesting.

It’s not that things haven’t been interesting from the beginning: By page three we’ve been witness to a double murder. The murderer’s name is Malcolm Hopeton, and he’s returned from the war only to find that half of his farm has been sold out from under him and his wife is canoodling with his hired man—the type who, in the old days, would have been called a cur.

In his fury, Malcolm even injures his hired boy, Harlan Davis, who has witnessed the whole tawdry mess. As for Malcolm, he resigns himself to the gallows. But will he hang, after all?

In between the murder and the book’s non-ending, Harlan heals up and goes to work for young widower August Swartout; Harlan’s sister, Becca, is already keeping house for him. The book then turns its focus from a spectacular crime of passion to the quieter rhythms of the labor that goes into running a farm. Most of the people we meet follow a Quakerish/Shakerish religion that values honesty, humility, hard work and an overall, austere decency. Observing that hard work and decency is where the novel’s real pleasure lies.

Lent, whose 2000 debut novel In the Fall was a bestseller, is known for his breathtaking and detailed descriptions of the land and nature. His characters’ speech is so rich and lyrical that it reminds the reader of J.M. Synge’s western Irishmen. One lingers over dialogue discussing the qualities of mules, the castration of pigs, the harvesting of oats and the making of jam, bread and pickles. Most impressive is the smallest person’s determination to be and do good in the face of calamity. And though he may dread having to tell the whole truth about his boss’ late wife and her paramour, no one wants to do good more than Harlan Davis.

Maybe A Slant of Light doesn’t deliver the resolution one might want from a modern police procedural, but its other virtues more than make up for it.

—ARLENE McKANIC

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reviews VIPER WINE

By Hermione Eyre Hogarth $25, 432 pages ISBN 9780553419351 eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

FICTION renaissance man, part of his world but anticipating our own.

Viper Wine occasionally bogs down in the detailed descriptions of Digby’s esoteric experiments, but Eyre’s stylish flair and sense of invention is truly impressive. Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Viper Wine is a historic fantasy reminding us of the limitless reaches of the imagination.

—LAUREN BUFFERD

Venetia Stanley was a great beauty of her day, sought after by poets and painters eager to pay homage to her good looks. Her early death in 1633 has remained a mystery over the centuries, some accusing her husband, Sir Kenelm Digby, of murder and others ascribing her demise to the toxic beauty treatments she was rumored to have used. Hermione Eyre’s brilliant debut, Viper Wine, explores the perils of achieving beauty at all costs, set against a backdrop of the political and social upheaval of 17th-century London.

After years of marriage and motherhood, Venetia fears her looks are fading and turns to her husband’s alchemical experiments for a cure. When he refuses to help, she seeks out chemist Lancelot Choice, whose viper wine, a cordial distilled from snake blood, is said to invigorate the skin and restore youth. But the remedy takes a terrible toll. Meanwhile, other women in and around the court of Charles I seek similar cures, and the dangerous elixir becomes all the rage.

Eyre notes the obvious parallels between Venetia’s search for perfection and today’s obsession with youth by sprinkling the text with quotes on celebrity from the likes of Naomi Campbell and Andy Warhol, as well as mentioning modern beauty regimens with dangerous downsides, such as Botox and bee venom. Intensifying the novel’s postmodern edge, Digby’s thoughts are occasionally bombarded by 20th-century phenomena: He hears Joy Division at a courtly dance, quotes Neil Armstrong as he scans the heavens and perceives computer code in an alchemical text. Open to these dazzling wonders that flow to him, unbidden, across the centuries, Digby proves himself a true

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to all the pills he can pop, as well as a young mistress. Miranda’s mom, seventh-grade-educated Joan, homeschools the boys to save them from the horrors of public education. Miranda, meanwhile, is sure that the daughter she now carries will be the answer to everything.

Butler’s debut novel is a smart, sarcastic portrayal of a dysfunctional American family—one that’s sure to have readers eager for more.

—CARLA JEAN WHITLEY

PRETTY UGLY

By Kirker Butler

Thomas Dunne $25.99, 304 pages ISBN 9781250049728 eBook available

SATIRICAL FICTION

THE TURNER HOUSE

By Angela Flournoy

HMH $23, 352 pages ISBN 9780544303164 eBook available

DEBUT FICTION

Power comes from being in the limelight. That’s the lesson Miranda Ford takes away from her second-runner-up win at the 18th annual Miss Daviess County Fair Pageant. As the winner and firstrunner-up involuntarily step aside, Miranda becomes queen—a position she’s determined never to lose.

Two decades, a husband and three children later, Miranda Ford Miller wants her 9-year-old daughter, Bailey, to take center stage.

Nothing will get in Miranda’s way— not Bailey’s growing disinterest in pageants, husband Ray’s hectic schedule with two full-time jobs or the expenses the family’s 14 credit cards can barely accommodate.

Or will it? In the rip-roaring ­Pretty Ugly, Emmy-nominated writer and producer Kirker Butler writes of the Southern child-pageant circuit with all the acerbic, snarky wit he’s brought to shows such as “Family Guy.” Butler turns a gimlet eye to each family member’s motivation and conflict. Miranda pours everything into Bailey’s career, including purchasing a gym membership complete with private pole-dancing lessons. However, Bailey is ready to retire from the pageant circuit, and so she sabotages her mom’s efforts by binge-eating. Ray’s nursing and hospice jobs allow him easy access

love or parental love, but we rarely find such an honest portrait of what it means to be a sibling—defined by your differences as much as your similarities—as the one Flournoy gives us. The Turners are continually rebuilding their lives, re-establishing connections that get tangled, torn and broken. Their story is beautiful in the way family is beautiful: full of heartbreak and broken dreams, but ultimately connection and community, understanding and love.

—C A R R I E R O L LWA G E N

EMMA

By Alexander McCall Smith

Pantheon $25.95, 368 pages ISBN 9780804197953 eBook available POPULAR FICTION

Tolstoy is famous for writing, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What he doesn’t mention is that each member of the family can be happy and unhappy in their own individual ways. That’s where Angela Flournoy picks up in The Turner House, the story of a big African-American family struggling with the decision of what to do with their family home.

In a Detroit struck by poverty and violence live the Turners, a sprawling family of 13 children.

The oldest and the youngest practically belong to different generations, different Detroits and different parents. Their mistakes and their lost hopes are the bonds that connect them to each other.

Flournoy doesn’t just detail the journey the family goes on together; she also lets us in on the problems each individual struggles with alone. Family is their support system, but that doesn’t mean they share everything. Sometimes family members only serve to make each Turner feel more alone with their personal weaknesses.

What makes The Turner House profound is its reality, its observation of a family so diverse and well-drawn that they seem real.

Many books center on romantic

The Jane Austen we know is delicious enough on her own, but Austen filtered through the mind of Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency) could be the best of both possible worlds.

Smith’s Emma: A Modern Retelling is the latest installment in “The Austen Project,” which drafted six contemporary authors to retell Austen’s complete works. Here, he co-opts Austen’s titular heroine and introduces her to a modern setting, complete with the same plot turns and many of the same characters present in one form or another. Certainly unmistakable is Emma, Austen’s heroine, a born controller who believes (with unshakable certainty in both books) that other people’s happiness can be arranged for them and that she is just the one to do it.

Smith assumes some of Austen’s tone here, and his fans might miss his singular voice. Still, the plot is surefire (and tested), and somewhere along the way, the reader embraces the concept in its own right.

This rewarding read is a fascinating pastiche of two of the most enjoyable writers in the British tradition.

—MAUDE McDANIEL

NONFICTION HISSING COUSINS

By Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer

NATURAL BORN HEROES

The lost art of the superhero

Nan A. Talese $28.95, 352 pages ISBN 9780385536011 eBook available BIOGRAPHY

REVIEW BY PRISCILLA KIPP

It’s reassuring to discover that heroes, both ancient and modern, are not somehow supernaturally endowed after all. Indeed, they may come by their skills quite naturally. In the thoroughly absorbing Natural Born Heroes, which tracks heroism from the times of Zeus and Odysseus to the World War II bravery of a motley crew of fighters, Christopher McDougall makes it clear that incredible acts of strength and endurance are doable. His extensive knowledge of fitness training, nutrition and physiology winds artfully around a tale of superhuman resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Greek island of Crete, Hitler’s designated launching pad for the invasion of Russia.

By the time Crete’s WWII heroes succeed, we know every detail of how they did it, and how, by reviewing the knowledge and skills they possessed, it is possible for their modern counterparts to do the

By Christopher McDougall same. Our skills are inborn, McDougall argues, forgotten perhaps, Knopf, $26.95, 352 pages but recoverable. These “natural strengths” can make anyone useful in ISBN 9780307594969, audio, eBook available the most challenging situations. Just ask Norina Bentzel, a Pennsylvania school principal who in 2001 saved her kindergarteners from a HISTORY machete-armed intruder.

At the heart of McDougall’s story lies a similar David versus Goliath duel. The Goliath in this case was Hitler, who never saw these Davids coming. A band of British special forces—described as the least-likely combatants in all of Europe—managed to kidnap Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe in 1944 under the very nose of his fellow commander. Nazi retaliation against the locals was swift and bloody, yet Cretan resisters risked their lives to aid the kidnappers. How did they—both British commandos and locals—manage to flee the Nazi pursuers and traverse a mountain, with very little food or rest, and challenges at every turn?

McDougall, author of the 2009 bestseller Born to Run and himself a highly trained athlete, solves this mystery with a witty eye for every detail, inspiring his own captive audience along the way.

BETWEEN YOU & ME

By Mary Norris

Norton $24.95, 240 pages ISBN 9780393240184 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

“Let’s get one thing straight right from the beginning: I didn’t set out to be a comma queen.” In fact, Mary Norris explored quite a few interesting career paths before finding her calling as a copy editor at The New Yorker. Her work life began at the age of 15, checking feet at a public pool in Cleveland.

She went on to drive a milk truck, package mozzarella at a cheese fac-

tory, and wash dishes (all the while managing to pursue a graduate degree in English).

Eventually, in 1978, Norris landed a job in the editorial library of The New Yorker. Her first day at work coincided with a snowstorm.

While riding in the elevator with an editor, she remarked that he was wearing “the kind of boots we wore in the cheese factory.” The editor quipped, “So this is the next stop after the cheese factory?”

As it happens, it proved to be a very good stop, both for devotees of The New Yorker and readers of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, Norris’ funny and entertaining new book about language and life (both in and out of the magazine’s offices).

After more than 35 years at The New Yorker, Norris has amassed

Both born in 1884, Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth could have been classmates in school. It’s easy to imagine Eleanor sitting up front (or even helping teach the class) and Alice occupying a back-row spot, launching spitballs and making wisecracks.

As Hissing Cousins makes clear, the two women from one of America’s foremost families could not have been more different. And that makes for some highly entertaining reading, especially if you like your history sweetened with delicious anecdotes and tasty bon mots.

Eleanor was the niece of Theodore Roosevelt and the wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Alice was Theodore’s daughter from his first marriage, fated never to know her mother (who died the day after Alice was born). The first cousins may have been from the same family tree, but complicated circumstances—some political, some personal—pulled them apart considerable knowledge of the En- as they matured into adulthood. At glish language and how (not) to use that point the stage was set, with it. In a chapter entitled “Spelling shy social reformer Eleanor on the Is for Weirdos,” Norris discusses side of the Democratic party and the history of dictionaries and attention-loving gadfly Alice castwhy spellcheck isn’t enough, and ing her lot with the Republicans. recounts the story of her first big Authors Marc Peyser and Timothy break at the magazine—discoverDwyer have a can’t-miss subject ing a typographical error everyon their hands, and they bring the one else had missed. We learn reader along for an exhilarating that Charles Dickens punctuated ride. Any history lessons, including by ear, that the semicolon is an a brief account of the Teapot Dome “upper-crust” punctuation mark scandal, are a bonus, and there’s best avoided and that the apostro- enough philandering to make the phe will most definitely need our residents of Peyton Place blush. prayers if it is to survive.

For better or worse, most of the While Norris may have a job hissing in Hissing Cousins is done as a “comma queen,” readers of from afar. Face to face, on numerBetween You & Me will find that ous social occasions, the cousins “prose goddess” is perhaps a more are all smiles. But as the authors apt description of this delightful know, where’s the fun—and the writer. book—in that?

—DEBORAH HOPKINSON

—KEITH HERRELL

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reviews A FINE ROMANCE

By Candice Bergen Simon & Schuster $28, 368 pages ISBN 9780684808277 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

NONFICTION that her child would be her first priority “by miles.”

Three years later, the script for a sitcom about a cantankerous TV newswoman landed on her desk.

Despite what she calls a “horrible” audition, she won the part, bringing a natural sense of comic timing to her role in “Murphy Brown,” a show that had a celebrated 10-year run.

Fifteen years after their wedding, Malle succumbed to cancer. A light in Bergen’s life was extinguished, though she and Chloe grew closer.

Three years after Malle’s death, she met and eventually married real estate developer Marshall Rose. The union has brought her much joy, though Bergen candidly chronicles her struggles with the differences between her two husbands.

Bergen’s rapier wit, warm personality and unflinching honesty make these stories of life and love all the more appealing.

Open Candice Bergen’s A Fine Romance and be prepared to settle in for an evening filled with a few drinks, casual grazing, laughter, tears and rollicking tales from one of America’s finest actresses.

In this follow-up to Knock Wood, Bergen reveals the glorious days of her long and passionate love for French filmmaker Louis Malle, their frenetic and full marriage, the birth of their daughter, Chloe, and the success of her Emmy-winning sitcom, “Murphy Brown.”

—HENRY L. CARRIGAN JR. Bergen married Malle in 1980 after a four-year courtship that had THE WILDERNESS OF RUIN an inauspicious beginning but grew tentatively and then blossomed

By Roseanne into a colorful marriage. Bergen Montillo calls Malle an “incredibly courtly Morrow and charming dynamo . . . always $26.99, 320 pages leaning into whatever he was headISBN 9780062273475 ing for; he was never idle.”

Audio, eBook available Ambivalent about having chilTRUE CRIME dren, Bergen pondered the ways that becoming a mother might add a new dimension to her life. When Chloe—a “potent and tiny spirit What with all the CSI television who had clearly been fighting to get dramas, books by FBI profilers and frightening news stories about here”—was born, Bergen declared serial killers, we’ve become quite familiar with the concept of the criminal psychopath, a person without remorse. But even now, most of us are shocked when a child is a murderer. In 1874, when our current ideas about mental illness were still in their infancy, 14-year-old Jesse Pomeroy seemed to many like a demon from hell.

As what we would now call a tween, Jesse kidnapped and tortured little boys not far from his home in Boston. A stint at a reform Lightning Strikes Twice school just taught him better crimby Mac O’Shea • Tate Publishing • $25.99 inal techniques: After his release, ISBN 9781634490085 he killed a girl and a boy in South Ultimately, all gentle souls must accept the Boston. He was quickly captured fact that bad things happen to good people. (though not quickly enough to save Read more at macoshea.tateauthor.com. the second victim). The troubling

26

question for Bostonians: What next for Jesse? Execution, imprisonment, treatment? Attitudes toward him changed as the study of mental illness evolved.

Roseanne Montillo’s absorbing The Wilderness of Ruin explores Jesse’s crimes and the decades-long debate that followed in the context of 19th-century law, medicine and literature. She particularly focuses on the life and social circle of writer Herman Melville, whose emotional troubles influenced Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, among other works. Melville’s friend Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (father of the Supreme Court justice) was among those who argued that Jesse should be studied, not hanged.

Perhaps most compelling is Montillo’s portrait of Jesse, who was intelligent and resourceful, but in modern terms clearly a dangerous psychopath. Bostonians were likely very lucky that he started his criminal career before he was sophisticated enough to cover his tracks.

—ANNE BARTLETT

ORDINARY LIGHT

By Tracy K. Smith

Knopf $25.95, 368 pages ISBN 9780307962669 eBook available MEMOIR

high-achieving children born to a former schoolteacher and an Air Force engineer. The fact that she is black does not immediately loom large on her mental horizon, but little by little, idle remarks from white friends and overheard family conversations knit themselves into a perspective that keeps her aware and on guard. By the third grade, she is recognized as intellectually gifted and put on a scholastic path that will lead her to Harvard and beyond. In high school, she is drawn to literature: “When my teacher and I talked about a poem or story,” she writes, “I felt its words rolling toward me in great waves that crashed, receded, then gathered force and returned.” She is also drawn to her lit teacher— and he to her—even though he is married and twice her age. For months, they engage in an intense but chaste love affair that leads to her first of several heartbreaks.

At Harvard, she revels in the “small freedoms” of being on her own, one of which is having her first sexual relationship. But always at the center of her life is her overwhelming love for her mother, who dies of cancer soon after Smith graduates. It is that sad event with which Smith begins and ends her compelling story.

—EDWARD MORRIS

WATER TO THE ANGELS

By Les Standiford

It’s rare that a memoir is so emotionally engaging that a reader may wish to reach back through time and envelop the author in a warm parental hug. But that’s the impulse poet Tracy K. Smith engenders in this account of growing up as a dutiful daughter in a small town in northern California during the 1970s and ’80s. “My mother was proud of my decorum,” Smith recalls. “She liked having a little girl who instinctively wanted to obey.” Smith was much more than a compliant child, though. She was also preternaturally attuned to everything happening around her and determined to find a place for it in her rich imagination.

Smith was the youngest of five

Ecco $28.99, 336 pages ISBN 9780062251428 Audio, eBook available HISTORY

Los Angeles would not exist as the sprawling, highly populated global center it is today were it not for one man. At the turn of the last century, William Mulholland, a civil servant self-educated in the ways of water engineering, all but willed Southern California’s future when he masterminded one of the greatest engineering projects of all time: the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Bringing massive amounts of

NONFICTION water south to this day, this monumental achievement was wrapped in controversy from the start, and in our more conservation-oriented age, there is still resentment about how Los Angeles “stole” the water of the central Owens Valley, dooming that rural area to an arid fate. Still, even Mulholland’s critics concede that the colorful Irish immigrant was a visionary who shaped the way that precious water is controlled not only in California, but also throughout the West.

Mulholland’s story has been told before, but perhaps never so compellingly as Les Standiford tells it in Water to the Angels. Newly arrived in California, Mulholland began working for the water department as a well- and ditch-digger, but impressed the company president with his unvarnished candor and knowledge. Mulholland’s single-minded mission was to bring water to L.A., and, unlike many others, he never made a penny from the project beyond his public salary.

Standiford expertly weaves the internecine drama behind the building of the aqueduct with a modern inquiry into its legacy (and even touches upon the movie Chinatown, which used the bones of the story but played fast and loose with the facts). Water to the Angels leaves little doubt that the forward-thinking Mulholland was as original as the city he birthed.

—ROBERT WEIBEZAHL

Europe—turns into a structure more complex, like an origami crane. Meditations on marriage and friendship appear and reappear. Diary entries might skip six months, or jump back a year.

Julavits arranges the raw material of her diary in such a way as to provoke insight across the units of time that we normally experience: the day, the week and the month.

Once the reader understands that this is no ordinary diary in which life is sliced into manageable chunks, the fun begins.

Julavits opens her book by telling us about her middle school diary, how it accounts for the days but not for the self who experiences them. (But whose middle school diary manages that?) She makes the canny observation that a day is a piece of time too small for a middle-aged working mom to contemplate; a week is the smallest unit of time she experiences, or even a month—life measured out in bills due.

The magic of The Folded Clock is the way it recaptures time, slowing and bending it, to create something new: art from life. There’s plenty of life here: swimming in the open ocean, writing in the library, drinking beer in the afternoon, a first husband, a second husband, therapy, girl crushes and more. By connecting these units of daily life, Julavits transforms her diary into an exceptional work of art.

—CATHERINE HOLLIS

THE FOLDED CLOCK

By Heidi Julavits

Doubleday $26.95, 304 pages ISBN 9780385538985 Audio, eBook available MEMOIR

SWANSONG 1945

By Walter Kempowski

Norton $35, 512 pages ISBN 9780393248159 eBook available HISTORY

The Folded Clock, as crafted by novelist Heidi Julavits, is intricate and delicately worked. Time doesn’t flow linearly in this memoir as we might expect. What at first glance appears to be the diary of a writer in her 40s living an enviable life—an apartment in Manhattan, a house in Maine, sabbaticals in

The end of World War II in Europe brought a wide range of reactions, especially in Germany. From concentration camp prisoners to top Nazi officers, from refugees crowding the roads to soldiers eager to see the war finally over, there was a mixture of heartbreak, relief,

chaos and disbelief. For German novelist Walter Kempowski, who died in 2007, researching and compiling those responses, through eyewitness accounts, letters and diaries, became a lifelong mission.

The result was 10 volumes and a diary of his project’s progress.

The first part of this extraordinary collection to be published in the United States, Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, assembles what Kempowski called his “particles” to form a “collage” that brings four days in 1945 vividly to life: Friday, April 20, Hitler’s 56th birthday; Wednesday, April 25, when American and Soviet troops met at the Elbe; Monday, April 30, Hitler’s suicide; and Tuesday, May 8, the German surrender and VE Day. The power of the work comes from the great variety and volume of the personal accounts, many of them eloquent and moving.

The most heartbreaking entries come from concentration camp prisoners who describe the horrific conditions they were subjected to. Some of the most eloquent accounts are from Alisah Shek, daughter of a Prague civil engineer who was deported to Ausch­witz.

She was held at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. “We sit here and watch: the worst thing they have done to us, is to rob us of reality, of the concept of reality. We know only a tormented, fear-filled world of cruelty, in which we are the victims of events, objects.”

From Dieter Wellershoff, a German citizen: “I really can’t even grasp it. The Germany that I so loved is finished. Because it isn’t just a war that’s being lost. . . . I know just one thing, that I want to survive. I’m only nineteen years old. Everything should just be starting.” There are detailed descriptions of the last days of Hitler and his closest confidants, as recorded by his secretaries and valet. Until the very end, Hitler denied that he had started the war and claimed he had tried to stop it.

This important book takes us beyond geography, statistics and battles and reveals the cost of war in very human terms.

Stephen King called Abigail Thomas’ memoir A Three Dog Life “the best memoir I have ever read,” and Thomas has another winner with her latest, What Comes Next and How to Like It. The previous book focused on life after a tragic accident left Thomas’ husband brain damaged and, seven years later, dead. What Comes Next shares the aftermath as she contemplates life in her 70s.

Thomas bares her soul in a series of short chapters, some only a paragraph long. The result, while a breeze to read, paints a rich, multifaceted portrait of the author’s daily life in Woodstock, New York, with her beloved dogs.

She is both forthright (“I am who I am and it has taken me a long time to get here.”) and self-deprecatingly funny (“Who sits in a dark room watching Burn Notice on a beautiful day?”).

Thomas frames her narrative with the story of how, years ago, her daughter Catherine had an affair with her best friend, literary agent Chuck Verrill, and how the repercussions affected her relationships with the pair for years afterward.

Catherine and Chuck continue to be mainstays in Thomas’ life, but also a source of continuing worry.

Catherine, now happily married, undergoes treatment for breast cancer, while Chuck, divorced, suffers from serious liver disease.

When a student describes her as a “nice old lady with a tattoo,” Thomas reports that she is startled “because I think of myself as not nice, not old, not a lady.” That’s all the more reason, of course, that readers will treasure this journey with a writer who comes across as a compelling, lively friend.

—ROGER BISHOP

—ALICE CARY

WHAT COMES NEXT AND HOW TO LIKE IT

By Abigail Thomas Scribner $24, 240 pages ISBN 9781476785059 eBook available MEMOIR

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teen

ELIZABETH WEIN INTERVIEW BY DEBORAH HOPKINSON

Slipping the surly bonds

R

eaders who know Elizabeth Wein’s award-winning books Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire, both set during World War II, may be surprised by the 1930s Ethiopian setting of her warmhearted, ambitious new novel, Black Dove, White Raven.

In fact, Wein is revisiting a place she’s written about several times before. When planning the first novel in her Lion Hunters series, The Winter Prince (1993), Wein turned to sixth-century Ethiopia to find a counterpoint for the Anglo-Saxon characters of the Arthurian legend. “My interest was sparked because, in fact, Ethiopia was one of the four great empires of the world at the time,” says the author from her home in Scotland, where she and her husband have lived since 2000.

Readers familiar with the older characters in her WWII novels might also be surprised to find that when we first meet Emilia Drummond Menotti and Teodros Gedeyon, the two narrators in Black Dove, White Raven, they are only 5 years old, sharing early memories of being strapped together in the open cockpit of a biplane.

As it happens, Wein is not one to worry much about age ranges when she spins her stories. “I tend to be very ambitious with my subject matter and don’t think too much

28

about the ages of my main characters,” she admits with a laugh. “I just write the sort of book I wanted to read when I was 15 or 16.”

Black Dove, White Raven is certainly a book that teens (and younger readers, too) will want to read. Em and Teo share an incredible history, which brought them together as infants when their mothers were daredevil flying partners in a double act called Black Dove and White Raven. As Em recalls in that early memory of being in a plane, Teo’s mother proclaims, “Look at our kids—they are a double act, just like us.” And so they are.

The novel has the scope of a complex family saga, as the paths of the women and their children intertwine and, sometimes painfully, separate. Through the form of school essays and flight logs, Em and Teo reveal their memories of loss and love, observations about the sometimes confusing and dangerous world around them and hopes for the future.

Wein’s own interest in small planes began in high school, but it was not until she met her husband, Tim, that she took up flying.

She was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she would eventually receive her Ph.D. in Folklore; he was working in Raleigh, North Carolina; both were bell-ringers at their respective churches. “At the time there were a lot of eligible young women ringing at Philadelphia and several eligible young men ringing in Raleigh, and the tower captain at Raleigh decided he needed to get them together!”

Wein’s first experience with “real” flying was in a small plane in Kenya, with her future husband as the pilot. “[It] was as amazing as you might imagine it to be after watching Out of Africa or reading West with the Night.”

Wein takes her flying research seriously, so for Black Dove, White Raven, she had to take a stab at wing walking.

Insurance issues apparently make this a rather difficult stunt to pull off. Nevertheless, says Wein, “I actually did a Wein snaps a selfie while flying in a Westland Lysander. half-hour wing-walking Photo courtesy of the author. experience at an old, well-kept World War I airfield that was nothing more than already closing in on this small grass—no runways.” family, and Teo and Em—the new Fortunately, Wein’s venture into Black Dove and White Raven—will wing walking went smoothly. And need all their courage to survive. while there is a plane accident in Black Dove, White Raven shares Black Dove, White Raven, it’s the with Code Name Verity and Rose result of a collision with a bird, not Under Fire the characteristics that a fall. This tragedy kills Teo’s mother have drawn readers so passionately and leaves Em’s mother, the White to Wein’s work: fierce and powerful Raven, devastated and with two storytelling; strong and complex children to raise. She does so with characters; an authenticity that the help of her Quaker parents. comes with thorough and dedicatEventually Momma, as both chil- ed research; and, of course, a love dren now call her, is able to recover of flying. enough to find a way to fulfill the Deborah Hopkinson’s next book, Courage dream the women had been work& Defiance, will be released this fall. ing toward: to go to Ethiopia, the home of Teo’s father, where their family can live free from the racial BLACK DOVE, WHITE RAVEN prejudice of late-1920s America.

Momma goes first, leaving Grandma and Grandfather to bring the children to join her two years later.

It’s a hallmark of Wein’s work that even minor characters feel like people we would like to know, and that’s especially true when we see the city of Addis Ababa through Em’s grandparents’ eyes.

As Teo and Em grow into adolescence on a cooperative coffee farm in pre-WWII Ethiopia, they continue to nurture their imaginative world. But outside political forces begin to transform their fantasy

By Elizabeth Wein life into real-life challenges. As an Disney-Hyperion, $17.99, 368 pages ISBN 9781423183105, audio, eBook available Ethiopian citizen, Teo will be reAges 12 and up quired to fight in any future wars, so Momma begins to teach both HISTORICAL FICTION children how to fly. But danger is

reviews THE TRUTH COMMISSION

TEEN

The truth will out REVIEW BY NORAH PIEHL

I promised myself I would write this whole review of Susan Juby’s latest novel without using the word “quirky.” There’s so much more to the author of Alice, I Think than just her knack for writing about eccentric characters and borderline outlandish situations. There is plenty of both in Juby’s latest, but that’s hardly the whole story.

The Truth Commission is (supposedly) a book-length work of creative nonfiction, submitted as part of Normandy Pale’s Spring Special Project at Green Pastures, a prestigious art high school in a small Vancouver town. Normandy starts off by telling the story of how she and her two best friends prompted (or cajoled, or outright pushed) their classmates to tell the truth about themselves.

But all this compulsive truth-telling has Normandy wondering whether it’s time to tell the truth about her own family: Her older sister Keira, Green Pastures’ most notable alum, has built a wildly successful

By Susan Juby Viking, $18.99, 320 pages, ISBN 9780451468772 career on a series of graphic novels portraying Keira as a heroine and Normandy and her parents as grotesque losers—and, in many ways, Audio, eBook available, ages 14 and up serving as a self-fulfilling prophecy for their real life.

FICTION For Normandy, it is a frightening but essential process to force her family to confront the realities of Keira’s brand of “truth”-telling and the damage it has inflicted. Along the way, readers get a lively course in storytelling, the ethics of producing art and how (not) to write creative nonfiction, all delivered in Normandy’s hilarious, heartfelt and (yes) brilliantly quirky voice.

Holly Stroud and the tormented, reckless Vincent McAlinden. Dominic, a weaver of words, can’t help

By David Almond but be drawn to Holly’s self-exCandlewick pression and caring—but he can’t $17.99, 336 pages seem to suppress the darkness ISBN 9780763673109 that attracts him to the wildness of Audio, eBook available Vincent’s uninhibited and dangerAges 14 and up ous life. When these two worlds FICTION inevitably collide, he is faced with making choices no one would ever want to make.

In this sprawling, emotionally British author David Almond is an immensely gifted storyteller enrapturing and mostly autobiographical tale, a talented lad and a receiver of a Hans Christian comes of age in the harsh shadows Andersen Award, a Carnegie Medal and a host of other honors. The of Northern England’s shipyards.

Dominic Hall was born in a hovel Tightrope Walkers is perhaps his most personal work, with so many along the River Tyne in the 1960s.

His severe father is still embittered similarities between the author from fighting in World War II, and and Dominic that fiction and reality become indistinguishable from his kind mother always wanted more for her sweet boy. Readers get one another. Almond’s phenomenal, philosophical writing balances key glimpses of Dominic’s growth well with his incisive clarity and and maturation over more than a decade as he befriends the two arresting narration, making it immensely relatable. most disparate people his age in town—the artistic, free-spirited —J U S T I N B A R I S I C H

THE TIGHTROPE WALKERS

out on the open plains. Their chances for survival are slim until a trio of young cowboys—rare, endearing gentlemen in a lawless landscape—take the girls, renamed Sammy and Andy, under their tutelage and offer protection and friendship. As the group of five head west, the dangers mount, but so do the laughs and camaraderie.

Stacey Lee’s debut is a beautifully narrated story about first loves, unbreakable friendships and family found in unlikely strangers.

— K I M B E R LY G I A R R A T A N O

SIMON VS. THE HOMO SAPIENS AGENDA

By Becky Albertalli Balzer + Bray $17.99, 320 pages ISBN 9780062348678 Audio, eBook available Ages 13 and up FICTION

Note to self: Don’t forget to log out of your personal email on a public computer. That’s the lesson 16-year-old Simon Spier learns the hard way after a high school classmate reads his emails to his secret, UNDER A PAINTED SKY anonymous boyfriend, Blue. Simon hasn’t come out to his friends or

By Stacey Lee family, and now he feels pressured Putnam to keep this fact, as well as the $16.99, 384 pages identity of Blue, a secret.

ISBN 9780399168031 Moments of teen life, drama and eBook available angst are well drawn by debut novAges 12 and up elist Becky Albertalli, a clinical psyHISTORICAL FICTION chologist who previously worked with gender-nonconforming children. Her insights are spot on, from It’s 1849 in rural Missouri, and the dialogue to the raw emotions 15-year-old Samantha Young is the Simon and Blue experience. As the only daughter of a Chinese immibook alternates between daily life grant. Like many fortune-seeking and the emails between Simon and pioneers during the Gold Rush, Sa- Blue, readers are immediately and magnetically pulled into this story mantha’s father has plans to move of coming out, being true to oneout West—until a tragedy leaves Samantha orphaned and penniless. self and challenging the societal To make matters worse, she is then status quo, or the “homo sapiens agenda,” as Simon refers to it. attacked, and though quick thinkTopical relevance aside, this ing saves her life, she accidentally leaves the attacker dead. book stands in the YA canon as Disguised as boys, Samantha an outstanding book about teens and a slave girl named Annamae coming of age, where several of the escape into the frontier, where characters just happen to be gay. they’re not the only outlaws hiding —SHARON VERBETEN

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reviews THE PENDERWICKS IN SPRING

CHILDREN’S

A family we all love REVIEW BY JILL RATZAN

Ten years ago, Jeanne Birdsall introduced readers to the funny, smart, sweet-but-never-saccharine Penderwick sisters, whose initial summer adventures were followed by two additional books. This fourth installment opens five years after The Penderwicks at Point Mouette.

With Rosalind away at college and Skye and Jane busy with teenage pursuits, the focus is on 10-year-old Batty, along with her stepbrother Ben and the newest Penderwick sibling, 2-year-old Lydia.

Batty has known since her summer at Point Mouette that she loves playing piano. She’s planning a Grand Eleventh Birthday Concert with longtime family friend Jeffrey, as well as walking dogs to earn money for singing lessons (although her grief for recently departed Hound is ever present). But when she overhears something that upends her world, only the determined, imperfect, loyal love of her family can

By Jeanne Birdsall untangle the knot of long-held assumptions and secrets that threaten Knopf, $16.99, 352 pages, ISBN 9780375870774 to overwhelm her.

Audio, eBook available, ages 8 to 12 Although it’s more of a tearjerker than its predecessors, the ending MIDDLE GRADE of this tale is still happy, and the story is still imbued with the hilarious family and neighborhood moments, ritualistic sisterly (now sibling-ly) meetings and perfectly drawn animal characters that Penderwick fans have come to love. The highlight here is the chance to learn the fates of minor characters from earlier books, including beloved Aunt Claire, stuck-up Mrs. Tifton and, most of all, brotherly neighbor Nick Geiger. A fifth and final Penderwicks book is planned, making this penultimate volume a treasure to be savored.

looms at the end of each day, hovering at the top of a steep climb up to Orion’s bed: the Dark. Despite his most creative solutions, bedtimes—and the Dark—are unavoidable. But delightfully, the Dark is less monstrous than Orion feared. Together, they explore and de-scary all the nighttime sounds and places, from closets and drains to ceiling fans and snoring.

Yarlett is the best kind of author-illustrator, incorporating exciting fonts into her whimsical images, pulling the reader in again and again. Her text is simple enough for young children, but clever asides will keep adults entertained. Quirky sketches and thought bubbles fill each colorful page to perfection. Best of all are two die-cut pages in which the Dark literally embraces Orion— and the reader’s imagination.

Night-shy children will find companionship in Orion and comfort in the Dark’s gentle, friendly appearance, while grown-up readers will invent excuses to keep this book on their own shelves.

—J I L L L O R E N Z I N I

MOON BEAR stories and observations. Next up, printed on even smaller pages, is his sister Fiona’s story. Dominated

By Barney by purples, it is filled with art and Saltzberg poetry, her two favorite things. She Abrams Appleseed also shares a poem she’s written $15.95, 40 pages about her dog before she runs out ISBN 9781419714870 Ages 3 to 6 of room. Finally, their youngest sibling, Wilbur, shares his book on PICTURE BOOK even smaller paper. It’s illustrated in what appears to be crayon, and Fans of the award-winning Open the sentences are simple: “This is me. This is my family.”

This Little Book will be drawn to the exuberant Inside This Book by There’s a lot of joy and humor author-illustrator Barney Saltzberg. here, and Wilbur gets the biggest It’s a testament to the robust imagi- laugh with his “This is a dinosaur nation of children, as well as the and my family!” spread, showing a hungry dinosaur chasing the very notion of self-publishing.

A boy named Seymour has family. Saltzberg uses bold and colwritten a story that is printed on orful fonts, and each story reflects the personality and age level of its smaller pages within the book that readers hold in their hands. author in very entertaining ways.

Seymour wraps things up by Seymour’s story is all about how his mother created for him and his showing how the family decided siblings some books with blank to put all their stories together pages. Seymour watches the world into . . . well, Saltzberg’s book. “Because books are better when they around him and fills his book with

INSIDE THIS BOOK

30

are shared.” And this remarkably child-centered book is one you’ll definitely want to share.

—J U L I E D A N I E L S O N

ORION AND THE DARK

By Gill Lewis

Atheneum $16.99, 384 pages ISBN 9781481400947 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

By Emma Yarlett

Templar $16.99, 40 pages ISBN 9780763675950 Ages 3 to 7 PICTURE BOOK

Author-illustrator Emma Yarlett first caught my attention with her picture book Sidney, Stella, and the Moon, and now I can’t stop re-reading her newest offering, Orion and the Dark. One glance at the cover and my book-stuffed heart says, “Yay!” My instincts rarely fail, and neither does Yarlett.

Orion’s fears are myriad: dogs, deep water, monsters, plaid. But the most terrifying thing of all

In this humbly magnificent tale of the ultimate triumph of good over evil, 12-year-old Tam goes from wretchedness to hopefulness as he begins to understand the ancient wisdom of his people.

Tam’s family is forced to relocate from the mountainous forests of Laos to an area outside the Mekong Delta, the first of several events he must adjust to and eventually overcome. The displaced family receives a terrible history lesson when Tam’s father explodes a stray land mine while clearing his field and dies. To help support his family, Tam takes a job in the city at a cruel “farm” where bile is extracted

CHILDREN’S from live, rare moon bears. The bears’ living situation is appalling, but Tam is powerless to change anything.

General Chan, the powerful man in charge of the relocation project, often visits the moon bear farm, seeking the bile to cure his daughter, Savanh. Tam and Savanh become friends, and he tells her the truth about the farm. Eventually Tam makes a bold move to forever change the life of one small bear.

Savanh supports Tam’s decision, leading to a dramatic confrontation.

Cultural references lend much grace to this tale, in which the pure of heart ultimately win.

—LORI K. JOYCE

IF YOU FIND THIS

By Matthew Baker

Little, Brown $17, 368 pages ISBN 9780316240086 Audio, eBook available Ages 8 to 12 MIDDLE GRADE

Sometimes being the smartest kid in your class doesn’t make you any friends. Sometimes the way you see the world is so different from “normal” that you’re not sure anyone can understand you. So it is for Nicholas Funes, the 11-yearold hero of If You Find This.

Nicholas can feel the vibrations of the sounds around him, and he can see—and reveres—any prime number he encounters. Nicholas’ family is in trouble, but he hopes that by finding his grandfather’s missing heirlooms, he can save them from their plight. Along the way he makes some friends, learns about the grandfather he’s never met and finds out that his strange worldview can actually help others as much as it helps himself.

Matthew Baker is an established short story writer, and his first book for young readers is an ethereal, fascinating mixture of music and math. His sense of story as vignette is reflected in his writing, which works well for the way Nicholas’ mind processes things. With

mystery, adventure, hidden treasure and wild boat rides, this book will appeal to any young reader.

the title of your Q: What’s

new book?

—J E N N I F E R B R U E R K I T C H E L

DEAR HANK WILLIAMS

would you describe Q: How

the book?

By Kimberly Willis Holt

Holt $16.99, 224 pages ISBN 9780805080223 eBook available Ages 9 to 12

has been the biggest influence on your work?

Q: Who

MIDDLE GRADE

It’s 1948, and 11-year-old Tate P. Ellerbee’s teacher wants each of her students to choose a pen pal, hoping that “new worlds will unfold in front of you, and you’ll see your own world through fresh eyes.” Tate decides to write to rising country singer Hank Williams.

She pours her heart out to her idol in letter after letter, even though he sends her fan photos but never writes back.

At first, Tate’s life in the tiny town of Rippling Creek, Louisiana, seems fairly ordinary. She spends her days with her Aunt Patty Cake, Uncle Jolly and her annoying younger brother nicknamed Frog.

But readers gradually learn Tate’s deepest secrets, such as the fact that her father really isn’t a globe­ trotting photographer and her mother isn’t a movie star.

Fans of Kimberly Willis Holt’s award-winning When Zachary Beaver Came to Town will welcome another sensitive portrayal of a child trying to find her place as she longs for absent parents. The rich Louisiana culture shines through, as do the daily effects of World War II and a community filled with cultural fears of African Americans, the Japanese and Communists.

(The historical aspects are nicely addressed in an afterword.)

As we learn our letter-writing heroine’s greatest secret of all, this seemingly gentle novel about a “simpler” time and place is packed with plenty of punch, all deftly handled by a writer who writes like Hank Williams sang—with heart and understanding.

—ALICE CARY

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

was your childhood hero?

Q: Who

books did you enjoy as a child?

Q: What

one thing would you like to learn to do?

Q: What

message would you like to send to young readers?

Q: What

EVERYBODY SLEEPS (BUT NOT FRED) Josh Schneider is the Theodor Seuss Geisel Awardwinning creator of Tales for Very Picky Eaters. In his new book, Everybody Sleeps (But Not Fred) (Clarion, $16.99, 32 pages, ISBN 9780544339248, ages 4 to 8), a rambunctious boy with a huge imagination has a long to-do list before he’ll go to sleep. Schneider lives in Chicago.

31

WORDNOOK

BY THE EDITORS OF MERRIAM-WEBSTER

LOW DOWN DIRTY Dear Editor: I recently read that the name ­turtle comes from Latin for “beast from hell.” Is this true? What’s so terrible about turtles?

R. F. Augusta, Montana The word turtle appears to have developed in 17th-century nautical English out of an earlier word tortu, or its French source tortue, from which tortoise is also derived.

French tortue, like Spanish tortuga and Italian tartaruga, ultimately descends from Late Latin tartarucha. This word is short for bestia tartarucha (or a similar collocation), literally, “infernal beast” or “beast from the nether regions.”

Such a humble and generally inoffensive animal hardly seems to deserve this epithet, but in early Christian art and literature, the turtle, thought because of its lowness to the ground to wallow in mud and filth, was taken as a symbol of

heresy and evil. (Conversely, the rooster was considered a symbol of good.) This demonic characterization of the turtle was pervasive enough to affect everyday speech, and the Romance descendants of tartarucha largely ousted the descendants of the classical Latin word for turtle, testudo.

STUFFED Dear Editor: I’m a theater lover and also like to dabble in the kitchen. I know the word farce from both theater and cooking, and wonder if there is a connection?

T. F. Charlotte, North Carolina When farce first appeared in English, its connection was with cooking, not comedy. In the 14th century, English adopted farce from French, retaining its original meaning of “stuffing of forcemeat.”

The comedic sense of farce in English dates back to the 16th centu-

ry, when England imported a kind of knockabout comedy that was already well-established in France and Italy. This dramatic genre had its origins in the 13th-century practice of interlarding or “stuffing” Latin liturgical texts with explanatory passages in the vernacular. By the 15th century, the practice arose of inserting unscripted buffoonery into performances of religious plays. Such farces, which included clowning, acrobatics, reversal of social roles and indecency, soon developed into a distinct brand of broad comedy. Since its introduction in England, farce has continued its popularity into the 21st century.

MEET MISS BLURB Dear Editor: Why is the little bit of information about a book that is written on its cover called a blurb? It seems like such a strange word.

W. Q. Blytheville, Arkansas

The origin of the word blurb can be traced to a single occasion. At the annual dinner of the American Booksellers’ Association in 1907, humorist Gelett Burgess was one of the guests. It was the custom at these dinners for the guest authors to present the assembled company with souvenir copies of their latest books. Seizing the occasion to satirize publishing’s practice of plastering book jackets with effusive copy, Burgess prepared a mock jacket of his latest, placing on the cover a doctored picture of a woman that he had lifted from a dental ad. He dubbed his creation Miss Belinda Blurb and appended self-congratulatory text. Seven years later, Burgess defined blurb in his own dictionary (Burgess Unabridged) as “a flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.”

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

Test Your Mental Mettle with Puzzles from The Little Book of Big Mind Benders puzzle type: word completion:

Family math B

difficulty: time: ___________

Fill in the missing words to turn LOGS into FIRE. Each word differs from the previous word in just one letter, like this: THIS–THIN–THAN–THAT. There are two completely different solutions. Can you find them both?

puzzle type: number completion:

Answer: first or last letter of LOGS.

in the diagram to the right, four pieces of straight dried spaghetti, all the same length, cross one another at six points. That’s the most number of crossings you can get with four pieces of spaghetti. What is the most number of crossings you can get with five pieces of straight dried spaghetti? With six pieces?

Seven pieces? Eight? What’s the pattern?

hint: Change either the

this is a game for two people. Lay 10 pennies

one coin. In either case, the number of coins is reduced by a total of three coins after two turns, and the first player always takes the last coin.

Answer: The first player wins by taking one coin.

From then on, if the second player takes one coin, the first player takes two coins, and if the second player takes two coins, the first player takes

on a table. Players take turns removing one or two pennies at a time. Players may not skip turns.

The player who takes the last penny wins.

Which player can always win—player 1 or player 2—and what is the winning strategy? hint: First play the game with three pennies. Once you have found the winning strategy, move on to six pennies. Then keep adding pennies.

workman.com

3. Bookpage Ad_3.indd 1

Answer: The most number of crossings you can get with 5 pieces of spaghetti is 10, as shown. Notice that adding piece 5 adds four crossings—one for each time it crosses each of the previous pieces.

Similarly, adding piece 6 adds five crossings, piece 7 adds six cross-

difficulty: time: ___________

ings, and so on. The total crossings are: 5 pieces = 10 crossings (6 + 4) 6 pieces = 15 crossings (10 + 5) 7 pieces = 21 crossings (15 + 6) 8 pieces = 28 crossings (21 + 7)

puzzle type: number completion:

hint: How many times can two straight pieces of

Family math a

difficulty: time: ___________

spaghetti cross each other?

Word ladder

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